2025 Albert Moore Lecturer
Professor Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (March 2025)
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (Northwestern University) will present three public lectures for the 2025 Albert Moore Lecture series.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (BA Wesleyan University, 1992; MA Yale University, 1996; PhD Johns Hopkins University, 2002) is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (US). She studies the varied public and political careers of religion, including in U.S. foreign and immigration policy, in the international politics of secularism and religious freedom, in and through American borders, and in US actions in and representations of the Middle East.
She is the author of Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2015), The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2008), and four co-edited volumes on religion and politics, including, most recently, At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion (Columbia University Press, 2021).
At Northwestern, Hurd co-directs the Global Religion & Politics Research Group and is a core faculty member in the MENA Studies program. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on religion, law and politics, American borders, the global Middle East, and the politics of religious diversity. She also curates the open access Teaching Law and Religion Case Study Archive, which offers legal cases and background materials for teaching on the intersections of law, religion, and politics around the world.
All three lectures will take place from 5:30pm to 7pm, at Burns 2 Lecture theatre.
| Date | Topic | |
|---|---|---|
| Mon 17 Mar | Lecture 1: Unsettling secularism: The politics of religion in the 21st century The idea that religion is disappearing or privatizing is the premise of most accounts of secularism. It does not fit with the realities of experience in most parts of the world. If we don’t have an absence of religion in national and international public affairs, what do we have? What vocabularies of politics, and of religion, allow us to speak and think about these complex entanglements of the secular and the religious? Is it possible to move beyond the insistence that religion is transculturally and trans-historically separate from the secular, the political, the public? Can we acknowledge the influence of Christianity in traditions and practices of secularism without simply collapsing the latter into the former? Today, a generation of scholars is exploring new ways to pluralize and globalize the study of secularism, religion, and public life. This lecture explores these challenges, preparing the way for a different approach to the study of religion in politics described in the lectures that follow. | |
| Wed 19 Mar | Lecture 2: American Border Religion In the first of two lectures drawing on Hurd’s new book, Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States, this talk introduces the idea of “American border religion.” While politicians write laws, build barriers, and manage flows of people and goods, another aspect of American borders goes unseen. Borders are more than just lines or transit points, or places of constraint and violence. They are also sites of efforts to escape the ordinary, to cross over, to find spaces outside of law, spaces of emancipation, even chosenness. Borders are religious as well as political. Expanding our understanding of American borders, and the American national project, this lecture explores the paradox of why Americans defend the border so ferociously even as they celebrate the idea of America as borderless, transcendent, and universal. Americans share a bipartisan “border religion” complete with an array of beliefs and practices. This border religion includes reverence for national security, a liturgy of immigration, and an eschatological foreign policy. | |
| Thurs 20 Mar | Lecture 3: “AmericaIsrael:” The War in Gaza and the Politics of Religious Dissent Heaven Has a Wall explores spaces in which the religious and the political become indistinguishable. The relationship between the United States and Israel is one of these spaces. At a moment in which US-Israeli relations have come under unprecedented strain, how does approaching this relationship from outside of the demands of a secularist worldview—which insists on distinguishing between religious and political—allow us to see things differently? This lecture examines the religious dimensions of the political life of US-Israeli relations. While religious Zionisms are an important part of this story, they are not the whole story. I approach the US-Israeli relationship as a single entity, with the two nations merged into one. I call this “AmericaIsrael.” US border ambivalence with Israel is part of a collective national drama in which the American people work to realize something greater than themselves. The lecture concludes with a discussion of rising domestic opposition to the American-Israeli destruction of Gaza. |
The Albert Moore Lectures
In 2013, the Religion Programme established a biennial lecture series in honour of Professor Albert Moore. The lectures are delivered in Dunedin by distinguished international scholars and, where possible, also made available online.
Albert Moore
Albert C. Moore pioneered the academic study of religion at the University of Otago and in New Zealand. After taking an MA in History at Victoria University Wellington, and a BD at Otago, he completed his doctorate in Biblical Studies at Manchester University, where he also took courses in Comparative Religion. After a year’s postdoctoral work in Germany, and almost ten years in the Presbyterian ministry in Tapanui, he devoted a further year to study in History of Religions under Mircea Eliade and Paul Tillich at the University of Chicago. After teaching at Indiana University, he returned to New Zealand in 1966 to take up a position as the first lecturer in Phenomenology of Religion at the University of Otago, where he was to teach for twenty-five years. While he published widely on religion throughout his career, Albert’s enduring interest and most important work was on the iconography of religion. His book Iconography of Religions: An Introduction (1977) is still in print.
After retiring as Associate Professor in 1992, Albert continued both to publish, and to teach, notably for the University of the Third Age in Dunedin. His book Art in the Religions of the Pacific: Symbols of Life appeared in 1995. In 2001, he published Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Otago: 1946-2000, a history of the Faculty of Theology in which he was trained and the Department which he had founded.
Having been present at the first meeting of the New Zealand Association for the Study of Religions in 1970, it is perhaps fitting that his last conference paper, 'Judas and fiction in the quest for the historical Jesus' (a discussion of C.K. Stead's My Name was Judas, 2006), was delivered at the 2007 NZASR conference. His autobiography More Than You Know was posthumously published, and is available from Rachel Ovens, 64 Cannington Road, Maori Hill, Dunedin, or from the Department. Albert died on January 23, 2009, aged 82. His obituary, from the Otago Daily Times, is reproduced below with permission.
Obituary, Otago Daily Times, 28 February 2009
By Philip Somerville
Former students of Albert Moore remember the "icon of the day," a piece of religious art he would bring to class and whose visual impact would resonate with the day’s lecture.
They remember his curiosity, empathy and perceptiveness, his eager, earnest, encouraging ways. It was Prof Moore, a Presbyterian minister, historian and theologian, who in 1967 founded the Phenomenology of Religion discipline at the University of Otago. From beginnings with a handful of students, Prof Moore oversaw its growth stage by stage over 25 years into a thriving corner of intellectual endeavour.
Prof Moore produced an extensive set of slides on world religions to help him with his teaching, to help capture "the value of the visual." With the lights dimmed and the audience stilled, he could find himself more involved in his subject matter, even at times "carried away" like a shaman in a seance, he has written.
His particular specialty grew from his passion for art and he became a world authority on iconography, the publication of the comprehensive and widely used Iconography of Religion: An Introduction in 1977 marking the breadth and detail of his knowledge and interest and the accessibility of his writing. Another major book, Arts in the Religions of the Pacific, appeared in 1995.
He had learned the clarinet as a young adult as he pursued another passion, jazz. Because he was drawn to link aspects of life, it came as no surprise when he wrote and broadcast on religion and jazz.
Prof Moore, who died in Dunedin last month aged 82, was born in Wellington and grew up in Island Bay, Wellington, in Invercargill and the Wairarapa, where his vocational dream for a time was to be a cartoonist. He was accelerated through school and spent a year as a Masterton office boy.
At Victoria University, Wellington, beginning before he turned 17, he studied history and became enmeshed in the Student Christian Movement, so influential for many leaders of his generation. He became a primary school teacher and then came to Dunedin to study for the ministry.
Winning a travelling scholarship, he earned his doctorate in New Testament studies in Manchester and continued with postdoctoral work in Germany. Then it was to Tapanui and parish ministry from 1955 to 1964, where he met and married Alexa (nee Hancox), a Karitane nurse who was home after overseas travel.
They and their two young children next left for Chicago, fired by Prof Moore’s fascination with culture, religion and arts and the chance to study the history of religion. New positions were beginning to open up in teaching religions of the world and Prof Moore was on the staff for a year at the University of Southern Indiana in the mid-western college city of Bloomington. He was housed, as it happened, next to the famous Kinsey Sex Research Institute.
Founding the Otago course, the second in religious studies in New Zealand after Canterbury, Prof Moore settled back into Dunedin, and Opoho. Phenomenology of Religion (or "phenom" as it came to be called colloquially) grew in 10 years from a handful of students to about 160, and added honours, masters and doctoral candidates. The courses are now part of the department of theology and religious studies.
Peter Donovan, who set up the first religious studies course at Massey University in Palmerston North, said Prof Moore was one of the founding fathers of university religious studies in New Zealand. He saw his task as being to help students see, appreciate and empathise with the religious experience of others without rushing in, labelling or engaging in territorial arguments.
One of his fortes was small group dynamics, and he ran week after week for more than 30 years a weekly adult study group at Opoho Presbyterian Church. There he is remembered for being gracious, gentle, generous and without guile, the type of loyal, warm person who engenders affection. Long before "inclusiveness" became a catchcry, he naturally and sympathetically listened and made every person he met feel they had an important contribution.
Forever probing intellectually, he was open to new challenges and experiences. At one time he agreed with the description from a mentor, the philosopher and theologian J.M. Bates, of him as a "responsible radical." Every new person and each new book he encountered held exciting, positive possibilities.
Prof Moore, in his active retirement, continued to explore new ideas and to write and read. He was heavily involved in the University of the Third Age (U3A), helping organise and lead courses. He was on the committee in Dunedin for its first 10 years. Diving was also an interest and he competed in the Masters Games.
He is survived by his wife, children Rachel Ovens and Jonathan and three grandchildren.
The Albert Moore Memorial Lectures appeal
Generous support for the lecture series has already been provided by Albert Moore's family, and the Presbyterian Synod of Otago and Southland.
In order to establish the series in perpetuity, the Programme is now seeking to raise an endowment fund of over $150,000.
The fund will be administered by the University of Otago Foundation Trust and as a registered charity with donee status donation may be tax deductible.
To make your contribution to the establishment of the Moore Lectures, please visit the University of Otago's secure online giving page:
We thank you for your support.