Surely one reason for the ongoing but mistakenly benign and otherworldly cliché of India as a land of “spirituality” is…
Le mal des fleurs
gender
Must a female God mother?
As we seek to reimagine God, I am not sure that the corrective to the damage that has been done…
Preposterous practices
In the broader culture and in the academy, we have moved from naming bad people to also naming privilege as…
Smuggling scholarship—In re The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law
The disciplines of knowledge production—through which we instill in our students the practices of objectivity, generalizability, and professionalism—are no less…
Refashioning gender and modern visual theology
The visual and material repertoire of Heavenly Bodies has also been fundamentally shaped by the role of allegory in Catholic…
Time, gender-bending, and the medieval church
There is undoubtedly an element of drag in contemporary women wearing quasi-clerical garb—drag charged with coquettish sacrilege. These women are…
On category-mistakes and androgynous divinities
A reprieve from those Western epistemological formulations of spirituality, this essay unpacks how the Ewe, an ethnic constituency in Ghana,…
The soulful, comic defiance of Heavenly Bodies
Heavenly Bodies surprised me because I was anticipating a celebration of Catholic aesthetics and fashion. It was partly this. But…
In defense of “crazy fatherhood,” or Parenting ain’t easy
Conscious, intentional fatherhood has limited celebration in these parts, especially that which refuses to center the father in ways the…
The “woman question” as symptomatic of imperialism
I want to bring the arguments of Farris and Scott into conversation with two other recent publications in order to…