What happens if we run out of resources, energy, and ultimately of time? Is depletion the only path ahead or is repair possible? Scholars of religion have increasingly turned their attention to spiritual ideas and community situated approaches in understanding what it means to live amid resource extraction. Join us as we think together about the interpretive failures, challenging legacies, and the potential for resilient responses in the current moment.
From its invention in the late nineteenth century though to the present, the category of “world religion” has served not only to demarcate the boundaries of certain forms of interfaith dialogue, but also shaped how courts define and protect religious freedom, how scholars of religious studies imagine their fields of inquiry, and, more generally, how non specialists conceptualize what religion is and what all religions seem to share. This event will feature scholars in conversation about the category of “world religion” and the modern emergence of interfaith dialogue, touching on the history and legacy of Chicago’s “Parliament of World Religions” and other key moments in the institutionalization of interreligious relations in the United States and elsewhere.
