Centre for Religion and Public Life

• Mikel Burley, Professor of Religion and Philosophy
• Caroline Fielder, Associate Professor in Chinese Studies
• Alistair McFadyen, Retired Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology
• Seán McLoughlin, Professor of the Anthropology of Islam (Muslim Diasporas)
• Joseph Powell, Lectureship (Teaching and Research)
• Tasia Scrutton, Associate Professor in Philosophy and Religion
• Mustapha Sheikh, Professor in Islamic Studies; Co-Director of the Iqbal Centre for the Study of Contemporary Islam
• Jasjit Singh,  ​​​​​Professor of Religion and Global Engagement
• Stefan Skrimshire, Associate Professor in Theology and Religious Studies
• Caroline Starkey,  Associate Professor of Religion and Society
• Johanna Stiebert, Professor of Hebrew Bible
• Aled Thomas, Lecturer in Religious Studies
• Emma Tomalin, Professor of Religion and Public Life
• Adriaan van Klinken, Professor of Religion and African Studies
• Robert Vanderbeck, Professor of Human Geography and Head of School

Content warning: sexual harassment and abuse.

This seminar will explore the sexual harassment and abuse of Catholic Religious Sisters, especially by Priests, and discuss the responses of church authorities when abuses are disclosed or become known. It will:

(1) examine the fictional story of Sister Shanumi in the film and novel Conclave; (2) discuss internal reports of abuses against religious sisters in 1990s, public media coverage of these reports in 2001, and the renewed internation concern over the issue since 2018; and (3) describe a current research project to learn more about church responses when sisters are subjected to sexual harassment or abuse.

David Tombs is the Howard Paterson Professorial Chair, and Director of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues, at the University of Otago | Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, Aotearoa New Zealand. Originally from the United Kingdom, he moved to Otago in 2015, when he was appointed under the university’s Leading Thinkers initiative. David is a lay Anglican theologian with a longstanding interest in religion and social justice. His work focusses on contextual and liberationist approaches in theology. Much of his recent research has explored how churches can make better responses to spiritual and sexual abuses. He is known internationally for biblical research that has identified the significance of forced nudity as an instrument of violence during crucifixion. Read more at www.david-tombs.com.

What does it mean to see Jesus on screen, and what happens when the person we see does, or does not, look like us? This seminar explores the relationship between race, visual representation and theological imagination through two contemporary portrayals of Jesus: The Lumo Project: The Gospel of Mark (2014) and Son of Man (2006). Drawing on cross-cultural audience research, the seminar considers how viewers interpret and respond to different cinematic representations of Jesus, and what these responses reveal about the relationship between biblical narratives, cultural identity and belonging. It asks whether any visual representation of Jesus can be understood as culturally neutral, and what is at stake when the universal Christ is imagined through particular bodies, cultures and histories.

 

Dr Victoria Omotoso is a lecturer, researcher and author specialising in theology, visual culture, race and the Bible. She is Lecturer in Global Media and Digital Cultures at the University of Southampton and lectures in Race and the Bible at London School of Theology. Her research explores the intersection of biblical interpretation, visual representation, race and cross-cultural reception. Her monograph, Imag(in)ing Jesus in the Universal or Particular: Cross-Cultural Bible Film Reception of The Lumo Project: The Gospel of Mark (2014) and Son of Man (2006), was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2025. She also works as a consultant and speaker on race, theology, media and questions of representation and belonging.

One of the tricksters’ promising potentials is their ability to offer new images and visions of the world and its future. Drawing on research into alternative political imaginations among Jewish progressive activists, the talk explores how women activists draw on memory of the past and Jewish traditions to imagine the future. While peace-building practices are usually associated with a liberal ethos, the protagonists of this talk draw on, intervene in, and invent magical traditions to gain a clearer view of the future and to intervene in its creation. Focusing on Women’s time tricking and future-making, the talk highlights the importance of situated feminine knowledge creation and explores traditions, such as coffee-reading, talismans, and ‘saint-cult,’ which were embodied and repeated for centuries, associated with the non-rational and therefore seen as inadequate to explain and act in the modern socio-political world. These practices are being hijacked, re-created, reclaimed from patriarchal contexts, and reused by women activists as trickster political tools to open cracks in how the past is told and transmitted, to envision the future, and to act on it in the present at both the personal and collective levels.

Livnat Konopny-Decleve is a British Academy International Fellow at The School of Social and Political Science at The University of Edinburgh. She is a political anthropologist researching the Jewish radical left and alternative political imagination in Israel/Palestine and beyond. Livnat received her PhD from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University (2022) and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2023). She is a former co-convenor of APeCS – Anthropology of Peace, Conflict, and Security, a network of EASA. In 2025, together with Adi Liraz and Na’ama Landau, Livnat produced the film The Rose of Ioannina, based on her research and funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Impact Acceleration Accounts (IAA). Her research has been published in journals including the Journal of Borderlands Studies, Israel Studies, Visual Studies, and Mafte'akh – Lexical Review of Political Thought.