Learning so much co-teaching a grad seminar in this moment of intersecting crises on “Religion & US Empire” w/ my wonderful colleague @TisaWenger Kicked off the semester with her book Religious Freedom The Contested History of an American Ideal & Jodi Byrd’s The Transit of Empire

Then we moved to 2 very different critical takes on how to decolonize the discipline of religious studies: David Chidester’s Empire of Religion which centers perspectives of South African intellectuals & Tomoko Masuzawa’s classic foundational work The Invention of World Religions

Last week we read Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular, especially meaningful for me as he was my teacher & has had a profound impact on all of my work Not a lot of scholars can claim to have a school of thought let alone two linked to their name (anthro of Islam & the secular)

Today we are teaching Sylvester Johnson’s African American Religions & got off the presses Josh Dubler & Vincent Lloyd’s Break Every Yoke: Religion Justice & the Abolition of Prisons & they are visiting class but you’re invited to the public panel courtesy of zoom 7pm EST TODAY

Here’s the poster for our webinar on Abolition Black Religions & US Empire with Sylvester Johnson, Josh Dubler & Vincent Lloyd open to the public but you must register first Tonight at 7pmEST Come by! @BelieverBailOut @migrantbailfund @YaleRITM

Co-teaching “Religion & US Empire” with @TisaWenger has been amazing—Ussama Makdisi’s Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries & the Failed Conversion of the Middle East & @MelaniMcA The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals make a great pair!

Last week we taught Elaine Pena’s Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe & David Chang’s The World & All the Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration—when Pena was a Yale ERM postdoc she’s just begun to transform her diss to the book

Today was a real treat teaching the 10th anniversary expanded edition of @jkpuar Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times & Peter Coviello’s Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons & the Unfinished Business of American Secularism w/ a class visit with the brilliant Jasbir Puar

Our students are still doing the reading cause the books are a history of the present & are helping them (and me) live through the chaos of now—last week was Steven Salaita’s Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America & Palestine & Jennifer Graber’s The Gods of Indian Country

Paired these great books with two great lit reviews on the problem the category of religion-as-analytical-object poses for so many historians and ethnic studies scholars (respectively) from my dear friends and amazing colleagues Katie Lofton & Junaid Rana who I love to think with