Social Science Research Council

In the Boston Review, Tara McKelvey reports on the hope of Veterans Affairs administrators that religious faith could be a replacement for costly psychiatric care for soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a symposium convened by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, the Social Science Research Council and the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West came together last month to discuss the project of “rethinking secularism.” Today we are posting audio and a transcript of the October 22 discussion between Habermas and Taylor, moderated by Craig Calhoun, in which the two leading philosophers discuss the place of religion in the public sphere and whether there are differences in kind between religious and secular reasons. (Listen to the paper presentations that preceded this discussion here. Add your own voice to the discussion here.)

K.L. Noll begins his recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education with a relatively uncontroversial clarification of what the academic study of religion represents. He then, however, goes on to insist that theology, while potentially academic, does not actually advance knowledge.

I argue that the moral narrative of modernity is a projection onto chronological time of a view of human moral and pragmatic self-transformation. This narrative, and the concrete projects it entails, runs into certain ubiquitous problems that arise from the material dimensions of human sociality and subjectivity. Protestantism was, historically, one major source of practices and concepts that express and try to control these problems. It was also a force for their circulation well beyond the Protestant, or even the religious, sphere as such.

Inside Higher Ed reports on a new phenomenon that is beginning to gain attention and grow: humanist chaplains on college campuses.

Patheos, a site devoted to “global dialogue about religion and spirituality,” which launched last year, is now partnering with On Faith for a contest that asks college students to make and submit videos about their religious faith and practice.

At Religion Dispatches, Richard Ricketts interviews Sharon Nepstad, a sociologist of religion whose new book, Religion and War Resistance in the Plowshares Movement, explores the nearly 30-year history of the Catholic anti-war group.

Harvey Cox and E.J. Dionne, two luminaries of American progressive Christianity, will be discussing Cox’s The Future of Faith tonight at WNYC’s Greene Space in lower Manhattan.

What does the academic study of religion have to contribute to public discussions concerning Major Hasan’s religious identity? What do we know about religion and religious identity? We are worried about stereotypes and we are anxious, but what do we know?

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Carlin Romano argues that training for journalists needs to be more deeply grounded in philosophical reflection.