With R. Michael Feener, Catherine Scheer, Giuseppe Bolotta

The past decade has witnessed a remarkable surge of interest among both policy makers and academics into the effects that religion has on international aid and development. Within this broad field ‘religious NGOs’ or ‘Faith-Based Organizations’ (FBOs) have garnered considerable scholarly and professional attention, resulting in a flurry of surveys and mapping exercises, as well as a number of practitioner-oriented handbooks and toolkits aiming at integrating religion into development programming. Beyond these attempts at conceptualizing the field at a macro level, more recently there has also been significant new research examining the work of particular organizations and contexts from ethnographic perspectives. This growing literature provides new tools to better appreciate the ways in which emergent institutional forms advocating diverse social interventions arise out of or in conversation with religious communities and discourses on transcendent values. This, in turn, sheds light on the variety of ways in which FBOs are reshaping the global landscape of non-governmental organizations and their work across diverse societies – thus opening up new conversations on the possibilities and problematics of contemporary engagements of religion in the public sphere in diverse societies across the globe. This presentation features critical reflections on cutting edge work in this direction by a team of researchers examining dynamics of religion and NGOs in Southeast Asia based at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute, and the University of Oxford.

With Katherine Ewing, Jessica Roda, Soraya Batmanghelichi, Bahar Tabakoglu & others

The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL) at Columbia University will host a one-day conference entitled Religion II: Dynamics, Processes, and Change on Friday, April 21, 2017. IRCPL will bring together visiting scholars and fellows to take up the theme of religion from various critical perspectives that engage: democratic processes, states, ideologies, identity-making, gender, social class, kinship, space, symbols and meaning construction in diverse places such as Canada, China, India, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Turkey, and the U.S. The conference aims to facilitate an active intellectual exchange and provide a comparative understanding of the multi-layered dynamics and processes undergirding religion in societies.

With Todd Weir

The starting point of much contemporary thinking about religion and politics is that we are confronted with irreducible disagreements between different ethical and religious worldviews. Some scholars have argued that the first step to reconciliation between worldviews might be to abandon absolute claims to truth. This conclusion would appear to be the labor of secular observers of contemporary culture wars, who might feel with this insight to have achieved a location above fray. Yet, as I will argue, this conclusion is neither necessarily liberal nor secular. It arose already amongst Protestant fundamentalists in the early twentieth century. They developed the notion of the irreconcilability, not to compromise with secular worldviews, but to dodge the scientific arrows aimed at their own "Christian worldview" by seculatists. Responding to the Second World War and the Cold War, liberal intellectuals, such as Sidney Hook and Daniel Bell, drew quite opposite conclusions about worldview. They attacked the very notion of worldview and came up with the plan for an "end of ideology" in the interest of promoting US-style pluralistic liberalism in post-totalitarian Europe. In my lecture, which draws from a book project on the history of Weltanschauung/worldview, I will discuss the politics of worldview in the 1940s and 1950s and ask what relevance they have for our contemporary discussion of post-truth politics.

With Arun Kundnani, Asim Qureshi, Ramzi Kassem, Maurits Berger & more

Last year’s turbulent presidential campaign revealed implicit biases about the status and security of Muslims in America and elsewhere. A rhetoric that was invariably framed using terms like “surveillance,” “suspicion,” “Islamic terror,” and “jihadist” permeated media and public discourse, culminating in widespread calls for increased surveillance of Muslim communities at home and abroad. These calls build upon discourses as well as policies and practices implemented by government officials and institutions that have policed and surveilled Muslims communities since 9/11. A consequence of these circumstances has been an amplification of commentary by Muslim leaders, civil liberties organizations, scholars, journalists, and artists on the practical and discursive implications they have for diverse Muslim communities. A fundamental point of contention is the way in which government surveillance of public “safe spaces,” such as mosques, impacts Muslim-Americans and Muslim communities here and abroad, jeopardizing their fair treatment and equal status.

With Master Fabio Aranha Miranda, Daniel Scruggs, Dr. Katya Wesolowski, Dr. T.J. Desch-Obi Dr. Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi

Part of the Spirit & Sound Series, The Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life presents "Capoeira: The Music, Movements, and Ritual of the Spirit Circle." The evening will begin with a capoeira demonstration after which there will be a panel discussion on the history, cultural origins, and spiritual significance of capoeira. Topics explored will include: capoeira's beginnings in Africa, destruction of documentation regarding its development in Brazil, the hybrid nature of the art form (instrument, song, movement, acrobatics, and ritual), and its role as a martial art.

With Attiya Ahmad

This talk examines the recent development of global halal tourism networks and the often-­‐frustrated attempts of actors involved in this emergent sector of Islamic enterprise to map leisure and tourist spaces in relation to Muslim sensibilities, practices, historical imaginaries and belongings. Recognizing the global importance of tourism, which today accounts for 10% of GDP and 9% of jobs worldwide, over the past ten years, a disparate group of transnational actors—including internet travel companies, hotel investors, tour guides, religious certification boards, national tourism boards, and consumers—have coalesced to develop ‘halal tourism’ as an alternative to hegemonic forms of tourist practice and infrastructure in the Middle East, ones that have developed through processes of consumer-­‐capitalism, colonialism, Judeo-­‐Christian imaginaries, secularization projects, and nationalist heritage-­‐making projects.

With Attiya Ahmad

Everyday Conversions examines the widespread but little known phenomenon of migrant domestic workers’ Islamic conversions in the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf region as a way to think more broadly about emergent transnational forms of gendered subjectivity, affinity, and belonging in our contemporary world. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kuwait, other Gulf states, and parts of South Asia, and vividly illustrated by descriptions of domestic workers’ everyday activities, encounters and utterances, the book argues these women’s experiences constitute a form of everyday conversion that complicates conventional understandings of both religious conversion and the feminization of transnational labour migration.

With Ruth Marshall

The Religion and Public Life lecture series presents public conversations that expand on current theories and spur debate about religion and secularism, considering the range of secularisms and institutionalizations of religion in Europe, the US, and other parts of the world. Lectures in the series examine specific approaches to how something called “religion” is manifest in public life, and cover timely topics including law, museums and cultural institutions, education and health provisions, politics/diplomacy, prisons, and protest and social movements.

With Josef Sorett, Courtney Bender, Robert Gooding-Williams, and Barbara Savage

Associate Professor of Religion and African-American Studies and Director of the Center on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice (CARSS), has just released Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics through Oxford University Press. Spirit in the Dark offers an account of the ways in which religion, especially Afro-Protestantism, remained pivotal to the ideas and aspirations of African American literature across much of the twentieth century. Professor Sorett is currently at work on his second book, tentatively titled The Holy Holy Black: The Ironies of an African American Secular, which is also in contract with Oxford UP, and is additionally editing an anthology, The Sexual Politics of Black Churches.

With Webb Keane

The Religion and Public Life lecture series presents public conversations that expand on current theories and spur debate about religion and secularism, considering the range of secularisms and institutionalizations of religion in Europe, the US, and other parts of the world. Lectures in the series examine specific approaches to how something called “religion” is manifest in public life, and cover timely topics including law, museums and cultural institutions, education and health provisions, politics/diplomacy, prisons, and protest and social movements.

With Matthew Engelke

The Religion and Public Life lecture series presents public conversations that expand on current theories and spur debate about religion and secularism, considering the range of secularisms and institutionalizations of religion in Europe, the US, and other parts of the world. Lectures in the series examine specific approaches to how something called “religion” is manifest in public life, and cover timely topics including law, museums and cultural institutions, education and health provisions, politics/diplomacy, prisons, and protest and social movements.

With Robert Orsi

The question of “real presence”—the Catholic doctrine of the literal, physical, embodied presence of Christ in the host—coincided with early modern global conquest and commerce and shaped how Europeans encountered the religions of others. The gods really present, in the Catholic sense, were translated into metaphors and symptoms, and into functions of the social and political. Presence became evidence of superstition, of magical thinking, of the infantile and irrational, the primitive and the savage. History and Presence radically confronts this intellectual heritage, proposing instead a model for the study of religion that begins with humans and gods present to each other in the circumstances of everyday life. Orsi then asks what it would mean to write history with the real presence of special beings restored. With reference to Marian apparitions, the cult of the saints, relations with the dead, and other Catholic instances of encounters with the gods really present, Orsi elaborates a theory of presence for the study of both contemporary religion and history.

With Carolyn Moxley Rouse, John L. Jackson, Jr., Marla F. Frederick & more

The institutional structures of white supremacy—slavery, Jim Crow laws, convict leasing, and mass incarceration—require a commonsense belief that black people lack the moral and intellectual capacities of white people. It is through this lens of belief that racial exclusions have been justified and reproduced in the United States. Televised Redemptionargues that African American religious media has long played a key role in humanizing the race by unabashedly claiming that blacks are endowed by God with the same gifts of goodness and reason as whites—if not more—thereby legitimizing black Americans’ rights to citizenship.

With Christian Lee Novetzke

The Religion and Public Life lecture series presents public conversations that expand on current theories and spur debate about religion and secularism, considering the range of secularisms and institutionalizations of religion in Europe, the US, and other parts of the world. Lectures in the series examine specific approaches to how something called “religion” is manifest in public life, and cover timely topics including law, museums and cultural institutions, education and health provisions, politics/diplomacy, prisons, and protest and social movements.

With Elizabeth Shakman Hurd 

The Religion and Public Life lecture series presents public conversations that expand on current theories and spur debate about religion and secularism, considering the range of secularisms and institutionalizations of religion in Europe, the US, and other parts of the world. Lectures in the series examine specific approaches to how something called “religion” is manifest in public life, and cover timely topics including law, museums and cultural institutions, education and health provisions, politics/diplomacy, prisons, and protest and social movements.

With K. Soraya Batmanghelichi

This session of the podcast responds to the urgent need for critical reflection in the wake of the recent, deeply divisive presidential election. Guests Kazembe Balagun (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung) and Bhaskar Sunkara (Jacobin) will convene together with BISR faculty including Tony Alessandrini, K. Soraya Batmanghelichi, Raphaële Chappe, Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Samantha Hill, Audrey Nicolaides, Rebecca Ariel Porte, Suzanne Schneider, and Jude Webre. What went wrong in the lead-up to the election? And what is to be done in its aftermath? How should we define Trumpism and and how can we understand it?

With Rebecca Parish

Follow Sisters Simone Campbell, Chris Schenk, and Jean Hughes as they challenge the patriarchal system, engaging everyday people in their struggle for equality and ultimately winning the heart of Pope Francis. From their cross-country Nuns on the Bus tour, to serving those on the margins, to a continued struggle for women’s religious equality, these sisters are transforming American politics — and the Church itself.

Collaborating with feminist and faith-based social justice organizations, we will leverage the film to support reform within religious institutions to end gender discrimination of women and girls in the U.S. and around the world and bridge divides to build a stronger progressive and feminist movement.

With Micheal Barnett

Michael Barnett will speak about his newest book, The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews for the Religion and Politics in American Public Life series.