Shaul Magid's Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (2021) has the potential to urge American and Israeli Jews to “own” Meir Kahane and hold him up as a mirror reflecting the toxic and tragic dimensions of modern Jewish history. Such a look in the mirror can only happen once Jews see Palestinian suffering as central to the building of the state of Israel and also how they are complicit and implicated in such suffering.

In this essay, I examine Richard Miller’s exposition of political solidarity as one of the key contributions of his multifaceted argument in Friends and Other Strangers to the study of religion, ethics, and culture. Miller’s focus on culture broadens the landscape of ethical analysis in ways that illuminate how culture and cultural productions mediate and construct norms and virtues, and the complex relations between self and society. I challenge Miller’s inclination, however, to focus scholarly attention more on habituated forms of (...) civic identity and communal solidarity rather than on disruptive potentialities and critical practices. I suggest that an engagement with social movement theory and the sociology of emotions, with their focus on semiotic analysis and social change processes and mechanisms, can greatly enrich Miller’s account of religion and ethical solidarity. (shrink)

The editors of the JRE collected short essays from scholars of religion in response to a recent incident at Hamline University that made national headlines. Last fall, Hamline University administrators refused to extend a contract to an adjunct professor of art history after a Muslim student accused her of Islamophobia for showing a 14th‐century image of Mohammad in an online class. The event provoked intense conversations about issues of academic freedom, religious diversity, the status of contingent faculty, and race. These (...) essays bring together scholarly and personal reflections about the incident at Hamline and what it means for the pedagogy of religious studies. (shrink)

Until the very recent days of the Turkish Republic, when every effort is being made to adopt the ways of Western civilization, it has been the picturesque and wellnigh universal custom for shops to carry on their walls small placards, usually framed, and these placards have contained in beautiful Arabic writing verses from the Quran, traditions of Muhammed, rhymed and unrhymed sayings which have for generations been passed down from father to son. Coffee-houses, barber shops, booksellers, grocery stores, pharmacies, candy (...) stores, fruit-stands, private houses even, all have decorated their walls with more or less artistically copied bits of wisdom from the past. In general there is no record of the authors or sources from which the sayings have come. They reflect in some measure also the thought of Turkish society as that thought has been passed on through the centuries. In order to get a picture of social relationships in the old Ottoman state it will perhaps be of value to study these texts and learn what we can from them of the social life and ideals of everyday folk in Constantinople from the earliest days down to the period which is just passing. There was a close relationship between these mottoes and their owners. The mottoes reflected in the first place the life philosophy of those who wrote them, and they served to mould the attitude toward life of successive generations. Not only religious belief, but attitudes toward the world and its problems, toward methods and standards of business dealing, are all touched upon in these texts. (shrink)

Based on extensive field work focused on interreligious peacebuilding practices in Kenya and the Philippines, this article argues that decolonial accounts of peacebuilding, in line with decolonial interventions in the study of religion, remain captive to the task of epistemological undoing and thus insufficiently relevant to the precarious lives of many invisibalized people in the global South. The question is whether decolonial thinking in the study of religion and theology should concern itself with such pertinence. I first examine the colonial (...) legacy of “peace” and key features of decolonial interventions in the modernist, civilizational, and developmentalist discourses within which “peace” is embedded. Next, I analyze how interreligious peacebuilding practices both entrench coloniality while improving the lives of people who engage in such practices and how such practices rely on thin or “sticky notes” religiosity, deeply inconsistent with decolonial theologies and religiosity. Finally, I show how, on the ground, mere existence and overcoming hate reside along a spectrum of decolonial politics. (shrink)

Based on extensive archival work, this essay assesses the contribution of a Palestinian liberation theology to a comprehensive view of peacebuilding that involves not only liberation from oppressive occupation but also a holistic vision and strategy for attaining just societal structures. Emerging out of the victim's viewpoint, a PLT is consistent with a multiperspectival approach to justice. It articulates a call for a holistic transformation of the interrelations between Jews and Palestinians, envisioning a just peace that must entail a re-framing (...) of geopolitical structures as well as ideological discourses that vindicate systemic and symbolic violence against the Palestinians. However, the author shows that a PLT is asymmetrical: while it challenges the theopolitical affinities between Christian and Jewish Zionists and the structural injustices and social mechanisms they endorse, it refrains from contesting the symbolic boundaries of a Palestinian national identity. This bears important implications for the broader debate concerning the role of religion in peacebuilding. The author argues that the limits of a PLT as a peacebuilding framework relate to its conceptual reliance on an unreconstructed secularist interpretation of a future Palestinian state and on its elective affinity with a supersessionist and theological orientation that, by definition, hermeneutically de-Zionizes the Bible and its interpretations. (shrink)

Religious nationalism is a complex topic fraught with sensitive questions. Does religion cause violence? Is nationalism a quasi-religion? Are the constant conflicts around the world really about religion, or is religion merely a form of false consciousness? Is religious nationalism primarily a powerful tool that political elites use to manipulate the masses? -/- Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook challenges dominant scholarly works on religious nationalism by identifying the preconceptions that skew analysis of the phenomenon dubbed “religious nationalism.” The book utilizes (...) a multidisciplinary approach that draws insight from theories of nationalism, religious studies, peace research, and political theory, and reframes the questions of religious nationalism within the perspectives of secularism, modernity, and Orientalism. In doing so, the authors enable readers to uncover their own presumptions regarding the role of religion in public life. The work also outlines connections between the analysis of the role of religion in conflict to thoughts regarding how religion may relate to processes of peacebuilding and conflict transformation, and further connects the discussion of religious nationalism to broader conversations on the so-called resurgence of religion. (shrink)