Author: katieaston

Posted on by katieaston Calls for Papers, News and Events

CFP Panel on Religion and Social Inequality‏

The 36th Congress of the German Society for Sociolgy (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie – DGS) will be held from 1 -5 October 2012 in Bochum and Dortmund.

The Section for Sociology of Religion is organizing a panel on “Religion and Social Inequality” during this conference. The call for paper is only in German, but papers in English are also very welcome.

In the early sociology of religion the relationship between social class and religion was a central topic. Weber for example analysed social strata as carriers of religious ideas. Following Weber this research question was picked up by Niebuhr in his exploration of the social sources of denominations and by Bourdieu in his analysis of the religious field. In the last decades, the problem of social inequality has been mostly neglected as a research question in the sociology of religion.

Papers presenting empirical findings, quantitative as well as qualitative, from a national or transnational perspective, about the  impact of social class and life conditions on religious beliefs,practices and affiliations are invited. The religions of the upper classes and the lower classes, of the privileged and the “negatively privileged” are of special interest for this panel.

Please send abstracts of 2500 signs maximum (inclunding spaces) until

March 15th to the organizers:

Prof.Dr. Gert Pickel: pickel@rz.uni-leipzig.de

Dr. Kornelia Sammet: sammet@uni-leipzig.de

Posted on by katieaston Publications

What is Phenomenology? First report for the Religious Study Project published today

What is Phenomenology?

Jonathan Tuckett, University of Stirling

The first response report has been published by the Religious Studies Project, on today, 20 January 2012. This report responds to the Religious Studies Project Interview with James Cox on ”The Phenomenology of Religion” (14 January 2012), published with the launch of the project this week.

About the Author

Jonathan is currently a PhD student at the University of Stirling. He has an MA in Philosophy and Religious Studies and an MSc in Religious Studies from the University of Edinburgh. His research is on the phenomenological method in the study of religion. Areas of interest include the phenomenology of religion, theory and method in the study of religion, and philosophy of religion

Posted on by katieaston News and Events

Conference Announcement: Men, Masculinities and Religious Change 20th April 2012

Registration is currently open for the Men, Masculinites and Religious change, please contact Dr Sue Morgan  (s.morgan@chi.ac.uk) for more details  about attendance.

I have posted the conference outline below, of particular note for the NSRN community is Professor Callum Brown’s paper ‘How men have lost religion since 1940’. The conference is taking place on 20 April 2012 in the Rylands Room at King’s College, Cambridge.

Men, Masculinities and Religious Change

20 April 2012, Rylands Room, King’s College, Cambridge

10am

Dr Sue Morgan, University of Chichester, and Dr Lucy Delap, St Catharine’s College – Why religion and masculinities?

10.30-11.30

Dr Alana Harris, University of Oxford – ‘Modern Catholic Masculinity and the Catenian Association: 1908-2008’

Dr Sean Brady, Birkbeck, University of London – ‘Sectarianism, religion and masculinity: Northern Ireland after 1921’

11.30 coffee

11.45-1.15

Dr Amanullah de Sondy, University of Miami – ‘British Muslim Men in the late 20th Century’

Dr Stephen Hunt, University of the West of England – ‘Masculinities, Spirituality and New Religious Movements in Late Twentieth Century Britain’

Dr Tim Jones, University of Glamorgan – ‘Christianity and the Making of Modern Homosexuality’

Lunch 1.15-2pm

2pm-3.30

Dr Susan Tananbaum, Bowdoin College – “Establishing healthy minds in healthy bodies in our rising generation’: Models of Masculinity in the Jewish East End, 1890-1930s’

Dr Alison Falby, Trinity College, Toronto – ‘Buddhist Psychology and Masculinity in Early Twentieth Century Britain’

Dr Ben Griffin, Girton College, Cambridge – ‘Religious Change and Male Domestic Authority in Late Nineteenth Century Britain’

3.30-3.45 – tea

3.45-4.45

Prof. Callum Brown, University of Dundee – ‘How men have lost religion since 1940’

Dr Sumita Mukherjee, Keble College, University of Oxford – ‘The Growth of a Masculine Hindu Community in Britain, 1936-7’

4.45-5.15 Closing discussion

Posted on by katieaston Calls for Papers, News and Events

LSE Religious Forum Seminars Announced

‘The Metropolis and Evangelical Life: coherence and fragmentation in “the lost city of London”‘

 This paper examines forms of cultural fragmentation experienced by members of a conservative evangelical congregation in London, focusing in particular on how evangelicals respond to their leaders’ aim to encourage them to speak publicly of their faith in their workplaces and other social settings. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s writing on city spaces and modernity, I describe how conservative evangelical subjectivities are formed in response to the contradictory cultural norms they encounter in the city, and how through particular embodied practices, members of this church develop an orientation to a transcendent source of coherence. This enables individuals to deal with internal subjective experiences of division formed through tensions associated with conflicting logics of practice in different urban spaces they inhabit, whilst also reinforcing their sense of cultural distinctive.

Anna Strhan, PhD Candidate, Department of Religious Studies, University of Kent 

and

‘Eating words through the ear: sermons as sacrifice’
Where preaching, locally understood, was said to be an act of reverent worship, I argue in this paper that such worship has to be understood anthropologically as a kind of sacrifice. Taking a new perspective on ‘traditional’ anthropological understandings of religious sacrifice as necessarily involving some form of eating (Robertson-Smith 2002 [1889]), I suggest that, when examining the act of preaching as it was experienced by the Christians of Gamrie, what is ‘eaten’ is not flesh but words. Thus, preaching (as sacrifice) is not about the imbibing of food through the mouth but rather concerns the imbibing of the ‘Living Word’ through the ear. By ethnographically distinguishing two types of sermonising – ‘preaching’ and ‘teaching’ – and by also paying attention to what needs to happen for a sermon to be deemed a performative failure (Tomlinson 2007, 2009), I suggest that sermonising, as understood through the lens of sacrifice, needs also to be understood in terms of two (often imagined) audiences, that of the ‘saved’ and the ‘unsaved’.
Dr. Joseph Webster, Research Fellow in Social Anthropology, Downing College, Cambridge University

The seminars are free and open to the public; no reservation required. They take place from 6-7:30 pm in room 1.11 in Cowdray House (COW), Portugal Street, London WC2A 2AE

Find Cowdray House on this map: http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/mapsAndDirections/findingYourWayAroundLSE.htm

The Religious Forum also welcome application to speak at the seminar series:

CALL FOR PAPERS 

PRESENT your RESEARCH in the Forum on Religion Seminar Series:

The Forum on Religion seminar series features work in progress on religion: submissions welcome from all disciplines and any geographical foci.

Send an email with your proposed presentation topic to religionforum@lse.ac.uk.

For information about the Forum on Religion and to keep updated on Forum activities, please visit our website at www.lse.ac.uk/religionforum.

You can also join our mailing list there.

Posted on by katieaston News and Events

THIS FRIDAY Matthew Engelke talks at LSE: ‘Do you realize?’ Humanism and the anthropology of non-religion.

A last minute events addition, this Friday (20 January), Matthew Engelke will be giving an extended version of the talk he previously gave at the Atheism and Anthropology workshop at UCL last year (Lorna Mumford’s useful discussion of that event provides a summary: https://thensrn.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/events-report-lorna-mumford-nsrn-net.pdf ). The talk will be part of the LSE’s Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory seminar series, which is open to all researchers. Details are as follows:

Friday 10:30am – 12:30pm

Seligman Library (OLD 6.05) Old Building, LS

 

Further info can be found here:

 

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/anthropology/events/seminars_lectures.aspx

Posted on by katieaston Publications

“What is Phenomenology?” First Report for the Religious Studies Project

The Religious Studies Project  (RSP) website and podcasting project launched today, 16th January 2012.  It features a weekly audio interview (of around 30 minutes) with leading scholars of Religious Studies (RS) and related fields, which shall be available through the website, iTunes and other portals. In addition to the podcasts, the website will also feature weekly articles from postgraduate students and other scholars of religion on the themes of the interview that week, in addition to other useful resources and articles relevant to teachers and students of religion in the modern world.

Every Friday, the RSP will publish feature articles on the topic of the week’s interview. The first response,   to be published 20 January 2012, is entitled “What is Phenomenology?” has been written by Jonathan Tuckett (University of Stirling)

You can find details of the podcasts and reports at the Report for Religious Studies Project site.

The RSP was founded by David G. Robertson and Christopher R. Cotter, and is presented in association with the British Association for the Study of Religions. For more information on this relationship, see here.

Posted on by katieaston Calls for Papers, Teaching

Aarhus University Research Foundation Call for grant applications: Deadline January 24 2012

Please see details below for grant opportunities for PhD’s with focus on the religion in the contemporary world or those wishing to work within a multidisciplinary setting, proposing to study religion, culture and cognition. Details should be presented to either Jørn Borup or Armin W. Geertz, details below.

For those interested in pursuing study or research with the following research groups at the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University:

1. Center for Contemporary Religion (CCR)

2. Religion, Cognition and Culture Research Unit (RCC)

Grant applications

AUFF, the Aarhus University Research Foundation invites interested Master or PhD students to apply for grants to be awarded during the first half of 2012.

http://www.au.dk/en/facultiesdepartmentsetc/otherunits/tilknyt/auff/

The foundation’s objective is to support scientific and scholarly research at Aarhus University. The foundation awards grants on the basis of recommendations from Aarhus University. In the evaluation of applications and recommendations, emphasis is placed on academic excellence and on supporting initiatives with the potential to strengthen strategically important research efforts.

The eligible applicant for AUFF is the head of the graduate school. This call is directed to interested Master or PhD students to send forward an expression of interest to:

1. Center for Contemporary Religion (CCR). The CCR constitutes a base for general interest in contemporary issues regarding religion and society. CCR was founded as collaboration between researchers within the Study of Religion and researchers within Theology, but now being placed at the Department of Culture and Society, the center organises research focusing on religion and society in the contemporary world.

2. Religion, Cognition and Culture Research Unit (RCC). The RCC explores the dynamic interrelationships between religion, cognition and culture from both top-down and bottom-up disciplinary approaches. Its scientific methodology is explicitly interdisciplinary and draws on and practices laboratory methods as well as fieldwork, textual, iconological and archaeological methods in close cooperation with its partners in psychology, the neurosciences and the humanities.

The CCR and RCC will send selected candidates further to the head of the graduate school. If more than one candidate is recommended, the head of the graduate school is responsible for ranking the candidates. The head of the graduate school is also responsible for the qualitative evaluation of the potential doctoral student.

Application deadline

Applicants wanting to be associated with CCR should send an expression of interest to Jørn Borup (JB@teo.au.dk)

Applicants wanting to be associated with RCC should send an expression of interest to Armin W. Geertz (AWG@teo.au.dk)

The deadline for application is January 24, 2012.

Funds are distributed in May and December.

The next call for grant applications to the Aarhus University Research Foundation will take place in July 2012.

FUNDING TO FURTHER THE INTERNATIONALISATION OF PHD EDUCATION AT AARHUS UNIVERSITY

Projects and initiatives which are eligible for support:

A. Recruitment of talented foreign researchers to PhD programmes at Aarhus University

Purpose

To increase the number of highly qualified foreign PhD students at Aarhus University. Grants to enable a potential foreign applicant to visit Aarhus University for one to three months are available. The goal of the visit is to facilitate a thorough qualitative evaluation of the potential applicant to a PhD programme at Arhus University. Examples of relevant activities in which a foreign candidate might participate include courses, summer school, and workshops; laboratory work; or developing a PhD project in collaboration with his/her supervisor. The candidate is to be evaluated by his/her supervisor at the end of his/her stay. This evaluation may be included in the candidate’s application for admission to a PhD programme at Aarhus University. Danish citizens are not eligible for this grant. Students with qualifying examinations from Danish institutions are not eligible.

Funding available

Applications for funds to cover the following costs will be considered:

* An introductory grant for the foreign candidate (DKK 10,000 per month)

* Travel expenses (DKK 15,000 maximum)

* Expenses related to courses, workshops, laboratory work, etc. (DKK 20,000 maximum)

Maximum total funding available per candidate: DKK 65,000

Evaluation criteria

Applications will be evaluated according to the following criteria:

* The foreign candidate’s qualifications in relation to the research field of the section to which he/she is considering applying

* The ability of the institutional research culture to host the candidate’s visit successfully

* Additional documentation of the foreign candidate’s qualifications (where applicable)

The following documentation must be submitted along with the application

* The foreign candidate’s CV

* Reasons from both principal supervisor and the head of the graduate school in question in support of the candidate’s stay, including any strategic considerations related to the recruitment of doctoral students from specific universities, countries or regions

* Documentation of PhD scholarships the foreign student would be able to apply for

B. Funding for a term of research at Aarhus University for doctoral students enrolled at a foreign university

Purpose

To increase the number of highly qualified foreign PhD students at Aarhus University, thereby contributing to the internationalisation of doctoral education at the university, by establishing three to six-month research collaborations with foreign doctoral students. During their term of study at AU, foreign PhD students may (for example) participate in research activities, PhD courses, summer schools and workshops: perform laboratory work and/or work on their PhD theses, in order to complete a limited portion of their doctoral work at AU. Doctoral students with Danish citizenship are not eligible.

Funding available

* Fellowships (DKK 5,000 – 10,000 per month)

* Travel expenses (DKK 15,000 maximum)

* Expenses related to courses, workshops, laboratory work, etc. (DKK 20,000 maximum)

Maximum total funding available per candidate: DKK 65,000

Evaluation criteria

Applications will be evaluated according to the following criteria:

* The foreign student’s individual qualifications

* The foreign candidate’s qualifications in relation to the research field of the section at which he/she would continue his/her studies

* The ability of the institutional research culture to host the candidate’s term of study successfully

* The extent to which the foreign student’s presence would strengthen the institutional collaboration between the foreign student’s home university and Aarhus University

The following documentation must be submitted along with the application

* The foreign student’s CV

* The head of the graduate school’s reasons in support of the candidate’s term of study at AU, including any strategic considerations related to the recruitment of doctoral students from specific universities, countries or regions

Posted on by katieaston Calls for Papers

Deadline Extended CFP: “Preservation and Access: Facilitating Research in Information & Religion”

Call for Papers & Posters – Deadline Extended

Second Annual Conference on Information & Religion: “Preservation and Access: Facilitating Research in Information & Religion”

Keynote: Carisse Mickey Berryhill, Ph.D., Special Collections Librarian,
Abilene Christian University

May 18 & 19, 2012
Kent State University, Kent, OH

The Center for the Study of Information and Religion (CSIR) will host its Second Annual International Conference on Information and Religion in May 2012. This call for papers and posters seeks original contributions in all areas related to information and religion. The conference theme invites participants to share their work in a variety of areas in which scholars are exploring the intersections of religion and information. Topics that might be addressed include but are not limited to the following:

  • Preserving and making available religious texts and information objects associated with communities of faith;
  • Social uses and appropriations made of these texts and objects;
  • The information-seeking behavior of clergy;
  • The role of the sermon as an influential communication medium in society; case studies in the sermon preparation task;
  • Information in its application to local congregations as communities of practice;
  • Faith and many types of intelligence (e.g., emotional intelligence);
  • Dissemination of faith messages;
  • Intersections of interests in the study of information and religion, where different disciplines might find it worthwhile to collaborate in research.

Prospective participants are encouraged to submit abstracts that report on recent research and scholarship. Contributions to this call for papers and posters should not have been previously published. There are no restrictions on research methodology.
Instructions for submitting refereed paper or poster abstracts:

The abstract should be no longer than 250 words and should include the following:
Title of the paper or poster;
Research question, methods, and results;
Names, affiliations, and contact information for the authors (with one author to be designated as primary contact for the paper).

The abstract should be submitted in PDF or Word format to Dr. Rosemary Du Mont, CSIR Associate, at rdumont@kent.edu.

Jan. 31, 2012: (Extended) Deadline to submit abstracts.
March 15, 2012: Notification of acceptance sent to participants.
April 15, 2012: Deadline to submit final, completed papers in order for them to be considered for publication in ASIR: Advances in the Study of Information and Religion. Papers must be in proper APA style. Additional details regarding submission of full papers will be sent to those whose abstracts are accepted for conference presentation.
Presenters are responsible for their own expenses related to the conference, including but not limited to registration fees, lodging, transportation, and meals.
The Center for the Study of Information and Religion (CSIR) is a research initiative of the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at Kent State University. Located in northeast Ohio, in close proximity to the cities of Akron-Canton and Cleveland, Kent State has an enrollment of more than 41,000 students. SLIS is home to approximately 700 master’s students and is a partner in the doctoral program of the College of Communication and Information (CCI).
For more information, please contact Dr. Don Wicks (dwicks@kent.edu), Interim Director of SLIS and Director of CSIR, Dr. Dan Roland (droland1@kent.edu), CSIR Primary Researcher, or Dr. Rosemary Du Mont (rdumont@kent.edu), CSIR Associate.
Conference information will be posted at http://bit.ly/CSIRconf2012.

Posted on by katieaston News and Events, Publications

The Religious Studies Project Launches Today

Today saw the launch of the Religious Studies Project, directed by Christopher R. Cotter and David G. Robertson in association with the British Association for the Study of Religions.

The project will allow some great dialogue between scholars, researchers, in fact anyone with an interest in contemporary issues in Religious Studies. Every Monday, they’ll be putting out a new podcast featuring an interview with a  leading international scholar, presenting a key idea in  the contemporary socio-scientific study of religion in a concise and accessible way. You can find the podcast and accompanying notes here, or you can also subscribe on iTunes to make sure you always get the latest episode.

Each Wednesday, they will also feature a resource to help postgraduate students and aspiring academics. And on Fridays  a response to each of the podcast will be put up, reflecting on, expanding upon or disagreeing with the Monday podcast. Plus much more, including conference reports, opinion, publishing opportunities, book reviews.

Please take some time today to have a look at the Religious Studies Project site, follow them on Twitter, “Like” them on Facebook or rate them on iTunes. Feel free to share this with friends, on you facebook wall or  post to interested networks.

Posted on by katieaston News

Baggini, Heathen’s Progress New Post: You don’t have to be religious to pray … but it helps

Julian Baggini continues his conversation on the topic of religion and non-religion with his latest post You don’t have to be religious to pray … but it helps

'I do think that prayer, like many rituals, is something that the religious get some real benefits from that are just lost to us heathens.' Photograph: Rex Features

This week, Baggini muses on prayer.”I think many religious rituals are like this. They have real benefits, whether you buy into the belief system behind them or not. But if you try to separate them from the beliefs, they lose some of their potency and grip”

He argues that practice is why people believe and perhaps not vice versa and concludes that in ridding “ourselves” of religions, the heathen refuses to sacrifice reason, but may in the process pay the price of losing some of the benefits, in this case prayer, having to make do with less worthy substitutes.

If you are interested in this you can read more about Heathens’s Progress in the Guaridan CIF pages.