I have learned much from this fascinating collection of short essays. Here we find on-the-ground engagements with violence in Gaza,…
Thinking about the discourse of “religion and violence”
Ruinations: Violence in these times
Co-curated and co-edited by Mona Oraby (TIF editor and Howard University) and Suzanne van Geuns (TIF editorial assistant and Princeton University), this forum draws together scholars who specialize in the entanglement of religion and violence, broadly construed. By featuring essays on a range of historical, political, and cultural contexts, the forum queries longstanding and emergent topics in this interdisciplinary field.
Questions that animate the forum include: What does it mean to behold or bear witness to violence? What role do mass movements play in fomenting violent conflict or sustaining such conflict over time? How is interpersonal violence experienced at various scales? What more can or should be said in this historical moment about the myth of religious violence?
Mughal neopaganism and the romance of history
In the last five decades, South Asian countries have experienced a notable increase in religious violence and discrimination. The most…
Rabid for a peace
“To have or not have sex,” writes R. Marie Griffith, “is a vital symbolic and discursive arena for [enacting] the relationship…
When mercy doesn’t season justice: Rights versus humanitarian relief
Contemporary calls for relief, aid, or charity span numerous domains of care and increasingly exist in the absence of a…
Rhetorics of violence after the war
Which violences persist, articulated in ever-new forms, in the aftermath of war? What accounts for these reshuffled patterns of violence?…
Carceral afterlives: Recording my father’s prison memoirs
In 2021, I began a project that examines Muslim carceral theologies, focusing on prisoners’ key expressions in rituals, theodicies, hermeneutics,…
Building the world that must be
In this conversation, we gather on Women With A Vision’s front porch, hallowed grounds of New Orleans Black feminist struggle,…
The dead ends of Hindu supremacy
In December last year, I was back in the Western Indian city of Ahmedabad to meet members of the far-right…
Objects, trauma, violence, and loss: Telling stories, doing justice
It is deeply troubling to speak about traumatic violence and the bloody, desecrated, and destroyed property of those whose lives…
Thinking about religion and violence
In the past fifty years, the study of religion and violence has grown exponentially. One reason for this is obvious:…