Friday, October 16, 2026
9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. (GMT+07:00) Yogyakarta
Location: Sanata Dharma University Yogyakarta
October 15, 2026
Religious Pluralism, Literature, and Society
Event Series: Yogyakarta, October 2026
Religious pluralism, often seen as a problem in the West, is pervasive in the Global South and particularly in Asia, where multiple religious belonging is commonplace. How have diverse and overlapping religious and spiritual identities shaped culture and society in Asia? How does literature illustrate and amplify the varied possibilities of multiple belonging? Ranjit Hoskote and Maria Stepanova will address these questions in conversation with Thomas Banchoff.
Participants
Thomas Banchoff
Thomas Banchoff (moderator) is vice president for global engagement at Georgetown University, where he also serves as professor in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service and director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, which he founded in 2006. His books include The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges (2016, with Jose Casanova); Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies (2011); Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics (2008); and Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism (2007). His essays have appeared in Commonweal, The Tablet, The Washington Post, and other outlets.
Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote is an Indian poet, theorist, and curator whose influential work centers on the complex history and presence of cultural pluralism from the local to the global. He has authored eight books of poetry—including Icelight (2022), Jonahwhale (2018), and a translation of a fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic-poet, I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Dĕd (2011)—and the acclaimed book Confluences: Forgotten Histories between East and West (2012, with Ilija Trojanow). Hoskote has curated more than 50 showcases of Indian and global art over the past three decades, including India’s first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Maria Stepanova
Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, journalist, and author of over 10 poetry collections and three books of essays. Her poetry collections Holy Winter 20/21 (2024) and War of the Beasts and the Animals (2021) were Poetry Book Society Translation Choices and won PEN Translates awards. In 2018, she won the Bolshaya Kniga Award for her novel In Memory of Memory (2021). She has been awarded numerous literary awards, including the Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the online independent crowd-sourced journal that she founded, Colta.ru, was shut down along with other dissent. A prominent critic of Putin’s regime, she now lives in exile.
Accessibility
Please email globaldialogues@georgetown.edu by October 9 with any accessibility requests. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill all requests made after this date.