FEATURES
Common Senses for Common Spaces Dialogues
Common Senses for Common Spaces’ (CSCS) interfaith dialogues seeks to encourage more interaction for a deeper interfaith and intercultural understanding through the exchanges on key and common cultural and spiritual practices, with the aim to foster greater appreciation of cultures, creeds and customs, hence camaraderie, confidence and commitment.
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We are What We Eat
Food is one of the most important things in everyone’s life, regardless of race, language or religion.
While families feast to familial bonding and festivities, food also help foster friendship, facilitate familiarity, flank formalities and fulfil fellowships. Yet food has forced interfaith friction and fracture due to fallacies, foolishness and fake news.
Practising commoners of different religions and professions will share on their respective faith's unique dietary observances, along with common dietary habits and benefits, based on science and spirituality and discuss the health, religious and social impacts of food on communities.
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Sacred Rendezvous
Pilgrimages are sacred passages taken by subscribers of faiths. It is as much a physical trip as it is a spiritual journey of the mind and heart.
Sacred Rendezvous presents pilgrimages to holy sites of different religions discoursing on the histories, destinations, motivations and impacts of this common spiritual pillar across various beliefs.
Interestingly, some holy sites of the different faiths share common locations, such as Jerusalem.
Distinguished Lecture
& Film Screening
- Jihad Selfie
Dr Noor Huda Ismail, a visiting fellow at S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Singapore, completed his PhD in International Relations and Politics at Monash University. In 2008, he established the Institute for International Peace Building, seeking to reintegrate former convicted terrorists into mainstream Indonesian society through meaningful employments.
Jihad Selfie is a film documentation of Dr Huda’s efforts in exploring and uncovering the allures of the ISIS movement and the varying motivations behind aspiring jihadists, in their desire to join the terror group. The film screening will be significantly supplemented by an up-close and personal dialogue with Dr Huda, particularly on masculinity which deems to bear a striking susceptibility to the radical and violent cause.
RSIS Sharing
Peace & Security:
The role of intercultural & interreligious dialogue
Dr Paul Hedges
Dr Paul Hedges is Associate Professor in Interreligious Studies at the Studies in Interreligious Relations in Plural Societies Programme, RSIS, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches, teaches, and publishes widely in such areas as Interreligious Studies, theory and method in the study of religion, contemporary global religious ideologies, and interreligious hermeneutics. He has engaged in work beyond academia with the media, NGOs, faith groups, and governments.
Recent books include Comparative Theology: Critical and Methodological Perspectives (Brill, 2017), Towards Better Disagreement: Religion and Atheism in Dialogue (Jessica Kingsley, 2017), and Contemporary Muslim-Christian Encounters (Bloomsbury, 2015). He is currently working on a book exploring method and theory in the study of religion, provisionally entitled Understanding Religion: Method and Theory for Exploring Religiously Diverse Societies (California University Press, due 2020).
RSIS SHARING
The world we live in & The world we could live in
Dr Irm Haleem
Dr Irm Haleem is Assistant Professor in the Strategic Studies Program at RSIS. Her research focuses on how notions of morality, necessity and self-defense, as well as desires for recognition (power), serve to legitimize, moralize, and thus normalize the use of violence. Her work straddles social philosophy, ethics, and political theory, with a particular focus on violence and its many different manifestations.
She is the author of the book, The Essence of Islamist Extremism: Recognition through Violence, Freedom through Death (Routledge 2012; paperback: 2014). She is also the author of encyclopedia entries published by Oxford University Press (2012), chapter in an edited volume published by Northeastern University Press (2005), and book reports. Irm Haleem is a recipient of a one-year research grant (2015-2016) from the United States Air Force (USAF), Asian Office of Research and Development (AOARD), which was awarded towards the completion of her second book. She has been an invited TEDx speaker by TEDxNTU, October 2017, where she spoke on ‘Love, Hope and Human Agency’, drawing upon arguments she forwards in her second book (in-progress). Prior to joining RSIS-NTU, Irm Haleem taught at Northeastern University (USA), Seton Hall University (USA), and Princeton University (USA).
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