Candace Lukasik | Mississippi State University (original) (raw)
Papers by Candace Lukasik
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2024
This article examines the idea of global Christianity in scholarship and the postcolonial and pre... more This article examines the idea of global Christianity in scholarship and the postcolonial and present imperial conditions that underlie it. Through an analysis of the fields of World Christianity and the anthropology of Christianity, it considers how Western Christian histories and power dynamics have impacted Christian traditions of the Global South and seriously considers the pervasive logics of geopolitical power that transform local contexts-not only altering how such communities and traditions are written about, but also impacting the traditions, practices, and people themselves. Thinking with Coptic Orthodox Christians between Egypt and the United States and Born-Again Christians in Uganda, this article examines how global power inequalities in the circuits of ideas, forms of life, and theopolitics are integral to thinking about the idea of global Christianity and its variations in scholarship.
Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies, 2023
This article attends to the entanglement of Coptic Christians and the Coptic Orthodox Church with... more This article attends to the entanglement of Coptic Christians and the Coptic Orthodox Church with a national politics centered around the citizenship concept and fraught with sectarianism. Since the early 1980s, the Coptic Orthodox Church has institutionally incorporated youth politics, pedagogy, and education through its Youth Bishopric. Following the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the rise of Coptic political movements that challenged the Church's authority were portrayed by scholars as working in opposition to the Church's politics and pedagogy. By weaving together accounts of the historical and contemporary programming of the Church's Youth Bishopric and conversations around the discourse of citizenship in post-2011 Egypt among Coptic youth activists from the Maspero Youth Union, this article tracks Coptic contradictions of secular citizenship and debate over minority status. It specifically shows how Copts are engaging these contradictions in debate and ultimately parses out how the social conditions of such debate in itself may answer a call for an "ethical thematization" of religious difference.
Rutgers University Press eBooks, Dec 9, 2022
International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2022
Tracing the transnational translations of the Coptic community as a minority has been the focus ... more Tracing the transnational translations of the Coptic community as a minority has been
the focus of my research. Between 2016 and 2021, I conducted multi-sited ethnographic
work among recent Coptic migrants: first-, second-, and third-generation American Copts
and clergy members moving transnationally between Egypt, primarily the village of
Bahjura, Naj Hammadi, Upper Egypt, and the United States, primarily Jersey City, New Jersey. Shuttling back and forth across these sites of migration, my work has examined the everyday practices and processes that shape transnational Coptic communal formation and belonging as it interfaces with the tension between their minority status in Egypt and their racial-religious placement within an American Christian conservative landscape. My interlocutors relate to each other through their religious tradition as well as their politicized transnational minority condition. As I argue, their struggle to grapple with their minoritization, modulated as it is between Egypt and the United States, poses the question of political praxis and interpellation in a broader geopolitical frame of international religious freedom and counterterrorism, as well as scholarly study.
Sociology of Islam, 2019
Sultan Doughan and Candace Lukasik invited Schirin Amir-Moazami and Lisa Wedeen to engage one ano... more Sultan Doughan and Candace Lukasik invited Schirin Amir-Moazami and Lisa Wedeen to engage one another through a virtual conversation that revolves around Saba’s scholarly intervention, dedication to critical thinking, and her impact beyond the discipline of anthropology. By asking these scholars to reflect with us on their respective fields after Saba Mahmood, we aimed at disclosing and unpacking the mark Mahmood has left in fields relevant to her research. Just as in Mahmood’s scholarly engagement, collaboration and thinking beyond boundaries, disciplinary and area-wise, is central to the conversation that follows.
American Anthropologist, 2021
Since the 1990s, attacks on Egyptian Copts have been made legible to American (particularly evang... more Since the 1990s, attacks on Egyptian Copts have been made legible to American (particularly evangelical) audiences through the moral imaginary of the “Persecuted Church,” which argues that Christians around the globe are persecuted more than any other time in history. Images of bloodied Egyptian Coptic bodies have circulated among Western Christian religio-political networks in an “economy of blood,” an imperial economy of Christian kinship that performs the double movement of glory and racialization. This double movement has placed American Copts in a bind, whereby indigenous Coptic collective memory of blood and persecution has intersected with the political, theological, and affective kinship formations of this economy of blood. This article analyzes how the contemporary remapping of Eastern Christian traditions, like that of the Copts, produces effects on a geopolitical scale, and examines how this reconfiguration unfolds whiteness and Western Christianity.
Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 2021
This essay attends to contemporary Oriental Orthodox solidarity as a postcolonial condition and t... more This essay attends to contemporary Oriental Orthodox solidarity as a postcolonial condition and to the possibilities of communal belonging along different planes of theopolitical intelligibility. Oriental Orthodox debates around what I call the “social hierarchy of theological truth” are mired in colonial histories of civilizational order and the production of the collective experience of Byzantine and Islamic subjugation. The project
of making Oriental Orthodox experience visible in the contemporary moment as perennial persecution and perpetual subjugation hinders analysis of the workings of this neo-imperial system that utilizes certain narratives of Oriental Orthodox while precluding the collective’s historicity and its enmeshment in other radical frameworks of solidarity. I argue that contemporary Oriental Orthodox experience must be historicized as a means to understand the operations of the complex and changing discursive processes by which such an identity is ascribed, debated, or embraced. By historicizing the identity that such a process has produced, I ethnographically trace how such processes are unmarked in the everyday interactions of Oriental Orthodox in the United States—in the ways history, theology, and collective memory are debated and politicized in the present.
Middle East Critique, 2016
This article explores conflicts within the Coptic community related to problems of definition and... more This article explores conflicts within the Coptic community related to problems of definition and representation. Coptic groups that emerged from Egypt’s 2011 revolution brought these tensions to the fore. Groups such as the prominent Maspero Youth Union (MYU) [Itihad Shabab Maspero] were formed to contest the hegemony of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egyptian national
politics. The MYU and others have attempted to reconstruct social boundaries drawn by the Church and the state, promoting political secularism, or the separation of religion from politics, as a solution to inter-communal strife and remedy to intra-communal conflict over the position of the Coptic Orthodox Church as the sole representative of the community. At the same time, the group has emphasized their Coptic identity through religious symbols and imagery at protest events, as depicted at the Maspero
memorial march in 2012. While the MYU officially endorsed secular governance as a means to overcome sectarianism, its actions also made visible internal conflicts over the representation of Coptic identity in contemporary Egyptian society. Although the promise of secularism and equal citizenship is not specific to the Coptic or Egyptian context, this article focuses on its paradoxical effects within the Coptic community and its relationship to the state.
Book Reviews by Candace Lukasik
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2024
History and Anthropology, 2021
Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief , 2020
Conference Presentations by Candace Lukasik
Presentation for Co-Organized Panel entitled, "Anthropology, Christianity, Critique: The Idea of ... more Presentation for Co-Organized Panel entitled, "Anthropology, Christianity, Critique: The Idea of Christianity in Anthropological Inquiry" (American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting)
Teaching Documents by Candace Lukasik
Religion continues to shape challenges and conflicts, political events and crises around the worl... more Religion continues to shape challenges and conflicts, political events and crises around the world. When we speak about religion as a force impacting social and political processes and events, however, it is often unclear what kind, or different kinds, of force we are referring to: the force of deeply held beliefs, of institutions, of moral commitments, of political rhetoric, or the force of habits formed within religious communities? How does the idea of religion (and the forms of life cultivated within different religious traditions) help us to understand aspects of the contemporary world, and where does its use only serve to obscure social and political processes?
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the idea of religion through different ways of studying it, experiencing it, and discussing it. We will begin by interrogating some of the basic concepts and debates which have classically informed studies of religion, noting both their genesis in the context of early modern Christian Europe and the problems entailed in applying them outside that context. The historical issues raised here will provide a basis from which to question the meaning of such key terms as belief, experience, superstition, fundamentalism, and law as they have been discussed in different religious traditions and in public discourse. We will then turn to a more in-depth analysis of specific problems and debates within the contemporary study of and public discourse on religion.
This seminar is an experiment in studying the intersections of religion, race, and migration thro... more This seminar is an experiment in studying the intersections of religion, race, and migration through the idea of difference. We discuss how particular understandings of religion, race, and migration inform contemporary scholarship and shape national and international legal and governmental practices. Specifically, this course explores how difference-of community, body, and place-produces conditions of possibility. Over the semester, we will investigate various borders of difference, using binaries to guide our analysis. We will examine this through a range of problem spaces including: religion/secularism; race/ethnicity/sectarianism; terrorist/citizen; and refugee/migrant. Ultimately, this course aims to critically unpack the relations of power by which people, places, and ideas are differentially constructed, maintained, and transformed.
This seminar explores how American entanglements of race and religion shape and are part of large... more This seminar explores how American entanglements of race and religion shape and are part of larger global processes. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate these entanglements through conceptual, historical, and ethnographic questions and insights on the remapping of
religious traditions and communal experiences onto imperial terrain. We will examine this through a range of problem spaces including: colonial rule and racial hierarchies; religious difference and migration; the racialization of religion; diaspora and empire; persecution and power; and global geographies of the War on Terror. This course is not an exhaustive account of the enmeshment of race and religion in the United States or globally. Rather, this course aims to critically unpack formations of religion and race, and their contemporary mediation by American geopolitics.
This course focuses on religion in the modern Middle East, from the seventeenth century to the co... more This course focuses on religion in the modern Middle East, from the seventeenth century to the contemporary period. It explores the different ways in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews have interpreted and put into practice their religious traditions through historical and anthropological analyses. These analyses aim for course participants to develop a framework for explaining the sources through which historically specific experiences have been understood as "Islamic," "Christian," and "Jewish" in a contemporary Middle Eastern context. By the end of the term, students are expected to develop the ability and the knowledge to engage the following questions: What is the sociopolitical history through which the Middle East has come to occupy particular images within Western popular and political imaginaries? How do we understand religion in the region within and outside of these framings? How has geopolitics affected the ways religion is practiced? What are the different sites by which we can look at and engage religion, in its diverse forms, across the Middle East?
This course is an introduction to Islam as a prophetic religious tradition. It explores the diffe... more This course is an introduction to Islam as a prophetic religious tradition. It explores the different ways in which Muslims have interpreted and put into practice the prophetic message of Muhammad through historical and anthropological analyses of varying theological, philosophical, legal, and political writings.These analyses aim for course participants to develop a framework for explaining the sources through which historically specific experiences and understandings have been understood as “Islamic.” The course focuses in particular on the classical and modern periods of Islamic history.
We will begin with a debate on the representation of Islam, in order to understand how Islam has been polemically framed. Subsequently, we will discuss the foundations of Islam, as a religious tradition, in order to understand its historical contexts and different philosophical perspectives. The third section of the course deals with different understandings of Islam in the contemporary context, focusing on transformations and
religious experience under modern conditions. The final section engages the relation of Islam to politics and empire, specifically focusing on geopolitics after September 11.
Non-Referred Publications by Candace Lukasik
Pope Shenouda III's passing comes at a moment of political uncertainty for a new Egypt and its Co... more Pope Shenouda III's passing comes at a moment of political uncertainty for a new Egypt and its Coptic communities. In Western media, fears of " sectarian violence " and potential " religious discrimination " have been expressed in numerous articles focusing on his passing as the next stage of a timeless religious conflict that will erupt between the Muslim and Coptic communities in Egypt. But, is " sectarianism " in Egypt indeed timeless and inevitable? " Sectarianism " in Egypt and the narrative associated with it has been normalized, naturalized, and constantly reified as something inevitable. This " sectarian " discourse and knowledge is perpetuated through the plethora of mainstream Western media stories addressing the passing of Pope Shenouda III and the " troubled " future of Coptic peoples.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2024
This article examines the idea of global Christianity in scholarship and the postcolonial and pre... more This article examines the idea of global Christianity in scholarship and the postcolonial and present imperial conditions that underlie it. Through an analysis of the fields of World Christianity and the anthropology of Christianity, it considers how Western Christian histories and power dynamics have impacted Christian traditions of the Global South and seriously considers the pervasive logics of geopolitical power that transform local contexts-not only altering how such communities and traditions are written about, but also impacting the traditions, practices, and people themselves. Thinking with Coptic Orthodox Christians between Egypt and the United States and Born-Again Christians in Uganda, this article examines how global power inequalities in the circuits of ideas, forms of life, and theopolitics are integral to thinking about the idea of global Christianity and its variations in scholarship.
Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies, 2023
This article attends to the entanglement of Coptic Christians and the Coptic Orthodox Church with... more This article attends to the entanglement of Coptic Christians and the Coptic Orthodox Church with a national politics centered around the citizenship concept and fraught with sectarianism. Since the early 1980s, the Coptic Orthodox Church has institutionally incorporated youth politics, pedagogy, and education through its Youth Bishopric. Following the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the rise of Coptic political movements that challenged the Church's authority were portrayed by scholars as working in opposition to the Church's politics and pedagogy. By weaving together accounts of the historical and contemporary programming of the Church's Youth Bishopric and conversations around the discourse of citizenship in post-2011 Egypt among Coptic youth activists from the Maspero Youth Union, this article tracks Coptic contradictions of secular citizenship and debate over minority status. It specifically shows how Copts are engaging these contradictions in debate and ultimately parses out how the social conditions of such debate in itself may answer a call for an "ethical thematization" of religious difference.
Rutgers University Press eBooks, Dec 9, 2022
International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2022
Tracing the transnational translations of the Coptic community as a minority has been the focus ... more Tracing the transnational translations of the Coptic community as a minority has been
the focus of my research. Between 2016 and 2021, I conducted multi-sited ethnographic
work among recent Coptic migrants: first-, second-, and third-generation American Copts
and clergy members moving transnationally between Egypt, primarily the village of
Bahjura, Naj Hammadi, Upper Egypt, and the United States, primarily Jersey City, New Jersey. Shuttling back and forth across these sites of migration, my work has examined the everyday practices and processes that shape transnational Coptic communal formation and belonging as it interfaces with the tension between their minority status in Egypt and their racial-religious placement within an American Christian conservative landscape. My interlocutors relate to each other through their religious tradition as well as their politicized transnational minority condition. As I argue, their struggle to grapple with their minoritization, modulated as it is between Egypt and the United States, poses the question of political praxis and interpellation in a broader geopolitical frame of international religious freedom and counterterrorism, as well as scholarly study.
Sociology of Islam, 2019
Sultan Doughan and Candace Lukasik invited Schirin Amir-Moazami and Lisa Wedeen to engage one ano... more Sultan Doughan and Candace Lukasik invited Schirin Amir-Moazami and Lisa Wedeen to engage one another through a virtual conversation that revolves around Saba’s scholarly intervention, dedication to critical thinking, and her impact beyond the discipline of anthropology. By asking these scholars to reflect with us on their respective fields after Saba Mahmood, we aimed at disclosing and unpacking the mark Mahmood has left in fields relevant to her research. Just as in Mahmood’s scholarly engagement, collaboration and thinking beyond boundaries, disciplinary and area-wise, is central to the conversation that follows.
American Anthropologist, 2021
Since the 1990s, attacks on Egyptian Copts have been made legible to American (particularly evang... more Since the 1990s, attacks on Egyptian Copts have been made legible to American (particularly evangelical) audiences through the moral imaginary of the “Persecuted Church,” which argues that Christians around the globe are persecuted more than any other time in history. Images of bloodied Egyptian Coptic bodies have circulated among Western Christian religio-political networks in an “economy of blood,” an imperial economy of Christian kinship that performs the double movement of glory and racialization. This double movement has placed American Copts in a bind, whereby indigenous Coptic collective memory of blood and persecution has intersected with the political, theological, and affective kinship formations of this economy of blood. This article analyzes how the contemporary remapping of Eastern Christian traditions, like that of the Copts, produces effects on a geopolitical scale, and examines how this reconfiguration unfolds whiteness and Western Christianity.
Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 2021
This essay attends to contemporary Oriental Orthodox solidarity as a postcolonial condition and t... more This essay attends to contemporary Oriental Orthodox solidarity as a postcolonial condition and to the possibilities of communal belonging along different planes of theopolitical intelligibility. Oriental Orthodox debates around what I call the “social hierarchy of theological truth” are mired in colonial histories of civilizational order and the production of the collective experience of Byzantine and Islamic subjugation. The project
of making Oriental Orthodox experience visible in the contemporary moment as perennial persecution and perpetual subjugation hinders analysis of the workings of this neo-imperial system that utilizes certain narratives of Oriental Orthodox while precluding the collective’s historicity and its enmeshment in other radical frameworks of solidarity. I argue that contemporary Oriental Orthodox experience must be historicized as a means to understand the operations of the complex and changing discursive processes by which such an identity is ascribed, debated, or embraced. By historicizing the identity that such a process has produced, I ethnographically trace how such processes are unmarked in the everyday interactions of Oriental Orthodox in the United States—in the ways history, theology, and collective memory are debated and politicized in the present.
Middle East Critique, 2016
This article explores conflicts within the Coptic community related to problems of definition and... more This article explores conflicts within the Coptic community related to problems of definition and representation. Coptic groups that emerged from Egypt’s 2011 revolution brought these tensions to the fore. Groups such as the prominent Maspero Youth Union (MYU) [Itihad Shabab Maspero] were formed to contest the hegemony of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egyptian national
politics. The MYU and others have attempted to reconstruct social boundaries drawn by the Church and the state, promoting political secularism, or the separation of religion from politics, as a solution to inter-communal strife and remedy to intra-communal conflict over the position of the Coptic Orthodox Church as the sole representative of the community. At the same time, the group has emphasized their Coptic identity through religious symbols and imagery at protest events, as depicted at the Maspero
memorial march in 2012. While the MYU officially endorsed secular governance as a means to overcome sectarianism, its actions also made visible internal conflicts over the representation of Coptic identity in contemporary Egyptian society. Although the promise of secularism and equal citizenship is not specific to the Coptic or Egyptian context, this article focuses on its paradoxical effects within the Coptic community and its relationship to the state.
Presentation for Co-Organized Panel entitled, "Anthropology, Christianity, Critique: The Idea of ... more Presentation for Co-Organized Panel entitled, "Anthropology, Christianity, Critique: The Idea of Christianity in Anthropological Inquiry" (American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting)
Religion continues to shape challenges and conflicts, political events and crises around the worl... more Religion continues to shape challenges and conflicts, political events and crises around the world. When we speak about religion as a force impacting social and political processes and events, however, it is often unclear what kind, or different kinds, of force we are referring to: the force of deeply held beliefs, of institutions, of moral commitments, of political rhetoric, or the force of habits formed within religious communities? How does the idea of religion (and the forms of life cultivated within different religious traditions) help us to understand aspects of the contemporary world, and where does its use only serve to obscure social and political processes?
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the idea of religion through different ways of studying it, experiencing it, and discussing it. We will begin by interrogating some of the basic concepts and debates which have classically informed studies of religion, noting both their genesis in the context of early modern Christian Europe and the problems entailed in applying them outside that context. The historical issues raised here will provide a basis from which to question the meaning of such key terms as belief, experience, superstition, fundamentalism, and law as they have been discussed in different religious traditions and in public discourse. We will then turn to a more in-depth analysis of specific problems and debates within the contemporary study of and public discourse on religion.
This seminar is an experiment in studying the intersections of religion, race, and migration thro... more This seminar is an experiment in studying the intersections of religion, race, and migration through the idea of difference. We discuss how particular understandings of religion, race, and migration inform contemporary scholarship and shape national and international legal and governmental practices. Specifically, this course explores how difference-of community, body, and place-produces conditions of possibility. Over the semester, we will investigate various borders of difference, using binaries to guide our analysis. We will examine this through a range of problem spaces including: religion/secularism; race/ethnicity/sectarianism; terrorist/citizen; and refugee/migrant. Ultimately, this course aims to critically unpack the relations of power by which people, places, and ideas are differentially constructed, maintained, and transformed.
This seminar explores how American entanglements of race and religion shape and are part of large... more This seminar explores how American entanglements of race and religion shape and are part of larger global processes. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate these entanglements through conceptual, historical, and ethnographic questions and insights on the remapping of
religious traditions and communal experiences onto imperial terrain. We will examine this through a range of problem spaces including: colonial rule and racial hierarchies; religious difference and migration; the racialization of religion; diaspora and empire; persecution and power; and global geographies of the War on Terror. This course is not an exhaustive account of the enmeshment of race and religion in the United States or globally. Rather, this course aims to critically unpack formations of religion and race, and their contemporary mediation by American geopolitics.
This course focuses on religion in the modern Middle East, from the seventeenth century to the co... more This course focuses on religion in the modern Middle East, from the seventeenth century to the contemporary period. It explores the different ways in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews have interpreted and put into practice their religious traditions through historical and anthropological analyses. These analyses aim for course participants to develop a framework for explaining the sources through which historically specific experiences have been understood as "Islamic," "Christian," and "Jewish" in a contemporary Middle Eastern context. By the end of the term, students are expected to develop the ability and the knowledge to engage the following questions: What is the sociopolitical history through which the Middle East has come to occupy particular images within Western popular and political imaginaries? How do we understand religion in the region within and outside of these framings? How has geopolitics affected the ways religion is practiced? What are the different sites by which we can look at and engage religion, in its diverse forms, across the Middle East?
This course is an introduction to Islam as a prophetic religious tradition. It explores the diffe... more This course is an introduction to Islam as a prophetic religious tradition. It explores the different ways in which Muslims have interpreted and put into practice the prophetic message of Muhammad through historical and anthropological analyses of varying theological, philosophical, legal, and political writings.These analyses aim for course participants to develop a framework for explaining the sources through which historically specific experiences and understandings have been understood as “Islamic.” The course focuses in particular on the classical and modern periods of Islamic history.
We will begin with a debate on the representation of Islam, in order to understand how Islam has been polemically framed. Subsequently, we will discuss the foundations of Islam, as a religious tradition, in order to understand its historical contexts and different philosophical perspectives. The third section of the course deals with different understandings of Islam in the contemporary context, focusing on transformations and
religious experience under modern conditions. The final section engages the relation of Islam to politics and empire, specifically focusing on geopolitics after September 11.
Pope Shenouda III's passing comes at a moment of political uncertainty for a new Egypt and its Co... more Pope Shenouda III's passing comes at a moment of political uncertainty for a new Egypt and its Coptic communities. In Western media, fears of " sectarian violence " and potential " religious discrimination " have been expressed in numerous articles focusing on his passing as the next stage of a timeless religious conflict that will erupt between the Muslim and Coptic communities in Egypt. But, is " sectarianism " in Egypt indeed timeless and inevitable? " Sectarianism " in Egypt and the narrative associated with it has been normalized, naturalized, and constantly reified as something inevitable. This " sectarian " discourse and knowledge is perpetuated through the plethora of mainstream Western media stories addressing the passing of Pope Shenouda III and the " troubled " future of Coptic peoples.
This seemingly ordinary village in the governorate of Qena tells a unique story of Coptic emigrat... more This seemingly ordinary village in the governorate of Qena tells a unique story of Coptic emigration over the past century. Its villas stand as a living testament to the Coptic land-owning families that once held considerable political and social power, prior to the 1952 revolution. Bahjura also tells of the current wave of Coptic emigration to the United States through the Diversity Visa (Green Card Lottery). Both distinctly classed perspectives on the changing climate in Egypt continue to live in Bahjura through folktales of a bygone era, the ever-present detailed wooden balconies of abandoned buildings, and the locked gates of the most elaborate villas, designed by French engineers.
Anthropology News, 2020
The Trump administration has focused policy on aiding persecuted Middle Eastern Christians, and t... more The Trump administration has focused policy on aiding persecuted Middle Eastern Christians, and the Copts have figured prominently in such initiatives. Although Copts stand as the exemplary Christian victims of Islamic terrorism within such circles, their struggles as people of color and migrants in the age of Donald Trump are not alleviated by their privileged status among Christian leaders and Western policymakers. Along with other communities of color, they face discrimination because of their racial difference from white America, and Copts encounter the same sort of targeted profiling and hate crimes as do their American Muslim counterparts, racialized and securitized after 9/11.
Public Orthodoxy , 2019
For most Western Christians, Coptic Christianity offers a powerful testimony to modern martyrdom.... more For most Western Christians, Coptic Christianity offers a powerful testimony to modern martyrdom. Several American Christian leaders point to violence against the Copts in order to garner attention for the persecution of Christians in the modern world and to shape US policy. In this regard, US activists and scholars tend to portray Coptic Christians as passive, premodern victims of modern religious violence. Such characterizations fail to recognize the extent to which the community has undergone a series of transformations and divisions of late.
The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, 2019
Under the leadership of Coptic Pope Tawadros II, the official message of the Coptic Orthodox Chur... more Under the leadership of Coptic Pope Tawadros II, the official message of the Coptic Orthodox Church has been that Copts under Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El Sisi are living under their best conditions in modern Egyptian history. Tawadros has championed Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El Sisi as a “savior” of the Copts, following the ouster of former President Mohammed Morsi. Despite the church’s official statements praising the government for its protection, acts of terrorism and incidents of sectarianism have continued.
Public Orthodoxy, 2020
If the Copts in Egypt are the subjects of human rights (those injured by Muslims, their claims in... more If the Copts in Egypt are the subjects of human rights (those injured by Muslims, their claims in need of redress), what then of Copts in America? Where American Muslims have been racialized and securitized under the War on Terror—and Copts racialized alongside them? How are these social, political, and religious contexts (the Copts in Egypt, the Copts in America) even comparable? How can we start to take American Copts seriously as communities in their own right—with their connections to Egypt, but also centering the struggles they face here, as immigrants, as racialized communities, as working-class people?
Sightings, 2021
Despite racial difference from white America, American Copts also overwhelmingly see their ties t... more Despite racial difference from white America, American Copts also overwhelmingly see their ties to the Christian Right in terms of kinship and blood rather than racial difference. Copts are a racial minority in the United States, but they are also part of the Christian majority. As a Middle Eastern Christian immigrant community, American Copts have contended with their lack of power in numbers and have sought allies among conservative forces on the Right.
Public Orthodoxy, 2020
On December 11, 2019, Metropolitan Serapion and the clergy of the Diocese of Los Angeles, Souther... more On December 11, 2019, Metropolitan Serapion and the clergy of the Diocese of Los Angeles, Southern California, and Hawaii wrote a statement pronouncing that Christmas celebrations will be held in the diocese on both December 25 and January 7 (29 Kiakh) to better serve the pastoral needs of local congregants. Yet the pronouncement caused a stir among Copts globally. Such debates are not new. Immigrant parishes in North America at one point in their early history routinely celebrated Christmas on December 25 to retain congregants and serve the needs of early Copts scattered across Central Canada and the North Eastern United States. At the heart of such debates, past and present, is the tremendous influence of Pope Shenouda and the many meanings of belonging to the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt. In order to chart this history and offer insights on its contemporary significance, we begin with the challenges faced by early Copts in North America and then outline the changing nature of Coptic diasporic communities as a consequence of rising immigration from Upper Egypt, following the 2011 revolution.