Publications (selected)

2024–2025

Kundu, Tanya. 2025. Metaphors of Sin and Disability in Augustine's Anti-Pelagian Writings. Modern Theology, 41, pp. 3—20. doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.13027. 

Drawing on disability studies in theology and literary theory, this article explores how Augustine uses metaphors of disability to provide a material anchor for his concept of sin. However, the article proffers that Augustine offers us a model of apophatic theological metaphor which might benefit our figurative theological landscape for conceptualising sin. Ultimately, this article argues for the pastoral benefits of a more underdetermined approach to our concept of sin.

Badder, Anastasia. 2024. Knowing which way to turn: Orienting supplementary Jewish education in Europe. Journal of Jewish Education, 90:4, pp. 283—304. doi.org/10.1080/15244113.2024.2399580.

Much research on part-time Jewish educational programs has focused on curricular content and pedagogy. Yet classrooms involve diverse exchanges about curricular subjects as well as those that appear little related to Jewish studies. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, this article proposes bringing a semiotic ideological lens to quotidian interactions as means to get at the “tacit curriculum” and aims of part-time schools, to better grasp what draws families to these schools, and to recognize the nuanced learning happening therein.

Badder, Anastasia & Lea Taragin-Zeller. 2024. Introduction to "The Materiality of Interreligious Encounters". Material Religion, 20:5, pp. 317—323. doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2024.2424712.

This article is an introduction to the special issue "The Materiality of Interreligious Encounters" (guest editors: Badder & Taragin-Zeller). This special issue provides a diverse sample of scholarly attention to the role of the material in interreligious relations. Together, the articles offer three main contributions: they demonstrate the material pragmatics of living together; they illuminate interreligious proximities that tend to be lost in discursive processes of religious differentiation; and they subvert normative views of interreligious encounter as primarily a matter of clashing beliefs, texts, and theologies.

Badder, Anastasia & Sharon Avni. 2024. The sanctity of decoding: Reframing Hebrew literacy in the United States and Europe. International Journal of Bilingualism, (Online first.) doi.org/10.1177/13670069241233389.

This article explores the challenges Jewish children face in educational programs teaching about Judaism and Jewish culture located in the United States and Europe. Students learn to decode Hebrew but not to read for comprehension; this article argues that this decoding of sacred texts without comprehension of lexico-semantic content can be a meaningful form of literacy that enables religious members to affirm community.

Badder, Anastasia. 2024. When a yarmulke stands for all Jews: Navigating shifting signs from synagogue to school in Luxembourg. Contemporary Jewry, 44 (2024), pp. 63—81. doi.org/10.1007/s12397-023-09524-8. 

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a material approach to religion, this article argues that the yarmulke comes to point to different levels and modes of observance and identities and enable different possible belongings in the secular public sphere as it travels across contexts that include different definitions of and attitudes toward religion and Jewishness.

Barua, Ankur. 2024. The Ultimacy of the Penultimate: The Advaita Allegories of Niścaldās (1791–1863). Religions of South Asia, 18:3, pp. 344—367. doi.org/10.1558/rosa.27094.

The Yukti-prakas (‘The Light of Reasoning’) of Niscaldas (1791–1863) constitutes a distinctive style of presenting the viewpoints of Advaita through parabolic discourses which elaborate symbolic equivalences between characters in a narrative, on the one hand, and Vedantic concepts, on the other hand. This articles explores seven of the many allegorical discourses sketched by Niscaldas in his attempts to re-orient the finite world as a pointer to the non-finite brahman. 

Cotterill, Aden. 2024. Tomáš Halík: A Theology for the Post-Secular. Theological Studies, 85:1, pp. 78—95. doi.org/10.1177/00405639231220863

This article presents the work of Czech theologian and priest Tomáš Halík as a theology for the post-secular. Cotterill demonstrates what is distinctive about Halík’s contribution: his engagement with themes of both plurality and uncertainty in a single theological schema.

Gallien, Claire. 2024. al-Yūsī, Tawḥīd and the Theological Structure of Islamic Knowledge. Islamic Studies Journal (Brill), pp. 1—22. doi.org/10.1163/29502276-20240016.

The article focuses on al-Qānūn fī Aḥkām al-ʿIlm written by Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan b. Masʿūd al-Yūsī (d. 1102 AH / 1691 CE) and explains how the interdependent, cohesive, and holistic dimensions of al-Yūsī’s organization of the sciences is directly derived from Islamic theology. More specifically, the article explores the unique structural role of the tri-partite definition of the religion (dīn) as “faith, religion, and spiritual excellence (imān-islām-iḥsān)” in al-Yūsī’s organization of the sciences and the function of tawḥīd in his conception of knowledge.

Gallien, Claire. 2024. Exploring Literature in Islam Beyond (Secularized) Christian Normativity in Western Academia. Religions (2024), 15:10, doi.org/10.3390/rel15101190.

This article unpacks the genealogy of the secular version of a Christian epistemic framework that dominates the study of Islamic theology in the West and engages with the issues related to its application in the field of Islamic theology. In doing so, it opens a critical space for the investigation of Islamic literary productions as both dissensual and consensual theological terrains, through the analysis of the poetry of two theologians and polymathic scholars from two different periods of Islamic history, namely Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1235) and Sidi Muḥammad Ibn al-Ḥabīb (d. 1390/1971). 

Katsos, Napoleon, et al. 2024. 'It's not just linguistically, there's much more going on’: The experiences and practices of bilingual paediatric speech and language therapists in the UK. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 59, pp. 1715—1733. doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.13027. 

Despite the high prevalence of bilingualism in the United Kingdom, few speech and language therapists (SLTs) are bilingual themselves. Most SLT research on bilingualism has generated knowledge to inform service delivery for bilingual clients, but few studies have investigated how being a bilingual SLT influences one's professional experiences and practices. This article shows how better understanding the unique positionality of bilingual SLTs can yield critical insights to meaningfully address issues of diversity, inclusion and equity in the profession.

Lardy, Camille. 2024. Too Religious to Protest? Contested Thresholds of Catholic and Muslim “Intransigence” in the French Public Sphere. American Behavioral Scientist, (Online first.) doi.org/10.1177/00027642241261037.

This article examines French Catholics’ recruitment, organization, and policing of Muslim participants in the 2012 to 2013 anti-same-sex-marriage protests La Manif Pour Tous. It argues that French Catholics are alert to forms of public participation which suggest religious “intransigence” (strict religious observance) and can be said to transgress the secular character of the public sphere. Instead, they craft a public presence that can be interpreted as secular, or “liberally” religious-and-secular, without passing the implicit threshold of intransigence.

Lypp, Jacob & Esra Özyürek. 2024. Taming Muslim Masculinity: Patriarchy and Christianity in German Immigrant Integration. Men and Masculinities, (Online first.) doi.org/10.1177/1097184X241256606.

This article analyzes a growing sector of state-funded pedagogies designed to reform Muslim masculinity in Germany. These programs present Muslim men as suffering from a psychopathology rooted in an alleged Islamic “honor culture”. They rely on a mix of Christian and non-religious welfare providers to supply Muslim youth with alternative masculine role models. Read a longer introduction to Lypp & Ozyurek’s study.

Monier, Elizabeth. 2024. Religious tolerance in the Arab Gulf states: Christian organizations, soft power, and the politics of sustaining the “family–state” beyond the rentier model. Politics and Religion, 17:1, pp. 22—39. doi.org/10.1017/S175504832300007X. 

The economic clout of the Gulf states has been central to political stability and legitimacy but they are increasingly seeking to expand and consolidate the soft power and resilience through political and diplomatic initiatives. This article examines how the Christian organizations established in recent decades by large migrant communities are incorporated into this strategy and how they are responding. It argues that religious tolerance has formed a central discourse in governmental policies and narratives that construct the Gulf states as modern progressive nations.

Müller, Tobias. 2024. Patriarchal “Love School”: Entrepreneurial Heroic Masculinity and Neoliberalism in A Pentecostal Church in London. American Behavioral Scientist, (Online first.) doi.org/10.1177/0002764224125.

Many Pentecostal churches founded in the Global South are now rapidly growing in European cities. Although research is catching up with this development, we know little about how these processes affect gendered and racialized practices regarding sexualities, bodies, and masculinities in former colonial metropolises shaped by neoliberal capitalism. This article addresses this gap by interrogating the transnational movement of Pentecostal masculinities and their economic, sexual, and political dimensions in a church in North London.

Müller, Tobias & Pınar Dokumacı. 2024. Introduction to "Resurgent Religion, Resurgent Patriarchy? Strictly Observant Religion, Gender, and the State". American Behavioral Scientist, (Online first.) doi.org/10.1177/00027642241260386. 

This article is an introduction to the special issue  “Strictly Observant Religion, Gender and the State in the 21st Century”. Here, Müller and Dokumacı outline how we might make sense of the increasing traction of liberal sexual politics and the concurrent rise of neo-traditionalist movements. Rather than providing a unified theory, they propose the concept of “strictly observant religion,” a “social system which aims at structuring all aspects of life around strict adherence to religious doctrines”. 

Posegay, Nick. 2024. An Early Arabic Translation of Exodus 15 from a Palestinian Melkite Psalter in the Cairo Genizah. Collectanea Christiana Orientalia, v.21. doi.org/10.21071/cco.v21i.16681.

This article presents an Arabic translation of Exodus 15 from the Cairo Genizah, preserved in two fragments of a Christian psalter (MSS CUL T-S NS 305.198 and T-S NS 305.210). The psalter's Arabic script style suggests that it was copied by a well-trained scribe in the late 9th or early 10th century, making it the oldest Christian Arabic Bible translation yet found in the Genizah.

Posegay, Nick. 2024. Five Qurʾanic Papyri from the Michaelides Collection at the Cambridge University Library. Journal of Qurʾanic Studies, 26:1, pp. 101—124. doi.org/10.3366/jqs.2024.0570. 

This article studies five Qur’anic papyri from the Michaelides manuscript collection at the Cambridge University Library which have thus far evaded analysis by scholars of Qur’anic history. By transcribing the contents of these manuscripts, this article provides new data for the textual and material transmission of the Qur’an during the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries.

Qureshi-Hurst, Emily. 2024. Many Worlds and Moral Responsibility. Theology and Science, 22:3, pp. 456—473. doi.org/10.1080/14746700.2024.2359187.

Moral responsibility is integral to most forms of theism. Yet its coherence as a concept is contingent upon the fulfilment of certain metaphysical conditions. This paper argues that (1) the continued existence of the self, and (2) freedom of will and action, are necessary conditions for moral responsibility, particularly within a theistic context. Qureshi-Hurst then argues that the Everett Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (or, the Many Worlds Interpretation) throws these assumptions into question in new and interesting ways.

Taragin-Zeller, Lea & Hannah Peterson. 2024. Science, Not Scientists: Reflections on Science, Culture, and Their Mediators. Science Communication, (Online first.) doi.org/10.1177/1075547024127557.

In this commentary, the authors lay out a research agenda for studying religion and science communication that moves beyond theological and moral tensions to include embodied knowledge practices and orientation toward particular vocational futures. Based on findings from a case study of a National Geographic Kids magazine tailored for Orthodox Jews, the authors argue that diversifying science communication includes navigating embodied knowledge practices and competing “imagined futures” regarding science-related vocations.

2022–2023

Cotterill, Aden. 2023. Triadic Differences and Theological Coherence: Oliver O’Donovan’s Reflections on Friendship as a Locus for Comparing Resurrection and Moral Order and Ethics as Theology. Studies in Christian Ethics, 36:3, pp. 457—474. doi.org/10.1177/09539468231162801. 

This article leverages the theme of friendship in Oliver O’Donovan's Entering into Rest as a locus of comparison between his earlier Resurrection and Moral Order and the Ethics as Theology trilogy. The article’s conclusion considers more generally—in light of O’Donovan's pursuit of ethics as theology—the inherent contingency and incompleteness of theological ethics.

Elbaz, Vanessa Paloma. 2023. KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive: Sounds, Voices, Memories, and Cognitive Rupture. The American Archivist , 86:2, pp. 346—369. doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-86.2.346.

KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive is a pioneering project to repatriate, digitize, record, and classify the remaining sonic memory of Morocco's dwindling Jewish community. This article probes into the necessary sociological cognitive rupture that either allows or disallows the formation of archival repositories of minority memory.

Iyer, Sriya, et al. 2023. Religion, Covid-19 and mental health. European Economic Review, 160. doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2023.104621.

Covid-19 and the resulting lockdowns affected various aspects of people’s lives, including their mental health. Using data from an online survey, this paper investigates the role of religiosity in mediating the effect of Covid-19 on mental health. The findings show that while the incidence of a Covid-19 infection is associated with significantly worse mental health, this negative association is significantly smaller for religious people. The authors thus argue that the mental health benefits of being religious emanate from the ability to participate in religious activities.

Kundu, Tanya. 2023. Intersections of Forgiveness And ‘Queer Use’ In T.S. Eliot’s ‘Marina’. Literature and Theology, 37:1, pp. 25—38. doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frad004. 

Recent literary and theological accounts of forgiveness have appealed to the poetic as offering an ‘ambiguous’ space appropriate to the complex process of forgiving. In this article, these accounts are textured with a close reading of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Marina’, which is well-placed as an example of this style of poetics. Beyond ambiguity, Kundu suggests, ‘Marina’ communicates an account of forgiveness that can be read generatively alongside Sara Ahmed’s category of ‘queer use’.

Müller, Tobias, et al. 2023. Scoping review on climate change and mental health in Germany: direct and indirect effects, vulnerable groups and resilience factors. Journal of Health Monitoring, 8:S4, pp. 132—161. doi.org/10.25646/11656.

The authors conducted a review to assess the state of knowledge on the impact of climate change on mental health in Germany. The authors conclude that the evidence for Germany is insufficient. In addition to the absolute priority of climate protection (mitigation) by reducing emissions, there is a particular need for additional research with a focus on vulnerable groups and possibilities for prevention and adaptation.

Müller, Tobias, et al. 2023. The Politics of Mapping Religion: Locating, Counting, and Categorizing Places of Worship in European Cities. Space & Culture, 26:2, pp. 167—179. doi.org/10.1177/12063312221130247. 

This article critically analyses the proliferation and production of what we call “religious maps” in Europe in recent years. Religious maps have emerged as a form of monitoring, describing, and representing spatial processes of (ethno-) religious diversification. Through the comparative empirical analysis of the cases of Barcelona, Hamburg, and Amsterdam, the authors demonstrate that maps and the knowledge formations they (re)produce have become key tools to govern religious diversity in contemporary Europe. 

Qureshi-Hurst, Emily. 2023. Does God Act in the Quantum World? A Critical Engagement with Robert John Russell, Theology and Science, 21:1, pp. 106—121. doi.org/10.1080/14746700.2022.2155914. 

Quantum Mechanics and its philosophical interpretation have proved fertile ground for theological reflection, particularly regarding divine action. Pioneer in this field, Robert John Russell, proposes a Non-Interventionist Objective Divine Action (NIODA) in which God acts in and through the quantum process to actualise events as a form of objective special providence. This paper analyses NIODA and suggests that there are areas of incompleteness. Both theodicy and relevance for day-to-day human existence remain open questions in NIODA.

Qureshi-Hurst, Emily. 2023. The Many Worries of Many Worlds, Zygon, 58: 1, pp. 225—245. doi.org/10.1111/zygo.12868.

Theological engagement with quantum mechanics has been dominated by the Copenhagen interpretation, failing to reflect the fact that philosophers and physicists alike are increasingly moving away from the Copenhagen interpretation in favor of other approaches. One such approach, Hugh Everett's so-called Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI), is being taken increasingly seriously. As the MWI's credibility grows, it is imperative that metaphysicians, theologians, and philosophers of religion engage with its ideas and their implications. This article does just that, setting out some implications of Everettian Quantum Mechanics that are particularly relevant to theism. 

Snyder, Julia. 2023. Prooftexting from Other People’s Scriptures? ‘Prophets and Patriarchs’ in Acts of Philip 5–7. Harvard Theological Review, 116:1, pp. 66—90. doi.org/10.1017/S0017816023000044.

What role has the “Old Testament” played in the self-understanding of Christians over the centuries, and what can we learn from the fact that Israel’s scriptures are often cited in early Christian texts? Using the Acts of Philip as a case study, this article argues that we should not assume all early Christian writers thought of these as “my own scriptures.” 

Xu, Ximian Simeon. 2023. A Theological Account of Artificial Moral Agency. Studies in Christian Ethics, 36:3, pp. 642—659. doi.org/10.1177/09539468231163002. 

This article seeks to explore the idea of artificial moral agency from a theological perspective. By drawing on the Reformed theology of archetype-ectype, it will demonstrate that computational artefacts are the ectype of human moral agents and, consequently, have a partial moral agency. This moral leitmotif opens up a way to deploy carebots into Christian pastoral care while maintaining the human agent's uniqueness and responsibility in pastoral caregiving practices.

Badder, Anastasia. 2022. ‘I Just Want You to Get into the Flow of Reading’: Reframing Hebrew Proficiency as an Enactment of Liberal Jewishness. Language & Communication 87, pp. 221—30, doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2022.08.003.

Families enroll their children in Luxembourg's Liberal Talmud Torah because they are committed to continuing Jewish tradition and teaching their children how to be Jewish. These families are also deeply attached to liberal modernity and its ideals of free choice and autonomy... [Read a longer introduction to Badder’s study.]

Elbaz, Vanessa Paloma. 2022. Jewish Music in Northern Morocco and the Building of Sonic Identity Boundaries. Journal of North African Studies, 27:5 (Sept 2022) pp. 1027—1059. doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2021.1884855.

Drawn from field work done in Morocco between 2007–2019 of the Judeo-Spanish repertoires of Northern Morocco and their internal societal functions: Communal use is strictly inner-facing and specific to their life in Morocco and not a representation of a long nostalgia for life in pre-Expulsion Spain.

Hawkes, Jason D., et al. 2022. Grounding Texts and Theories of Societal Change. Antiquity, 96:387 (June 2022), pp. 611—627. doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2022.28.

During the mid-first millennium CE, new kingdoms and states emerged across South Asia. At this time, land grants made to Hindu temples are thought to have led to wide-ranging societal transformations. Neither the land-grant charters nor the changes they are said to have driven had been studied archaeologically. Hawke & his co-authors present the results of the first archaeological investigation of the charters and their landscape context. 

Dekel, I., & Esra G. Özyürek. 2022. The Logic of the Fight against Antisemitism in Germany in Three Cultural Shifts. Patterns of Prejudice, 56: 2-3 (May 2022), pp. 157—187. doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2023.2192029.

In Germany, public accusations of antisemitism are increasingly directed at two groups: (1) designated Others (Muslims and other racialized minorities who seldom engage in anti-Jewish hate crimes) and (2) public intellectuals who are for the most part white ethnic Germans (including Jews and Christians) who demonstrate solidarity with these minorities. Dekel and Özyürek describe the logic that drives this growth in accusations.

Posegay, Nick. 2022. Searching for the Last Genizah Fragment in Late Ottoman Cairo: A Material Survey of Egyptian Jewish Literary Culture. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 54:3 (Aug. 2022), pp. 423–441. Cambridge University Press, doi.org/10.1017/S0020743822000356.

The Cairo Genizah is known as a repository for manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Less known is the fact that 100s of Genizah fragments were produced in the late 19th century, even as European collectors were scouring Cairo for ancient texts. This later corpus remains understudied for both Ottoman and Jewish history, and raises questions about the integrity of “Cairo Genizah” manuscript collections around the world.

HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2021) Locating Pandemic Grief in Sarajevo: Georgic Notes Against Self-Isolating Regimes. Forum Bosnae 91-92: 308-26.

Chiefly focusing on the political developments in Sarajevo at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the article suggests that the biopolitical regime of power in Bosnia – wholly conceivable through the deployed concept of “self-isolation” – might be irreconcilable with St George's Day traditions. 

2020 and earlier

Barua, Ankur (2020) The Hindu Cosmopolitanism of Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble): An Irish Self in Imperial Currents, Harvard Theological Review 113(1): 1–23. 

The Irishwoman, Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble), a well-known disciple of the charismatic Hindu guru Swami Vivekananda, creatively reconfigured some traditional Vedāntic vocabularies to present the “cosmo-national” (what we would today call the “cosmopolitan”) individual as one who is not antithetical to but is deeply immersed in the densities of one’s own national locations.

Lockhart, Alastair (2020) New Religious Movements and Quasi-religion: Cognitive Science of Religion at the Margins. Archive for the Psychology of Religion 42(1): 101-122.

The article examines the ways in which new and quasi-religious movements have been analysed in the cognitive science of religion and uncovers something of the underlying theoretical material in cognitive science of religion in its interaction with religious thinking.

Lockhart, Alastair (2019) A Bud from the Tree of Life: William McDougall’s Response to Freud. History and Philosophy of Psychology 20(1): 28-33.
Focused on the interaction between the ideas of the prominent interwar British psychologist William McDougall (Professor of Psychology at Harvard 1920-27 and Duke University 1927-1938) and the founder of psychoanalysis. McDougall emerged from an idealistically inflected anthropological tradition in the Britain hospitable to religious ideas presenting a sharp contrast to Freud's reductive and anti-religious views.

Meggitt, Justin J. (2019) A Turke Turn’d Quaker: Conversion from Islam to Radical Dissent in Early Modern England. The Seventeenth Century 34(3): 353–80. 

Whilst accounts of early modern English ‘renegades’ who ‘turn’d Turke’ and converted to Islam, attracted considerable anxiety in Protestant England, and have been subject of considerable scholarship in recent years, this micro-historical study sheds light on the less well known phenomenon of movement in the other direction.

Soars, Daniel J. (2019) The Virtues of Comparative Theology. Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies 32, Article 8. 

This article reflects on the practice of comparative theology and the sorts of virtues—personal as well as academic—which such interfaith experiments require of the practitioner. By exploring notions like doctrinal humility and rootedness in a particular tradition, we are forced to reflect upon the ‘virtues’ of the discipline in both senses of the word—not only those attributes required to engage in it, but the merits of doing it at all.

Waller, Giles (2019) Complicity, Recognition, and Conversion in the Christus Patiens Drama. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 49(1): 33–55.

Waller traces the dynamic of tragic recognition and conversion through one of the most explicit attempts to consider the central narrative of the Gospels in a tragic mode, Hugo Grotius’s 1608 Christus Patiens (translated into English by George Sandys in 1640). Converting the Passion narrative into neoclassical drama, Christus Patiens raises troubling dramaturgical, ethical, and theological questions about the nature of Christian tragedy and its relation to atonement and conversion. 

Davison, Andrew (2018) Christian Systematic Theology and Life Elsewhere in the Universe: A Study in Suitability. Theology and Science 16(4): 447-461.  

A three-way interaction between theology, natural science, and philosophy. The philosophical distinction between necessity and possibility, augmented by the scholastic category of fittingness, or suitability, is applied to the discussion of whether Christians ought to entertain, or even expect, that sentient life elsewhere in the universe would have received its own incarnation. 

Davison, Andrew (2018) “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change”, but “who knows how?”: Evolution and Divine Exemplarity. Nova et Vetera 16(4): 1067-1102

What connections can be drawn between scientific discussion of how evolution explores possible biological forms and mediaeval discussions of creatures as imitating ideas in the divine mind? Responding to the tendency in theology of the past century or so to play down previous ideas of divine exemplarity – the sense that imitation of God stands as the wellspring of creaturely form – Davison suggests that this paradigm can find renewed use, with evolutionary thought not sweeping it away.

Barua, Ankur (2017) The Absolute of Advaita and the Spirit of Hegel: Situating Vedanta on the Horizons of British Idealisms. Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34(1): 1-17.

What happens in a triangular “fusion of horizons” across the conceptual landscapes of Hegelian Idealism; British reconfigurations of Hegelian Idealism; and modernised restructurings of Advaita Vedānta, in British India and postcolonial India, through the lenses of Hegelian worldviews? – this article explores the philosophical significance of Hegel-influenced systems as an intellectual conduit for some Indo-British and Indo-European intellectual encounters.

Davison, Andrew (2017) “Not to Escape the World but to Join It”: Responding to Climate Change with Imagination not Fantasy. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences 375:20160365. 

The prospect of catastrophic climate change is well established, and yet human behaviour has not sufficiently changed so as to mitigate it. Turning to philosophical and literary discussions of the role of the imagination, as a capacity that opens us up to the reality before us, in comparison to what has been called ‘fantasy’, which instead projects our aspirations or desires upon the world, Davison argues that those who reach too readily for futuristic technological solutions, rather than changes in behaviour, are following a ‘fantastic’ path here, and not only those who deny climate change outright. 

Winter, Tim (2017) Some Islamic reflections on Gavin D’Costa’s Vatican II: Catholic Doctrines on Jews and Muslims. Louvain Studies 40(3): 286-302.

A look at the genesis and theology of Vatican II’s declarations on Muslims, in the form of a review essay of this book by a Catholic theologian.

Barua, Ankur (2016) Christian Visions of Vedanta: The Spiritual Exercises of Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux. Journal of Ecumenical Studies 51(4): 524-551.

At first sight, nothing could seem to be further removed from the personalist theism of Christianity than the austere non-dualism of Advaita Vedānta which claims that there is no ontological distinction between devotee and deity – this article explores how two European Roman Catholic monks (one British and the other French) have nevertheless argued that precisely an Advaita-informed spirituality can revitalise Christian forms of contemplative life.

Barua, Ankur (2014) Interreligious Dialogue, Comparative Theology, and the Alterity of Hindu Thought. Studies in World Christianity 20(3): 215–237.

If non-Christian religious worldviews are to be conceptualised as radically other to Christianity, what might be the shape of a Christian style of engagement with them? – this article studies the work of two Scotsmen in British India, J. N. Farquhar (1861–1929) and A. G. Hogg (1875–1954), who struggled around a hundred years ago with this question vis-à-vis the religious universes of Vedāntic Hinduism.

2025

Elbaz, Vanessa Paloma. 2025. “Sephardi Orature and the Myth of Judeo-Spanish Hispanidad.” In Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation, ed. S. Marzagora & F. Orsini, Open Book Publishers, 2025, pp. 233—260.

2024

Barua, Ankur. 2024. "Liberation in Life: Advaita Allegories for Defeating Death." In Global Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion: From Religious Experience to the Afterlife, ed. Y. Nagasawa & M. S. Zarepour, Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 307—328.

Barua, Ankur. 2024. "The Brahmo Universalism of Protap Chunder Mozoomdar (1840–1905): Harmonising Reason and Revelation in the New Dispensation." In Empire, Religion, and Identity: Modern South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas, ed. S. Mukherjee, Brill, 2024, pp.127—151.

Müller, Tobias. 2024. “From Climate Coloniality to Pluriversalising Democracy.” In Seeds for Democratic Futures, ed. F. Hanusch & A. Katsman, transcript Verlag, 2024, pp. 57—70.

Müller, Tobias & Thandeka Cochrane. 2024. “Spirituality, Health and Ecology: Co-Liberation, the Climate Movement and the Quest for Planetary Health.” In Handbook on Religion and Health: Pathways for a Turbulent Future, ed. J. Cochrane, G. Gunderson, & T. Cutts, Edward Elgar, 2024, pp. 114—132. 

Posegay, Nick. 2024. “Eleven Colophons by Ten Printers from Seven Cities in the Cairo Genizah.” In Literary Snippets: A Colophon Reader, ed. G. A. Kiraz & S. Schmidtke, Gorgias Press, 2024, pp. 25—37.

Posegay, Nick. 2024. “Ernest James Worman and the Victorian Genizah: A Salt-Miner’s Tale of Romance, Tax Evasion, and Sudden Death.” In From The Battlefield of Books: Essays Celebrating 50 Years of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, ed. N. Posegay, M. M. Connolly, & B. Outhwaite, Leiden: Brill, 2024, pp. 239—258.

Weiss, Daniel. 2024. “Wittgenstein and the Rabbinic Grammar of God’s Name.” In The Grammar of ‘God’ in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ed. F. Suleiman & M. Sievers, De Gruyters, 2024, pp. 35—70. 

2022–2023

Badder, Anastasia & Sharon Avni. 2023. "Jewish Languages and American Jewishness." In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Religion, ed. S. Pihlaja & H. Ringrow, Routledge, 2023.

Barua, Ankur. 2023. “Spectres of Violence and Landscapes of Peace: Imagining the Religious Other in Patterns of Hindu Modernity.” In Violence and Peace in Sacred Texts: Interreligious Perspectives, ed. M. Power & H. Paynter, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, pp. 29—51.

Elbaz, Vanessa Paloma. 2023. “Land, Voice, Nation: Jewish Music in the Adamot of al-Andalus.” In Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies, ed. T. Frühauf, Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 70—90. 

Elbaz, Vanessa Paloma. 2023. “Oscillating Technologies of Sephardi Transmission: The Role of Notebooks and Orality.” In Reflections on a New Mexican Crypto-Jewish Songbook, ed. S. Kunin, Lexington Books, 2023, pp. 63—87.

Özyürek, Esra G. 2023, “Situating Empathy: Holocaust Education for the Middle East/Muslim Minority in Germany.” In Conversations on Empathy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Imagination and Radical Othering, ed. F. Mezzenzana & D. Peluso, Routledge, 2023, pp. 174—190, doi.org/10.4324/9781003189978

Posegay, Nick. 2023. “Hebrew Printing and Printers’ Colophons in the Cairo Genizah: Networking Book Trade in Europe and the Ottoman Empire.” In Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time, ed. G.A. Kiraz & S. Schmidtke, Giorgias Press, 2023, pp. 79—105.

Xu, Ximian Simeon. 2023. "Give Us Dutch Neo-Calvinism: Retrieving and Reconsidering Dutch Neo-Calvinism in the Chinese Context." In Modern Chinese Theologies, Volume 2: Independent and Indigenous, ed. C. Starr, Fortress Press, 2023, pp. 69—88.

Xu, Ximian Simeon. 2023. "Human Sustainability in the Age of Technology: A Theological Proposal on Technomoral Human Futures." In Issues in Science and Theology: Global Sustainability: Science and Religion in Dialogue, ed. M. Fuller, M. Harris, J. Leidenhag, & A. Runehov, Springer, 2023, pp. 187—196.

Moulin-Stożek, Daniel. 2022. “‘Religion’, ‘Worldviews’ and the Reappearing Problems of Pedagogy.” In Religion and Worldviews: The Triumph of the Secular in Religious Education, ed. L.P. Barnes, Routledge, pp. 136—151, doi.org/10.4324/9781003264439-8

Moulin-Stożek, Daniel, & M.W. James. 2022. “Religion and Social Development in Childhood.” In The Wiley‐Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development, ed. P.K. Smith & C.H. Hart, 3^rd edn, Wiley, pp. 405—421. doi.org/10.1002/9781119679028.ch22

Weiss, Daniel H. 2022. “Iconic Theology in Classical Rabbinic Literature and Orthodox Christianity.” In Elonei Mamre: The Encounter of Judaism and Orthodox Christianity, ed. N. De Lange et al., Fortress Academic, 2022, pp. 88—98. 

Weiss, Daniel H. 2022. “Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise: Jewish Philosophy in an Anti-Jewish Guise?” In The Marrano Way: Between Betrayal and Innovation, ed. A. Bielik-Robson, De Gruyter, pp. 133—154. www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110768275-006/html.

2021–2020

HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2021) My Grandmother Drank the Qur'an: Liquid Readings and Permeable Bodies in Bosnia. In L. McCormick Kilbride, S. Kotva & R. Jackson Ravenscroft (eds) Theologies of Reading: Positions and Responses. Special issue of CounterText 7.1: 73-89.

This article considers the practices of imbibing – or otherwise transforming and internalising – sacred texts as modes of reading in their own right. 

Snyder, Julia A. (2020) Apostles and Politics in the Roman Empire. In J. A. Snyder & K. Zamfir (eds) Reading the Political in Jewish and Christian Texts. Biblical Tools and Studies 38. Leuven: Peeters: 227–256

This essay discusses political perspectives in several early Christian texts that are set against the backdrop of the Roman empire. 

Pre-2020

HadžiMuhamedović, Safet and Marija Grujić (2019) Thinking Post-Home: An Introduction. In Safet HadžiMuhamedović & Marija Grujić (eds) Post-Home: Dwelling on Loss, Belonging and Movement. Special issue of EthnoScripts 21(1): 1-29.

This introduction considers some of the ways in which the meanings and expressions of ‘home’ might change after persons, communities and things ‘move’ – by will, force, rituals, dreams, or otherwise – towards new spaces, times and bodies, as well as through new political and affective capacities. 

HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2019) Flow and Constraint: Syncretism and Nationalism Along a Bosnian Sinking River. In R Povall (ed.) Liquidscapes: Tales and Tellings of Watery Worlds and Fluid States. Dartington: Art.Earth Imprint: 223-9.

This essay focuses on a Bosnian river, one of the longest underground watercourses in the world, known by various names and of central importance to Bosnian shared and syncretic rituals. 

Haecker, Ryan (2019) A Plastic Possibility for Ralph Cudworth’s Libertarianism. In A Fürst (ed.) Origen’s Philosophy of Freedom in Early Modern Times: Debates about Free Will and Apokatastasis in 17th-Century England and Europe. Adamantiana Series 13. Münster: Achendorff Verlag: 75-85.

In spite of the many merits of Cudworth’s libertarianism, there appears to remain an as yet unanswered logical problem of free will, which could only be answered by extending the principle of plasticity from plastic nature to plastic logic; the plastical logic of dialectic; and, supremely, of the divine dialectic of the Trinity.

Snyder, Julia A. (2019) Simon, Agrippa, and Other Antagonists in the Vercelli Acts of Peter. In U Mell & M Tilly (eds) Gegenspieler: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit dem Gegner in frühjüdischer und urchristlicher Literatur. WUNT 428. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck: 311–31. 

This essay analyzes the portrayal of literary antagonists in an early Christian story about the apostle Peter. Peter faces opposition not only from a "Jewish magician" who challenges his teaching about Jesus, but also from members of the "pagan" Roman elite, who object to his ethical teachings. 

HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2018) Syncretic Debris: From Shared Bosnian Saints to the ICTY Courtroom. In A Wand (ed.) Tradition, Performance and Identity Politics in European Festivals. EthnoScripts 20(1): 32-63.

An anthropological postscript to the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), brought to a conclusion in 2017. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Bosnia, I trace in the Tribunal’s archives the strange afterlives of two shared and syncretic saints, George and Elijah.

Meggitt, Justin J. (2018) Early Unitarians and Islam: Revisiting a “Primary Document”. In D Steers & S Lingwood (eds) Unitarian Theology  II. Oxford: Faith and Freedom: 48–59.

The address of English Unitarians to the Moroccan ambassador in 1682 was foundational in the formation of a new and increasingly influential denomination, and is evidence of the complex perception of Islam amongst early modern Christians in the English-speaking world. 

Winter, Tim (2018) ‘The Inception of A Common Word’. In L. Demiri and Y. Said (eds) The Future of Interfaith Dialogue: Muslim-Christian Encounters through A Common Word. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 13-30.

A history of the origins of the Common Word, the best-known Muslim joint statement on Islam’s relationship to Christianity.

Davison, Andrew (2017) Looking Back toward the Origin: Scientific Cosmology as Creation ex nihilo Considered “from the Inside”. In G. Anderson & M. Bockmuehl (eds) Creatio ex nihilo: Origins and Contemporary Significance. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press: 367-390. 

Retrieving metaphysical thinking from the high Middle Ages to provide resources for discussions about the theological implications of various theories in contemporary science about the earliest moments of the universe and the notion of ’t=0’ or a beginning to time.

HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2014) The Tree of Gernika: Political Poetics of Rootedness and Belonging. In P. Dransart (ed.) Living Beings: Perspectives on Interspecies Engagements [ASA Monographs]. Oxford: Bloomsbury: 53-72.

On 26 April 1937 Nazi aeroplanes razed Gernika to the ground. However, one oak tree survived.... The trunk of the ‘old tree’ was later housed in a nearby shrine, and its acorns continued to be used to plant new oaks in Gernika and across the Basque diasporas. Building on recent anthropological theory on nonhuman agency, the article dwells on Basque inter-species engagements and the agentive qualities of this extraordinary arboreal being. 

HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2013) Bosnian Sacral Geography: Ethnographic Approaches to Landscape Protection. In J-M Mallarach (ed.) Spiritual Values of Protected Areas of Europe. German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation: 56-62.

What happens when the states’ attempts to protect sacred spaces run counter to their traditional religious use? Who gets to protect and from whom? This article starts with the image of fenced up walls of Djevojačka Pećina, the ‘Maiden’s Cave’ in central Bosnia, one of the largest Muslim pilgrimage sites in Europe. The material interactions of the pilgrims with the cave are inseparable from the (protected) value of the site. 

Winter, Tim (2013) Realism and the Real: Paradoxes of Islamic Pluralist Soteriology. In Mohammad Hassan Khalil (ed.) Between Heaven and Hell: Islam, Salvation, and the Fate of Others. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 122-150.

An assessment of the viability of a pluralist Muslim theology of religions.