How does Kafka’s “cynical” story, Researches of a Dog, intersect with Shakespeare’s sad stories of the death of kings? How does each author locate a kind of freedom at the point of a missing link in the constitution of the world presented in each text, a point where the sovereign and the creature encounter one another in, to use Paul Celan’s phrase, the majesty of the absurd?

Astrology is everywhere these days. In our digital age, astrological symbols and concepts have never been more popular, or as diverse in their applications. As ancient divination practices are being actively revived and synthesized with elements of modern philosophy, astronomy, psychology, and alternative spirituality, we are compelled to ask: What does it mean to reproduce classical meanings and metaphysics in modern contexts? How do occult traditions of the past align with contemporary social ethics and values? This panel brings three professional astrologers in conversation with a cultural anthropologist to discuss the growing popularity of astrology, considering these and other questions. We will examine the “timeless” nature of astrology while also asking if there are limits to the universality of ancient knowledge systems.

What can Palestine teach us about the global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession? What is the relationship between land and colonialism? Moving beyond paradigms of exceptionalism and the confines of the nation-state reveals Palestine as a key site to explore these questions. Tracing the struggle on and over land, this talk reflects on Palestine’s lessons in and with the movement for global racial justice.

How do museum exhibitions about religion shape public understandings of religion and race today? What are some of the challenges and prospects that curators and museum professionals face in “representing religion” to diverse audiences? This event brings Azra Dawood, curator of the exhibit, “City of Faith: Religion, Activism, and Urban Space,” currently on display at the Museum of the City of New York, into conversation with Najam Haider, Professor of Religion at Barnard College. Following a presentation on the exhibit, which has a particular focus on South Asian communities in New York, they will address these questions and more, before Q&A from the audience.

A conversation with Kaiama L. Glover (Barnard College) and Mona Oraby (Howard University). This event is prompted by the publication of Oraby's coauthored graphic nonfiction book, A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor, which is based on a project she first convened and edited on The Immanent Frame, a digital platform hosted by the Social Science Research Council. Using A Universe of Terms as a point of departure, Glover and Oraby will discuss the boundaries of research, including the expected products of scholarship, as well as the role of the digital humanities in bridging public-facing work with specialist interests. Glover and Oraby, both long-time editors of born-digital projects, will also engage in a conversation about how editorial experiences shape their scholarly praxis.

Twelver Shiʿa Muslims form the largest religious minority in Pakistan where they occupy a precarious position in relation to a Sunni-Islamic majority state. Despite the threat of marginalization and violence, finding new avenues through which to practice publicity has become central to Shiʿi groups’ demands for recognition. Seizing on an increase in smartphone ownership, combined events-organizers and digital collectives known as “azadari networks” use existing platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok to publicize Shiʿi faith. These networks are recognized by their audiences as experts in “liveness”, that sees technology contribute to the reception of divine presence or lend affective significance to existing rituals.

Building on ethnographic research among Shiʿi videographers, this paper examines the qualities of liveness that have long been desired in Shiʿi media. This can be traced to the availability of sound amplification, the rare appearance of Shiʿi orators on broadcast television in the 1960s, and the adoption of home recording technology in the 1980s that allowed ritual events, processions, or regular commemorative gatherings known as majlis to be recorded and reproduced on audio- and videocassette. Yet since the launch of Facebook Live in 2016 and the ensuring popularity of livestreamed events, reform scholars, popular orators, and audiences have debated the ethics of liveness, particularly whether the mediation of co-presence constitutes an appropriate performance of belief. Contrary to Shiʿi discourse on the glory or trauma of past events, these debates address what the Shi’i Muslim present should look, sound, and feel like in an era of public life characterized by outrage, heightened sentiment, and religious controversy.

The recent Dobbs v. Jackson decision puts the function of race in settling the matter of reproductive rights (to say nothing of reproductive justice) on display, showing the two to be crucial in establishing the legitimating reason and unreason of the decision. This talk considers how the convergence of race and reproduction in this decision can be an occasion to examine the enduring tie between the political and theological as manifest in the Supreme Court’s function in US governance. A key source of the court’s decision to overturn Roe and Casey is the sense that preserving those precedents is inconsistent with both the Constitution and the United States’ “history and tradition of ordered liberty.” Taking the dependence of the court’s ruling on the significance of order to conceptions of liberty, this talk shows how the afterlife of racial slavery and reproduction’s entanglement in the decision reveals a political theological sense of epistemological and existential order, and not only sovereignty, that is foundational to the court’s authority, power, and function.

In this event, co-organized with and held at the Museum of the City of New York, curator Azra Dawood will be joined in conversation by leading scholars of religion in New York City, exploring the intersections of the public and private, the political, secular and sacred. In conjunction with an exhibit at MCNY that launches November 16.

In the past decade, artists, curators, and art historians have been increasingly exploring performative and installation work tied to spiritual manifestations. The retrieval of Indigenous and Afro-Diasporic belief systems and cosmogonies has been at the heart of this discussion as the art world becomes more decolonized, decentered, and polyphonic. This revamped spiritual turn in the arts signals an interest in building new, interconnected epistemologies with healing practices as a central source of concern. This conversation, with two leading figures in the Caribbean art world, will highlight how ritualistic and collective acts can provide us with tools to build more sustainable relationships with nature and with each other.

The house has long been an ideal locale for horror. The home is intended to be our primary space of security and control, a reflection of our identity and values. The single-family detached house, synonymous with family and domesticity, has long been considered the intrinsic domain of women. But what happens to the home when the traditional patriarchal family structure is challenged, and the predictable stability of the house becomes unreliable? In this talk, Leila Taylor, the author of Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, will look at supernatural spaces in film and literature, the image of the witch’s house, and how the home of the single, childless, autonomous woman became symbols of both enchantment and dread.

Few would question petroleum’s historical importance to our nation, or the critical role that Christianity has played in shaping its contours. Yet what happens if we link both entities together and place them at the center of modern American history? In this talk Darren Dochuk will explore how, from its earliest discovery during the Civil War to the present, this liquid resource assumed sacred form as the nation's special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. In the boardrooms, drill sites, pulpits, and pews of this country’s oil patches, meanwhile, petroleum executives, wildcat producers, and rank-and-file workers who mutually embraced oil as God’s gift fundamentally transformed US religion and politics—boosting America's ascent as the preeminent global power, fueling the rise of the evangelical Republican Right, and setting the terms for today's debates over energy and environment. With an eye to current trends, and America’s moment of crisis, in this talk Dochuk will measure the legacies of religion and oil’s distinctive bond.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Carl Schmitt’s book, Political Theology. In that time, but especially in the past few decades, Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, his assertion of the persistence of theological appeals in secular politics, and the very idea of “political theology” itself have been hugely influential. They have shaped our understandings of everything from state power to the “War on Terror” to the abject subject. Schmitt has also been controversial, not least given his work as a Nazi ideologue and jurist. In this panel discussion, leading critical thinkers reflect on the past, present, and future of both Political Theology and political theology. What does this concept offer now for an understanding of our world? A century on, how should we think about—and act upon—the notions of sovereignty, miracles, and sacrifice that Schmitt, and many others, have brought to the fore?

Before Joseph Smith was the American prophet who claimed to have translated The Book of Mormon, he was a seer and magician who used occult tools to search for treasure supposedly buried in the hills of upstate New York. While the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tends to underemphasize the folk-magic elements of Joseph Smith's biography, there are some people, both inside and outside of the Church, who not only see magic and esotericism as an important aspect of Smith's religious career but even see magic as a part of their own contemporary practices. Join us as anthropologist Jon Bialecki guides a roundtable discussion on the role of magic in historical and contemporary Mormonism and some of the tarot decks recently crafted.

Gun culture in America has deep and varied roots. But the merging of contemporary Christian nationalism and this culture is a worrisome and dangerous trend in need of much greater exploration. In this discussion, leading experts on guns in relation to religion, race, policing and the law address the trend in a broad outline, while also highlighting particular developments related to Christian nationalist imaginaries: marketing of the "Crusader" rifle; liturgical use of AR-15's by Rod of Iron Ministries; the proclamation of the AR-15 as the gun of apocalypse by former Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin; and the use of bullet rosaries by some branches of radical traditionalist Catholics.