Holy Friendship for a Religiously Plural World

James Shelton Nalley, Ph.D.

About the Author

James Shelton Nalley is pursuing his Ph.D. at Georgetown University`s Department of Theology and Religious Studies. His dissertation is on “Towards a Holy Friendship: Reflecting on Interreligious Friendship with Thomas Aquinas and Ibn al-ʿArabī”. His research focuses on philosophical theology as it relates to spiritual life and how the contemporary incarnation of comparative theology offers an opportunity to enrich our understanding of one another, our traditions, and ourselves. While Shelton is interested broadly in historical and contemporary encounters between Christianity and Islam, he is mainly engaged with the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and Ibn al-‘Arabī.

Shelton seeks to reimagine the works of Aquinas through an encounter with Ibn al-‘Arabī’s intellectual mysticism, in the same way Aquinas reimagined Christianity due to his encounter with Greco-Arab philosophy. Shelton received an M.T.S. degree in Comparative Theology from Harvard Divinity School (2016) and a B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies from Christopher Newport University (2012). He worked as the Office Manager at the Christian Association and Muslim Life at UPenn.

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