Journal of Interreligious Studies

From the Editor-in-Chief

Axel Marc Oaks Takács — 2025-01-22

Issue 44 is a rolling submissions issue with five articles and seven book reviews.

Practices, Beliefs, and Identities

Kylee Smith — 2025-01-22

This paper explores how interreligious and intercultural encounters in the politically secular yet culturally Christian southeastern United States shape Muslim immigrants’ religious practices, beliefs, and identities. Situated at the intersection of interreligious studies, migration studies, and cultural geography, it examines the experiences of Muslim immigrants in North Carolina’s “Bible Belt.” These encounters reveal a dual dynamic: positive interreligious relationships rooted in shared family and moral values and Islamophobic marginalization. Using an interreligious and grounded theology framework, this study draws on interviews with Muslim immigrants and second-generation Muslim Americans, alongside participant observation at a local mosque. Findings suggest that navigating life as a religious minority often prompts self-reflection, knowledge-seeking, and intentionality, which deepens personal faith (imān). The mosque emerges as a vital space for worship (ʿibādah), community connection, and intercultural engagement. This process of self-reflection and community-building highlights how interreligious and intercultural interactions foster resilience and strengthen religious identity, transforming the challenges of migration into opportunities for spiritual growth and communal belonging.

Christian-Muslim Relations after the “A Common Word” Initiative of 2007

Halil Avci — 2025-01-22

This paper explores an Islamic theology of religions that considers the theological borders of interreligious dialogue, emphasizes reciprocal relationship, and recognizes the dynamic of a dialogical relationship (i.e., going forth and coming back) to address intra-religious and interreligious dynamics in grappling with religious diversity. The “A Common Word Between Us and You” initiative of 2007 serves as a case study.

The "Quest of the Historical Jesus” within the Framework of Interreligious Relations in the Middle East

Najib George Awad — 2025-01-22

This essay explores the use of the “Quest of the Historical Jesus” framework in Arab and Middle Eastern scholarship. It analyzes its rare but significant presence in contemporary theological discourse. While historical criticism is well-established in Western Christological studies, it is largely unwelcomed by Middle Eastern Christian and Muslim theologians; this results in limited engagement with this method in the region. However, some 20th-century Arab Christian and Muslim authors have employed historical criticism to examine Jesus Christ, producing works that remain largely unstudied in Anglophone and Germanic academic circles. This essay offers a comparative and analytical presentation of four such discourses— two by Christian authors and two by Muslims. By contextualizing these works, it provides a cross-religious perspective on how Arabic-speaking, Middle Easterners have engaged with the historical Jesus (ʿĪsā al-Masīḥ) through a method not widely accepted in institutional religious scholarship. This study contributes to a non-Euroamerican, interreligious hermeneutical framework, enriching understanding of the historical Jesus within Middle Eastern contexts.

The Logic of Religion?

Daniel Pratt Morris-Chapman — 2025-01-22

This essay offers a critique of the theoretical framework used by Hans Küng for extrapolating the essence of the Abrahamic faiths. It then presents an alternative approach which allows for an inductive examination of what might be described as the inner logic of a religious tradition. Grounded in an Aristotelean philosophical principle, “epistemic fit,” it presupposes that religious traditions possess an intrinsic logic which can be brought to the surface in order to exhibit parallels between them. Thus, following a critique of Küng, the paper probes how this Aristotelean principle might be applied to the dialogue of religions, illustrating the value of this approach by contrasting it with the conceptual apparatus utilized by Küng in his search for a global ethic.

Material Memories

Madelyn Starr — 2025-01-22

Since 1948, the state of pervasive tension and mutual distrust that characterizes Israel/Palestine has produced both structural violence and resistance to occupation. This article analyzes people’s everyday experiences of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as well as their “material memories” to examine how historical memory and recurring interactions with objects and images inform the widespread tension, structural violence, and resistance of ordinary Israelis and Palestinians. Drawing on more than thirty interviews and hundreds of hours of participant-observation in Jerusalem and the West Bank, I suggest that divergent memories of brutal conflict, structural violence, and dehumanization shape the perceptions of Israelis and Palestinians and fuel everyday tension and mutual distrust. I also argue that individuals in Israel/Palestine employ objects and images as “material memories” to construct and recollect the near and distant past that both perpetuate and resist prevailing violence.

Religious Diversity in Contemporary Shi‘i Thought: The Views of Ayatollah ‘Abdollah Javadi-Amoli and Professor Mahmoud Ayoub

R. David Coolidge — 2025-01-22

Book Review: Religious Diversity in Contemporary Shi‘i Thought: The Views of Ayatollah ‘Abdollah Javadi-Amoli and Professor Mahmoud Ayoub. By Saeid Sobhani. ICAS Press, 2022. 375pp. £20.00, paperback. ISBN 9781907905-551.

Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible

David Marshall — 2025-01-22

Book Review: Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible. By Mitri Raheb. Orbis Books, 2023. 184pp. $18.72 (paper). ISBN 9781626985490.

Christian Perspectives on Transforming Interreligious Encounter: Essays in Honor of Leo D. Lefebure

Peter Admirand — 2025-01-22

Book Review: Christian Perspectives on Transforming Interreligious Encounter: Essays in Honor of Leo D. Lefebure. Edited by Peter C. Phan and Anh Q. Tran. Lexington Books, 2024. 378pp. $130 (hardback). ISBN 9781666959987.

A Christian-Muslim Comparative Theology of Saints: The Community of God’s Friends

Charles Tieszen — 2025-01-22

Book Review: A Christian-Muslim Comparative Theology of Saints: The Community of God’s Friends. By Hans A. Harmakaputra. Brill, 2022. $68.00 (paper). ISBN 9789004510524

The Religious Dimensions of Shared Spaces: When and How Religion Matters in Space-Sharing Arrangements

Kevin McCarty — 2025-01-22

Book Review: The Religious Dimensions of Shared Spaces: When and How Religion Matters in Space-Sharing Arrangements. By Paul D. Numrich. Lexington Books, 2023. 290pp. $110.00 (hardcover). ISBN 9781793639349.

A Global Racial Enemy: Muslims and 21st-Century Racism

Valeria Vergani — 2025-01-22

Book Review: A Global Racial Enemy: Muslims and 21st-Century Racism. By Saher Selod, Inaash Islam, and Steve Garner. Polity Press, 2024. vii+227pp. $22.95 (paper). ISBN 9781509540204

Reviewing and Reflecting on Juergensmeyer's "God at War" and "When God Stops Fighting"

Steven Jacobs — 2025-01-22

This is a combined review and reflection on Mark Juergensmeyer's When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends (University of California Press, 2022) and God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare (Oxford University Press, 2020).