The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University is co-sponsoring a conference later this week on “credulity.”
Posts Tagged ‘modernity’
March 26th, 2013
Credulity: Enchantment and Modernity in the 19th-Century U.S.
posted by Jonathan VanAntwerpen
November 13th, 2012
On the freedom of the concepts of religion and belief
posted by Yvonne Sherwood
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 25th, 2012
Secularization and disenchantment
posted by Birgit Meyer
Over the past decade, scholarly inquiry into contemporary religion has moved from an understanding of religion as waning in the face of ongoing secularization toward a focus on the mutual constitution and interaction of religious and secular that underpins both the ideology of secularism and modern religiosity. This has produced pathbreaking research into the dynamics of religious transformation and generated deeper insights into the relation between religion and modernity. Importantly, these insights yield a new theoretical standpoint that transcends secularist ideologies according to which religion is bound to disappear—or at least to retreat into the private sphere—yet at the same time makes these ideologies subject to investigation. The fact that public debates about the so-called resurgence of religion often affirm the fault lines between “religious” and “secular” positions testifies to the fruitfulness of this new standpoint.
June 19th, 2012
Tunisian modernities
posted by Wei ZhuOver at the University of Notre Dame’s Contending Modernities blog, Michael Driessen takes lessons from the secular-Islamist negotiation happening in Tunisia.
April 3rd, 2012
What is religious freedom supposed to free?
posted by Webb Keane
What is religious freedom supposed to free? That is, what is the operant understanding of “religion” behind the claims of religious freedom such that religion requires its own forms, practices, and concepts of freedom under the law? Is there something about religion that gives freedom of religion either a privileged or a peculiarly worrisome character different in kind from artistic, political, or sexual freedom? And to this list, why not add occupational, associational, or, say, economic freedoms?
January 31st, 2012
Religious roots of the secular
posted by Jessica PolebaumAt the Harvard University Press Blog, historian Brad S. Gregory discusses his latest book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society: Brad S. Gregory’s new book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, is very much in the tradition of and in conversation with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Both are [...]
January 24th, 2012
Modern enchantment
posted by Jessica PolebaumRecently released by Oxford University Press, Michael Saler’s latest volume explores the imaginary realms of the modern world.
November 18th, 2011
Where religion comes from and leads us
posted by Steven M. Tipton
In seeking to make sense of modernity in the classical tradition of sociology as a field, the body of Robert Bellah’s work spans the social sciences and comparative cultural inquiry to embrace the global diversity and coherence of religion as the key to culture across civilizations and epochs within the framework of human evolution. Formally trained as a student of tribal cultures, East Asian civilization, and Islam, Bellah engages the West, and America in particular, as problematic cases that can only be understood in the broadest comparative perspective on human cultural development. This global perspective informs Bellah’s conceptions of religion and human evolution as they have deepened and grown over a half century.
September 13th, 2011
Conference/CFP: Modernism, Christianity, and Apocalypse
posted by Jessica PolebaumA conference organized by the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen, Norway, to take place on July 18-20, 2012, will include keynote speakers Paul S. Fiddes, John Milbank, Hans Ottomeyer, and Marjorie Perloff.
September 9th, 2011
9/11 chronomania
posted by Justin Neuman
Under its congressional mandate to “examine and report upon the facts and causes relating to the terrorist attacks…[and] make a full and complete accounting of the[ir] circumstances,” the Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission Report, begins with a narrative timeline. In the simple past, in a voice devoid of interiority but rich in temporal data, the Report tracks movement in time and space.
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