Posts Tagged ‘international affairs’

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.

January 23rd, 2013

Global reflex

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As both Marcia Pally and David Gushee note, there is no historical reason why evangelicalism should identify with a single political orientation. There is also no global reason. Research on evangelicals in Asia, Africa, and Latin America is uncovering startling political diversity. Paul Freston, one of the most informed scholars on the subject, dismisses “facile equations of evangelicalism with conservative stances.” Historical and contemporary conditions, he writes, demonstrate “the distance of these actors—indeed, total independence of these actors—from the American evangelical right.”

December 14th, 2012

Morsi’s moves

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On November 21st, a Egyptian-sponsored ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect, bringing an end to eight days of particularly fierce fighting between the two.

December 13th, 2012

Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs

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A central source of support for the Social Science Research Council’s program on religion and the public sphere (including ongoing support for the efforts of The Immanent Frame), the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs ”seeks to deepen understanding of religion as a critical but often neglected dimension of national and international policies and politics.” [...]

December 6th, 2012

Conference on René Girard and international relations

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On May 23-24, 2013, the University of Central Lancashire will convene a conference on “Politics, Violence and the Sacred: Exploring René Girard’s thought in Security and International Studies.”

November 15th, 2012

The discourse of Islamic militancy

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Over at ISLAMiCommentary, TIF contributor Mbaye Lo sees a clear disconnect and calls for a retrospective analysis in the wake of the furor created by the film Innocence of Muslims.

November 13th, 2012

On the freedom of the concepts of religion and belief

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This short piece attempts to come at the current debate on law and religious freedom from two unusual angles. I end by looking at the strange and revealing positioning of “religion or belief” in current legislation in England and Wales. And I begin by putting a different spin on religious freedom by exploring the terrifying freedom of the concepts of religion and belief. We have never needed the rise of Al Qaeda, so-called Islamicism or a hardline religious right to terrify us with a resurgent specter of specifically religious (as opposed to purely “political”) “terror.” Instead of bearing down on us like some old specter of the Turk or Moor at Europe’s gates, the terror of religion emerges—or insurges (if “insurge” can be made into a verb)—from within the normative conceptualizations of religion in the so-called modern West.

October 18th, 2012

Elizabeth Hurd on reimagining religious freedom as resistance

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Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, co-Guest Editor of the TIF discussion series The politics of religious freedom, reflects on the sometimes paradoxical effects of the state promotion of religious freedom—and argues that Canada’s proposed Office of Religious Freedom should adopt a more nuanced, less top-down approach.

September 14th, 2012

Death in the Middle East: What happens next?

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On the 11th anniversary of the September 11, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt and U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya were attacked amidst protests over a trailer for a purported film entitled Innocence of Muslims.

September 11th, 2012

The secular as space, the secular as process: The 2012 UCSIA summer school

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At the end of August, the two of us joined approximately 30 scholars from around the world in Antwerp, Belgium for the 2012 Universitair Centrum Sint-Ignatius Antwerpen (UCSIA) Religion, Culture and Society Summer School. UCSIA annually invites select early-career researchers (doctoral and post-doctoral) and senior scholars for a weeklong program designed to stimulate interdisciplinary and international discussion on a theme, this year’s being “secularism(s) and religion in society.”