Axel is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Seton Hall University and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Interreligious Studies. He completed his doctorate at Harvard Divinity School in comparative (interreligious) theology, Islamic Studies, and Catholic theology in 2019. As a constructive theologian, his scholarship aims to read pre-modern sources as resources to contemporary questions. His dissertation and current research focus on poetry, poetics, the imagination, and social imaginary as ways to understand the Christian theology of the Incarnation and the Islamic theology of the imagination. 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 capitalism functions as a modern religion that effectively restricts our collective imagination of alternative, more equitable ways to relate with each other. At Seton Hall, he teaches the introductory course of Religions of the World, as well as CORE and upper-level elective courses such as Islamic Spirituality and Mysticism, Islamic and Christian Perspectives on Faith and Reason, Pluralism in Multireligious America: The Politics of Inclusion, and Islamophobia: Theology, History & Contemporary Contexts. He is developing two courses, one entitled God is Beautiful and Loves Beauty: Arts and Literature of Islam and Muslim Cultures, and the other on Interfaith Studies. He lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with his spouse (Kim), their child (Emery), and two rescue poodles (Donovan and Ducky).