{"id":35633,"date":"2026-07-15T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/in-memoriam-john-l-esposito-1940-2026\/"},"modified":"2026-07-18T07:29:35","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T06:29:35","slug":"in-memoriam-john-l-esposito-1940-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/en\/in-memoriam-john-l-esposito-1940-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"In Memoriam: John L. Esposito (1940-2026)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The scholar of Islam John L. Esposito<\/strong> passed away on 15 July 2026 in Philadelphia, at the age of 86. A leading figure in the study of Islam and in the relationship between religion and international affairs, he was one of the great voices of dialogue between the Muslim and Christian worlds.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alberto Priego<\/strong><\/a>, a member of Pluriel<\/em> and professor of international relations at the Comillas Pontifical University (Madrid), who hosted and interviewed him in 2018, pays tribute to him: “He was a teacher, within and beyond the university, and above all he always sought to enable people to understand one another, regardless of how they prayed to God.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in 1940 in Brooklyn, into an Italian-American Catholic family, John L. Esposito taught for nearly twenty years at the College of the Holy Cross (Massachusetts), where he chaired the Department of Religious Studies, before joining Georgetown University in 1993. There he became University Professor and Professor of Religion, International Affairs and Islamic Studies at the Walsh School of Foreign Service. He founded the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) and, later, The Bridge Initiative, a research project devoted to protecting pluralism and ending Islamophobia. He served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and of the American Academy of Religion, and received seven honorary doctorates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His work helped to define and shape the modern study of Muslim societies. The author of more than fifty-five books, translated into many languages, and of over a hundred scholarly articles, he served as editor-in-chief of Oxford University Press’s major encyclopedias of Islam and founded Oxford Islamic Studies Online<\/em>. Against readings framed in terms of a “clash of civilizations,” he championed an empirical, nuanced approach to Islam and Muslims, attentive to the diversity of societies and grounded in large-scale opinion surveys. An influential public voice, particularly after 11 September 2001, he mentored generations of scholars and worked for mutual understanding between Christians and Muslims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John L. Esposito was among the researchers listed by Pluriel<\/strong><\/em><\/a>. In 2018, on the occasion of his honorary doctorate in international relations at Comillas, he gave an interview to Alberto Priego<\/strong><\/a>, in which he set out his approach and his view of contemporary challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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