A graduate student conference on how religious traditions have been instrumental in both reflecting and constructing humans’ notions of animals and have integrated such notions into comprehensive mythical, symbolic, and ritual frameworks of meaning and action.  This conference engages both the shifting complexity of the modern world and a growing body of scholarship in religious studies.

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Keynote speakers include Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the University of Chicago Divinity School; and Kimberley C. Patton, Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion at Harvard Divinity School.

Sponsored by the Religion Graduate Students’ Association of Columbia University.

A conversation with John Feinblatt, the chief policy adviser to Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York and the lead architect of the Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Moderated by Gillian Metzger, Stanley H. Fuld Professor of Law at Columbia University.

Burden of Choice is a conversation series about how proliferating choices in a liberal democracy both liberate and constrain us, including charitable giving on February 15; waste on March 28; and debt on April 3.

A conversation with Charles Best, Founder and CEO of DonorsChoose.org, an online charity that provides a way for people to donate directly to public schools. Through peer-to-peer philanthropy, the nonprofit has raised more than $1o0 million for 200,000 projects at public schools across the country. Moderated by Mark C. Taylor, Chair of the Department of Religion and Co-Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life.

Burden of Choice is a conversation series about how proliferating choices in a liberal democracy both liberate and constrain us, including guns on February 29; waste on March 28; and debt on April 3. 

Directions to the Heyman Center. Enter the Wien Hall Gate on 116th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive.

A public talk by Glenn Bowman, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at IRCPL.

His talk is part of the Religion and Mobility Faculty Seminar, organized by Karen Barkey, Professor of Sociology and History, and Valentina Izmirlieva, Professor of Slavic Languages, and sponsored by the IRCPL.

Co-sponsored with the Center for Democracy, Toleration, and Religion and the Middle East Institute.

image credit: Mark Fischer

A lecture by Alioune Badara Diop, a political scientist at Université Gaston Berger de Saint-Louis, Senegal. Moderated by Ousmane Kane, associate professor of international and public affairs at SIPA at Columbia University.

Co-sponsored with Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion (CDTR).

4:00 – 6:00 pm: A discussion with Bachir Souleymane Diagne, Etienne Smith, Alfred Stepan, and Alioune Badara Diop, a political scientist at Université Gaston Berger de Saint-Louis, Senegal. Moderated by Mamadou Diouf.

6:15 – 7:30 pm: A screening of film Democracy in Dakar, which looks at the involvement of the youth and rap singers in the elections in 2007.

Co-sponsored with Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion (CDTR).

A conversation with Michael Laffan, Professor of History, Princeton University and author of The Makings of Indonesian Islam; and with Duncan McCargo, Visiting Scholar, Weatherhead East Asian Institute and author of Mapping National Anxieties: Thailand’s Southern Conflict.
Co-sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute (WEAI) and the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR).

A conversation with Paul Kollman, who will draw upon his research in African Christianity as well as other trends in religious studies to offer some suggestions about how studies of religion and mobility have been already undertaken and how they might profitably move forward. Kollman is an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Fellow of the Kellogg, Kroc, and Nanovic Institutes at the University of Notre Dame, as well as Acting Director of the Center for Social Concerns at Notre Dame. In 2005 he published The Evangelization of Slaves and Catholic Origins in Eastern Africa and his current project is a book on the Catholic missionary evangelization of eastern Africa.

A workshop on religion and human rights pragmatism, which focuses on strategies for promoting rights through persuasion and dialogue across cultural and religious divides. The panelists and audience for these open workshops will include scholars and non-academic practitioners in the human rights field.  Students are welcome to attend.

Sponsored by Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion, supported by a grant from the Luce Foundation.