Religious Studies

Emma Foca, "Preaching Politics: Analysis of Political Speech in White Protestant Christian Sermons"

This study explores the quality and characteristics of political speech in evangelical and mainline white christian services since the 2024 presidential election. Previous research identified evangelical churches as referencing external threats to christian ideals more than mainlines (Lendway, 2025). The change in politics since 2024 encouraged the researcher to re-evaluate this claim. A total of 30 sermons from eight protestant churches in the greater Richmond Virginia Area were transcribed and evaluated. Initially, sermons were taken from two Sundays surrounding the 2024 presidential election (November 3rd and 10th, 2024). These sermons showed a stark contrast between mainline and evangelical political rhetoric in orientation (evangelicals as conservative, mainlines as liberal), strategy (evangelicals as calling the congregation to action, mainlines as grounding them in their purpose), and language/diction within that strategy. The study was then extended to analyze Easter sermons from 2025 and 2026 to evaluate political speech in a different context. While evangelical sermons in the context of the election tended towards more actionable, argumentative speech, they did not address modern politics in their Easter services to the same degree as mainline counterparts, opting instead to focus on individual sin and conversion. Given the result of the 2024 presidential election and the developments of the American Republican Party in the 21st century, these findings contribute to the broader literature on the significance of white evangelicals to Trump’s second election, and begin to question the theological ideologies and political benefits behind the strategies of the mainline and evangelical Easter services. 

Student Major(s): Linguistics and Religious Studies Major

Advisor: Dr. Annie Blazer

Jada Luxene, "Poetry as Qur'anic Commentary: Contemporary Female Poets and Their Engagement With the Qur'an"

The Qur’an is still primarily read and understood through pre-modern commentaries – produced exclusively by free, male Muslim elite scholars. Women were not part of the interpretive tradition until recently; their work is still often ignored or even suppressed. The project aims to connect and publicize contemporary female poets who reference Islamic themes and the Qur’an in their poetry. The product will be a website that offers space for lesser-known poets to present their poetry and contextualizes the poems through interviews of the authors. The poets are majority Muslim women from the Arabic-speaking world, Europe, and the US, but also non-Muslims who use powerful Islamic or Qur’anic metaphors and images in their art for personal, ancestral, or interreligious reasons. The aim of this website is to create an open space for art and provide a more official overview of a genre that mainly lives on social media, in private notebooks, and poetry slams. In compiling, digitizing, and translating these poems produced by and about women, this project contributes to other attempts to synthesize and appraise overlooked literature on the Qur’an by epistemically marginalized groups. 

Student Major(s)/Minor: Middle Eastern Studies Major, Arabic Studies Minor

Advisor: Dr. Rahel Fischbach