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 explored those creative and constructive efforts in descriptive, normative, analytical, and literary forms. Participants included academics, scholars, and practitioners who shared 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.
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.
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, J.D., Ph.D.
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, J.D., Ph.D., is Provost Professor Emeritus at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she held appointments in both the Department of Religious Studies and at the Maurer School of Law. She also is founding director of the Center for Religion and the Human at IU.
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.
