Religion in the American West Seminar

Paul Harvey

Sorry for being an absentee blogger as of late, hope to catch up this weekend with posts about the AAR. To start with, though, Tisa Wenger has provided an excellent summary/analysis of the Religion in the American West seminar panel; click here for it. The discussion there concerned the following presentations:

1. Travis Ross, “California Imagined: The Pacific Expositor and the Religious Imagination”

2. Jonathan Olson, “Not Merely Asiatic but Pagan: Religion, Chinese Exclusion, and the American West”

3. Barry Alan Joyce, “Creating an Axis Mundi in the American Southwest: Religion, Science, and the Sacred at Chaco Culture National Historic Park”

4. Brett Hendrickson, “Mexican-American Religious Healing and the American Spiritual Marketplace”

More post-AAR reflections will be coming up soon.

Florida State University Graduate Symposium

Coming off the 2010 Annual American Academy of Religion meeting, I thought it was especially relevant to blog about the Florida State University Graduate Symposium hosted each year by FSU's religion graduate students. The call for papers has been up on h-net for about a month now, but I particularly wanted to draw the attention of my fellow Americanists.

The Florida State University Department of Religion is pleased to announce its 10^th Annual Graduate Student Symposium to be held February 18-20, 2011 in Tallahassee, Florida. This year’s symposium will be centered on the theme “Discourses of Ritual and Power.”

Dr. Matthew Kapstein, of the University of Chicago and Directeur d'études of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, will deliver this year’s keynote address. His lecture is tentatively titled “Spiritual Exercises in Indian Buddhist Philosophy: The Thought of Pierre Hadot in a Comparative Perspective.” Also, we are pleased to once again host Dr. Kathryn Lofton of Yale University as a guest respondent.

Presentations should be approximately 15 to 20 minutes in length and will receive faculty responses. Those proposing papers in the sub-field of American Religious History can look forward to Dr. Lofton, Dr. John Corrigan, Dr. Amanda Porterfield, and Dr. Amy Koehlinger offering thoughtful responses. In addition, every year respondents select the best graduate paper to receive the Leo F. Sandon Award, an endowed award named for the Religion Department's former chair.

Every year, this conference is a big success. There is no registration fee, and food and drink is provided throughout the weekend.

Proposals including an abstract of approximately 300 words, a list of key terms, and a one-page CV should be submitted by December 1, 2010 for review. Final papers must be submitted by January 15, 2011. Please send proposals to fsureligionsymposium@gmail.com

Religion and the Liberal Public Realm

Randall Stephens

Over at the NYT's Opinionator blog Stanley Fish weighs in on "Religion and the Liberal State Once Again." An excerpt:

The question is what does the liberal state do with those religious believers [fundamentalists and the range of exclusivists]— the popular answer in the comments is “tell them to go back where they came from” — and my contention, and the only one I make (in agreement with John Milbank), is that the liberal state is incapable of doing anything with them except regard them, as many of the posters do, as fanatical, medieval, crazy, dictatorial and downright dangerous. As I point out, liberalism’s inability to regard strong religious claims — claims that spill out into public life — as anything but a mistake and a transgression is not something liberalism can correct or get beyond; it is the inevitable (and blameless) reflection of what liberalism is and must be if it is to sustain its particular, not to say peculiar, brand of universalism, a universalism that operates by reducing persons to formal entities, all of which are, in the essential political respect, exactly the same. (It’s universalism writ small.)

Fighting words, in some quarters. It will be interesting to read the blazing comments on the NYT and elsewhere. Mostly elsewhere.