The Food and Security Initiatives—or, for short, FSI— has become an international transdisciplinary, collaborative engagement of a rather frightening type of realization: the nexus between food (as a code word for the basic human needs for food, water, warmth, rest) and security (ranging from basic safety needs to the ultimate sense of self-actualization). Compounding an already complicated situation is the dilemma that global security concerns are growing despite innovations in technology or improvements in science, an irony that is not lost on the experts in the field and policy-makers around the world.

Enter Food and Security Initiatives: an analytically engaging translocal research project, with a mission to provide frameworks and references points for understanding relationships between and intersectionalities in the domains of spirituality, food, and security.

In my theorizing religion, I deploy FSI as a means of fostering critical conversations that engage topical themes in society and around the world (for example, Boko Haram insurgency in northeastern and Pentecostal Revivalisms in southwestern Nigeria; scripture and constitution, or the rhetoricization of race, poverty, crimes, and justice in the United States).

Whether in Africa or in the Americas, the consequences of a dearth in food supply or a lack of security are vastly similar on undeniable scales, which is why l invite interested persons, groups, and organizations—states and corporations—to join our teams around the globe in addressing what may be aptly categorized as legitimate concerns on life and living, the raison d’etres of national and global security.