Religious Reflections on Friendship Seminar

For the fifth year of Religious Reflections on Friendship (RRF), our focus will be most specifically on the study of friendship from interreligious/interfaith perspectives. The following themes, amongst others, may be engaged:

• Friendship, peacebuilding, and politics
• Friendship, activism, and the pursuit of the common good
• Religious practice, decolonization, and the honoring of covenantal friendship treaties
• Religion and nonhuman friendships, friendship and the land, friendship and nature
• Friendship, spirituality, suffering, caregiving, health, and healing
• Religion and utilitarian friendships: the use and misuse of friendship
• Friendship and gender, sex, and sexuality
• Friendship across boundaries, whether geographical, generational, professional, ecclesial, power differentials

We invite 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 or enrich dominant perceptions of friendship, as they bring friendship and religion into dialogue with contemporary issues, needs, and challenges.

Religion, Friendship, and (Non)Violence

Echoing the 2024 presidential theme—Violence, Nonviolence, and the Margin—we also invite papers that explore the intersection of friendship with these themes. Scholars have long emphasized the inherently relational dimensions of religion and violence. Friendship—as a voluntary interpersonal relationship shaped by culture and, possibly, universal cognitive and biosensory processes—has important implications for the scholarly examination of these matters. RRF invites papers that explore the intersection of religion, friendship, and violence. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Theological discussions of friendship and (non-)violence in religion/s.
• Role/s of peace and friendship treaties in promoting coexistence and kinship-like relationships between or among groups.
• Religious dimensions of peace and friendship treaties between Indigenous Peoples and colonizing powers; the violence of dishonoring treaties and possible remedies.
• Role/s of rituals (religious or otherwise) in promoting friendship and nonviolence
• Role/s of persecution in response to relationships between or among people or groups of different religious traditions; the role/s of persecution in promoting various forms of friendship and solidarity.
• LGBTQIA2S+, youth, and/or minoritized/marginalized communities at the intersection of religion, friendship, and violence.
• Complications and ambiguities surrounding religion, friendship, and violence: Do religions promote or discourage friendship, and to what ends? What if practices of friendship violate traditional religious rules or provoke the “paradox of using violence to stop violence”?