Center for Religion & the Human

A research center of the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Indiana University Bloomington

Noli Me Tangere Project debuts website

reflections on the pandemic

Our project takes the words spoken by Jesus to Mary Magdalene in the garden after she discovers his empty tomb — noli me tangere (“touch me not”) — as a provocation for reflection on the COVID-19 pandemic, and on other pandemics, viral and social, that engulf us.

Featuring original music, paintings, photography, essays, poetry, talks, conversations, and more, with a new reflections added every two weeks.

Terence Keel receives the 2021 Iris Book Award

for "Divine Variations"

Jurors for the Iris Book Award praised Divine Variations as “a rigorous and readable intervention into the field of religion-and-science,” and noted that “the book’s thoroughly interdisciplinary method connects Christian theological anthropology with scientific ideas of race in ways that disrupt inherited assumptions about the so-called domains of religion and science and constructions of human identity.”

Maddened Pedagogies: Teaching Religion and Black Popular Culture

BY JAMES HOWARD HILL, Jr.

"At its core, this teaching module highlights pedagogical gaps and silences that might occasion the opportunity for professors teaching at the intersection of religion and black popular culture to lean fully into the disturbing, mad and maddening epistemic possibilities found within the architecture of black popular culture."

A Cat in the Basket and Other Scholarly Stories

by Anand Venkatkrishnan

"Spend enough time being broken down by your teachers and you will think that criticism is a form of love. But bring your whole being into the life of learning and your values change. This is what I’ve learned from students who agitate for a more just and democratic educational space."

Now in paperback

Theologies of American Exceptionalism

A collection of fifteen interlocking essays reflecting on the vagaries of exceptionalist claims in and about the United States. Loosely and generatively curious, these essays bring together a range of historical and contemporary voices, some familiar and some less so, to stimulate new thought about America. Available in paperback, or in a free e-book version.

Asian Women, Christianity, and American Purity Culture

BY MIHEE KIM-KORT

"Through an engagement of the discourses of evangelical purity culture we can see how the figure of the Asian woman in Asia and in diaspora, particularly in the U.S., acts as a canvas on which expectations and anxieties around domesticity, sexuality, and nation-state converge to produce more than a scapegoat, but a particular objecthood and aesthetic that evokes a racialized femininity." 

Let the Past Fail Me

BY HSIAO-WEN CHENG

Engaging Religion presents a short essay by Hsiao-Wen Cheng (University of Pennsylvania).

"When I fail to make sense of what I see in a historical record, or when I fail to apprehend someone’s response to my question, maybe that means I am asking a failing question."

The Matter of Black Religion: Thinking with Charles H. Long

NEW ISSUE OUT NOW

From editors Cooper Harriss and Sarah Imhoff: This is a special issue of American Religion: “The Matter of Black Religion: Thinking with Charles H. Long”—edited by J. Kameron Carter. The legacy of Charles Long, who died in February of 2020, is one that both cannot be underestimated and, improbably, too often has been.

Church State Corporation

Symposium Essays

The journal Political Theology hosts an online symposium on CRH Co-Director Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's newest book Church State Corporation (University of Chicago Press, 2020). 

The sympsium features an introduction by Vincent Lloyd and essays by Yael Almog (read here), Spencer Dew (read here), Joshua Mauldin (read here), and Méadhbh McIvor (read here), followed by Sullivan's response (read here). 

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson in conversation with J. Kameron Carter

From Wednesday, March 24

Please enjoy our recording of this event!

J. Kameron Carter hosted a conversation with Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, author of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU Press, 2020).