“Covenant as Source of Community: Biblical Tenets, Early America, and Points of Fracture”

Professor Marcia Pally teaches at New York University and held the Mercator Professorship in the Theology Faculty of Humboldt University, Berlin, where she is now an annual guest professor. Her most recent books are White Evangelicals and Right-wing Populism: How Did We Get Here? (2022); From This Broken Hill I Sing to You: God, Sex, and Politics in the Work of Leonard Cohen (2021), Commonwealth and Covenant: Economics, Politics, and Theologies of Relationality (2016), Mimesis and Sacrifice (2019), and America’s New Evangelicals: Expanding the vision of the common good (2011). Commonwealth and Covenant was selected by the United Nations Committee on Education for Justice for worldwide distribution and was nominated for a Grawemeyer Award in religion. Prof. Pally was a Fellow at the Center for Theological Inquiry in Princeton and was twice a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin.

“The Crisis of Trust the Concept of the Sacred”

Moshe Halbertal is the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Hebrew University, the Gruss Professor at NYU Law School, a faculty member of Mandel Institute and a member of the Israel’s National Academy for Sciences and the Humanities. Among his books are “Idolatry” (co authored with Avishai Margalit); “People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and Authority”, published by Harvard University Press, and “On Sacrifice”, “Maimonides: Life and Thought”, and ” The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel” published by Princeton University. His latest book “Nahmanides: Law and Mysticism” was published by Yale University Press at 2020.

“Secularism and Universal Truth: Readings from South Asian History”

“Homeopathy or Apotropaeon: Two Models of Postwar Jewish Identification"

Sarah Hammerschlag is a scholar in the area of Religion and Literature. Her research thus far has focused on the position of Judaism in the post-World War II French intellectual scene, a field that puts her at the crossroads of numerous disciplines and scholarly approaches including philosophy, literary studies, and intellectual history. She is the author of The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016) and the editor of Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics (Brandeis University Press, 2018). The Figural Jew received an Honorable Mention for the 2012 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, given by the Association of Jewish Scholars, and was a finalist for the AAR’s Best First Book in the History of Religions in 2011. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Sowers and Sages: The Renaissance of Judaism in Postwar Paris. Her most recent book is Devotion: Three Inquiries in Religion, Literature and Political Imagination (2021), co-written with Constance Furey and Amy Hollywood.

“Trust and Community with Other Than Human Beings”

Miguel Vatter is professor of politics at Deakin University. His main areas of research are in the history of political thought, biopolitics, and political theology. His most recent books are: Divine Democracy. Political Theology After Carl Schmitt and Living Law. Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt, both for Oxford University Press (2021). He is currently completing a new book on Machiavelli and Renaissance Platonism, and is a Humboldt fellow at the Goethe-University Frankfurt for the Fall of 2023 working on the planetary turn in the social sciences and humanities.

“Church State Corporation: How the Church-in-Law Limits Religious Freedom”

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, JD, PhD, University of Chicago, is Provost Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Religion and the Human at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is also an Affiliated Professor of Law at the Maurer School of Law. Sullivan studies the intersection of religion and law in the modern period, particularly the phenomenology of modern religion as it is shaped in its encounter with law. Sullivan is the author of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, 2005, 2d ed. 2018), Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton, 2009), A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care and the Law (Chicago, 2014), and Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in US Law (Chicago, 2020), coauthor of Ekklesia: Three Studies in Church and State (Chicago, 2018) and The Abyss or life is Simple (Chicago 2022), and coeditor of Politics of Religious Freedom (Chicago, 2015).

“The Sacredness and Power of Others: A Plea for Public Globalism”

Lewis R. Gordon is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he also holds an appointment in Jewish and Judaic Studies. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Penguin-UKK 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon, edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023). His accolades include the 2022 Eminent Scholar Award from the Global Development Studies division of the International Studies Association.

“Openness and Closure in Islamic Ethics”

Tim Winter gained his first degree in Arabic from Cambridge University in 1983, after which he studied for six years in traditional Islamic institutions in the Middle East, before returning to take up his present post in Cambridge in 1997. His publications include translations of ethical and mystical texts by al-Ghazali (d.1111), a series of articles on Islamic theology and Muslim-Christian relations, and two theological books in Turkish. In 2006 he published Abraham’s Children, co-edited with Bishop Richard Harries and Rabbi Normon Solomon. He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology (2008).

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Zareena A. Grewal is an Associate Professor of American Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology, and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. Her first award-winning book, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (NYU 2013), is a historical ethnography of transnational Muslim intellectual networks that link US mosques to Islamic movements in post-colonial Middle East through debates about the reform of Islam, based on fieldwork in Egypt, Jordan and Syria. She is currently working on a book that examines the social life of the Quran as a racialized text-object at the center of the culture wars in the US, titled Reading Muslims. She is also a documentary filmmaker who made By the Dawn's Early Light, an account of the life and career of NBA guard Mahmoud Abdul Rauf, and is currently collaborating on a multi-part documentary series on the history of Islam in the US for PBS.

“America's Secular Surge: What The Growing Secular Population Means For American Democracy”

David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on civic and political engagement, with particular attention to religion and young people. His most recent book is Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics (with Geoff Layman and John Green), which received the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Among his other books is American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (with Robert Putnam), winner of the award from the American Political Science Association for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs. His work has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Daedalus. In addition, he has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and—every political scientist’s dream—Cosmopolitan.

“Ritual, Recognition, and the Making of Solidarity”

Molly Farneth is associate professor in the Religion Department at Haverford College. Her research and teaching focus on modern Western religious thought, with particular attention to religion and politics, ritual, and feminist studies in religion. She is interested in the relationship between religious diversity and democracy, and the ways that members of diverse communities confront ethical conflicts and forge solidarity. Farneth is the author of Hegel’s Social Ethics: Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of Reconciliation (Princeton University Press, 2017) and The Politics of Ritual (Princeton University Press, 2023). Outside of her scholarship, she is working with campus and community organizers and residents to build transformative community partnerships between Haverford College and its neighbors.

“One Earth, One Health and the Tower of Babel”

Teresa Forcades i Vila (1966) is a physician, theologian, and Benedictine nun in the mountain monastery of Sant Benet de Montserrat (Catalonien, Spain). Master of Divinity (Harvard, 1997), doctor in Public Health (U. Barcelona, 2004) and doctor in Sacred Theology (Facultat de Teologia de Catalunya, 2007). Her most recent books are: ‘Il corpo, gioia di Dio: la materia come spazio di incontro tra divino e humano’ (Gabrielli, 2020), ‘Forte come la morte è questo amore: otto lezioni sul Cantico dei Cantici’ (Castelvecchi, 2021). Forcades is director of the journal of Christianism and critical thinking ‘Iglesia Viva’ (iviva.org) and of the monastic School Sinclètica (sincletica.cat). At present, she lives and teaches at her monastery in Montserrat.