Axel Takacs, Th.D.

Assistant Professor of Comparative Theology and Interreligious Studies
Department of Religion

Dr. Takacs is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Interreligious Studies, the journal of record in the field.

Dr. Takacs is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Theology and Interreligious Studies at Seton Hall University and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Interreligious Studies.

He is a Catholic comparative theologian, interreligious studies scholar, and scholar of Islamic intellectual traditions (philosophy, theology, Sufism). In the Islamic traditions, his focus is on classical and post-classical Sufi-Philosophical traditions in Arabic and Persian, such as the School of Ibn ʿArabī and the madhhab-i ʿishq (School of Passionate Love). He researches and learns from Persian poetry and their commentarial traditions. As a constructive theologian, his scholarship aims to read pre-modern sources as resources to historical and systematic questions and issues concerning the Catholic traditions.

Subjects of interest include poetics, the imagination, the social imaginary, theological aesthetics, theo-poetics, and the thought of Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. Contemporary concerns of Islamophobia, racism, and white supremacy inform a lot of his research in the field of interreligious studies.

His other academic interest attends to how the ideology of late capitalism--especially neoliberalism--functions as a modern religion that effectively restricts our collective imagination for alternative, more equitable ways to relate with each other. He continues to be challenged by the knowledges and embodied intelligences of those indigenous to Turtle Island.