Boston College Biennial Conference on the History of Religion

This note on Boston College's religion conference just appeared in my in box.

Boston College Biennial Conference on the History of Religion

March 30-31, 2012

"History's Fourth Lens? Race, Class, Gender--and Religion"

The History Department of Boston College invites papers and panels for its Biennial Conference on the History of Religion to be held on March 30-31, 2012. In recent years, scholars have increasingly focused on the important roles that religious intuitions, beliefs, or practices have played in human history. They have also expressed concern that historical analyses done primarily through the lenses of race, class, and gender have neglected or at least deemphasized the religious influences on the lives of their subjects. Such scholars argue that to ignore how religion informed the lives of historical subjects is to fundamentally misinterpret the past. Religion, therefore, is one of a number of forces that interact, collide, and impel the historical experience. We will consider how religion complements race, class, and gender as a lens for historical analysis.

We welcome proposals for full panels and individual papers from both established scholars and graduate students on topics from the medieval period to the present that touch upon the question of religion as history's fourth lens in Christian and non-Christian forms. The geographic scope is broadly defined. Suggested themes include, but are not limited to, the role of religious institutions, practices, and beliefs in:

* Political and economic systems
* Church-state relations
* Class consciousness
* Migration
* Family and community
* Gender identities

Individual paper proposals should include a 300-word proposal, paper title, and current c.v. Panel proposals for two to three presenters should include a 250-word panel abstract (including panel title), a 300-word proposal for each individual paper (including paper title), and a current c.v. for each presenter.

Deadline for submission is October 3, 2011.

To submit a proposal or for further conference details including a schedule, registration form and travel information contact Peter Cajka at peter.cajka.1@bc.edu.

Religion Enters the Academy, Looks for Emergency Exit

Paul Harvey

And I don't know if I can do it,
Oh no, I've said too much, I haven't said enough.
REM, "Losing My Religion"

"Jason Kidd is . . . savant-like."
Rick Carlisle, Coach, Dallas Mavericks, on ESPN

My previously promised post reflecting further on one particular session of the 2^nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture isn’t going to happen today (tonight) as planned. Besides, Curtis Evans’s comment on yesterday’s post concisely summarized most of what I was going to say anyway.

But briefly, the discussion at the conference about interpreting supernatural events/experiences/”abundant events”/whatever you want to call them brought my mind to one of the classics of the field, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. And that was coincidental, because on the plane to the conference I just read a slender and very entertaining new volume by James Turner, Religion Enters the Academy: The Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion in America. And let me say, next time you have a 2 or 3 hour plane ride to a conference, bring along this volume. It’s substantive and meaty enough to make you feel like you’ve earned a scholarly pat on the back, but it’s also funny and entertaining enough to distract you from the 3 year old in the seat behind you screaming his/her brains out and kicking the back of your chair for the entirety of the route from, oh, say, Denver to Indianapolis. Just saying.

This work is the published form of some recent lectures Turner gave at Stetson University in 2010. Unlike my experience with the Lamar lectures, which I gave in 2008 and then spent the next 2 1/2 years piddling around with, Turner was prompt in turning in his manuscript and getting it right out there for publication.

I’m going to take the lazy way out and plagiarize from the book’s website to give you a brief summary, one which captures the argument if not the dry wit and entertaining prose of the book:

Religious studies—also known as comparative religion or history of religions—emerged as a field of study in colleges and universities on both sides of the Atlantic during the late nineteenth century. In Europe, as previous historians have demonstrated, the discipline grew from long established traditions of university-based philological scholarship. But in the United States, James Turner argues, religious studies developed outside the academy.

Until about 1820, Turner contends, even learned Americans showed little interest in non-European religions—a subject that had fascinated their counterparts in Europe since the end of the seventeenth century. Growing concerns about the status of Christianity generated American interest in comparing it to other great religions, and the resulting writings eventually produced the academic discipline of religious studies in U.S. universities. Fostered especially by learned Protestant ministers, this new discipline focused on canonical texts—the “bibles”—of other great world religions. This rather narrow approach provoked the philosopher and psychologist William James to challenge academic religious studies in 1902 with his celebrated and groundbreaking Varieties of Religious Experience.

Turner concludes by writing, “Long recognized as a classic, Varieties now became something of a model. To be sure, the great majority of scholars of religion today study religions in ways far different from James, but many religious-studies experts do follow a Jamesian path to understanding religious experience.” He then goes on to cite a number of works, including Ann Taves’s Fits, Trances, and Visions, as examples of how James “stretched the map of religious studies in America" -- all the way from Boston to the experiments of the 60s to the pluralistic vocabulary of describing brilliantly "in the zone" point guards as savant-like -- an instance of neither saying too much, or not saying enough.

Then, late last week, I was talking to an academic editor for Bedford Books, and we were discussing some of the volumes in the wonderfully classroom-usable Bedford Series in History and Culture. I asked him what else was forthcoming in that series, and guess what he told me: Robert Abzug of the University of Texas is putting out a Bedford edition of a trimmed-down, annotated, sizable excerpt of Varieties of Religious Experience.

Will wonders never cease? This particular editor was a little skeptical of the project, but one of the series editors, the historian David Blight, apparently told one of the Bedford people that James's book had "changed my life,” and for that and other reasons the founder and head of Bedford Books became a major champion of the volume. So, apparently it is on the way.

True confession: I first read James in college, hated it, and gave up about halfway through. Of course, at that age my tastes in a number of things (excruciatingly rancid 3.2 beer, Herman Hesse, Quadrophenia, and those blobs of nothing that passed for "tofu" in the 1970s/early 80s) were very questionable, so it’s no wonder it took me some time and mentoring to understand James and some other classics of that sort. If the Bedford series volume succeeds, it will be the kind of introduction to the text that I didn’t have but needed. Here’s hoping.

In his discussion with Richard Bushman, which Chris Jones wrote about on our blog here, Robert Orsi discusses how we need a new language to interpret religious experience in a way that is neither overtly confessional or crudely reductionist. Bushman suggests that James provides one model, to which Orsi replies that that’s still too individualist (read: Protestant) a model, a point he elaborated on at the conference by noting how the understood subject of religious studies is the “autonomous subject.” Reading Turner’s history of the discipline, it’s easy to see how this became the case, and given the obstacles to its development (cultural, intellectual, political, etc.), it’s a wonder that “comparative religion” ever developed as a discipline in America at all. But it did, and now it's everywhere, in everyday vocabulary, hence Rick Carlisle's brilliantly offhanded description of Jason Kidd's mastery over the psychology of his team, and his mastery over the more talented Heat.

More on this as the week progresses, I hope, but as someone who has spent some time studying folks whose "abundant events" are less than politically neutral or benign, it makes me wonder how Orsi's attractive theories and wonderful discussion with Bushman affect work on religious intolerance and violence in America. Just a quick example comes to mind: sitting in the Southern Historical Collection archives in Chapel Hill years ago, I came across the letters of a white southern Spiritualist, who was writing correspondence to her deceased son in the way that nineteenth-century Spiritualists did.

The Spiritualists in Ann Braude's classic book Radical Spirits are, in a sense, easy to root for: they are women finding their voices, arguing for abolitionism and women's rights during their trances, and so forth. But this particular woman (who initially interested me because Spiritualism was almost totally a Northern thing in the antebellum era, so I was trying to figure out how it made its way South) was writing about a son who was involved in the massively repressive violence that was overturning Reconstruction in Mississippi -- specifically, her son, whom she now saw addressing her from the interplanetary realms in her own rationally inexplicable but emotionally/spiritually powerful event, was a white Redemptionist who was killed trying to deny the vote to black men in Clinton, Mississippi, in 1875, one of the "autumnal outbreaks" that President Grant famously grew weary of as the experiment of Reconstruction ran its course and the fateful federal compromise with southern white supremacy took hold.

This woman's experience clearly was real and powerful "to her," and I don't mean "to her, and she was crazy." I'm no Spiritualist, for sure, but can recognize culturally sanctioned forms of mourning as part of religious experience. But her experience was of hearing the voice of her deceased son who also happened to be a violent white supremacist.

I don't know what to make of all of it, but the fascinating discussion at the first session of the conference and continued online elsewhere just made me recall that reaction to that particular document in the archives.

Simple Things You See are All Complicated: Random Reflections on the 2nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture

Paul Harvey

The simple things you see are all complicated
I look pretty young, but I'm just back-dated, yeah
The Who, "Substitute"

If it's a lie, then we fight, on that lie. But we gotta fight.
Slim Charles in The Wire

Elesha, Janine, and Kelly have initiated a vigorous conversation arising from one particular session at the 2^nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture which concluded just over a week ago. Because I had to leave just before this particular session, I don’t have much to add to it in particular, but I had a few stray thoughts on other parts of the meeting to throw up here. Today’s post will be lighter, more observations about some key phrases and indelible memories that I’ll carry from the conference. Tomorrow I hope to develop a few more serious thoughts about one session in particular, the one involving a discussion about the "bracketing" of religious belief in religious studies -- its rationale, its benefits, and its costs.

Before continuing, the last session was on "The Future of American Religion," but I was unable to be there, so am really hoping that one of ya'll out there will post on the discussion that went on there.

The first thought: a shout out to my partner in crime Philip Goff for organizing the conference in the first place, a huge undertaking of fundraising and organization. I don’ t know whether Phil got thanked at the end, but having lunch with him just before I left, he told myself and someone else present about his death struggle with the J.W. Marriott (the conference hotel) to get them to do what they had in fact been contracted to do (such as set up our room chairs in a circular pattern, put us in the room agreed to, etc.). Conference attendees don’t normally think about stuff like that, but suffice to say after threatening to call in his university lawyers and engaging in numerous conversations with the Marriott staff, the hotel at last came through with what they were contracted to come through with. That was a lot of work they had to go to just so we could sit around and talk.

All went smoothly, but not without a lot of background fighting leading up to the event. Anyway, since scholars tend to bitch and find fault with individual sessions or presenters or anything else, a shout out for those (Phil and his assistant Becky Vasko in particular) who make these things possible.

Second, I have no doubt that long after some of the substantive intellectual discussions have been forgotten, I’ll still remember some of the shorter or even “throwaway “ observations, conversations, and barroom late night jesting. Here are a few that stick with me (I had some others at the time, but they disappeared after the third martini).

One presenter, Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, discussing her research on the styles and head scarves of inner-city Muslim women, related that the women she studies refer to their scarf styles as “hood-jabs.” Her entire discussion of the phenomenon of "Muslim Cool" was the single most interesting ethnographic description I've heard in a good while, and a reminder of the tireless vitality of American religious cultures. She might have been the only person there from the discipline of Anthropology (maybe there were others, but I didn't see any), and as someone who did a minor field in Cultural Anthropology lo so many years ago I still enjoy hearing work from that perspective.

At the session on religion and market models, James Hudnut-Beumler, a scholar of religion and economics, author recently of In Pursuit of the Almighty's Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism, and Dean of the Div. School at Vanderbilt, related a conversation he had once with Ben Bernanke at some kind of conference or meeting. Bernanke asked him what he studied, and he replied “religion.” Bernanke answered back, “I can explain that.” Bernanke was being a little facetious, but only a little, for he went on to give an economic analysis, based on rational choice theory, on why women historically would predominate in many types of religious organizations (basically, their “wages” from this participation were equal to or greater than the discriminatory wages they would have faced – and would still face – in the secular marketplace and workplace). The idea here was both to suggest what we can learn from approaches drawn from market models of religion, as well as why we resist the hegemony of those models – the irritation we feel at the “I can explain that,” even when meant only half-seriously, is an irritation at a reductionism run amok.

And yet, reductionism is a tool that leads to significant insights (like, what's causing that e coli outbreak? and why are there more religious "nones" now than there used to be?), so it never hurts when humanists get exposed to social science scholars who use the word "data" a lot. There will always be a fair amount of cross-disciplinary carping at these kinds of conferences, a small price to pay for crossdisciplinary conversations.

At the very first session, we had a great “ethnographic moment,” in an impromptu discussion between Robert Orsi and Jan Shipps, renowned scholars both but slightly separated generationally, concerning whether we can “bracket out” religious belief in our studies. In reflecting on her pioneering studies of Mormonism, Shipps noted how she always said (or implied) “for them,” as in “for them, these visions were real.” Orsi replied that the problem with the “for them” bracketing was that it could easily lead to “for them, these visions were real – and they are crazy.”

I hope to develop a fuller post on this conversation early this week, as it was the session that ultimately interested me the most, but just this brief conversation between the two raised the same kinds of issues and back-and-forth responses which Orsi and Richard Bushman discussed recently in the journal Dialogue (see Chris Jones’s post on that), and which Orsi and Stephen Prothero batted back-and-forth several years ago in a discussion that is still frequently referenced – click here for a useful summary of that. I have noted recently that a lot of folks are assigning that discussion to students in classes, because it really gets to the heart of the matter of how scholars conceive of themselves and their work in religion.

Is the “whoosh” that we get from sporting events (or from some other mass group activity that induces emotional excitement in individuals) the same as the “whoosh,” the rapid firing of neurons and physiological response, that “we” get from religion? If so, is religion some sort of minor subdiscipline of cognitive psychology and neuro-biology? This became the theme of a lively discussion between Ann Taves (whose recent work has been done in collaboration, so I gather, with neuro-psychologists and other scientists) and Tracy Fessenden, who spoke eloquently of her resistance to adopting the scientific model of study as a means of accessing the huge money and prestige that scientists win at universities, in comparison to the perpetually impoverished and denigrated state of the humanities at many (most?) institutions nowadays – especially state institutions where “productivity” is measured in grant dollars raised. I don't mean to suggest that Taves was leading that direction -- certainly not true for the President of the AAR! But we are entering a new era of discussion (beyond the "two cultures" model) of sciences and the humanities, and there's an awful lot at stake in those discussions.

Rachel Wheeler concluded one session by noting how our generation of scholars always ends up saying, in effect, “it’s complicated.” That is certainly my classroom mode, and the message one would end up with at a conference like this. Yet others in the room, especially those in the social sciences, bring more concrete questions (and therefore answers) to the table, as when Roger Finke discussed some of the findings that can be gleaned from sociological studies of religious behavior such as he has conducted in some of his well-known studies. That brings us back to the discussion that Hudnut-Beumler and Ben Bernanke had about “I can explain that.” The humanists in the room stiffen their backbones against any explanation that does not invoke complexity and some degree of unknowability; some (not all) of the social scientists naturally are drawn to projects that focus on concrete questions and answers – has religious/philanthropic giving risen or fallen over time as a percentage of people’s incomes? Has the pay of clergy risen or fallen relative to other professions over the longue duree (answer: fallen, but you already knew that)? And so on.

As a humanist at heart, naturally I gravitate towards “It’s complicated” as my answer for most important questions. For the smaller questions, we can find answers, but for the bigger questions that drew me into academic studies in the first place, our answers will be tentative at best. Therefore, my classroom pedagogy tends to be deconstructively Socratic, in the sense of proposing questions, letting students pose hypotheses, poking holes/finding problems with those hypotheses, and then commanding them to “go and research some more” at the end of the period (they probably go to toga parties instead, but at least I want to leave them with the idea of the beautiful confusion of historical research). Is that, ultimately, where I want to leave it? I don’t think that will leave the assessment committee at my university very happy, since we are supposed to be assessing concrete bits of student learning.

But that leads to a final irony: I am chair of our departmental assessment committee (that's a committee of one -- but full of self-doubt as I am, reaching consensus is surprisingly difficult), so I get to develop the instruments to test exactly what bytes of data students "learn." Since I developed them, our instruments, therefore, essentially capture the degree to which students "get" the concept "it's complicated."

Is “boring from within” the way to beat a bureaucratic system that inevitably beats down individuals? On the other hand, as a lover and scholar of The Wire, I also know that, ultimately, the institution always wins, so we shall see whether, like Slim Charles, I "fight on that lie," just because we have to fight, or whether "boring from within" is simply carving a hole in my own academic soul.

Ultimately, in this age of the privatization of public goods such as education, the game does change, while it also just gets more fierce -- as Kathryn Lofton and Sylvester Johnson reminded us in their presentations on/critiques of (respectively) neoliberalism and its influence in market models of religion, and the relationship of American religion to the American imperial state. Reflecting further on the privatization of the public good of education (as in Colorado, where state funding now represents less than 8% of the CU budget) threw some cold water on the neural "whoosh" that conferences such as this, at their best, provide. (And if, like Janine, you live in Illinois, then that water bath is even colder.)