Religious Reflections on Friendship Seminar
The Religious Reflections on Friendship Seminar invites proposals for papers and panel presentations that address the intersection of religion/s and friendship from any scholarly perspective and religious tradition. We welcome papers that broaden contemporary perspectives on friendship and challenge dominant perspectives on friendship, as they bring friendship and religion into dialogue with contemporary issues, needs, and challenges. Our focus in 2023 will be most specifically on the study of friendship from interreligious/interfaith perspectives.
The following themes, amongst others, may be engaged from the perspective of two or more religious traditions:
- Interfaith friendship
- Friendship and ethics
- Friendship and the arts
- Friendship and the land; friendship and nature
- Friendship, religious practice, and decolonization
- Theological and/or mystical perspectives on friendship
- Friendship, crisis, discernment, and dark nights of the soul
- Friendship within religious texts and/or historic time periods
- Friendship-informed pedagogies for the teaching of inter-religious/inter-faith studies
- Civic friendship, political friendship, prophetic friendship, activism, and the common good
Echoing 2023’s presidential theme “La Labor de Nuestras Manos” (The Work of Our Hands) we also invite papers that consider the role of friendship practices and interfaith dialogue in the work that we do in the study of religion and theology including scholarly work, pedagogical practice, and alternatives to traditional academic roles.
Ideally seminar participants pre-circulate papers and come to the seminar’s Annual Meeting session ready to discuss them. Papers should be submitted to co-chairs for pre-circulation by mid-October.
The purpose of this Seminar is to provide a broad forum in which the important but under-studied relationship of friendship can be studied, discussed, challenged, and ultimately enriched – from a variety of religious perspectives. Friendship is a relationship that is essential for flourishing. In times ripe with division and conflict, we assert that the study of friendship contributes towards furthering religious understanding and dialogue. Friendship as a religious topic, broadly and creatively defined, touches on matters of faith, ecclesiology, anthropology, history, politics, philosophy, ethics, race, gender, sex, class, and economics among others.
We welcome papers that explore friendship from different disciplines and theological/religious perspectives and are open to a variety of methodological approaches. Papers from the Seminar are eligible to be considered for inclusion in a published volume. Our first volume focused on multireligious reflections and will be published in Lexington Books Religion and Borders Series. A second volume will be based on interreligious reflections, with the publisher yet to be confirmed.
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Anne-Marie Ellithorpe | aellithorpe@vst.edu | - | View |
| Hussam S. Timani | hussam.timani@cnu.edu | - | View |