Oct 21 – Beyond the Religion-Liberalism Divide: Wahid’s “Civil Islam” & Maritain’s “Integral Humanism” with Timothy Samuel Shah

Wednesday, Oct 21, 2026, 4 PM – 5:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA

Please register here.

A family of religious humanisms has been a powerful force in global politics since at least the 19th century. These movements share a Wittgensteinian family resemblance in that they propose a radical turn away from both secularist liberalism and particularist fundamentalism and towards an emphasis on the transcendent and equal value of all human persons as objects of God’s universal love. The talk will consider, compare, and commend two striking exemplars of liberal religious humanism whose impact is still widely felt — the Indonesian religious leader, theologian, and statesman, Abdurrahman Wahid (1940-2009) and the French Catholic public intellectual, Jacques Maritain (1882-1973).

Speaker:

Timothy Samuel Shah is co-founder and the Director of Strategic Initiatives of the Center for Shared Civilizational Values, Secretary of the R20, and Distinguished Research Scholar in Politics at the University of Dallas. He specializes in political philosophy, global politics, religion, religious freedom, and the history of moral and political theory. From 2017 to 2020, Shah led an intensive project funded by Templeton Religion Trust examining the religious freedom landscape in South and Southeast Asia. One of the project’s major findings — that spiritual leaders of Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) “represent the most theologically potent and operationally effective actors promoting religious liberty in the Islamic world today” — inspired Shah to join these NU leaders in establishing the Center for Shared Civilizational Values (CSCV) in 2021. Between 2011 and 2018, he was at Georgetown University, where he served as associate director of the Berkley Center’s Religious Freedom Project and associate professor of the practice of religion and global politics in Georgetown’s Department of Government. Shah is the author or editor of Proceedings of the R20 International Summit of Religious Leaders in Bali, Indonesia (Gadjah Mada University Press, 2023); Under Caesar’s Sword: Christian Responses to Persecution (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Homo Religiosus?: Exploring the Roots of Religious Freedom in Human Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Rethinking Religion and World Affairs (Oxford University Press, 2011); and God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (W.W. Norton and Company, 2011). His most recent publication is Indonesia’s Humanitarian Islam Movement: Origins, Development, and Global Impact (Routledge, 2027), co-edited with Robert W. Hefner, C. Holland Taylor, and Thomas G. Dinham.

Moderator:

Robert W. Hefner is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Pardee School of Global Affairs at Boston University. From 1986-2017, he worked with the sociologist Peter L. Berger and served as director and/or associate director of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA) at Boston University.

Hefner is a social theorist who specializes in the anthropology of religion, ethics and law (including shariah law), education and youth development, as well as the comparative study of gender, citizenship, globalization, and modernity. He has directed some 24 major research projects and organized 19 international conferences, on issues ranging from Muslim politics and shariah law to citizenship and civic education in Western democratic societies. His research in recent years has had two thematic and areal foci: the politics and ethics of pluralist co-existence in the the Muslim-majority world, including especially Indonesia and Malaysia; and, second, social recognition and citizenship among Catholics, Muslims, and secular-liberals in France and the United States. Hefner has published 21 edited or single-authored books, as well as seven major policy reports for the U.S. government and private foundations. Seven of his book have been translated into Indonesian and Malay; one has been published in Chinese. With the support of the Henry Luce Foundation, Hefner is currently (2019-2021) co-producing (with Zainal Abidin Bagir of Gadjah Mada University) six films on plurality, gender, and citizenship in Indonesia. He is also completing a book on Muslims, shariah law, and the quest for a modern Muslim ethics.

During 2009-2010, Hefner served as the elected president of the Association for Asian Studies, the largest professional association for Asian studies in the world. In 2007-2008 he was recognized as a Carnegie Scholar in Islam. From 2016 to 2019, he was Director of the Religion and Education Committee in the United States-Indonesia Society (USINDO), as part of the Presidential Initiative undertaken by Presidents Barack Obama and Joko Widodo on “Religious Pluralism in Indonesia and the United States.” During 2008-2009, he was the first Lee Kong Chian Fellow in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and Stanford University. From 2007-2015 he was a Senior Professor in the Summer Graduate Program on Religion Culture, and Society at the University Centre-St. Ignatius, University of Antwerp, Belgium (2007-2009). He has also been a visiting senior scholar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France; the Kroc Institute for Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame; the University of Cambridge (UK); the Department of Sociology at Fudan University (Shanghai); the Center for Asian Studies at Melbourne University (Australia); the Humanities Institute, Santa Cruz; the National University of Malaysia; the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton); and Gadjah Mada University (Yogyakarta).