The purpose of this workshop is to explore from many different angles the meanings of the ways in which Muslims pray God. How and why was the commandment of prayer established? What is its significance in connection with the Prophet’s Ascent (Mi’raj)? How should we comprehend the time of prayer as different from the serial time of our works and days? How should we understand also the different times of the five prayers? For example the systematic grouping of zuhr and asr on the one hand, maghrib and isha on the other hand by Shi’i Muslims while such a grouping is exceptional among Sunni Muslims? What interpretations for the very gestures accomplished during a prayer? How do we decipher the signs that are written by the praying body?

These are but just a few of the questions that could be raised by the different presenters and discussed. They are merely indicative and other perspectives on the “phenomenology of Muslim prayer” are welcome.

Co-sponsored by the IRCPL and Institute of African Studies.

At the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, realization grew that, at several times the level of annual revenue, the Public Debt had become a permanent institution to be serviced in perpetuity. This talk looks at land and socialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in light of this “financialization” of the British economy, a process that would have a spiraling effects across the globe. The objects under investigation here are the follies of garden Britain, Ireland and America, compared with the Zamindari bagan-baris and thakur-baris (garden estates and estate-temples) of colonial Bengal as a coterminous type. The follies and thakur-baris can be read as differential markers in a dispersed set of concerns and anxieties over nature, economy, government and religion, all of these headings being themselves synthesized and systematized into new epistemic fields through the course of the long eighteenth century. The talk looks at the entanglement of two of these new epistemic fields – “economy” and “religion” – in this context, particularly in the places where the singular, secular temporal expectancy of a ballooning, perdurable Public Debt was seen as interjecting into eschatologically-defined conceptions of obligation and existence. The shards of the Mughal Empire in India, and the “Augustan Age” of eighteenth-century Britain, abruptly joined into a single system by the fact of global capital, present signal comparisons and contrasts in their constructions of time even as they are bound by the same temporal devices of debt and finance. It is as if folly and thakur-bari, signifiers of disparate tempos of memory and divinity, speak to each other through a kind of imperfect translation, a heteroglossia called the economic.

Arindam Dutta is Associate Professor of Architectural History in the Department of Architecture, MIT. Dutta teaches surveys and advanced research courses at the graduate level, and directs the SMArchS Program at MIT’s Department of Architecture. His teaching interests are in the area of modern architectural theory and history, imperialism and globalization, gender and body politics, Marxist thought, and post-structuralism. Dutta obtained his Ph.D. in the History of Architecture from Princeton University in 2001. He has degrees in architectural design from the Harvard Design School and the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad, India. Graduating with gold medals from his undergraduate institution in India, Dutta has been the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the Getty Fellowship, in addition to numerous research grants and awards. Dutta’s articles have appeared in the Journal of Society of Architectural Historians, Grey Room, the Journal of Arts and Ideas, and Perspecta. Dutta is the author of The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility, (New York: Routledge, 2007), a wide-ranging work of cultural theory that connects literary studies, postcoloniality, the history of architecture and design, and the history and present of empire.

Cosponsored by the South Asian Institute and the Institute of Religion, Culture, and Public Life.

Please join us for the opening conversation for the 2013 Religion Graduate Students Association Conference:

The history of religion in the African diaspora is a history of movement.  But what happens when religion is on the move?  This panel will explore how an interdisciplinary approach to migratory experiences in the African diaspora — on United States soil, in the Caribbean, and across the Atlantic divide — might attune us to how mobility is not only an aspect of religious experience across traditions, times and spaces, but is also constitutive of religious beliefs, practices and communities.  By treating religion as an embodied and spatial phenomenon that intersects with racial, gendered, political and economic structures in complex and often unexpected ways, this panel aims to broaden the our theoretical and methodological repertoire for future studies of religion in the African diaspora inclusive of movement, migration, missions and new media.

Moderator: Josef Sorett, Columbia University

Panelists: Randall Jelks (Kansas University); Lerone Martin (Eden Theological Seminary); Frances Negrón-Muntaner (Columbia University); Carla Shedd (Columbia University).

Co-sponsored by  Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL), Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER), Institute for Religion in African American Studies (IRAAS), Religions of Harlem Project.

Dr. Seyed Masoud Noori, Former Faculty Member at the Center for Human Rights Studies at Mofid University in Qom, Iran and currently a Visiting Scholar at Emory Law, will explain the relationship between Shariah and state law in Muslim-majority countries’ constitutions approved since 2000, as well as the role of Shariah in basic and fundamental codes in those countries. He will focus on Iraq’s and Egypt’s constitutions, as these two models balance Shariah and state law, and he will examine how these models affect human rights issues.

Co-sponsored by: Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Middle East Institute, Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, Human Rights Institute.

Martin Seymour Lipset stressed, more than fifty years ago, that ‘prerequisites’ for democracy include economic development and political legitimacy. Since the beginning of the so called Arab Spring, aspects of political legitimacy dominate discussions, while economic development seems to have been put on the back burner, if not forgotten altogether. In this talk, Dr. Filali-Ansary will revisit the way in which issues of legitimacy are linked to discussions of religious and cultural traditions. He will explore how this leads us to raise fresh questions about the on-going transitions in Muslim contexts and the prospects of democratisation in the Third World, more generally.

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Please join us for a lecture by Eric Gregory, Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Recent developments in political theory, religious studies, and social criticism have led to revived interest in political theology as an alternative to more conventional approaches to “religion and politics.”  This lecture examines these developments in light of various encounters with the contested legacy of Augustine of Hippo.  Particular focus will be given to debates about secularity, realism, and moral sentiment in democratic culture.

Professor Gregory is the author of Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (University of Chicago Press, 2008). His interests include religious and philosophical ethics, theology, political theory, law and religion, and the role of religion in public life. In 2007 he was awarded Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. A graduate of Harvard College, he earned an M.Phil. and Diploma in Theology from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and his doctorate in Religious Studies from Yale University. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sociology Colloquium at City University of New York, Graduate Center presents “Conceptualizing Religion: A Comparative Perspective,” a lecture by Volkhard Krech (Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany)

Volkhard Krech is Professor of Religious Studies at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, and director of the International Research Consortium on “Dynamics in the History of Religions” as well as of the Center for Religious Studies (CERES).  His research interests cover the history of religions, processes of sacralization, religion and violence, religion and the arts, and the history of Religious Studies.  He has published numerous articles and books on these issues, including Wo bleibt die Religion? Zur Ambivalenz des Religiösen in der modernen Gesellschaft (What Becomes of Religion? On the Ambivalent Status of the Religious in Modern Society; Bielefeld 2011), Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe in Past and Present Times (ed. with Marion Steinicke, Brill 2011), “Sacrifice and Holy War: A Study of Religion and Violence” (in W. Heitmeyer and J. Hagan, eds., International Handbook of Violence Research, 2003), Georg Simmels Religionstheorie (Georg Simmel’s Theory of Religion; Tübingen 1998), and Religionssoziologie (Sociology of Religion; Bielefeld 1999).  He is the editor, together with Marion Steinicke, of the series Dynamics in the History of Religions (Brill), and, together with others, of the series Religion in der Gesellschaft (Religion in Society; Ergon).

A wine and cheese reception will follow the lecture and discussion

The distinguished British sociologist of religion David Martin has argued, above all on the basis of the global spread of Pentecostalism, that we are living through a period comparable in significance to the Protestant Reformation.  This lecture seeks to evaluate that claim by examining a number of other major “points of departure” in human history, most of them associated with the birth of major world religions.  Professor Torpey will seek to identify patterns in these other episodes that might help us set our own time in a broader perspective and hence to make better sense of it.

The Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History at Columbia University presents a talk by Barbara J. Fields, Professor of History, Columbia University.

Lunch will be served; RSVP required: lehmancenter@columbia.edu

In this lecture, Eddie Glaude will consider how the “blind spots” in African American religious historiography block the way to a more nuanced engagement with the powerful phenomenon of celebrity preachers and their mega churches.  More specifically, he will examine W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic essay, “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” as a paradigmatic example of the evasion of forms of African American Christian expression that complicate traditional narratives of the prophetic role of black churches in African American politics.  Glaude maintains that a different story must be told about the relationship between African American religion and political debate if we are to understand more fully how shifts and changes among African American Christians today affect the form and content of black public debate about political questions.  Too often certain rigid assumptions about that relationship impede inquiry. His aim then is not so much to engage in a close reading of the ministries of celebrity black preachers but, rather, to open up conceptual space for a fuller understanding of the political significance of African American mega churches and their pastors at the beginning of the 21^st century.

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