We invite submissions from scholars and graduate students based in Canada and
abroad on the topic of Continental Thought and Religion. The general theme of
the conference is meant to reflect the variety of articulations of religion that
have emerged in contemporary European thought. While the focus of the conference
is continental thought, we nonetheless conceive the latter in an
interdisciplinary manner (including literary theory, social and political
thought, psychoanalysis, and religious studies). We also encourage submissions
from people interested in exploring possible connections with analytic
philosophy.
Confirmed Speakers: John Caputo (Syracuse U.), Bettina Bergo
(U. de Montréal), more to be announced in the near future.
In addition to
our keynote speaker, John Caputo, we will have four commissioned workshops
comprised of two papers and a response, and a series of themed panels. We invite
submissions of three-page proposals for essays for the following themed panels
with included possible topics:
Phenomenology of Religion
The thought
of Chrétien, Henry, Lacoste, Levinas, Marion, and Ricoeur
Topics: the gift;
the work of art; appearance and transcendence; call and response
Religion
and Politics
The thought of Agamben, Asad, Connolly, Derrida, de Vries,
Girard, Habermas, Schmitt, and Taylor
Topics: political theology; the
post-secular; sovereignty; religion and violence; pluralism
Religion and
Speculative Realism
The thought of Brassier, Harman, Laruelle, and
Meillassoux
Topics: materialism; correlationism; nihilism; the things
themselves; divine inexistence; ‘future Christ’
Beyond Theism and
Atheism
The thought of Caputo, Kearney, Kristeva, Milbank, Vattimo
Topics:
kenosis; anatheism; weak theology; a/theology; radical
orthodoxy
Continental Thought, Religion, and Aesthetics
The artwork of
Bresson, Caravaggio, Celan, Chagall, Dostoyevsky, Dumont, Artemisia Gentileschi,
Kahlo, Kapoor, Kiarostami, Kiefer, Malick, Newman, O'Keefe, and Stevens
The
thought of Cavell, Cixous, Critchley, Irigaray, Marion, Nancy, and
Rancière
Topics: transcendence in art; image and icon; creativity and
creation; representation and idolatry
Immanentism and
Religion
Agamben, Badiou, Bergson, Deleuze, James, Foucault, Keller, and
Žižek
Topics: self-organization; the event; plurality; bio-power;
polydoxy
History of Continental Thought and Religion
Spinoza, Kant,
Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger
Topics: death
of God; reason and faith; scripture and philosophy; religion and fantasy;
onto-theology
Please send only one three-page (double-spaced) proposal on
one of the above themes and any questions to varieties2012@gmail.com
by December 31, 2011
Showing posts with label Topics: Religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Topics: Religion. Show all posts
Monday, October 17, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
"The Power of the Word: Poetry, Theology and Life," Heythrop College and Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, June 17-18, 2011.
Religion has always been part of Western literary traditions. Many canonical literary texts engage extensively with theology and religious faith and practice, and theological and spiritual writers make liberal use of literary genres, tropes and strategies. Recent work in philosophy of religion, theology, the study of religions and literary criticism has once again brought to the fore issues which arise when literature, faith, theology and life meet, whether in harmony or in conflict.
This international conference aims to:
Keynote Speakers:
Gianni Vattimo (Turin): "Poetry as Prayer"
Jay Parini (Vermont): "Poetry as Scripture: the Idea of Inspiration"
Michael Paul Gallagher (Rome): "Identifying a Religious Imagination"
Paul Fiddes (Oxford): "Law and Divine Mercy in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice"
Helen Wilcox (Bangor): "'When the Soul unto the lines accords': Faith and Imagination in the Poetry of Donne and Herbert"
Panels:
Does Poetry Matter?
Poetry, the Mystical and the Devotional
Poetry and Sacred Texts
Poetry, Ethics and Society
Poetry, Philosophy and Theology
This international conference aims to:
• foster a dialogue among scholars in theology, philosophy, spirituality and literature and between these and creative writers;
• discuss the ‘truth’ of poetry and the ‘truth’ of theology in relation to each other;
• reassess the idea of poetry as a criticism of life;
• discuss the relationship between faith, theology and the creative imagination through an examination of theoretical issues and the study of specific texts;
• examine the importance of poetry for personal and social identity, social cohesion and relations between faiths and cultures.
• discuss the ‘truth’ of poetry and the ‘truth’ of theology in relation to each other;
• reassess the idea of poetry as a criticism of life;
• discuss the relationship between faith, theology and the creative imagination through an examination of theoretical issues and the study of specific texts;
• examine the importance of poetry for personal and social identity, social cohesion and relations between faiths and cultures.
Keynote Speakers:
Gianni Vattimo (Turin): "Poetry as Prayer"
Jay Parini (Vermont): "Poetry as Scripture: the Idea of Inspiration"
Michael Paul Gallagher (Rome): "Identifying a Religious Imagination"
Paul Fiddes (Oxford): "Law and Divine Mercy in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice"
Helen Wilcox (Bangor): "'When the Soul unto the lines accords': Faith and Imagination in the Poetry of Donne and Herbert"
Panels:
Does Poetry Matter?
Imagination, Theology and Faith
Poetry and Theology Poetry, the Mystical and the Devotional
Poetry and Sacred Texts
Poetry, Ethics and Society
Poetry, Philosophy and Theology
Thursday, May 05, 2011
Cfp: "Thinking the Absolute: Speculation, Philosophy and the End of Religion," Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion, Liverpool Hope University, June 29-July 1, 2012.
Keynote Speakers: Ray Brassier, Levi Bryant, Iain Hamilton Grant and Catherine Malabou
‘The contemporary end of metaphysics is an end which, being sceptical, could only be a religious end of metaphysics.' Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: an Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008).
Meillassoux identifies the ‘turn to religion' in contemporary continental philosophy with a failure of thinking. The Kantian refusal to think the absolute leads to scepticism about reality in itself. Ironically, this lends itself to ‘fideism', the decision to project religious meaning on to the unknowable beyond. According to Meillassoux, a philosophy obsessed with mystery becomes the accomplice of irrational faith. The solution is to find ways of once more thinking the absolute in its reality, severed from its dependence upon a knowing subject, or upon language and social norms. At the same time, new possibilities for thinking religion (exemplified by Meillassoux's own Divine Inexistence) are emerging.
This conference invites proposals which critically consider this speculative turn in philosophy and its implications for thinking about religion. To what ‘end' is speculation leading? Does it simply announce the closure of religion and its subordination to a philosophy of the absolute, nature or the ‘All'? Can it open new lines for a philosophy of religion which is not wedded to the Kantian horizon? Is speculation itself open to Kierkegaardian critique as yet another move to position and reduce ethical and religious claims, sacrificing the future on the altar of abstract possibility? Does renewed attention to the canon of speculative idealism offer a way beyond the impasse between relativism and dogmatism?
The organisers welcome proposals which examine the roots and extensity of recent speculative thinking, and which critically consider its impact - direct and indirect - on philosophy of religion. Relevant thinkers and themes might include Quentin Meillassoux on God and the absolute, Alain Badiou's ontology, Catherine Malabou on Hegel and plasticity, Francois Laruelle's ‘future Christ', Iain Hamilton Grant on Schelling's Naturphilosophie and the thinking of the All, Ray Brassier's nihilism. However, we are particularly looking for contributions which creatively use or depart from the speculative turn to offer original insights into the nature and content of the field.
Visit: http://www.hope.ac.uk/acpr/call-for-papers.html.
‘The contemporary end of metaphysics is an end which, being sceptical, could only be a religious end of metaphysics.' Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: an Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008).
Meillassoux identifies the ‘turn to religion' in contemporary continental philosophy with a failure of thinking. The Kantian refusal to think the absolute leads to scepticism about reality in itself. Ironically, this lends itself to ‘fideism', the decision to project religious meaning on to the unknowable beyond. According to Meillassoux, a philosophy obsessed with mystery becomes the accomplice of irrational faith. The solution is to find ways of once more thinking the absolute in its reality, severed from its dependence upon a knowing subject, or upon language and social norms. At the same time, new possibilities for thinking religion (exemplified by Meillassoux's own Divine Inexistence) are emerging.
This conference invites proposals which critically consider this speculative turn in philosophy and its implications for thinking about religion. To what ‘end' is speculation leading? Does it simply announce the closure of religion and its subordination to a philosophy of the absolute, nature or the ‘All'? Can it open new lines for a philosophy of religion which is not wedded to the Kantian horizon? Is speculation itself open to Kierkegaardian critique as yet another move to position and reduce ethical and religious claims, sacrificing the future on the altar of abstract possibility? Does renewed attention to the canon of speculative idealism offer a way beyond the impasse between relativism and dogmatism?
The organisers welcome proposals which examine the roots and extensity of recent speculative thinking, and which critically consider its impact - direct and indirect - on philosophy of religion. Relevant thinkers and themes might include Quentin Meillassoux on God and the absolute, Alain Badiou's ontology, Catherine Malabou on Hegel and plasticity, Francois Laruelle's ‘future Christ', Iain Hamilton Grant on Schelling's Naturphilosophie and the thinking of the All, Ray Brassier's nihilism. However, we are particularly looking for contributions which creatively use or depart from the speculative turn to offer original insights into the nature and content of the field.
Visit: http://www.hope.ac.uk/acpr/call-for-papers.html.
Friday, April 15, 2011
"Speculative Philosophies and Religious Practices: New Directions in the Philosophy of Religion and Post-Secular Practical Theology," Centre for Faiths and Public Policy, University of Chester, June 1, 2011.
This workshop is a one-day workshop exploring the intersection between recent trends in continental philosophy of religion and realist versions of public theology. It is an interrogation of the implications – whether political, theological or practical – of the turn to the Real in recent thought. From the perspective of public and practical theology, this involves bolstering the realist strands of the discipline (Manchester Realism and the William Temple Foundation) with the resources of philosophy, constructing a philosophical toolkit for realist public theologians. John Reader and Christopher Baker’s Entering the New Theological Space, for example, has already started drawing on post-Derridean philosophies as theoretical background to their theological enterprises, moving beyond the sociological and pragmatic basis that public theologians have traditionally found sufficient; there is a growing realisation, however, that a new generation of philosophers – the philosophers of the speculative turn – may well be more fruitful for deepening and broadening public theology’s self-understanding. Therefore and from the perspective of philosophy of religion, this interrogation of the Real involves thinking through the consequences of continental philosophy of religion’s recent flirtations with a more realist brand of speculation. The philosophies of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant and Quentin Meillassoux are beginning to be felt throughout the humanities, and the papers in this workshop, following the lead established in Smith and Whistler’s After the Postsecular and the Postmodern, will begin to think through the broader impact of this new tendency, especially as it impacts on philosophy of religion. In other words, the guiding question for the day is: what has the speculative turn in continental philosophy of religion to do with religious practice? This workshop brings together public theologians and philosophers of religion to inhabit the intersection between philosophical theory and religious phenomena.
See: http://www.chester.ac.uk/sites/files/chester/Speculative%20Philosophies%20and%20Religious%20Practices%20-%20vs%202.pdf.
See: http://www.chester.ac.uk/sites/files/chester/Speculative%20Philosophies%20and%20Religious%20Practices%20-%20vs%202.pdf.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Cfp: "Uncanny Homecomings: Narrative Structures, Existential Questions, Theological Visions," University of Iowa, August 26-28, 2011.
The 2011 Religion, Literature and the Arts conference encourages participants to investigate the subject of home and homecoming. Poets and philosophers have long identified the human yearning to find a geographic and emotional environment that allows for a feeling of integration, where we understand our place in the greater whole. If we linger with this notion, however, the paradoxical nature of our desire for homecoming emerges: the home that we remember from our past is not the place that we are ever able to find in our present, and the places that we find or create in our present that have an aura of "home" are frequently disconcerting in their ability to provide comfort. There is something unheimlich in returning home, a lesson learned by individuals from Odysseus or the Prodigal Son in the Western tradition to those facing crises of homecoming in 21st century Palestine or Algeria.
Several different and helpful frames emerge as ways of investigating our longing for home. Narrative structures reveal the stories that shape and alter our trajectories, helping us to find a home in and through language, to root ourselves in a plot of land. Existential questions disclose the historical, philosophical, political, psychological and temporal desire for locating ourselves in a home. Theological visions incorporate the depth dimension of the human desire for integration within the rich tapestry of religious narratives that frame our cycles of exile and return.
Papers can speak about a particular historical figure or group, event, practice, text or work of art, reflecting on its capacity to disclose the provocative problem of homecoming in relation to human well-being. They can reflect on the nature, origin and effects of this desire in human history, using resources from any of the disciplines represented at the conference, and discussing how particular religious or secular communities have understood, interpreted, or reused myths, symbols or ideas about homecoming. Session papers should be 20 minutes long, with 10 minutes reserved for questions and answers. Please submit your abstract into the most appropriate of the following categories: Religious Studies, Literature, Art and Art History, Popular Culture, Postcolonial Approaches.
More information is available on the website at: http://rla2011.blogspot.com/.
Several different and helpful frames emerge as ways of investigating our longing for home. Narrative structures reveal the stories that shape and alter our trajectories, helping us to find a home in and through language, to root ourselves in a plot of land. Existential questions disclose the historical, philosophical, political, psychological and temporal desire for locating ourselves in a home. Theological visions incorporate the depth dimension of the human desire for integration within the rich tapestry of religious narratives that frame our cycles of exile and return.
Papers can speak about a particular historical figure or group, event, practice, text or work of art, reflecting on its capacity to disclose the provocative problem of homecoming in relation to human well-being. They can reflect on the nature, origin and effects of this desire in human history, using resources from any of the disciplines represented at the conference, and discussing how particular religious or secular communities have understood, interpreted, or reused myths, symbols or ideas about homecoming. Session papers should be 20 minutes long, with 10 minutes reserved for questions and answers. Please submit your abstract into the most appropriate of the following categories: Religious Studies, Literature, Art and Art History, Popular Culture, Postcolonial Approaches.
More information is available on the website at: http://rla2011.blogspot.com/.
Cfp: "Empowerment and the Sacred," Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Leeds, June 24-26, 2011.
Keynote Speakers:
Kim Knott (University of Leeds);
Bart Moore-Gilbert (Goldsmith’s University);
Neil L. Whitehead (University of Wisconsin)
Discussing international responses to the ‘resurgence of religion’ in our time, Talal Asad has argued: ‘If anything is agreed upon, it is that a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable’ (Asad, 2006). In the ‘straightforward narratives’ of which Asad talks – and in Enlightenment discourses of ‘reason’, ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ more generally - religion, spirituality and the sacred have customarily been pitted against empowerment and emancipation, in political, cultural and intellectual terms. At this present historical juncture, then - when the secularist orientation of global futures is increasingly being called into question - a vital need presents itself for cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary debate about the role that the sacred has, does and can play in our understanding of the possibilities of personal and collective agency, power and change.
This conference will bring together scholars, professionals and arts-practitioners to investigate the ways in which sacred traditions - in diverse cultural and historical contexts - have shaped discourses, practices and narratives of empowerment, emancipation, social change, resistance and survival. We ask: How do different sacred discourses and practices frame and/or extend the possibilities of agency - socially, spiritually, imaginatively and corporeally? What variant conceptions of the spheres of activity have they produced – whether temporal, spatial, cultural, cosmic, public and/or private? And what role have religious and spiritual traditions played in political discourses and counter-discourses of class, gender, race, sexuality, cultural identity, humanism and human rights? Where sacred traditions have challenged the limits of secular reason, what alternatives have they suggested for cognition, representation, and even rationality? And how have they ‘empowered’ different artistic practices? Does the ‘commitment to social justice’ necessitate the ‘translation’ of sacred realities into ‘disenchanted histories’, in order to maintain dialogue with modern institutions (Dipesh Chakrabarty)? Or does a ‘conception of creativity in dialogue with the sacred’ enable an interrogation of ‘forbidden territories within ourselves’ as well as ‘the sacrosanct territories of our institutions’ (Wilson Harris)? Do sacred traditions themselves provide the premises for imaginations of cross-cultural and inter-faith community that differ from secular multiculturalism?
We welcome papers, especially from postgraduates and early career researchers, that address issues of the sacred and empowerment inrelation to topics which may include, but are by no means limited to:
•Concepts of agency: God, gods, spirits and the divine; thehuman/extra-human; identity and ‘imagined communities’; actors,heroes/anti-heroes, role-models and leaders; somatic/spiritual powers.
•Performances of power: artistic, cultural, political, ritual; protest and activism; violence/non-violence.
•Histories and historiography: colonialism and the postcolonial; globalization; materialism; memory.
•Sacred texts and authority: interpretation, translation,intertextuality; secular/religious criticism; freedom of speech, blasphemy, and taboo.
•Place, space and environment: sacred sites and land rights; nature, geography, topography, archaeology.
•Difference and dialogue: orthodoxy/the unorthodox; syncretism, inter-faith and cross-culturalism.
•Justice and judgment: ethics, morality, legality; sacred-secular/inter-faith arbitration.
•Secular/sacred powers and the state: private/public spheres; policy-making and pedagogy.
•Re/conceptualizations: ‘sacred’, ‘secular’, ‘post-secular’, ‘religion’, ‘magic’, ‘spirituality’, ‘myth’ etc.
•Action, motivation and practice: choice, desire, sacrifice and faith; freedom/constraint.
•Epistemologies and aesthetics: faith, rationalism and science; representation and the unrepresentable.
Please submit 300 word abstracts, accompanied by a 100 word biography, for 20 minute papers to the conference organisers, Shivani Rajkomar and Lori Shelbourn, atorganisers@empowermentandthesacred.com.
The deadline for submissions has been extended to the 30th of March 2011. Further details can be found on our website: http://www.empowermentandthesacred.com/.
Kim Knott (University of Leeds);
Bart Moore-Gilbert (Goldsmith’s University);
Neil L. Whitehead (University of Wisconsin)
Discussing international responses to the ‘resurgence of religion’ in our time, Talal Asad has argued: ‘If anything is agreed upon, it is that a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable’ (Asad, 2006). In the ‘straightforward narratives’ of which Asad talks – and in Enlightenment discourses of ‘reason’, ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ more generally - religion, spirituality and the sacred have customarily been pitted against empowerment and emancipation, in political, cultural and intellectual terms. At this present historical juncture, then - when the secularist orientation of global futures is increasingly being called into question - a vital need presents itself for cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary debate about the role that the sacred has, does and can play in our understanding of the possibilities of personal and collective agency, power and change.
This conference will bring together scholars, professionals and arts-practitioners to investigate the ways in which sacred traditions - in diverse cultural and historical contexts - have shaped discourses, practices and narratives of empowerment, emancipation, social change, resistance and survival. We ask: How do different sacred discourses and practices frame and/or extend the possibilities of agency - socially, spiritually, imaginatively and corporeally? What variant conceptions of the spheres of activity have they produced – whether temporal, spatial, cultural, cosmic, public and/or private? And what role have religious and spiritual traditions played in political discourses and counter-discourses of class, gender, race, sexuality, cultural identity, humanism and human rights? Where sacred traditions have challenged the limits of secular reason, what alternatives have they suggested for cognition, representation, and even rationality? And how have they ‘empowered’ different artistic practices? Does the ‘commitment to social justice’ necessitate the ‘translation’ of sacred realities into ‘disenchanted histories’, in order to maintain dialogue with modern institutions (Dipesh Chakrabarty)? Or does a ‘conception of creativity in dialogue with the sacred’ enable an interrogation of ‘forbidden territories within ourselves’ as well as ‘the sacrosanct territories of our institutions’ (Wilson Harris)? Do sacred traditions themselves provide the premises for imaginations of cross-cultural and inter-faith community that differ from secular multiculturalism?
We welcome papers, especially from postgraduates and early career researchers, that address issues of the sacred and empowerment inrelation to topics which may include, but are by no means limited to:
•Concepts of agency: God, gods, spirits and the divine; thehuman/extra-human; identity and ‘imagined communities’; actors,heroes/anti-heroes, role-models and leaders; somatic/spiritual powers.
•Performances of power: artistic, cultural, political, ritual; protest and activism; violence/non-violence.
•Histories and historiography: colonialism and the postcolonial; globalization; materialism; memory.
•Sacred texts and authority: interpretation, translation,intertextuality; secular/religious criticism; freedom of speech, blasphemy, and taboo.
•Place, space and environment: sacred sites and land rights; nature, geography, topography, archaeology.
•Difference and dialogue: orthodoxy/the unorthodox; syncretism, inter-faith and cross-culturalism.
•Justice and judgment: ethics, morality, legality; sacred-secular/inter-faith arbitration.
•Secular/sacred powers and the state: private/public spheres; policy-making and pedagogy.
•Re/conceptualizations: ‘sacred’, ‘secular’, ‘post-secular’, ‘religion’, ‘magic’, ‘spirituality’, ‘myth’ etc.
•Action, motivation and practice: choice, desire, sacrifice and faith; freedom/constraint.
•Epistemologies and aesthetics: faith, rationalism and science; representation and the unrepresentable.
Please submit 300 word abstracts, accompanied by a 100 word biography, for 20 minute papers to the conference organisers, Shivani Rajkomar and Lori Shelbourn, atorganisers@empowermentandthesacred.com.
The deadline for submissions has been extended to the 30th of March 2011. Further details can be found on our website: http://www.empowermentandthesacred.com/.
Monday, April 11, 2011
"Creation, Creatureliness, and Creativity: the Human Place in the Natural World," Annual Conference, Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology, Loyola Marymount University, April 20-22, 2012.
Keynote Speakers:
Bruce Foltz (Eckerd College)
Janet Martin Soskice (Cambridge University)
Norman Wirzba (Duke Divinity School)
SCPT's 2012 conference takes today’s ecological crises as its point of departure. We invite theological and philosophical contributions informed by continental traditions such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, eco-feminism, post-structuralism, post-colonial studies, deconstruction, and social and deep ecology that help us understand and implement a sustainable future together. Authors may submit papers that address ecological issues head on, as well as those that tackle philosophical and theological themes that underlie these issues.
The Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology seeks to promote inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and theology. For more information about SCPT, visit http://www.scptonline.org/.
Bruce Foltz (Eckerd College)
Janet Martin Soskice (Cambridge University)
Norman Wirzba (Duke Divinity School)
SCPT's 2012 conference takes today’s ecological crises as its point of departure. We invite theological and philosophical contributions informed by continental traditions such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, eco-feminism, post-structuralism, post-colonial studies, deconstruction, and social and deep ecology that help us understand and implement a sustainable future together. Authors may submit papers that address ecological issues head on, as well as those that tackle philosophical and theological themes that underlie these issues.
The Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology seeks to promote inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and theology. For more information about SCPT, visit http://www.scptonline.org/.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Cfp: The Rhetoric of Religion, MEMPHIS THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY JOURNAL (Spring 2012).
The Memphis Theological Seminary Journal is seeking papers for its Spring 2012 issue. The theme of the issue is Rhetoric and Religion. We seek submissions that examine the relationships and intersections of rhetoric and religion. This includes but not limited to:
The theory and practice of rhetoric and religion
Forms of communication addressed to gods or God or gods
The religious rhetoric of any religious or non-religious (secular) tradition
God talk among different groups, cultures, or within institutions
The role of religious discourse in the public arena
The relationship between speaker and audience within a religious context
The role of rhetoric in the religious studies curriculum
Rhetorical analysis of certain religious texts, such as scripture, sermons, and theological writings
Religious rhetoric and the role of power
Rhetorical histories of any tradition, event, or time period
Rhetoricaltrajectories of religious leaders
Prophetic rhetoric
Religious rhetoric and the role of women
The deadline for submissions is June 30, 2011.
Please send all essays to Andre E. Johnson at rhetoricandreligion@gmail.com.
The theory and practice of rhetoric and religion
Forms of communication addressed to gods or God or gods
The religious rhetoric of any religious or non-religious (secular) tradition
God talk among different groups, cultures, or within institutions
The role of religious discourse in the public arena
The relationship between speaker and audience within a religious context
The role of rhetoric in the religious studies curriculum
Rhetorical analysis of certain religious texts, such as scripture, sermons, and theological writings
Religious rhetoric and the role of power
Rhetorical histories of any tradition, event, or time period
Rhetoricaltrajectories of religious leaders
Prophetic rhetoric
Religious rhetoric and the role of women
The deadline for submissions is June 30, 2011.
Please send all essays to Andre E. Johnson at rhetoricandreligion@gmail.com.
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
Pub: Goodfellow, Aaron, ed. Religion and Sexuality. BORDERLANDS 9.3 (2010).
INTRODUCTION
- Aaron Goodfellow, "Religion/Sexuality: Politics/Affects"
- Veena Das, "Sexuality, Vulnerability, and the Oddness of the Human: Lessons from the Mahabharata"
- Naveeda Khan, "Images That Come Unbidden: Some thoughts on the Danish cartoons controversy"
- Éric Fassin, "Celibate Priests, Continent Homosexuals: What the exclusion of gay (and gay-friendly) men from priesthood reveals about the political nature of the Roman Catholic Church"
- Deepak Mehta, "Self-Dissolution, Politics and the Work of Affect: The life and death of Sufi Baba"
- Bhrigupati Singh, "Asceticism and Eroticism in Gandhi, Thoreau and Nietzsche: An essay in geo-philosophy"
- François-David Sebbah, "Erotic Face and Ethical Face After Levinas"
- Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, "A Human Right to Stupidity" (Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign Volume 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2009.)
- Vineeth Mathoor, (Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.)
- Guy Lancaster, "Promoting Conflict or Peace through Identity" (Nikki Slocum-Bradley (ed.), Promoting Conflict or Peace through Identity, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.)
Monday, January 24, 2011
"Transgression and the Sacred," an International Philosophy and Literature Conference, University College Dublin, February 22-23, 2011.
“The sacred world depends on limited acts of transgression” (Georges Bataille, Eroticism)
Transgression refers to a crossing over, the exceeding of bounds or limits, the infringement or violation of a law or convention. For Bataille, it is through acts of transgression that we experience the sacred. The profane world is the world of the taboo, while the subject of a taboo, that which the taboo prohibits, is sacred. Yet, transgression does not deny or destroy the taboo; it exceeds the taboo but also completes it.
In our post-enlightenment age transgression and the limit have replaced the older dichotomy of the sacred and the profane. If transgression and the sacred depend on limits what are the limits that still exist in the modern world? If we live in a largely limitless world has the sacred now disappeared?
Or, do we now in fact now live in a post-secular world? How has the sacred been reorganised or reconstituted in modern philosophical and literary discourse? How might transgression be important in rediscovering the sacred, as Foucault declares in his ‘Preface to Transgression’, “In that zone which our culture affords for our gestures and speech, transgression prescribes not only the sole manner of discovering the sacred in its unmediated substance, but also a way of recomposing its empty form, its absence”.
Bataille’s ideas on transgression and the sacred derive largely from the anthropology of religion. The word ‘sacred’ derives from the Latin sacer, meaning to set apart. The sacred is separated from the profane by a taboo or limit. Therefore we want to examine the importance of liminality, the scapegoat, sacrifice, pollution, and sacred transgressors such as Hermes and Trickster in the history of philosophy and literature.
We would also like to consider theological conceptions of the sacred. Bataille’s conception of the sacred is anti-Christian and denies any form of transcendence or salvation; Christianity is the least religious of all religions for him as it denies the impure aspect of the sacred – eroticism, excess, excretion, horror, death. But what is the relationship between transgression and the sacred in Christianity and the major religions and how is this relationship represented in philosophy and literature? Rudolph Otto refers to the numinous in which the Other, the wholly other or the transcendent, appears as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans - that is, a mystery before which man both trembles and is fascinated, is both repelled and attracted. How might such a deification and demonising of the Other be problematised in philosophy and literature?
We welcome papers that engage exclusively with philosophy or exclusively with literature and literary theory, or papers that combine the two disciplines - the literary analysis of philosophy or the use of philosophy as a theoretical framework for the analysis of literary texts.
Topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:
The scapegoat
Eroticism
Violence and the sacred
Sin
Gothic and horror fiction
Shamans and tricksters as sacred transgressors
Liminality – border-crossing, the sacred and the spatial conditioning of transgression
The stranger / the Other
Wild men, sacred savages and holy fools
Derrida and messianicity
Lyotard’s The Confessions of Augustine
The Carnivalesque
Hallucinogens, altered states of consciousness and sacred visions
Blasphemy and censorship
Gender studies and Queer theory
The writings of The Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault
Transgressive Literature and genre
Levinas on the sacred and the holy
Transgressing form and textual boundaries, transgressing sacred texts
Postcolonialism
Modernism / postmodernism
For further information, contact: to wlmailhtml:{33249020-683D-4460-BFA5-A1EEB3208D51}mid://00000314/!x-usc:mailto:Rozemund.Uljee@ucdconnect.ie and Adrian.Naughton@ucdconncect.ie .
Transgression refers to a crossing over, the exceeding of bounds or limits, the infringement or violation of a law or convention. For Bataille, it is through acts of transgression that we experience the sacred. The profane world is the world of the taboo, while the subject of a taboo, that which the taboo prohibits, is sacred. Yet, transgression does not deny or destroy the taboo; it exceeds the taboo but also completes it.
In our post-enlightenment age transgression and the limit have replaced the older dichotomy of the sacred and the profane. If transgression and the sacred depend on limits what are the limits that still exist in the modern world? If we live in a largely limitless world has the sacred now disappeared?
Or, do we now in fact now live in a post-secular world? How has the sacred been reorganised or reconstituted in modern philosophical and literary discourse? How might transgression be important in rediscovering the sacred, as Foucault declares in his ‘Preface to Transgression’, “In that zone which our culture affords for our gestures and speech, transgression prescribes not only the sole manner of discovering the sacred in its unmediated substance, but also a way of recomposing its empty form, its absence”.
Bataille’s ideas on transgression and the sacred derive largely from the anthropology of religion. The word ‘sacred’ derives from the Latin sacer, meaning to set apart. The sacred is separated from the profane by a taboo or limit. Therefore we want to examine the importance of liminality, the scapegoat, sacrifice, pollution, and sacred transgressors such as Hermes and Trickster in the history of philosophy and literature.
We would also like to consider theological conceptions of the sacred. Bataille’s conception of the sacred is anti-Christian and denies any form of transcendence or salvation; Christianity is the least religious of all religions for him as it denies the impure aspect of the sacred – eroticism, excess, excretion, horror, death. But what is the relationship between transgression and the sacred in Christianity and the major religions and how is this relationship represented in philosophy and literature? Rudolph Otto refers to the numinous in which the Other, the wholly other or the transcendent, appears as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans - that is, a mystery before which man both trembles and is fascinated, is both repelled and attracted. How might such a deification and demonising of the Other be problematised in philosophy and literature?
We welcome papers that engage exclusively with philosophy or exclusively with literature and literary theory, or papers that combine the two disciplines - the literary analysis of philosophy or the use of philosophy as a theoretical framework for the analysis of literary texts.
Topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:
The scapegoat
Eroticism
Violence and the sacred
Sin
Gothic and horror fiction
Shamans and tricksters as sacred transgressors
Liminality – border-crossing, the sacred and the spatial conditioning of transgression
The stranger / the Other
Wild men, sacred savages and holy fools
Derrida and messianicity
Lyotard’s The Confessions of Augustine
The Carnivalesque
Hallucinogens, altered states of consciousness and sacred visions
Blasphemy and censorship
Gender studies and Queer theory
The writings of The Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault
Transgressive Literature and genre
Levinas on the sacred and the holy
Transgressing form and textual boundaries, transgressing sacred texts
Postcolonialism
Modernism / postmodernism
For further information, contact: to wlmailhtml:{33249020-683D-4460-BFA5-A1EEB3208D51}mid://00000314/!x-usc:mailto:Rozemund.Uljee@ucdconnect.ie and Adrian.Naughton@ucdconncect.ie .
Monday, August 09, 2010
Blincoe, Nicholas. "Is the Pope a Philosopher?" GUARDIAN April 2, 2010.
Pope Benedict XVI spent his earlier, professional life as a theologian and one might say he has reached the absolute heights of his profession: he has become infallible. Yet his PhD was in philosophy, a field that lies outside Catholic doctrinal certainties. This presumably means that even the most ardent Catholic could challenge the pope on his philosophy. So what is it? Is the pope a philosopher?
The first task is to separate the pope's philosophy from his theology. How do we construct a Benedictine philosophy that is separate from his faith? . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/02/pope-philosophy.
The first task is to separate the pope's philosophy from his theology. How do we construct a Benedictine philosophy that is separate from his faith? . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/02/pope-philosophy.
McCarthy, John. Review of Christopher Ben Simpson, RELIGION, METAPHYSICS, AND THE POSTMODERN. NDPR (August 2010).
Simpson, Christopher Ben. Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern: William Desmond and John D. Caputo. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009.
Christopher Ben Simpson identifies the very large horizon of the concerns addressed in his book, Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern: William Desmond and John D. Caputo, early in the introduction:
How we should think of religion and God today, or in any day, has proven to be an enduring, controversial issue for Western thought. The "today" location of this issue places the thinking at a particularly congested intersection of professional discourses: philosophy of religion, epistemology, critical theory, fundamental theology, neuro-theology, metaphysics, and phenomenology, to name a few. And at this congested intersection several discussions converge, some with quite a long history, others with a more recent vintage: the relation of faith/reason; how to describe "the modern" and its many adjectival children; the possibility of a philosophical apologetics for religion in an age of critical thought; the relation of "thinking" to "rationality"; the ubiquitous issues with language; and the relation of academic discourse about religion and God to religious life. To be sure, Simpson's book addresses a large matrix of issues that are both important in the tradition of Western thought about religion and God and of current concern given the rapidly changing discourses involved in the discussion.
So the question then becomes, "Can and does the book achieve its goal through this strategy of juxtaposing the thought of Caputo and Desmond, the goal understood not only as the viability and preferability of Desmond's metaphysical approach to philosophy of religion, ethics, and God, over that of Caputo, but also the viability and preferability of metaphysical theism over and against a postmodern radical hermeneutics?" This is not a book that can be understood as dealing only with the extensive corpus of two living philosophers, Desmond and Caputo; it is a book about a form of thinking appropriate to ethics, religion, and the understanding of God for contemporary Western Christian theism. . . .
Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20847.
Christopher Ben Simpson identifies the very large horizon of the concerns addressed in his book, Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern: William Desmond and John D. Caputo, early in the introduction:
The broad issue addressed is the state of religion and/or God-talk in the context of "postmodernity." It attends to the question: how should we think of religion and God today? How now -- in the context of recent continental ('postmodern') philosophy -- God? Within the broad outlines of this question, I wish to address the more particular issue of the relationship between religion and metaphysics -- and, secondarily, ethics. (p. 1)How Simpson "addresses" and "attends" to this large horizon is by placing the thought of two authors in relation to each other on the topics of metaphysics, ethics, and religion. John Caputo becomes the emblematic figure for "postmodern" (anti-metaphysical) thinking, and William Desmond becomes the emblematic figure for metaphysical/theistic thinking. The thesis argued regarding the relationship between the figures, and consequently, between the emblematic forms of thinking, "is that William Desmond's approach to thinking about religion and God in relation to the domains of metaphysics and ethics provides a viable and preferable alternative to the like position represented in the work of John D. Caputo" (p. 3). The book, published by Indiana University Press in its series on Philosophy of Religion (series editor, Merold Westphal), is a very minimally revised Ph.D. thesis titled, Divine Hyperbolics: Desmond, Religion, Metaphysics and the Postmodern, completed in 2008 under the supervision of John Milbank at the University of Nottingham.
How we should think of religion and God today, or in any day, has proven to be an enduring, controversial issue for Western thought. The "today" location of this issue places the thinking at a particularly congested intersection of professional discourses: philosophy of religion, epistemology, critical theory, fundamental theology, neuro-theology, metaphysics, and phenomenology, to name a few. And at this congested intersection several discussions converge, some with quite a long history, others with a more recent vintage: the relation of faith/reason; how to describe "the modern" and its many adjectival children; the possibility of a philosophical apologetics for religion in an age of critical thought; the relation of "thinking" to "rationality"; the ubiquitous issues with language; and the relation of academic discourse about religion and God to religious life. To be sure, Simpson's book addresses a large matrix of issues that are both important in the tradition of Western thought about religion and God and of current concern given the rapidly changing discourses involved in the discussion.
So the question then becomes, "Can and does the book achieve its goal through this strategy of juxtaposing the thought of Caputo and Desmond, the goal understood not only as the viability and preferability of Desmond's metaphysical approach to philosophy of religion, ethics, and God, over that of Caputo, but also the viability and preferability of metaphysical theism over and against a postmodern radical hermeneutics?" This is not a book that can be understood as dealing only with the extensive corpus of two living philosophers, Desmond and Caputo; it is a book about a form of thinking appropriate to ethics, religion, and the understanding of God for contemporary Western Christian theism. . . .
Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20847.
Friday, August 06, 2010
McLemee, Scott. "After the Postsecular." INSIDE HIGHER ED August 4, 2010.
Smith, Anthony Paul, and Daniel Whistler, eds. After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.
Call it a revival, of sorts. In recent years, anyone interested in contemporary European philosophy has noticed a tendency variously called the religious or theological "turn" (adapting a formulation previously used to describe the "linguistic turn" of the 1960s and '70s). Thinkers have revisited scriptural texts, for example, or traced the logic of seemingly secular concepts, such as political sovereignty, back to their moorings in theology. The list of figures involved would include Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, and Jürgen Habermas -- to give a list no longer or more heterogenous than that.
A sampling of recent work done in the wake of this turn can be found in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, a collection just issued by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. One of the editors, Anthony Paul Smith, is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Nottingham and also a research fellow at the Institute for Nature and Culture at DePaul University. The other, Daniel Whistler, is a tutor at the University of Oxford, where he just submitted a dissertation on F.W.J. Schelling's theology of language. I interviewed them about their book by e-mail. A transcript of the discussion follows. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee301.
Call it a revival, of sorts. In recent years, anyone interested in contemporary European philosophy has noticed a tendency variously called the religious or theological "turn" (adapting a formulation previously used to describe the "linguistic turn" of the 1960s and '70s). Thinkers have revisited scriptural texts, for example, or traced the logic of seemingly secular concepts, such as political sovereignty, back to their moorings in theology. The list of figures involved would include Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, and Jürgen Habermas -- to give a list no longer or more heterogenous than that.
A sampling of recent work done in the wake of this turn can be found in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, a collection just issued by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. One of the editors, Anthony Paul Smith, is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Nottingham and also a research fellow at the Institute for Nature and Culture at DePaul University. The other, Daniel Whistler, is a tutor at the University of Oxford, where he just submitted a dissertation on F.W.J. Schelling's theology of language. I interviewed them about their book by e-mail. A transcript of the discussion follows. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee301.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Cfp: "The Power of the Word: Poetry, Theology and Life," Heythrop College, University of London, June 17-18, 2011.
Religion has always been part of Western literary traditions. Many canonical literary texts engage extensively with theology and religious faith and practice, and theological and spiritual writers make liberal use of literary genres, tropes and strategies. Recent work in philosophy of religion, theology, the study of religions and literary criticism has once again brought to the fore issues which arise when literature, faith, theology and life meet, whether in harmony or in conflict. This international conference aims to: · foster a dialogue among scholars in theology, philosophy, spirituality and literature and between these and creative writers;
· discuss the ‘truth’ of poetry and the ‘truth’ of theology in relation to each other;
· reassess the idea of poetry as a criticism of life;
· discuss the relationship between faith, theology and the creative imagination through an examination of theoretical issues and the study of specific texts;
· examine the importance of poetry for personal and social identity, social cohesion and relations between faiths and cultures.
Keynote Speakers:
Professor Gianni Vattimo (University of Turin)
Professor Helen Wilcox (University of Bangor)
Professor M. Paul Gallagher (Gregorian University, Rome)
Professor Paul Fiddes (University of Oxford), tbc.
Other Invited Speakers:
Professor John Took (UCL),
Professor Jay Parini (Middlebury College, Vermont),
Olivier-Thomas Venard (Professor Ecole Biblique, Jerusalem),
Dr Antonio Spadaro (Gregorian University, Rome),
Dr Stefano Maria Casella (IULM University, Milan),
Dr Florian Mussgnug (UCL).
The organisers invite scholars currently working in the subject field to offer panel papers (30 minutes plus 10 minutes discussion) to address the following titles and themes.
Titles and themes of panels:
1. Why poetry matters:
· The activity of reading
· ‘Tolle, lege’: reading as transformative
· Poetry and the development of the reader
· The purpose and value of religious poetry
· Is religiously committed literary criticism possible, desirable, necessary?
· Specific writers and texts
2. Poetry, faith, religion and theology:
· Faith and the poet
· Poetry and poets in theological perspective
· Religious experience and the experience of poetry
· Devotional poetry
· What makes a work of poetry theologically or religiously significant or relevant?
· Metaphor, symbol, faith and theology
· Is the writer/poet as such theologically significant?
· Specific writers and texts
3. Poetry and the mystical:
· Relationships between mysticism and poetry
· Mystical poetry
· Poets as mystics, mystics as poets
· Specific writers and texts
4. Imagination, faith and theology:
· The place of imagination in religion, faith, theology, spirituality
· The ‘sacramental imagination’; poetry as sacramental
· Reason and imagination in faith and theology
· Theology, spirituality and the poetic imagination
· Specific writers and texts
5. Poetry and sacred texts:
· ‘Secular’ and ‘sacred’ poetic texts
· ‘Secular’ poetry and sacred texts
· Specific writers and texts
6. Poetry and society:
· Does poetry make anything happen?
· Poetry, literary criticism and ethics
· Poetry and politics
· Specific writers and texts
Please email abstracts of 500 words max. by Friday 14 October 2010 to: f.knox@heythrop.ac.uk and d.lonsdale@heythrop.ac.uk.
· discuss the ‘truth’ of poetry and the ‘truth’ of theology in relation to each other;
· reassess the idea of poetry as a criticism of life;
· discuss the relationship between faith, theology and the creative imagination through an examination of theoretical issues and the study of specific texts;
· examine the importance of poetry for personal and social identity, social cohesion and relations between faiths and cultures.
Keynote Speakers:
Professor Gianni Vattimo (University of Turin)
Professor Helen Wilcox (University of Bangor)
Professor M. Paul Gallagher (Gregorian University, Rome)
Professor Paul Fiddes (University of Oxford), tbc.
Other Invited Speakers:
Professor John Took (UCL),
Professor Jay Parini (Middlebury College, Vermont),
Olivier-Thomas Venard (Professor Ecole Biblique, Jerusalem),
Dr Antonio Spadaro (Gregorian University, Rome),
Dr Stefano Maria Casella (IULM University, Milan),
Dr Florian Mussgnug (UCL).
The organisers invite scholars currently working in the subject field to offer panel papers (30 minutes plus 10 minutes discussion) to address the following titles and themes.
Titles and themes of panels:
1. Why poetry matters:
· The activity of reading
· ‘Tolle, lege’: reading as transformative
· Poetry and the development of the reader
· The purpose and value of religious poetry
· Is religiously committed literary criticism possible, desirable, necessary?
· Specific writers and texts
2. Poetry, faith, religion and theology:
· Faith and the poet
· Poetry and poets in theological perspective
· Religious experience and the experience of poetry
· Devotional poetry
· What makes a work of poetry theologically or religiously significant or relevant?
· Metaphor, symbol, faith and theology
· Is the writer/poet as such theologically significant?
· Specific writers and texts
3. Poetry and the mystical:
· Relationships between mysticism and poetry
· Mystical poetry
· Poets as mystics, mystics as poets
· Specific writers and texts
4. Imagination, faith and theology:
· The place of imagination in religion, faith, theology, spirituality
· The ‘sacramental imagination’; poetry as sacramental
· Reason and imagination in faith and theology
· Theology, spirituality and the poetic imagination
· Specific writers and texts
5. Poetry and sacred texts:
· ‘Secular’ and ‘sacred’ poetic texts
· ‘Secular’ poetry and sacred texts
· Specific writers and texts
6. Poetry and society:
· Does poetry make anything happen?
· Poetry, literary criticism and ethics
· Poetry and politics
· Specific writers and texts
Please email abstracts of 500 words max. by Friday 14 October 2010 to: f.knox@heythrop.ac.uk and d.lonsdale@heythrop.ac.uk.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Cfp: "The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion," Postmodernism, Culture and Religion 4, Syracuse University, April 7-9, 2011.
Paper submissions are invited on the topic "The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion," its past and present, its history and its prospects, in the widest possible terms, addressing the whole range of its implications—politics, feminism, constructive theology, philosophy, history, literature, interfaith dialogue, and the hermeneutics of sacred texts.
In the past, these conferences, which have provided a forum for the most influential philosophers, theologians, and cultural theorists to interact, have consisted solely of several keynote speakers. This conference will be different. It will feature three plenary speakers and offer multiple concurrent sessions devoted to papers submitted on a diversity of issues relating to the primary theme. This call for papers is deliberately open, befitting the conference's animating concern with the future. Papers are invited that address questions like (but not limited to) the following:
JOHN D. CAPUTO, Watson Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Syracuse University (http://religion.syr.edu/Caputo.html)
PHILIP GOODCHILD, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Nottingham(http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/Theology/People/philip.goodchild)
CATHERINE MALABOU, Professor of Philosophy, University of Paris-X, Nanterre (http://www.u-paris10.fr/10980645/0/fiche_EE8__pagelibre/)
Visit the conference website here: http://pcr.syr.edu/.
In the past, these conferences, which have provided a forum for the most influential philosophers, theologians, and cultural theorists to interact, have consisted solely of several keynote speakers. This conference will be different. It will feature three plenary speakers and offer multiple concurrent sessions devoted to papers submitted on a diversity of issues relating to the primary theme. This call for papers is deliberately open, befitting the conference's animating concern with the future. Papers are invited that address questions like (but not limited to) the following:
- What now, or what comes next—specifically, after the death, if not of God, at least of the generation consisting of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Levinas, etc.? This question concerns not only the future after those significant theorists, but also the future after-life of these eminent minds who have left such a deep impact on Continental philosophy of religion.
- What is the future of Kant and German Idealism, of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in Continental philosophy of religion?
- What remains for the future of phenomenology? Of the "theological turn" in the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion and others? Of Gadamer, Ricoeur and philosophical hermeneutics? Of apophatic or mystical theology?
- What is the future of feminism and Continental philosophy of religion?
- What are the status and future of the new trinity of Agamben, Badiou and Zizek?
- What relevance do the political interpretations of Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and the more recent Continental philosophers such as François Laruelle and Catherine Malabou have to philosophy of religion and political theology?
- What about the future of sovereignty, of money and capitalism, as in the work of Philip Goodchild?
- What is the future of the movements of Radical Orthodoxy and of radical death of God theology, whether in their original or contemporary manifestations?
- What about the new sciences of information and complexity in thinkers like Mark C. Taylor and Michel Serres?
- What about Continental philosophy of religion and our “companion species” in Donna Haraway?
- What about “Post-Humanism”?
- What is the future of Continental Philosophy of religion and Judaism? And Islam? Or world religions generally?
- What is the relationship between postmodernism, religion and postcolonialism?
- What role can Continental philosophy play in the future of religion? In the professional study of religion?
- How does Continental philosophical theology relate to the ethnological and empirical-scientific study of religion?
- How does Continental philosophy of religion differ from traditional philosophy of religion? Or from analytic philosophy of religion?
- What is continental philosophy of religion anyway?
JOHN D. CAPUTO, Watson Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Syracuse University (http://religion.syr.edu/Caputo.html)
PHILIP GOODCHILD, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Nottingham(http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/Theology/People/philip.goodchild)
CATHERINE MALABOU, Professor of Philosophy, University of Paris-X, Nanterre (http://www.u-paris10.fr/10980645/0/fiche_EE8__pagelibre/)
Visit the conference website here: http://pcr.syr.edu/.
Friday, April 23, 2010
"'Become who you are': Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Philosophy of Religion," University of Essex, May 15, 2010.
13th International Graduate Conference in Philosophy in honour of Mike Weston, Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, University of Essex.
[T]here can be no general issue of the significance of life which must be resolved in order to give the guidelines for the individual’s life. To raise the question of life’s significance is always something done by an individual. There is no ‘truth’ here apart from its being lived by individuals: to say a certain view of life is ‘true’ is to adopt it, see one’s life in its terms, whether to try to live it or feel guilt at one’s failure to do so. It is to take it as the measure for one’s life.’ (Mike Weston, Philosophy, Literature, and the Human Good)
Keynote Speakers:
Stephen Mulhall (Oxford)
Michael McGhee (Liverpool)
Further information may be found here: http://www.essex.ac.uk/philosophy/gradconference/.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Fish, Stanley. "Must There Be a Bottom Line?" NEW YORK TIMES January 18, 2010.
Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010.
January 19 marks the official publication of Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion. The title would seem to identify the book as an addition to the ever-growing body of studies that explore the relationships and tensions between religion and science, usually with the intent either of declaring one epistemologically or morally superior to the other, or of insisting (somewhat piously) that the two are compatible if we avoid extreme claims and counterclaims, or of triumphantly announcing that science is a form of faith, or of purporting to demonstrate that religion can be explained in naturalist terms as an expression of the instinct to survive and propagate.
While Smith rehearses these theses and shows limited sympathy for some of them (and disdain for some others), her object in the book is to interrogate and critique the assumption informing the conversation in which these are the standard contentions. The assumption she challenges — or, rather, says we can do without — is that underlying it all is some foundation or nodal point or central truth or master procedure that, if identified, allows us to distinguish among ways of knowing and anoint one as the lodestar of inquiry. The desire, she explains, is to sift through the claims of those perspectives and methods that vie for “underneath-it-all status” (a wonderful phrase) and validate one of them so that we can proceed in the confidence that our measures, protocols, techniques and procedures are in harmony with the universe and perhaps with God.
It is within the context of such a desire that science and religion are seen as in conflict, in part because the claims of both are often (but not always) totalizing; they amount to saying, I am the Truth and you shall have no other truths before me. But if religion and science are not thought of as rival candidates for the title “Ultimate Arbiter,” they can be examined, in more or less evolutionary terms, as highly developed, successful and different (though not totally different, as the history of their previous union shows) ways of coping with the situations and challenges human existence presents. . . .
Read the rest here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/must-there-be-a-bottom-line/.
Herrnstein Smith's response is here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/science-and-religion-lives-and-rocks/.
"Ethics, Hospitality, and Radical Atheism," a Dialogue between Derek Attridge and Martin Hägglund, University of Oxford, March 4, 2010.
5.15 pm, Thursday March 4, 2010 New Seminar Room, Wadham College, University of Oxford.
Hägglund’s recent book, Radical Atheism, offers a novel and provocative account of Derrida’s thinking on life and death, good and evil, self and other. The book has already been the subject of a special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review and has prompted enthusiastic critical responses from thinkers like Ernesto Laclau and Derek Attridge. Attridge, eminent literary critic and theorist, is responding to Hägglund in his forthcoming book Reading and Responsibility, where he further develops his influential notion of the relation between deconstruction, ethics, and literature. In his response, Attridge raises the question of what difference deconstruction makes for the way we live our lives and opens the stakes of the debate through the question of hospitality. This dialogue will stage a wide-ranging discussion between these distinguished interlocutors before opening the debate to the floor.
Places are limited. Please register interest with Ankhi Mukherjee (ankhi.mukherjee@wadh.ox.ac.uk) and Sarah Senk (sfs28@cornell.edu).
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Cfp: "Attending to the Other: Critical Theory and Spiritual Practice," St. Catherine's College, University of Oxford, September 23-26, 2010.
15th Biennial Conference, International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture (ISRLC).
Short papers are invited for the following panels; contributors should aim to deliver a 20-minute piece with 10 further minutes for questions and discussion. Please send the proposed title of your paper, with an abstract of not more than 500 words, to the convenor of the panel for which it seems most appropriate.
Visit the conference webpage here: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc2329/index.html.
Short papers are invited for the following panels; contributors should aim to deliver a 20-minute piece with 10 further minutes for questions and discussion. Please send the proposed title of your paper, with an abstract of not more than 500 words, to the convenor of the panel for which it seems most appropriate.
- Literature
- Modern Theology
- The Bible
- Islamic Studies
- Judaism
- Religion and Modernity
- German Idealism
- Postcolonialism
- Movies
- The Visual Arts
- Higher Education
- Spirituality and Reconciliatio
- Continental Philosophy of Religion
- Critical Theory
- Gender
- Theological Humanism
- Music
Visit the conference webpage here: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc2329/index.html.
Monday, November 23, 2009
"Divining the Message / Mediating the Divine," Graduate Students' Conference, Department of Religion, University of Columbia, April 2-3, 2010.
Update:
The keynote speakers will be Bernard Stiegler, Samuel Weber, Mark C. Taylor, and Brian Larkin.
Original Post (October 17, 2009):
Whether sacred symbols or sanctioned authorities, intermediaries have been both conduits for and barriers to access to the divine. Mediating objects, forms, rituals, and people have long been central to religious practice and belief. They are conditions of both possibility and impossibility, at one and the same time providing glimpses of the heavens and anchoring us to the earth.
Institutions such as the Catholic Church and the Imamate have at times dictated the ways in which humans commune with the divine. In other places and at other times, charismatic leaders or apprenticed specialists have mediated more directly. Some of these leaders prophetically mediate between a culture's past and its future, and in the example of the archive, between its past and its present sovereignty. At other times, previously religious spheres have undergone near total reinscription, leaving passive forces like evolution and the invisible hand of the economy to dictate what was previously the realm of a more intentional being. The institutions mediating faith in markets and divine faith have changed radically, leaving us to wonder what may persist through their reinscription.
New media technologies have transformed not only how people commune with one another, but also how they communicate with the divine. With the printing press and telephone wires, and with television and the internet, we can now consider whether our message to the divine is best delivered by letter, email, voicemail, or text message. While many still attend brick and mortar churches, build a sukkah in their backyard, or chant at a Shinto shrine, the current moment of technological acceleration has changed the ways in which many people practice religion. Some study Buddhism in the virtual gaming world of Second Life, others visit a satellite campus of Saddleback Church to see Rick Warren's Sunday sermon streamed in from the other side of Orange County, and still others sit on the beach while reading the New International Version of the Bible on their Amazon Kindles. As intermediaries proliferate, and as our relationship to old mediations changes, so do the ways in which we practice religion, imagine the divine, and imagine ourselves.
The 2010 Columbia University Religion Graduate Students' Conference seeks to bring together papers from a wide range of disciplinary, theoretical, historical, and geographical perspectives that examine varying conceptions of mediation, including:
1. The media of mediation (print, TV, internet, cinema, icons, translation, etc.)
2. The institutions of mediation (Church, state, theology, tradition, economy, culture)
3. The people who mediate (the Pope, gurus, pastors, priests, séance mediums, other spiritual leaders, and the spirit possessed)
4. Temporal mediations (prophecy, mourning, melancholy, and trauma, as mediating the past, present, and future)
Presenters from the social sciences and humanities are equally welcome. We also invite visual art proposals exploring the conference's theme to be displayed in the gallery adjoining the panel rooms for the duration of the conference.
Please submit an abstract (prepared for blind review) of no more than 300 words to columbia.religion@gmail.com by December 1, 2009. Final papers should be 9-12 double-spaced pages in length (presenters will have approximately 20 minutes to speak). Panel submissions are also welcome; for panels of 3 or 4 presenters, please include an abstract of 250 words detailing the common concerns tying the individual presentations together, in addition to the individual paper abstracts.
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