Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life

End of Year Thank You

Chelsea — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:45:56 +0000

The staff of the Institute of Religion, Culture, and Public Life would like to thank you for making 2012-2013 another wonderfully successful year and to extend our congratulations to all of Columbia University’s 2013 graduates. In addition to on-going research projects on religious accommodation, mobility, and toleration, this year brought events ranging from talks by Rebecca Solnit, Wally Broecker, and Paul Lieberman, to the 2013 Bampton Lectures in America with the artist Liam Gillick, to series on religion in American politics and the intersections of immigration, incarceration, and religion. Stay tuned to the IRCPL throughout the summer as we will be releasing new radio episodes from our New Directions in Prayer series and posting our Fall 2013 events calendar.

Rethinking Religion: New Directions in Trauma and Prayer

Chelsea — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:34:29 +0000

Join us for the Institute of Religion, Culture, and Public Life’s newest radio episode New Directions in Prayer: Trauma and Prayer. This hour-long episode explores the role prayer plays in the lives of people who have experienced abuse or extreme trauma. With Dr. Norris Chumley acting as a guide and the Rev. Dr. Jones providing scholarly insight, the episode focuses not only on distinct forms of prayer, but also on the varied areas in which prayer is used to mitigate the impact of abuse and/or trauma. New Directions in Prayer is a three part radio series from the IRCPL’s Rethinking Religion media program. Future episodes, to be released in Summer 2013, look at the Jesus Prayer and Islamic Prayer. This program was made possible through a grant from the Social Science Research Council, with support of the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this program do not necessarily reflect the views of the Social Science Research Council or the John Templeton Foundation.

The Phenomenology of Muslim Prayer

Chelsea — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:10:03 +0000

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.

Arindam Dutta on TransNational HaHas: Deltas, Deities and the Debt

Chelsea — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:02:56 +0000

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.

Migrant Imaginaries: Religion on the Move in the African Diaspora

Chelsea — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:58:03 +0000

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 on Islamic Constitutionalism and Human Rights: Case Studies of Iraq and Egypt

Chelsea — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:38:22 +0000

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.

Abdou Filali-Ansary on Democratisation in Muslim Contexts: The Return to the Question of Legitimacy

Chelsea — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:40:55 +0000

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.

Abdou Filali-Ansary is Research Professor at the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC) in London, UK. Previously, he was the Founding Director of the same Institute (2002-9), Director of the King Abdul-Aziz Foundation for Islamic Studies and Human Sciences in Casablanca, Morocco (1973-84), and Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Letters at Rabat University where he taught modern philosophy from 1970 to 1973. In 1993, Professor Filali-Ansary initiated a bilingual journal (Arabic/French) “Prologues: revue maghrébine du livre” with a team from the academic community in Morocco. His publications include French and English translations (with introduction) of Ali Abdel Razek’s essay Islam and the foundations of political power (Paris: La Découverte, and Casablanca: Le Fennec, 1994; Edinburgh: EUP, 2012), essays entitled L’islam est-il hostile à la laïcité ? (Casablanca: Le Fennec, 1996 and 1999), Par souci de clarité (Casablanca, Le Fennec, 2001), Réformer l’islam ? Une introduction aux débats contemporains (Paris, La Découverte, 2003), as well as articles in academic journals.

Strange Fruit: Augustine, Liberalism, and the Good Samaritan – A Lecture by Eric Gregory

Chelsea — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 20:48:42 +0000

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. He has received fellowships from the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, the Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Among his current projects is a book tentatively titled, What Do We Owe Strangers? Globalization and the Good Samaritan, which examines secular and religious perspectives on global justice. Prof. Gregory is currently a fellow at The Tikvah Center for Law & Jewish Civilization at New York University School of Law.

Conceptualizing Religion: A Comparative Perspective with Volkhard Krech

Chelsea — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 22:25:07 +0000

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

Third Annual Radical Democracy Conference

Chelsea — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:17:04 +0000

March 16th, 2013
Wolff Conference Room
6 East 16th Street, New York, NY 10003
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Draft Agenda9.00 am Welcome

9.30 am Panel I: Radical Democracy and Economic Justice
Simon Marti, Columbia University, “The Politics of Economic Democratization in the United States during the Great Depression”
Stephen Polk, UC Denver, “The Necessity of Prefigurative Politics in an Age of Crisis and Collapse”
Tomer Zeigerman, NSSR, “Rule of the poor? Democratic Political Power and Economic Inequality”
Chris Tallent, Brown University, “Economic Justice Through Radical Democracy”

Discussant: Nicholas Fiori, NSSR
Chair: Julia Ott, NSSR

11.30 am Parallel Panel IIa: New Perspectives on Radical Democracy
Samuel Galloway, Chicago University, “J’encule le Monde: Queering Arendt’s Amor Mundi“
Jason Vick, University of California, Irvine, “Participatory Democracy, Radical Democracy, and the Future of Democratic Theory“
Felix Petersen, Humboldt University Berlin, “Critique, Destruction, Reformulation and Going Beyond the “Known”. Radical (Pragmatist) Democracy as Organization of Society-Induced Change“
Aylon Assael, Oxford University, “Radical Animals, Rupturing Speech: Maintaining Fidelity to Animal Rebellions.“

Discussant: Alhelí de María Alvarado-Díaz, Columbia University
Chair: Ross Poole, NSSR

Parallel Panel IIb: Democracy Through and Against Institutions
Gerasimos Karavitis, NSSR, “What Castoriadis Would Say to Michels: The Iron Law of Oligarchy Revisited“
Tim Frawley et al., OWS, “Make Voting Count: An Experiment in Alternative Voting Methods“
Adam Uddin, Wayne State University, “Insurrection Denied: A Structuralist Overview of the Current Obstacles Encountered by Post-1968 Leftist Social Movements”
Jennifer Hudson, Columbia University, “From Autogestion to Independent Regulatory Authorities: Pierre Rosanvallon’s Managerial Turn.“

Discussant: Vincent Bloch, Columbia University
Chair: Mehmet Tabak, NYU

1.30 pm Lunch2.30 pm Panel IV: Borders – From Democratization to Contestation
Julia Honkasalo, NSSR, “The Refugee Camp as a Site of Resistance: Palestinians and the Struggle for Recognition in Lebanon”
Andreas Hetzel, TU Darmstadt, “What Could It Mean to ‘Democratize’ Borders? Some Considerations Following Balibar”
Andreas Oberprantacher, Universität Innsbruck, “Expressing Democratic Dissent in European Frontier Zones”
Marina Kaneti, NSSR, “Metis and the Migrant: Choices under constraint and strategies of freedom”

Discussant: Owen D. Thomas, University of Exeter
Chair: Andreas Kalyvas, NSSR

4.30 pm Coffee

5.00 pm Keynote Address
William E. Connolly
“The New Materialism, Fragility, and Activism”

6.30 pm Roundtable Discussion: Radical Democracy – Challenges and Possibilities
Conversation with William E. Connolly, Stathis Gourgouris, Andreas Kalyvas, Ross Poole, Mehmet Tabak