In August 2025, I had the opportunity to participate in the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies’ 2025 Faculty Seminar, “No Church | No State: Religious Experiments in Imagining the World Otherwise” that stretched my thinking at the intersections of religion, law, and social justice. The cohort pushed me to consider how religious communities across history have imagined alternative ways of living, and how those experiments can inform today’s struggles for equity and belonging.
For me, this experience was deeply connected to my work with Sadhana: Coalition of Progressive Hindus, where I’ve led our amicus brief work on reproductive justice and built interfaith coalitions committed to racial and economic justice. The seminar gave me new frameworks for thinking about how dharmic approaches and other religious imaginations can help us reimagine the role of faith in public life outside narrow “church–state” categories.
It also affirmed something I’ve long believed: that advocacy, pedagogy, and scholarship can’t live in separate silos. What I’ve carried forward from ICJS is already informing my next chapter, in developing a syllabus to teach through Fordham University School of Law’s Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyers’ Work. My aim is to help students see how law and religious imagination interact, not as abstractions, but as lived strategies for contesting inequality and building community.
I’m so grateful to Heather Miller Rubens and to my fellow seminar participants for the rigor, imagination, and solidarity they brought into the room and excited to continue weaving these insights into the classroom soon!