The mobilization of theological concepts within the political sphere is increasingly dependent upon the capacity of those concepts to bear the weight of a discourse of universalism; this universalization becomes problematic when such theo-political concepts are then taken up as terms of commonality in interreligious dialogue. This article will…[Read more]

In the wake of the 2015 killing of twelve people at the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, thousands of individuals – many of whom had never before seen a copy of the paper – changed their Face- book statuses and profile pictures, or broadcast Twitter updates, to proclaim ‘Je suis Charlie’. A month previous, a similar outpour…[Read more]

This article reads the design of the British Imperial War Graves cemeteries in the context of the religious pluralism of the late Empire. Reviewing the deliberations of the design committee and parliamentary debates on the design of the cemeteries, it notes that the Christian character of the cemeteries was relatively muted, a design decision…[Read more]

One advantage of investigating inter-religious exchange through the lens of ritual is that it permits attention to a range of extra-textual phenomena such as tone, gesture, pacing, costume, and locatedness, which are capable of adding nuance to, or even subverting, a textual tradition. In the case of post-Holocaust reconciliation, it is worth…[Read more]

Institutionalized Holocaust commemoration in IHRA member states very often serves to mask problematic policies by offering reassurance that the Holocaust was perpetrated in another place, at another time, by other people. Rote commemoration runs the risk of moral anesthetization, and the further removed the original event becomes in place and…[Read more]

This chapter will present a historicised phenomenological account of the two dominant forms of social justice within Judaism: tzedakah (justice) and tikkun (advocacy, or, literally, ‘mending’). Tzedakah is a core principle of religious Judaism and also has profound resonances within secular Judaism; the history of the Anglo-Jewish community is ill…[Read more]

The Second Commandment, prohibiting both the worship and manufacture of graven images, is often employed as a mechanism for explaining a perceived absence of Jewish participation in the visual arts, in spite of a well recorded history of Jewish participation in the manufacture of graven images which are typically classed as craft objects. This…[Read more]

Taking into account current disputes about the nature of theology and religious studies, both inside and outside of the academy, this article argues that the academic discipline of theology would benefit greatly by expanding its religious remit beyond the traditional field of Christian systematic theology to include constructive-critical insider…[Read more]