Robert Beckford unfortunately had to cancel his participation on short notice. In his stead, Joaquín La Habana will take part in the panel discussion. 

When religions meet, it is rare for one to be completely absorbed by the other. More often, something new emerges: a practice in which the saints of two worlds live under a single roof, in which a Catholic holiday and the feast of an orisha fall on the same day, in which the language of one faith calls the spirits of the other. Faiths Intertwined focuses on this phenomenon—long derided as ‘syncretism’ and now understood as one of the most creative forces of the African diaspora. How did those abducted from West Africa preserve their cosmologies, clothing them in the languages of Christianity and Islam? What happened when Yoruba orishas became Catholic saints, when the Gnawa inserted their sub-Saharan spirits into an Islamic framework, when prohibition and adaptation gave rise to new, distinct spiritual worlds? Chouki El Hamel, a historian and author of  Black Morocco. A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam (2014), recounts the emergence of the Gnawa identity in Morocco. Murah Soares, a  babalorixá (spiritual leader), speaks from the living practice of Candomblé —the tradition in which the orishas of Bahia stand alongside the Catholic saints. Robert Beckford, one of the leading theologians of the African diaspora and a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker, considers liberation, memory, and the political dimension of Black religious practice. Moderated by Miriam Camara, the panel asks not how pure a tradition is, but how capable it is of endurance—exploring the intelligence and strong-mindedness with which people under conditions of coercion and abduction transformed their faith rather than abandoning it.