Posts Tagged ‘public life’

April 19th, 2011

CFP: Knight Grants for Reporting on Religion and American Public Life

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A new grants program for journalists, sponsored by the Knight Program at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism:

Knight Grants for Reporting on Religion and American Public Life, sponsored by the Knight Program at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, provides funding for projects that explore how religion — morals, values, spirituality and the search for meaning — shapes responses to social issues, including housing, health care, poverty, sexuality, immigration, economic equity, and civil rights in the US.

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January 25th, 2011

Call for papers: Spirituality, political engagement, and public life

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The SSRC Working Group on Spritituality, Political Engagement & Public Life is inviting submissions of abstracts for a conference to be held at Columbia University in New York City, June 3-4, 2011. Submissions are due by March 1, when they will be reviewed by members of the working group co-chaired by Courtney Bender and Omar McRoberts.

The conference, like the working group, will engage with a set of overarching themes: “the institutions and traditions that construct, condition, and demarcate spiritual activities and identities” and “the relations of these institutions and traditions to systems and patterns of political participation in the contemporary United States.”

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November 24th, 2010

Reconceiving the secular and the practice of the liberal arts

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Between 2006-2009, with the support of the Teagle Foundation, four self-identifying secular liberal arts campuses—Bucknell University and Macalester, Vassar, and Williams Colleges—engaged in a project, “Secularity and the Liberal Arts,” that tried to get at the purpose and nature of liberal arts education by asking what it means for a liberal arts campus to unabashedly call its practices “secular.” Is there a way, we wondered, that by spending some time thinking critically and honestly about this crucial term—one that ostensibly governs our practices—we might get a better handle on the nature of liberal arts education?

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June 19th, 2010

The dangers of spirituality?

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CNN profiles the growing “spiritual but not religious” population, contrasting the views of some who fear that the spiritual turn is symptomatic of a decline in meaningful commitments with those of others who are more sanguine, if not enthusiastic, about its significance.

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November 20th, 2009

Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor in conversation

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rethinkingIn 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.)

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November 16th, 2009

So you want to be a new atheist

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saved by atheismIf you want to be a New Atheist, first and foremost, you need to possess an unrelenting desire to help. The desire may seem at times cruel, but you have to start focusing on a higher good: the goal here is to get the cannibals to put down their wafer and wine glass. It’s not for your wellness, but for the good of mankind.

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February 11th, 2008

Cosmopolitanism and the ideal of postsecular public reason

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Cosmopolitanism is not realistically imaginable as the transcendence of all forms of belonging. To propose a leap into traditionless secular reason is to propose the tyranny of the pure ought, and indeed, an ought without a can. It is also to privilege a class and a cultural group able to identify its traditions – including secularism – with neutral reason. Global solidarity will be achieved – if it is ever achieved – by transformation of religion and other forms of cultural belonging rather than by escape from them. And it will be achieved on the basis of hope and critical perspectives and solidarity that inform public reason but are not produced simply from within it.

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