Rethinking Religion « Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life

Rethinking Religion

The Burden of Choice

By Mark C. Taylor

A response to a public conversation series held Spring 2012.

How many different items does the average American grocery store stock? (45,000) How many Starbucks are there in Manhattan? (187 and counting) In the world? (17,244) How many channels are there on your TV? (You don’t know.) We have become obsessed with choice — the more choices the better. Or at least so it seems. Why? Why is there so much emphasis on choice and the supposed freedom of choice?

While the freedom of choice has long been one of the most important values for democratic societies, something has changed in the past several decades. What might best be described as an ideology of choice has emerged among the partisans of neo-liberal economists and neo-conservative politicians. This development is symptomatic of the latest stage of capitalism.

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Posted in Burden of Choice, Responses

Mark Z. Danielewski: Rewiring the Real

Listen to a conversation with author of Mark Z. Danielewski, author of House of Leaves and Only Revolutions. Moderated by Mark C. Taylor, Chair of the Department of Religion and Co-Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life. Rewiring the Real is a yearlong series of conversations with writers about the interplay of literature, technology and religion.

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Posted in Podcasts, Rewiring the Real

Why the World Needs Religious Studies (and Why Religious Studies Needs the World)

Listen to a talk by Nathan Schneider, adapted from an essay he wrote for Religion Dispatches, and a conversation that followed with Columbia faculty and students. Nathan Schneider, editor of the online literary magazine Killing the Buddha and the website Waging Nonviolence, writes about reason, religion, and politics for publications including Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Times, and Commonweal.

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Jennifer Egan: Rewiring the Real

Read the transcript of a the public conversation with Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit From the Goon Squad as well as Look at Me and The Keep. Moderated by Willing Davidson, fiction editor of The New Yorker. Rewiring the Real is a yearlong series of conversations with writers about the interplay of literature, technology and religion.

William Davidson: So I thought we could sort of begin at the beginning and I wanted to talk a little about your epigraph for Visit from the Goon Squad. There are two quotes from Proust and the second one is: “The unknown element in the lives of other people like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but not abolish.” And I wanted to just sort of start out by asking a little bit about how Proust – who is sort of living in a time of tremendous scientific and technological change as we are – how did it influence your writing?

Jennifer Egan: Well, in many ways, I guess I’ll start by just saying, you’re right. His book was written at such an interesting technological time and yet it feels really imbued with sort of old world sensibilities, so it’s one of the shocks of reading it is having things happen like an airplane flies. You think: “What?” Or there is a period where people started talking on the telephone and that’s very startling.

Nuclear Waste: Between a Rock and a Radioactive Place

By Michele Lent Hirsch

A response to a public conversation with Allison Macfarlane on March 28, 2012.

Listening last week to Allison Macfarlane, Harvard-affiliated member of the White House’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future and author of Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste, one got the impression that if anyone could explicate the quagmire that is nuclear-waste safety, it’d be this woman. An MIT-trained geologist who went on to study nuclear reactors and their radioactive byproducts, she has a dazzlingly thorough knowledge of both nuclear power and the geological constraints on underground waste disposal.

And so when she said our grasp of nuclear safety is a joke, I didn’t find myself laughing.

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Posted in Burden of Choice, Responses

Mark C. Taylor: Refiguring the Spiritual

Is the increasing commercialization of art an effect of the widening scope of finance markets? Is contemporary art dying at the hands of capitalism? And how can we refuse the impulse to bring art down to its lowest common denominator – money?

While forcing us to address these troubling questions, Mark C. Taylor’s newest book, Refiguring the Spiritual: Bueys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, brings critical analysis to bear on art’s decaying place in the world today.

The structure and development of financial markets and the art market mirror each other. As art becomes a progressively abstract play of non-referential signs, so increasingly abstract financial instruments become an autonomous sphere of circulation whose end is nothing other than itself. When the overall economy moves from industrial and consumer capitalism to finance capitalism, art undergoes parallel changes. There are three stages in this process: the commodification of art, the corporatization of art, and the financialization of art.”

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Posted in Responses

Getting Guns Out of New York

By Carlos Blanco

A response to a public conversation with John Feinblatt on February 29, 2012.

For the past decade, John Feinblatt, chief policy advisor to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has led New York City’s effort to rid its streets of illegal guns. At a recent event at Columbia, he emphasized the need to get guns “out of the wrong hands,” by which he meant reducing gun violence by reducing gun availability.

Feinblatt has been instrumental in involving Mayor Bloomberg in the coalition Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which seeks “stop criminals from getting guns while also protecting the rights of citizens to freely own them.” As Feinblatt pointed out, no federal legislation prevents guns from being manufactured in other states and shipped to New York, whose gun-control laws are, in fact, relatively strict. Most illegal guns in New York City are actually imported—85% of guns recovered in crimes are originally sold out of state. Without a federal law stemming this flow, illegal guns will continue to litter large urban cities like New York.

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Posted in Burden of Choice, Responses

Can Donors Choose?

By Charity Hanley

A response to a public conversation with Charles Best on February 15, 2012.

Since 2000, Donorschoose.org has raised more than $100 million to fund classroom projects in public schools across the country, reaching more than 6 million students. On its site, teachers post projects like trips to an aquarium or requests for dictionaries, construction paper, even iPads to make classroom lessons come to life. Anyone can go online, pick a project, and donate as little as $5 to the project that interests them most.

CEO and founder Charles Best believes the nonprofit’s success has been fueled by the “pent-up innovation” of teachers and donors. Donorschoose.org, he said, gives teachers an unparalleled platform to develop new and creative solutions to the challenges they confront in their classrooms. And donors see exactly where their money is going. As with other peer-to-peer philanthropy sites like Kiva or even Kickstarter, they connect to the donation on a personal level, giving to their hometown, their favorite sport, or the class reading their favorite book from 7th grade.

But too much choice can be a problem, Best admitted. In some cases, donors found it too difficult to choose a project, and after looking through three or four web pages, they left without donating. Identifying a passion, said Best, “wasn’t in their muscle memory.” I am not so sure.

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Posted in Burden of Choice, Responses

Charles Best: Burden of Choice

Listen to a public 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 $100 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.

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Posted in Burden of Choice, Podcasts

Mobilities and Immobilities: Reflections of Fieldwork in Palestine

Listen to a podcast of a public talk by Glenn Bowman, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at IRCPL. This 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.

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Posted in Podcasts

Multivocality of Religious Sites

Listen to a podcast of a seminar discussion with Glenn Bowman, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at IRCPL. This 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.

[download podcast]

Posted in Podcasts

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