Religion, State, and Nationalism: Problems and Possibilities Symposium

You are invited to a Zoom webinar.
When: Apr 8, 2022, 9:00 AM Central Time (US and Canada)
Topic: Religion, State, and Nationalism: Problems and Possibilities

Register in advance for this webinar:

You are invited to a Zoom webinar.
When: Apr 8, 2022, 1:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)
Topic: Religion, State, and Nationalism: Problems and Possibilities

Register in advance for this webinar:

Atalia Omer

Atalia Omer is Associate Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies, and a core faculty member of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She earned her Ph.D. (November 2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Omer has published articles in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Religious Ethics; Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal; the Journal of Political Theology, the Study of Nationalism and Ethnicity, the International Journal of Peace Studies, Critical Sociology, and Method & Theory in the Study of Religion. She is the author of  When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice,  Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians, with the University of Chicago Press.

Antoine Arjakovsky

Antoine Arjakovsky holds a Doctorate in History from the Ecole des hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He is a French citizen with Slavic roots (Russian, Belarussian and Ukrainian). He worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during 13 years (1989-2002) as Cultural attaché in the French Embassy in Moscow and in Kyiv. He was also the Director of the French university of Moscow and the Deputy Director of the French Institute in Kyiv. He published a dozen of books dedicated to the history of Russia and Ukraine and to the history of the Christian orthodox thought. He is the current Research Director at the Collège des Bernardins (Paris) and the Founding Director of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv, Ukraine).Arjakovsky’s books include The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal (University of Notre Dame Press), and What is Orthodoxy? (Angelico Press).

Scott Hibbard

Scott Hibbard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at DePaul University in Chicago, IL.  He has taught at DePaul since 2005, where he offers courses on International Relations, Middle East Politics, and Religion and Politics (among other topics).  He has also taught at the American University in Cairo (2009-2010) and at Swarthmore College (2005).  Hibbard received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University (2005), and holds advanced degrees from the London School of Economics and Political Science (MSc Political Theory, 1989), and Georgetown University (MA Liberal Studies, 1988). Hibbard previously worked in the U.S. Government, serving as a Program Officer at the United States Institute of Peace (1992 to 1997) and as a legislative staff member in the United States Congress (1985-1992).  Hibbard is the author of Religious Politics and Secular States: Egypt, India and the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, September 2010), and co-author (with David Little) of Islamic Activism and U.S. Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1997).  He is also a co-editor (with Aminah McCloud and Laith Saud) of An Introduction to Islam in the 21^st Century (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, March 2013).

Slavica  Jakelić 

Slavica Jakelić is the Richard P. Baepler Distinguished Professor in the Humanities. Her scholarly interests and publications center on religion and nationalism, religious and secular humanisms, theories of religion and secularism, theories of modernity, and interreligious conflict and dialogue. Jakelić has worked at or was a fellow of a number of interdisciplinary institutes in Europe and the United States—the Erasmus Institute for the Culture of Democracy in Croatia; the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University; the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna; the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago; the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study; the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame; and the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School. She is a Senior Fellow of the national project “Religion & Its Publics,” placed at the University of Virginia, where she was a faculty member and co-director at the UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture for several years. She is also a Senior Fellow of the international project “Orthodoxy and Human Rights,” placed at Fordham University.Jakelić ‘s writings have appeared in journals such as the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal of Religious Ethics, Political Theology, The Hedgehog Review, The Review of Faith &International Affairs, Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, and Commonweal. She co-edited three volumes: The Future of the Study of Religion, Crossing Boundaries: From Syria to Slovakia, and The Hedgehog Review’s issue “After Secularization.” Jakelić is the author of Collectivistic Religions and is currently working on two books, Pluralizing Humanism (under contract with Routledge) and Ethical Nationalisms.

Rev. Dorian Llywelyn, S.J.

Rev. Dorian Llywelyn, S.J. is president of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at USC. Fr. Llywelyn brings to the Institute a unique range of scholarly and international experiences, speaks eight languages, is the author of two books, and has published articles in multiple academic journals. His particular academic interests include nationalism and religion, popular religiosity, and Mariology. He holds degrees in English and theology from Cambridge University, the Pontifical University of Salamanca, Spain, the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, and the University of Wales. He was executive director of the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education at Santa Clara University, and a member of the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University, where he led the Catholic Studies program and was the first director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute. He has also held visiting chairs at Marquette University and Seattle University, and has taught at the University of London and the University of Wales.

Rev. Robert Saler

Rev. Robert Saler came to Christian Theological Seminary in the fall of 2012. He is Research Professor of Religion and Culture and Executive Director of the Center for Pastoral Excellence and the Lilly Endowment Clergy Renewal Program. Saler received his BA summa cum laude from Valparaiso University, an MA in theology from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, and the M.Div., Th.M. and Ph.D. (with distinction) from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Saler works at the intersection of Christian intellectual history and social theory, with a goal of making the resources of Christian tradition(s) available to leaders in church and society today. His first book, Between Magisterium and Marketplace, explored the ways in which ecclesiology and literary theory provide insights into how theologians understand themselves as authors. His second book, Theologia Crucis, is a field guide to the multifaceted use of the theology of the cross from Luther to liberation theologies.

Samuel Graber

Samuel Graber is Associate Professor of Humanities and Literature in Christ College at Valparaiso University. Graber’s teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century literature and culture, the American Civil War, transatlantic studies, memory studies, and religion. He has published articles and reviews in American Nineteenth Century History, the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Christianity and Literature, Civil War Book Review, Common-Place, and the Journal of Southern History, as well as in the forthcoming Literary Cultures of the American Civil War. He teaches “Interpretation: Self, Culture, Society,” “Word & Image,” “American Identity,” “American War Literature,” “African American Literature,” “Literatures of Freedom,” “Film and Literature,” and also in the Christ College First-Year Program.

Timothy Larsen

Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, an Honorary Fellow, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, and an Honorary Research Fellow, School of Theology, Religious Studies and Islamic Studies, University of Wales Trinity Saint David.  He has been a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and All Souls College, Oxford, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.  He is the author or editor of twenty books including Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England, A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians, The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith, and John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life (all with Oxford University Press).

Philipp Gollner

Philipp Gollner is Associate Professor of U.S. History and chair of the Department of History at Goshen College, where his teaching and scholarly interests center on ethnicity, religion and class in American history. His current book project, entitled “Good, White Christians” traces the stories of European immigrants to demonstrate how “white religion” in America was never simply Anglo-Saxon, but a fundamentally spiritual construct comprised of beliefs in world-changing activism, limitless human potential, and a post-ethnic society. Most recently, he has also been working on a critique of activism in the relationship between faith and historical scholarship as an Emerging Scholars fellow at the University of Virgina’s Center for the Study of Religion, and a Young Scholar in American Religion. He teaches “American Culture Wars,” “Immigration and Ethnicity in American History,” “American Foodways,” and “Thinking About the Dead,” and is the book review editor for the Mennonite Quarterly Review. A native of Austria, Gollner was educated at the Universities of Munich, Chicago and Notre Dame (Ph.D.)