Expertise
Political Theology; Race and Religion; Theory and Methodology in Religion and Secularism; Religion and the Body; Africana Religion; Islam; Gender and Sexuality Studies
Biography
Jake is an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher of religion with expertise in Race and Religion, Theory and Methodology in Religion and Secularism, Africana Religion, and Islam. He works within the discourse of Political Theology, with his primary focus being the questions of how modern racial reasoning is informed by theological precedents, and what this reveals about the ongoing function of race and the nature of political antagonism generally in ostensibly universal secular-liberal frameworks for moral and political order. His broad aim is to offer insights, via a "decolonial" framework, into how epistemologies of the Global South might provide resources for urgently needed critical responses to the most pressing political and economic challenges of our day.
Jake's work has been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, as "The Spirit of the Pluriverse: Africana Spirit-Based Epistemologies and Interepistemic Thinking." There, he argued that Africana spirit-based epistemologies provide a perspective on sociality and the body that presents an alternative to a liberal pluralist approach to social difference.
Currently a PhD candidate in the Religion Department with plans to graduate in the Fall of 2026, Jake's dissertation, "Decolonizing 'Religion': Race, Secularity, and Islam," presents a "Muslim counter-political theology" as a means of rethinking the critical subject that informs dominant efforts to combat and otherwise navigate power in the modern world. It does this specifically via a reconsideration of the nature and function of 'religion' and theology for modern politics and subject formation. At issue is an illustration of how Islamic theology presents a "politics of absolute vulnerability" as a way out of the impasses of the liberal international order's state of emergency. This is effectively an intervention into the discourse of political theology with the aim of asking - and offering some suggestions for - how a Muslim perspective might challenge some of the most common assumptions there.
Jake graduated with his M.A. in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies from the University of South Florida, where he studied under decolonial theorist, Bernd Reiter, having written his Master's thesis on Jamaican 'religion' and its interactions with modern biomedicine. He has been teaching for Temple's Religion Department since Fall 2020.
Selected Publications
Courses Taught
- Race and Poverty in the Americas
- Religion in Philadelphia
- Death and Dying