The IRCPL will start accepting applications for the 2013 fellowships beginning January 1, 2013.  View past fellowship recipients and guidelines for 2013 fellowship applications, due Friday, March, 2013, at 5pm.

2012 Graduate Fellows

• Talia Andrei, Department of Art History and Archaeology: Mapping Sacred Spaces: Representations of Pleasure and Worship in Shaji sankei mandara. 
• Michael Low, Department of History: Colonizing Mecca: The Hajj and Anglo-Ottoman Rivalry in the Hijaz, 1858-1916.
• Elizabeth Marcus, Department of French Romance and Philology: Communities, Continuity and Change: Lebanon and France, 1943-1958.
• Irene Sanpietro, Department of Classics: Fasting, Prayer, Alms: Christian Virtue Theory and the Transition from Apostolic to Institutional Church.
• Drew Thomases, Department of Religion: The King of Pilgrimage Places: Religion, Recreation, and Encounter in Pushkar.

2012 Undergraduate Fellows

• Jordan Alam, Department of English: Madness and Modernity: The Current Conception of Mental Illness and Mental Healthcare in Bangladesh.
• Nicholas Bloom, Department of History: Taking off the Mask:  James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, and the Consciousness of Revolution.
• Zachary Natan Cohen, Department of Sociology: The Global Hasid
   Food Stamps, Remittences, and the Satmar Diaspora.

What Matters? Ethnographies of Value in a Not So Secular Age

Edited by Courtney Bender and Ann Taves
Published: May 2012

Over the past decade, religious, secular, and spiritual distinctions have broken down, forcing scholars to rethink secularity and its relationship to society. Since classifying a person, activity, or experience as religious or otherwise is an important act of valuation, one that defines the characteristics of a group and its relation to others, scholars are struggling to recast these concepts in our increasingly ambiguous, pluralistic world.

This collection considers religious and secular categories and what they mean to those who seek valuable, ethical lives. As they investigate how individuals and groups determine significance, set goals, and attribute meaning, contributors illustrate the ways in which religious, secular, and spiritual designations serve as markers of value. Reflecting on recent ethnographic and historical research, chapters explore contemporary psychical research and liberal American homeschooling; the work of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American psychologists and French archaeologists; the role of contemporary humanitarian and volunteer organizations based in Europe and India; and the prevalence of highly mediated and spiritualized publics, from international psy-trance festivals to Ghanaian national political contexts. Contributors particularly focus on the role of ambivalence, attachment, and disaffection in the formation of religious, secular, and spiritual identities, resetting research on secular society and contemporary religious life while illuminating what matters in the lives of ordinary individuals.

Edited by co-directors Mark C. Taylor and Alfred Stepan, the Religion, Culture, and Public Life series focuses on issues related to questions of difference, identity and practice within local, national and international contexts.  Special attention is paid to the ways in which religious traditions encourage conflict, violence and intolerance as well as support human rights, ecumenical values and facilitate mutual understanding.  By mediating alternative methodologies and different religious, social and cultural traditions, works published in the series open channels of communication that facilitate critical analysis.

Talia Andrei, Department of Art History and Archaeology. Mapping Sacred Spaces: Representations of Pleasure and Worship in Shaji sankei mandara.
Michael Low, Department of History. Colonizing Mecca: The Hajj and Anglo-Ottoman Rivalry in the Hijaz, 1858-1916.
Elizabeth Marcus, Department of French Romance and Philology.
Irene Sanpietro, Department of Classics. Fasting, Prayer, Alms: Christian Virtue Theory and the Transition from Apostolic to Institutional Church.
Drew Thomases, Department of Religion. The King of Pilgrimage Places: Religion, Recreation, and Encounter in Pushkar.

Jordan Alam, Department of English. Madness and Modernity: The Current Conception of Mental Illness and Mental Healthcare in Bangladesh.
Nicholas Bloom, Department of History.Taking off the Mask:  James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, and the Consciousness of Revolution.
Zachary Natan Cohen, Department of Sociology. The Global Hasid
 Food Stamps, Remittences, and the Satmar Diaspora.

Following this line of thought, Sacred Spaces presents Sacred Sites: Post-Gujarat’s Hindu-Muslim Violence Reconciliation Workshop on Wednesday, November 9th, 2011. This workshop will seek to enable NGO activists who have been involved in reconciliation work in Gujurat, India, to share their experience and to assess the impact of their efforts.

Speakers will include Christophe Jaffrelot, Research director at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and professor of South Asian politics and history at Sciences Po, and Rajeev Bhargava, Senior Fellow and Director at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Cosponsored by CDTR.

For more information please click here.

Past Sacred Spaces Events:

In April of 2011, Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies,  part of the Middle East Institute, hosted a conference very relevant to the work of the Choreography of Sacred Sites project called Locating Tolerance: The Conflict over the Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem. Details of the conference can be found here.

Explore the May 2009 conference, Choreography of Sacred Space: State, Religion and Conflict Resolution, conducted in partnership with Bogaziçi University, Istanbul and Columbia University’s The Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR), Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL), and The Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR).

View Conference Program  |  Read Presentation Abstracts |  Read Invitee Bios

Listen to Conference Audio

Religious antagonism and shared sanctuaries in Algeria

Dionigi Albera, French National Center for Scientific Research

Sacred Memories, Plural Realities: Remembering and Producing Shared Sacred Spaces

Anna Bigelow, North Carolina State University

 Re-consolidating the borders between self and other and between self and the state: Ethnographic explorations of past memories and present struggles between Syrian Christians and Kurds at the margins of contemporary Turkey

Zerrin Ozlem Binar, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Comparative Perspectives on the Balkans and the Middle East

Glenn Bowman, University of Kent at Canterbury

A Rebel, a Saint, and a Contested Shrine: The Türbe of the 16th Century Sheikh Bali Efendi, Its Inauspicious Usurpation by a Notorious Muslim in the 19th Century, and the Stir it Caused in the Forging of the
Bulgarian Nation-State in the 20th Century

Tolga Esmer, Central European University

Secularizing the unsecularizable: A comparative study of the Haci Bektash Veli and the Mevlana Museums in Turkey

Rabia Harmansah, Doctoral Student, University of Pittsburgh

Three Ways of Sharing the Sacred: Choreographies of Co-existence in Cyprus

Mete Hatay, Project Leader at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) Cyprus Centre

The Byzantine Mosque at Trilye: A Processual Analysis of Dominance, Sharing, Transformation, and Tolerance

Robert Hayden, University of Pittsburgh

Conflict over Holy Sites in the City; Symptoms of the Conflict in nature, images and type of the city

Rassem Khamaisi, Department of Geography and Environmental Planning, University of Haifa

The Ambiguous Politics of “Ambiguous Sanctuaries”: F. Hasluck and Historiography on Syncretism and Conversion to Islam in 15th – and 16th-century Ottoman Empire

Tijana Krstic, Central European University

At the Boundaries of the Sacred. The Reinvention of Everyday Life in Jerusalem’s Al-Wad Street

Wendy Pullan, University of Cambridge

For more information, please visit our grants page.

New Hope Church of Seventh Day Adventists, West Harlem
By Noel Bohl-Fabian

I had an astonishing experience wandering around West Harlem Saturday afternoon, looking for interesting topics and trying to find expressions of “alternative religion”.  What began as an innocent and accidental encounter with a church I’d never seen before, quickly ended up as an experience of deep self-consciousness that completely transformed my perspective of so-called “Black culture” and “Black religion.”

Second Providence Baptist Church
By Dafna Revah

While walking past the Second Providence Baptist Church, I noticed this sign referring to Youth Resources Numbers. The sign includes many numbers that are not associated with religious life. The sign includes a variety of emergency hotlines, a number for a cocaine hotline, a poison hotline, and a STD hotline. Why would such a sign be posted outside of a church? Perhaps the sign is posted because the church is known as a safe place. The church embodies a protected environment for people. The Second Providence Baptist Church may be trying to help not only members of the church, but also members of the community when in crisis.

The Black Barbershop
By Benji de la Piedra

Level’s Barbershop, located on 125th St. between Amsterdam and Morningside Aves, was my initial introduction to Harlem when I first arrived here at Columbia, so in light of our course subject, this post has a bit more of a personal motivation. As I was getting my haircut today, I chatted up my barber about his experience in working at Level’s. As common knowledge (or stereotype, if you want to call it that) affirms, Level’s, being a barbershop with a predominately black clientele, is more than simply a place for people to get their hair cut. At any given hour, but especially Thursday-Saturday, the shop’s busy days, both customers and friends of the barbers come in and out, and the place is vibrant with talk and exchange. Generally this revolves around sports, music, and daily life. Yet from what I’ve seen and heard, religion, at least institutionally, is generally not a hot topic for discussion at Level’s.

M. Moran Weston and St. Philip’s Episcopal Church
By Natalie Shibley

St. Philip’s Episcopal Church is a historically black congregation with a riveting history in New York City. Founded in 1809, the church had various homes downtown before moving to Harlem in 1910. The current building, pictured above, was designed by the architectural firm of Tandy and Foster. (Tandy was the first black architect licensed to work in New York State.) The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission has designated the neo-Gothic structure a New York City Landmark. Although St. Philip’s history is long, I would like to return to one (extended) moment in the church’s story, the time during which M. Moran Weston served as rector (1957-1982).

The first book in IRCPL’s publication series with Columbia University Press After Pluralism offers a critique on how religious difference is often framed as a problem only pluralism can solve. Its essays treat pluralism as concept historically and ideologically produced and explore it as a term that sets the norms of identity and the parameters of exchange, encounter and conflict. Contributors locate pluralism’s ideals in diverse sites—Broadway plays, Polish Holocaust memorials, Egyptian dream interpretations, German jails, and legal theories—and demonstrate its shaping of political and social interaction in surprising and powerful ways. To be published on October 15, 2010.

If you would like to organize a faculty seminar in the Fall 2011 or Spring 2012, please submit a proposal with a 1-2 page description of subject and a list of likely participants. It should also indicate anticipated results of the seminar, such as particular courses, a collection of essays, public lectures or symposia. Each seminar may have up to two organizers, who will each receive a stipend of $2000. Each seminar will also be provided with $2000 for expenses such as books, catering and materials.

Deadline for Fall 2011 Seminars: June 1st, 2011

Deadline for Spring 2012 Seminars: October 1st, 2011

Proposals due to Emily Brennan at eb422@columbia.edu