religion and race

Featured J.E.S. Author: Marianne Moyaert on the Role of Race in Interreligious Dialogue

Issue 60.2 of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies is now available via Project Muse. For this issue, we highlight Marianne Moyaert’s essay “Interreligious Dialogue, the Religiosecular, and the Race-Religion Divide: Musing from an Interfaith Scholar (and a Catholic Theologian),” which can be accessed HERE.

What is the central argument of your J.E.S. essay?

In this essay, I explore how, in Christian and, more specifically, Roman Catholic calls for interreligious dialogue, the acceptance of the so-called religiosecular divide goes hand-in-hand with the projection of the distinction between race and religion. I hypothesize that the dialogical turn in the Roman Catholic Church contributes to what Anya Topolski has called the masking of the religioracial constellation and what Geraldine Heng has called the refusal of race. Ironically, this becomes especially clear in the document We Remember, in which the Roman Catholic Church dedicated itself to exploring the extent to which it was co-responsible for the Shoah.

How did you become interested in this topic?

As a theologian of religions and interfaith educator, I was trained—like many—to treat religion and race as distinct domains. But over time, I became increasingly aware of how this separation restricted the critical scope of my work. Engaging with scholarship in critical race and secularism studies helped me see how deeply entangled these categories are, and how theology has often functioned to obscure that entanglement.

As a theologian of religions and interfaith educator, I was trained—like many—to treat religion and race as distinct domains. But over time, I became increasingly aware of how this separation restricted the critical scope of my work. This insight deepened while writing my recent book, Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other: A History of Religionization (Wiley-Blackwell, 2024), in which I trace how Christians throughout history have imagined religious others—Jews, Muslims, heretics, and pagans—and examine how these processes of religionization intersect with racialization. Engaging with critical race and secularism studies alongside this historical work made it increasingly clear how theology has often contributed to obscuring these entanglements, rather than confronting them.

You call attention to the corpus christianum and how excluding the religio-racial other was presented as a matter of societal health in the Middle Ages—an argument that draws comparisons to xenophobic violence in both the 20th and 21st centuries. If modern racism is not, in fact, modern, how do you think it has changed in the last hundred years?

What’s changed is not the logic of exclusion but the terms in which it is justified. In the Middle Ages, Christian authorities framed Jews, Muslims, and others as bodily threats to the purity of the Christian social body. Today, that same logic resurfaces in secularized language—invoking security, civility, or integration—but continues to mark certain bodies and beliefs as out of place. Understanding these continuities is essential for meaningful theological engagement with race.

What is your next project?

My next project, co-authored with Michelle Voss Roberts, is titled Multiple Voices, Multiple Salvations: Entangling Theologies of Religions. This comparative theological project reimagines salvation by engaging voices long excluded from dominant Christian theology, foregrounding race, gender, coloniality, and ecology. Each chapter brings Christian traditions into conversation with other theological perspectives, reworking central themes through embodied and entangled approaches to explore what multiple, liberative visions of salvation might look like today.


Marianne Moyaert, Ph.D., is a Professor at KU Leuven in Belgium, where she joined the Research Unit for Systematic Theology and the Study of Religions in 2023. Previously, she was Chair of Comparative Theology and Hermeneutics of Interreligious Dialogue at VU Amsterdam, where she led the master’s program in Interreligious Studies and the Emoena interfaith leadership program. Her research encompasses comparative theology, interreligious hermeneutics, and Jewish-Christian relations, with a particular interest in the ritual and material aspects of interfaith encounters. Since 2020, Dr. Moyaert has directed the VIDI research project Unequal Partners? a comparative ethnographic study examining how Christian-Jewish and Christian-Islamic couples in the Netherlands navigate their daily lives. She is also the editor-in-chief of Currents of Encounter, a Brill series at the intersection of theology, intercultural studies, and interfaith dialogue. A long-standing leader in the field, she serves on the steering committee for the Interreligious/Interfaith Studies group and has co-chaired the Comparative Theology group at the American Academy of Religion. Her magisterial new book, Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other: A History of Religionization (Wiley, 2024), crafts a Western European mosaic of religionization's turbulent history by unveiling how religious identities are constructed, hierarchies function, and how they are relevant for engaging diverse societies today worldwide.

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Book Review: Blacks and Jews in America: An Invitation to Dialogue

Terrance L. Johnson and Jacques Berlinerblau, Blacks and Jews in America: An Invitation to Dialogue. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2022. Pp. 224. $26.95.

Volume 57, Number 4, Fall 2022 of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies features a book review of Blacks and Jews in America: An Invitation to Dialogue. The review is written by Dialogue Institute executive director, David M. Krueger. The book has been useful in informing the organization’s various programs on Black-Jewish Dialogue and Understanding. In collaboration with the American Jewish Committee, the Dialogue Institute will be hosting history and dialogue programming in March and April, 2023. We are actively recruiting a spring 2023 intern to assist with research and curriculum development. Position description can be found HERE.

Below is an excerpt of the review, and the rest can be read HERE on Project Muse. The full text PDF is open access until February 1, 2023.

Among minority groups in the U.S., Blacks and Jews have had a unique relationship, often characterized by collaborations in music, sports, and the common pursuit of civil rights. One of the most iconic images of this relationship is the image of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching side-by-side during the American civil rights movements of the 1960’s. However, the relationships between Blacks and Jews have also been fraught with disagreements over questions of Israel/Palestine policy and commitment to racial justice. Drawing on their experience teaching a class on Blacks and Jews in America at Georgetown University, the authors take a fresh look at the complicated and contested history of the relations between these two groups, identifying the key obstacles to constructive dialogue.

In the early-to-mid-twentieth century, Jews and Blacks lived near one another in many urban areas, but this is less common today. Due to white flight in the latter half of the twentieth century, neighborhoods and schools are highly segregated along lines of race and class. As the authors observe, Jews and Blacks today tend to see one another as strangers. As a result, there are few face-to-face encounters that happen organically. Therefore, they suggest, dialogue and relationship-building must be intentional if they are to happen. To engage in this difficult work, the authors identify several key issues that must be taken into consideration. Foremost is the power asymmetry between the two groups. In political collaborations between Blacks and Jews in the twentieth century, white Jews have typically held the financial and economic power, an imbalance that has often distorted the relationship and led to misunderstandings about motivations. According to the authors, a shared commitment to a political vision that advances structural equality for African Americans must be the starting point for meaningful dialogue between Blacks and Jews.

The establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 is often cited as the highpoint of the “Grand Alliance” of Black-Jewish relations. During this period, the groups shared concerns about legalized racial discrimination and segregation. In time, immigrant Jews were better able to assimilate and become recognized as white—a privilege not afforded to African Americans, including Black Jews, who number more than a half million in the U.S. However, while many Jews do benefit from white privilege, they recognize that their status as white in American society is liminal. According to the authors, sincere dialogue between Blacks and Jews (including nonwhite Jews) must address the complexities of race in America.

To read more, click HERE to download a PDF from Project Muse.

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