What our professors do when they aren’t teaching.
From research to activism, Montclair State University Religion department faculty members are active, engaged scholars outside the classroom. Below is a sampling of activities they are engaged in.
The Religious Imagination
The Sixth Annual Creative Research Center Symposium, in collaboration with the University’s Creative Research Center, featured members of the department of Religion reflecting on the imaginative actions in religion and religious studies.
Panel discussion with entire faculty reflecting on the nature of religion and the role of the imagination in religious practices.
Dr. Dorothy Rogers
Dr. Rogers is currently working on a two-part book project:
- Women Philosophers: German Thought in the U.S.
- Women Philosophers: Entering Academia in the U.S.
Both texts are expected to be published by Bloomsbury Press in 2019.
She is also writing “Sanctuary: Religion and Law in America,” a book chapter set to appear in Law and Religion in the Liberal State, edited by Jahid Bhuiyan and Uddin Khan.
Apart from serving on several campus committees, she is the co-chair of the University’s Council for Faith and Spirituality, as well as being part of Montclair State’s President’s Commission on Affirmative Action and Diversity.
For the last two years Dr. Rogers has coordinated lecture series on religion and social/political thought in public life for local community groups, where she herself presented on feminism and left-wing Christian activism.
Dr. Mark Clatterbuck
Dr. Clatterbuck recently published Crow Jesus: Personal Stories of Native Religious Belonging (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017).
He is also the co-founder of Lancaster Against Pipelines (LAP), a 501c3 federal non-profit battling the fracked-gas industry in Pennsylvania. Defenders of environmental and community rights, LAP’s educational, legal, and regulatory efforts against the gas industry are accompanied by ambitious grassroots activism. Over fifty members of LAP have been arrested in non-violent actions aimed at derailing pipeline installation through the community’s farmland, waterways, forests, and neighborhoods.
LAP’s work has been featured in a number of recent documentaries, including The Climate and the Cross (The Guardian, 2018) and Protecting the Sacred (CBS News, 2017).
Dr. Clatterbuck is also involved with other climate justice work from a faith-based perspective, including his work with a federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act lawsuit filed against the gas industry by the Adorers of the Blood of Christ, a vowed order of Roman Catholic women. The Washington Post reported on their lawsuit in 2017.
Dr. John Soboslai
Dr. Soboslai is a specialist in the comparative study of religion and violence, focusing on martyrdom and self-sacrifice. He has published articles on Tibetan self-immolation, Sikh discourses of sacrifice during WWI, and modern forms of Christian violence. He is currently working on a book to be titled Witnessing Death: Global Ideologies of Martyrdom which is a comparative study of martyrdom across time and tradition. There, he compares cases of martyrdom in second-century Christianity, Shi’a Islam during the 1980s, anticolonial and loyalist Sikhs in the early twentieth century, and Tibetan Buddhists who have been self-immolating in opposition to the programs of the People’s Republic of China since 2009. This last case led to his co-authored article “The Bodhisattva, the Dharmarāja, and the Dalai Lamas: Evaluating the Religious and Political Causes of Tibetan Self-Immolation,” published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, while his article “Sikh Self-Sacrifice and Religious Representation During World War I” published as part of a special edition of Religions.
In 2016, Dr. Soboslai was selected as the year’s Sherman Emerging Scholar by the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. As part of the award he gave a presentation “Dying For God? Martyrdom Across Time,” and was also interviewed for UNC-TV on the subject of martyrdom and suicide bombing. He is also the co-author of the 2015 book God in the Tumult of the Global Square (UC Press, with Mark Juergensmeyer and Dinah Griego).
Dr. Kate Temoney
Dr. Temoney is a comparative religious ethicist with a specialization in religion and human rights, and her current research analyzes the intersections of religion and genocide. Her most recent and forthcoming works are: Anatomizing White Rage: ‘Race is My Religion!’ and ‘White Genocide,’” The Religion of White Rage: White Workers, Religious Fervor, and the Myth of Racial Progress (University of Edinburgh Press, 2020); “An Assessment of the Plan of Action for Religious Leaders and Actors to Prevent Incitement to Violence that Could Lead to Atrocity Crimes,” Routledge Handbook on Religion and Genocide (Routledge, forthcoming), and an “Historical Understanding and Reconciliation after Violent Conflict,” Historical Understanding, co-author Berber Bevernage (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming). Her courses include the Holocaust: Religious Perspectives, Applied Jewish Ethics, African Religions, Religions of the World, Religious Ethics, and Religion and Human Rights.
Since joining Montclair State’s faculty in 2016, she has traveled throughout the U.S. and abroad to countries such as Australia, Brazil, Poland, Cambodia, and Morocco as an invited speaker and conference presenter or participant. She also is the co-founder of the Genocide Education and Prevention Project, which held its first conference at the University in the Summer of 2017, and co-chair of the Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide Unit of the American Academy of Religion.
In March 2020, Dr. Temoney delivered a lecture on religious actors and genocide prevention at The University of Manitoba’s Arthur V. Mauro Institute for Peace & Justice at St. Paul’s College in Winnipeg, Canada, and in September 2020, she was invited by the US State Department to contribute to the panel: “Working with Religious Actors to Mitigate Environmental Conflict.” She is a 2020-2021 Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning Theology awardee and a 2021 selected participant in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust Seminar. Her upcoming conference presentations include papers on moral injury and genocidal rape (American Academy of Religion, November/December 2020, USA); holographic representations of Holocaust survivors (International Network for Theory of History, April 2021, Puebla, Mexico); and the perspectives and prospectives of Genocide Studies (International Commission of Historical Sciences, August 2021, Poznan, Poland).