Conferences & Workshops
The Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion is dedicated to the study of religion around the world and serves as a center of public deliberation and education through research, teaching, outreach, and interaction with religious communities and the public worldwide. To that end, the institute organizes, hosts, and participates in conferences that bring together scholars, journalists, and thinkers whose research and coverage contributes to the rich, substantial, and ongoing conversation around global religion.
Catholic-Shi'a Dialogue Project (Spring 2025)
The Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion's Catholic-Shi’a Dialogue Series was created to tackle global challenges at the intersection of religion, ethics, and democracy. The program promotes the goals outlined by the University of Notre Dame’s initiative on Global Catholicism, as outlined in its Strategic Framework, emphasizing a commitment to making the most meaningful contributions to questions of national and international concern. The Dialogue Series builds a platform for interfaith engagement between Catholic scholars and leaders and Shi’a scholars and clerics in three key areas, each inflected by the theologies and social teachings of the respective traditions: dialogue among civilizations, geopolitical dialogue, and gender dialogue.
Ansari Book Prize Symposiums (2022, 2024)
The Ansari Institute's Book Prize highlights the work of scholars who reimagine the connection of religion and global affairs. In addition to recognizing the author of the chosen book and inviting he or she to provide a keynote talk, the Ansari institute also then invites scholars from different faith traditions to respond to the provocative ideas in Cathonomics through the lens of their own scholarly interest and faith traditions. These are organized in a series of panels.
Faith in the Story: Trialogues for Enhancing Religious Literacy (2020-2023)
In reporting religion, media professionals balance commitment to their stories with challenges of their markets. Similarly, faith leaders can find themselves caught between the prophetic and the practical aspects of their work. Academic scholars of religion strive to create new knowledge about religions that is responsible to scholarly and religious communities alike. Finally, an American public is also hungry for more and better quality media coverage of religion in public affairs. Despite their political and religious disagreements, these parties all agree on wanting more diverse and more accurate representations of religion available to the public sphere. How and why are we all still falling short of the mark?
Faith in the Story: Trialogues for Enhancing Religious Literacy, a multi-year series of workshops from the Ansari Institute, brought together media professionals, faith leaders, and scholars of religion to work together and identify solutions to these problems.
Religion Beyond Memes (October 2019)
In a world where communications are based on 280-character counts, influencer posts, and memes, how can reporters and educators effectively explain the complexities of religion? How can understanding of faith be expanded beyond generalizations and stereotypes? Can academics, practitioners, and journalists collectively change the conversation about religion? The "Religion Beyond Memes" conference explored these questions in depth.
Accomplished journalists, scholars, and thought leaders gathered at the Keough School of Global Affairs’ Washington Office to discuss the complexities of religion at a time when a cascade of social media platforms shapes how people understand and discuss faith and practice.
Inaugural Conference (October 2018)
What role does religion play in promoting the flourishing of the individual, community, and environment? How can the “metaphysical anguish and ontological delight” that allows us to “cross,” in the words of Ansari Institute Director Tom Tweed, between life stages and through space mobilize resources and structures for holistic human development? The inaugural conference for the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion at the University of Notre Dame, held in October of 2018, took a close look at the ambivalent role of religion in the present-day migration and ecological crises, as well as in the public discourses of media misinformation.