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2025 ICJS Faculty Seminar

No Church | No State: Religious Experiments in Imagining the World Otherwise

August 3–7, 2025
Baltimore, MD

In a religiously and ethically diverse world, how do we build a life together? People building communities—both with fellow religious believers and interreligious neighbors—adopt, adapt, accommodate, and resist existing political, social, economic, and religious paradigms for negotiating shared concerns. Importantly this is not exclusively a reactive posture—with the religious responding or reacting to the political—but a dynamic interplay. Religious people have invented, dreamed, and conjured radical alternatives to shaping and sharing community life for centuries.

This seminar seeks to explore those creative and constructive efforts in descriptive, normative, analytical, and literary forms. We welcome academics, scholars, and practitioners to share original research, creative projects, and/or teaching materials that engage a range of questions related to historical, sociological, anthropological, legal, theological, ethical, and literary approaches to reimagining religion and the creation of community. 

Apply for the 2025 Faculty Seminar

Seminar Goals

  • To broaden the existing conversation on religion, law, and the creation of community among academics, scholars, and practitioners.
  • To share research and pedagogical methods for teaching in the classroom and teaching in the community.
  • To build and sustain an interdisciplinary learning community to collaborate in research, syllabi development and pedagogical practices in various learning environments.

Seminar Topics

  • Religious/Interreligious approaches to negotiating community building, making law, and navigating areas of shared concerns (conflicts, collaborations & moments of retreat).
  • Imagining community otherwise; explorations into the work of imagination in creating new realities beyond the nation-state, both historically and in the present.

Pre-Work & In-Person Seminar

Pre-Work

Seminar participants will meet twice via Zoom (April & June) for introductions to coordinate the creation of a shared bibliography, and discuss expected participant presentations.

In-Person Seminar

Participants will meet at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore,  Sunday, August 3-Thursday, August 7, 2025. During our time together in August we will discuss shared readings and participant projects. The tentative schedule is as follows:

  • Sunday, August 3: Arrival at ICJS by 5:00 PM & welcome dinner
  • Monday, August 4: Discussion of shared readings & presentations of participants projects
  • Tuesday, August 5: Discussion of shared readings & presentations of participants projects
  • Wednesday, August 6: Discussion of shared readings & presentations of participants projects
  • Thursday, August 7: Closing session. Lunch & departures after 1:00 PM.

Program Details

When: August 3-August 7, 2025

Location: ICJS Library, 956 Dulaney Valley Rd., Baltimore, MD 21204

ICJS will provide each participant with:

  • Hotel accommodation
  • Travel reimbursement (up to $600, determined by travel distance)
  • Dinner on Sunday
  • Breakfast and lunch, Monday through Thursday
  • Materials as needed

Application Process

  • Applications due: March 3, 2025
  • Notification of Acceptance: March 17, 2025
  • Proposals should include a CV and 500 words that outline the research and/or work of the applicant, including how participating in the Faculty Seminar will be helpful to the applicant’s research, teaching, service, and/or work.

Facilitators

Heather Miller Rubens, Ph.D.

Heather Miller Rubens, Ph.D. is the Executive Director and Roman Catholic Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. She is responsible for advancing the organization’s vision to build an interreligious society in which dialogue replaces division, friendship overcomes fear, and education eradicates ignorance.

Rubens is an experienced teacher, public speaker, facilitator, and scholar-practitioner of interreligious learning and dialogue. She develops educational initiatives that foster interreligious learning and conversation for the public in the Baltimore-Washington corridor and online. In her research and writing Heather creatively focuses on the theoretical, theological, ethical, and political implications of affirming religious diversity and building an interreligious society. She is currently working on a book entitled In Good Faith: An Argument for the Interreligious Society.

She holds degrees from Georgetown University (B.A.), the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (G.Dip.), and the University of Chicago (A.M. and Ph.D.). She has taught at Lewis University, DePaul University, and St. Mary’s Seminary, and she served as a Visiting Scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Ph.D.

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, J.D., Ph.D., is Provost Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Religion and the Human at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is also an Affiliated Professor of Law at the Maurer School of Law.

Sullivan studies the intersection of religion and law in the modern period, particularly the phenomenology of modern religion as it is shaped in its encounter with law.

Sullivan is the author of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton University Press, 2005, 2d ed. 2018), Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton University Press, 2009), A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care and the Law (The University of Chicago Press, 2014), and Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in US Law (The University of Chicago Press, 2020), co-author of Ekklesia: Three Studies in Church and State (The University of Chicago Press, 2018) and The Abyss or Life is Simple (The University of Chicago Press, 2022), and coeditor of Politics of Religious Freedom (The University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Sullivan holds a Ph.D. and a J.D. from the University of Chicago.

Previous Faculty Seminars

2024 | Interreligious Perspectives on Death and Dying
2023 | America’s Unexceptional Christian Nationalism: Democratic Lessons from Other Contexts
2022 } Genocide Studies and Interreligious Studies: Comparative Pedagogical and Research Approaches