Finding Beauty in the Other

Peter Casarella has been since 2013 an Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, where he currently serves as Interim Director of Latin American North American Church Concerns and Area Coordinator for the Ph.D. program in World Religions World Church. He received his Ph.D. in 1992 from the department of Religious Studies at Yale University. In 2005-2006 he served as president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians in the U.S. (ACHTUS). After teaching at the University of Dallas and The Catholic University of America, he was appointed in 2007 as a Professor in Department of Catholic Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. In 2008 he was named the founding Director of DePaul’s Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology. He was elected in 2009 as the fourth President of the American Cusanus Society. In the academic year 2014-2015 he was named a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology and also received a Sabbatical Leave Fellowship from the Louisville Institute for a research project entitled: “God of the People: A Latino/a Theology.”Mun’im Sirry earned a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School (2012). His academic interests include political theology, modern Islamic thought, Qur’anic studies, interreligious relations, and Southeast Asian religions and cultures. Sirry's most recent book, Scriptural Polemics: The Qur’an and Other Religions (Oxford University Press, 2014) examines difficult passages in the Qur’an that have usually been viewed as obstacles to peaceful co-existence among different religious communities. Currently, along with the Contending Modernities team, Sirry is developing a Contending Modernities working group on Indonesia focusing on authority, community and identity. The working group will explore and analyze the complex relationships between the various contending authorities, communities and identities that have shaped and been shaped by religious life at both the societal and state levels. The Indonesian working group will be comprised of leading scholars in various fields exploring the conditions for the possibility of pluralist co-existence among diverse ethnic and religious communities in Indonesia through a wide range of engagement with religious and secular forces. In Sirry’s publications have appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Arabica,al-Bayan, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Interpretation, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Journal of Semitic Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, The Muslim World, Studia Islamica, and Die Welt des Islams.