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May 9th, 2013

Opportunity at the SSRC

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The Social Science Research Council seeks a Program Officer/Coordinator for its work on religion and the public sphere:

The Program Officer/Coordinator will work closely with the Program Director on a variety of program management and development activities. S/he will also be responsible for a range of social media and communications activities emanating from the program’s various projects and will play a central editorial and managerial role for two digital publications (The Immanent Frame and Reverberations).

For more information, see the full job listing.

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May 8th, 2013

Digital publishing and the academic study of religion

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Over at The Huffington Post, Norris J. Chumley writes on the growing influence of online forums and journals in the academic world of religion:

Internet publishing is being taken more seriously these days in the study of religion. Online journals and forums such as The Immanent Frame, Fre.quenci.es, and the recently launched Reverberations, from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) are now considered to be creditable sources of scholarly research, conduits of collaboration and tools for dialogue.

It’s a nascent endeavor to be sure as these online forums are fairly new. Not so long ago anything but a peer-reviewed article or book printed by an established academic press was all that found its way onto a curriculum vitae. It initially took a bit of courage and brave experimentation to forgo a traditionally published and bound volume in favor of an all-digital platform for one’s work. Still, peer-reviewed, bound and traditionally published work is at the forefront. But times are changing exponentially fast.

Read the full article here.

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May 6th, 2013

CFP: Bridging Voices

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The British Council has recently announced the launch of Bridging Voices, a grants program aimed at promoting improved understanding of the role religion plays in public life and international affairs through a series of transatlantic academic and policy dialogues and outreach activities:

Bridging Voices is supported by a $450,000 award from the Henry Luce Foundation to the Friends of the British Council. Five grants, to be managed by the British Council, will be awarded annually to groups of institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. The grants will fund the organisation of two academic and policy dialogues over a period of one year – one in the United States and the other in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in Europe.

Through these dialogues, Bridging Voices will bring together transatlantic academics and policymakers to share their expertise on topics related to religion and international affairs. Participants will use these dialogues to exchange knowledge and develop a more accurate and nuanced understanding of religion and its role in international relations.

Read more about the grants program here.

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April 30th, 2013

Religion and the Public Sphere internship at the Social Science Research Council

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The SSRC’s Religion and the Public Sphere program is currently accepting applications for a summer semester internship which would focus on its ongoing projects and digital forums:

The Social Science Research Council (SSRC), an independent, nonprofit international organization devoted to the advancement of interdisciplinary research in the social sciences, seeks a summer 2013 intern for the Religion and the Public Sphere Program.

The intern will assist with the Religion Program’s ongoing projects and digital forums, including The Immanent Frame and Reverberations, and will be expected to work at the SSRC’s Brooklyn Heights office for approximately twenty hours per week for three months (June–August). This is an unpaid internship, with a monthly stipend for travel and expenses.

Read more about this opportunity here. To apply, please send a cover letter and resume to applications@ssrc.org.

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April 30th, 2013

Citizenship and minorities in Egypt

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Over at Jadaliyya, Mona Oraby addresses the relationship between religious affiliation and national belonging in an article on citizenship debates in Egypt. She writes:

Clashes over the Khusus killings in Egypt are the most recent of a long list of tragic sectarian episodes since 2011. Paul Sedra is right that “the impulse to lay the blame for this sectarianism at the feet of the Muslim Brotherhood is strong and…not without justification.” It is small wonder that the Brotherhood’s hyper-politicization of religion and religious difference at this juncture in Egyptian history would enable the radical escalation of conflict between individuals during what might under other circumstances be rudimentary or even banal interactions.

In Sedra’s estimation, the tendency to look upon Coptic Christians in Egypt as members of a unitary and unified community, led by the Coptic Orthodox Church and in need of protection, perpetuates Copts’ status “as a distinctly sectarian constituency.” For the first time in Egypt’s history, the Church is constitutionally designated the warden of Coptic Christians in matters of personal status irrespective of an individual’s self-proclaimed affinity with the Patriarch. The drive to link religious affiliation with Egyptian identity, Sedra contends, hinges on the issue of citizenship and the idea that Copts are not fully Egyptian. This designation prohibits their appearance as “equal before Egyptian law and the Egyptian state to their Muslim compatriots.”

In light of these considerations, Sedra asks provocatively: “Has citizenship got a future in Egypt?” Sedra claims that “important conversations about citizenship simply are not happening in post-revolutionary Egypt” and “in the few places where they have occurred, conversations about Egyptian identity have remained strikingly unsophisticated and ill-informed.” Is the future of Egyptian citizenship really this bleak?

Read the full article here.

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April 23rd, 2013

New journal: The Red Egg Review

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The Red Egg Review is a new online journal addressing questions of secularism and politics from an Eastern Orthodox perspective. There is a noticeable lack of resources about Eastern Orthodox Christianity and questions of secularism and church-state relations. The Red Egg Review, a new online quarterly journal, intends to fill this gap. From the editors:

The Red Egg Review stands against anything that reduces the Orthodox Church to a belligerent in cultural battles. We oppose the use of the Church as a cultural or liturgical nature preserve. The Church has no glorious past to recover, no more innocent or holy time to which we might return, because the Church is, as Fr. Georges Florovsky once said, ‘the continual manifestation of the beginning and the end.’ The Church, like the Magdalene’s red egg, will inevitably destabilize the established social, political, economic, and intellectual systems of the moment through its eschatological presence and witness.

Of particular interest is the article “The Non-Sectarian Sect”  by Samuel Noble, an examination of challenges now facing Lebanese Orthodox Christians’ historically secular and non-sectarian identity, and a review by Daniel Greeson of Aristotle Papanikolaou’s book The Mystical as Political, which argues for the compatibility of Orthodox Christianity and liberal democracy. More information can be found here.

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April 12th, 2013

CFP: Religious Studies 50 years after Schempp

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On September 27-29, 2013, the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington will host a conference entitled “Religious Studies 50 Years after Schempp: History, Institutions, Theory.” Conference organizers have issued a call for papers:

Schempp_LogoFifty years ago the Supreme Court of the United States announced its decision in Abington v Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963). While the case before the Court concerned the constitutionality of mandatory Bible reading in Pennsylvania public schools, the opinions in the case have come to be understood as the authorizing texts for the academic study of religion in public colleges and universities across the U.S. and beyond. The Court wrote that while prescribing religious exercises in public schools violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, “a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization” could be said to be a necessary part of a complete education.

The years following the Schempp decision witnessed a flourishing of departments of religion in public colleges and universities and an intense conversation about the appropriate approach to the academic study of religion in the U.S. context. Now, fifty years later, the anniversary of the decision provides an occasion for an appraisal of Schempp’s role and for a broader assessment of the past, present, and future of the field of religious studies. This conference will explore the impact that Schempp may have had on the comparative and multi-disciplinary nature of the study of religion as well as other significant influences on shifts in the study of religion over that time.

We invite proposals for papers across the disciplines of religious studies. While Schempp provides a focal point for the conference, we invite conferees to propose 20-minute paper presentations that consider the broader history and phenomenology of the study of religion in the multiple locations in which such study takes place, private and public.

More details here.

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March 26th, 2013

Credulity: Enchantment and Modernity in the 19th-Century U.S.

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The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University is co-sponsoring a conference later this week on “credulity”:

What is the place of enchantment in nineteenth-century America? Scholars of the secular have been accumulating a rich description of what it meant in this period to “aim for ‘modernity,’” in Talal Asad’s phrase. This conference asks about the persons and knowledges which appeared as excessive, even dangerous, to this project—while assuming that this excess cannot simply be described as “religion.” Credulity, a frequent term of abuse in antebellum sources, meant believing too readily and too well, often with the implication of bodily mismanagement: the credulous person’s nerves or brain did her down. So who were the credulous, and what did they know? Detractors saw an ad-hoc collection of gullible scientists, political patsies, occult practitioners, religious enthusiasts, fiction readers, and superstitious primitives, all of them behind the times. But how were such alleged failures distinctively modern? Did connections develop between forms of credulity at first linked only by their bad reputations? How should we understand credulity’s angle on the rational—as symptom, queering, disability, doubling?

Details here.

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March 22nd, 2013

Essays on Religion in Human Evolution

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EJS 53(3) coverCambridge University Press is currently offering free access to the three essays in the review symposium on Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution from the December 2012 issue of the European Journal of Sociology.

Christopher Hann: Humans and their Hierarchies: Cosmological and Sociological

Ji Zhe: From Relaxed Fields to Renouncers

Marcel Hénaff: Three Crucial Aspects of Religion in Human Evolution: Shamanism, Sacrifice and Exogamic Alliance

In addition, the issue contains paywalled book reviews by TIF contributors Bryan Turner (on Religion in China by Fenggang Yang) and John Torpey (on The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker).

Explore the full issue here. For more on Religion in Human Evolution, see our series of essays on the book.

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March 21st, 2013

The renewal of evangelical philosophy

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Over at Commonweal contributing editor Nathan Schneider writes about the renewal of Christian, and more specifically evangelical, philosophy in the United States over the past few decades:

When was the last time you saw dozens of people lining up for a philosopher’s autograph? That’s what happened in the sprawling basement of a Marietta, Georgia, megachurch after Alvin Plantinga spoke there during a 2010 “Apologetics Conference.” And most of the attendees weren’t even philosophy students. They were teenagers, housewives, mothers and fathers—all excited about philosophy.

…

For his part, Plantinga didn’t appear entirely comfortable with all the attention. But, the truth is, he brought it on himself.

In the late 1970s, Plantinga and his former teacher William Alston helped to found the Society of Christian Philosophers (SCP), a sub-group of the American Philosophical Association. The SCP had lofty ambitions. It set out to restore the stature of expressly Christian philosophizing within the often antireligious philosophical establishment. Plantinga had already led the charge, publishing a series of papers and books that stood up for religious belief using cutting-edge techniques that philosophers had recently developed in modal logic and epistemology. At least among analytic philosophers of religion, Plantinga’s impact was enormous. A field once dominated by a handful of atheists has given way to a critical mass of articulate, rigorous theists.

Schneider briefly recounts the history of the SCP, including the event that lead evangelical philosopher William Lane Craig to part ways with it. Instead Craig began pouring “his energy into the Evangelical Philosophical Society—what had been a smaller, less dynamic organization founded in 1977.” To learn more about the influence that Plantinga, Craig and their respective societies have had on contemporary Evangelical thought, read Schneider’s full essay here. For more on evangelical Christianity in the 21st century see our recent series on the new evangelicals.

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