Twelver Shiʿa Muslims form the largest religious minority in Pakistan where they occupy a precarious position in relation to a Sunni-Islamic majority state. Despite the threat of marginalization and violence, finding new avenues through which to practice publicity has become central to Shiʿi groups’ demands for recognition. Seizing on an increase in smartphone ownership, combined events-organizers and digital collectives known as “azadari networks” use existing platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok to publicize Shiʿi faith. These networks are recognized by their audiences as experts in “liveness”, that sees technology contribute to the reception of divine presence or lend affective significance to existing rituals.

Building on ethnographic research among Shiʿi videographers, this paper examines the qualities of liveness that have long been desired in Shiʿi media. This can be traced to the availability of sound amplification, the rare appearance of Shiʿi orators on broadcast television in the 1960s, and the adoption of home recording technology in the 1980s that allowed ritual events, processions, or regular commemorative gatherings known as majlis to be recorded and reproduced on audio- and videocassette. Yet since the launch of Facebook Live in 2016 and the ensuring popularity of livestreamed events, reform scholars, popular orators, and audiences have debated the ethics of liveness, particularly whether the mediation of co-presence constitutes an appropriate performance of belief. Contrary to Shiʿi discourse on the glory or trauma of past events, these debates address what the Shi’i Muslim present should look, sound, and feel like in an era of public life characterized by outrage, heightened sentiment, and religious controversy.

The recent Dobbs v. Jackson decision puts the function of race in settling the matter of reproductive rights (to say nothing of reproductive justice) on display, showing the two to be crucial in establishing the legitimating reason and unreason of the decision. This talk considers how the convergence of race and reproduction in this decision can be an occasion to examine the enduring tie between the political and theological as manifest in the Supreme Court’s function in US governance. A key source of the court’s decision to overturn Roe and Casey is the sense that preserving those precedents is inconsistent with both the Constitution and the United States’ “history and tradition of ordered liberty.” Taking the dependence of the court’s ruling on the significance of order to conceptions of liberty, this talk shows how the afterlife of racial slavery and reproduction’s entanglement in the decision reveals a political theological sense of epistemological and existential order, and not only sovereignty, that is foundational to the court’s authority, power, and function.

In this event, co-organized with and held at the Museum of the City of New York, curator Azra Dawood will be joined in conversation by leading scholars of religion in New York City, exploring the intersections of the public and private, the political, secular and sacred. In conjunction with an exhibit at MCNY that launches November 16.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Carl Schmitt’s book, Political Theology. In that time, but especially in the past few decades, Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, his assertion of the persistence of theological appeals in secular politics, and the very idea of “political theology” itself have been hugely influential. They have shaped our understandings of everything from state power to the “War on Terror” to the abject subject. Schmitt has also been controversial, not least given his work as a Nazi ideologue and jurist. In this panel discussion, leading critical thinkers reflect on the past, present, and future of both Political Theology and political theology. What does this concept offer now for an understanding of our world? A century on, how should we think about—and act upon—the notions of sovereignty, miracles, and sacrifice that Schmitt, and many others, have brought to the fore?

Gun culture in America has deep and varied roots. But the merging of contemporary Christian nationalism and this culture is a worrisome and dangerous trend in need of much greater exploration. In this discussion, leading experts on guns in relation to religion, race, policing and the law address the trend in a broad outline, while also highlighting particular developments related to Christian nationalist imaginaries: marketing of the "Crusader" rifle; liturgical use of AR-15's by Rod of Iron Ministries; the proclamation of the AR-15 as the gun of apocalypse by former Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin; and the use of bullet rosaries by some branches of radical traditionalist Catholics.