About
The Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life supports academic research, teaching, and scholarship on the study of religion, culture, and social difference at Columbia University. In addition, it convenes academic conferences, public forums, and collaborative programming to support and extend academic and scholarly understanding of these topics, and to disseminate and distribute such new understandings to broader publics and communities.
The Institute actively supports scholarship, teaching and public programming across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as well as in the University more broadly under the auspices and oversight of the Department of Religion.
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What’s New
UPCOMING EVENTS:
Minoritization of Religion: Ancestors, Religion & Erasure in Zimbabwe
Date: Monday, April 7, 2025, from 12:15-1:45pm
Location: Calder Lounge (Uris Hall 107)
Series: Religion, Culture, and Public Life
Speaker: Raffaella Taylor-Seymour (Columbia University)
Respondent: Chazelle Rhoden (Columbia University)
“Ancestor worship” is a classic category of analysis in religious studies, one that has come to be taken for granted in both academic writing and public discourse as a minoritarian form of religious practice. This talk examines the complexities of imposing the frame of religion on ancestors by examining the relational dimensions of ancestral practices in Zimbabwe that also raise questions about kinship. Drawing on missionary, colonial, and ethnographic archives, the talk interrogates how ancestral practices came to be a minoritized form of “religion” over the past two centuries. In the precolonial world, ancestral spirits were fundamental to local knowledge systems, played a central role in everyday life, and formed the bedrock of social and political power. The talk traces how British colonists worked to demonize, marginalize and ultimately minoritize ancestors in Zimbabwe, configuring them first as “superstition” and later a kind of religion that would become a minority form of religious practice. Ultimately, the talk argues that these processes transformed ancestors into a minority “religion” while erasing their relational dimensions, a struggle that played out in many contexts and continues to limit understandings of ancestors and ancestral practices. At the same time, the talk makes the case for a relational approach to ancestral spirits by examining how people in Zimbabwe continue to imagine, resist, and rework the meanings of both ancestors and religion. This talk draws on material from Raffaella Taylor-Seymour’s book project, titled Ancestral Intimacies: Queerness, Relationality and Religion in Zimbabwe.
Events
RELIGION, Culture AND PUBLIC LIFE
Our core event series, Religion, Culture, and Public Life, provides a platform for exploration and debate of both pressing current events and the often overlooked ways in which religion can figure in the different aspects of society, the economy, and the arts. In recent years, we have discussed the rise of populism and conspiracy theories, White Christian gun culture in the United States, the sexual politics of Black Churches, and the atrocities against the Uyghur in Xinjiang.
patriarchal violence
Patriarchal violence affects many targets, both now and in history: violence against women, violence against children, violence against LGBTQ+ populations, violence against racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Sometimes, that violence takes the form of direct physical assault within the domestic sphere; sometimes it takes the form of institutionalized imprisonment and dehumanization; sometimes it takes the form of the legal system; sometimes it takes the form of the medical establishment. These forms of violence are pervasive, and are often insidious, coursing through notionally liberal democracies like the United States. This series aims to help us think in new ways about patriarchal violence in contemporary culture. The Fall semester of the Patriarchal Violence series will explore the historical roots of these types of violence and their relation to European religion and patterns of colonization. The Spring semester will focus on current forms of Patriarchal Violence, and will think through the various mechanisms available for curbing it, ranging from activism to legal protections to consciousness raising.
Religion and Climate
IRCPL’s Religion and Climate series is animated by calls to reimagine human relationships with and responsibilities to the environment in an age of planetary crisis. As the impact of climate change is increasingly but unevenly felt, religion is emerging as a site of epistemological doubt, struggle, and possibility. This series will explore the cosmological underpinnings that shape diverse understandings of the environment and examine how religious subjects react to and act upon the ecological upheavals they face, challenging exclusively technocratic or secular responses to the climate crisis.
Shifting paradigms of american religion
The Shifting Paradigms of American Religion series convenes public-facing conversations intended to rethink the history of religion and to imagine future possibilities for its place in American democracy, culture, and public life. Each event focuses on a single paradigm, with the aim of interrogating assumptions about religious identity and providing a productive conceptual meeting place for diverse audiences. Bringing together scholars, practitioners, and community members, Shifting Paradigms carves out space for reflection on the challenges that define our current moment. Programs in this series span a wide range of concerns—from identifying alternative ways of thinking about humanity in our questionably algorithmic age, to examining the pitfalls and possibilities in policymaking of understanding religion in terms of belief. This series is funded by the Henry R. Luce Foundation.
Grantee Spotlight
Opportunities
Joint projects
IRCPL will fund projects by Columbia University faculty that aim to understand the role of religion in the contemporary world and its historical roots. Joint Project funding may be applied to research projects, seminars, conferences, working groups, and other programs that bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars.
student fellowships
Every year, IRCPL awards a number of research fellowships to students traveling over the summer to complete their dissertation or other research projects:
Undergraduate Summer Fellowships
THE CLAREMONT PRIZE
The Claremont Prize in the Study of Religion is dedicated to the publication of first books by early career scholars working in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences. Prize-winners will be invited to IRCPL to participate in a workshop and the books will appear in IRCPL’s series, “Religion, Culture, and Public Life,” published by Columbia University Press.