“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.

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 explores 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 and secular responses to the climate crisis.

The series involves four events structured around the elements—Earth, Water, Fire, and Air—each of which will take one element as a lens for engaging with specific climate struggles and the religious debates they ignite. In the final event, an online program on the theme of “Air,” Sophie Chao (University of Sydney) and Nikita Simpson (SOAS, University of London) will discuss their work on climate change, atmospherics and spirits in West Papua, India, and the U.K. This conversation will explore both the religious dimensions of air and atmospheres in these contexts, and the ways contemporary climate change emerges out of longer histories of environmental destruction.

Islamophobia has posed a serious threat to religious freedom and human rights in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. This event will bring together experts and civil society leaders to explore effective strategies and foster international collaboration in combating Islamophobia. The goal is to serve as a catalyst for change, inspiring a region-wide commitment to protecting the dignity and rights of Muslim communities.

"An Indigenous love story between an incompetent man and his dog," Dead Bird Hearts offers a story of “love, loss and life with its own quirky spin.” Join IRCPL for an in-person screening of the award-winning short film, followed by a conversation between filmmaker/writer Ryan RedCorn (Osage) and Professor Tiffany Hale.

Registration required.

Samson Occom: Radical Hospitality in the Native Northeast
by Ryan Carr

The Mohegan-Brothertown minister Samson Occom (1723–1792) was a prominent political and religious leader of the Indigenous peoples of present-day New York and New England, among whom he is still revered today. An international celebrity in his day, Occom rose to fame as the first Native person to be ordained a minister in the New England colonies. In the 1770s, he helped found the nation of Brothertown, where Coastal Algonquian families seeking respite from colonialism built a new life on land given to them by the Oneida Nation. Occom was a highly productive author, probably the most prolific Native American writer prior to the late nineteenth century. Most of Occom’s writings, however, have been overlooked, partly because many of them are about Christian themes that seem unrelated to Native life.

In this groundbreaking book, Ryan Carr argues that Occom’s writings were deeply rooted in Indigenous traditions of hospitality, diplomacy, and openness to strangers. From Occom’s point of view, evangelical Christianity was not a foreign culture; it was a new opportunity to practice his people’s ancestral customs. Carr demonstrates Occom’s originality as a religious thinker, showing how his commitment to Native sovereignty shaped his reading of the Bible. By emphasizing the Native sources of Occom’s evangelicalism, this book offers new ways to understand the relations of Northeast Native traditions to Christianity, colonialism, and Indigenous self-determination.

Registration required.

“Water and Oil” is a photography exhibit that demonstrates the effects of climate change on Iran, with a particular focus on the intersection of women’s rights and environmentalism. These photographers depict a landscape that is teetering toward water bankruptcy while also showcasing alternative models of caring for the environment through the rituals of the diasporic Afro-Iranian communities in Balochistan and the islands off the Strait of Hormuz. Please join IRCPL for an opening reception, with remarks from Professor Aziza Shanazarova (Department of Religion, Columbia) and Professor Yasmine Ergas (SIPA, Columbia). Light refreshments will be provided. 

Speaker: Lauren Mancia (Brooklyn College)

How can we uncover the lived religious experiences of distant historical subjects, like medieval monks from 1,000 years ago? This conversation-performance-experience will investigate this problem. Together at The Met Cloisters, we will explore potential answers to this question, first through traditional scholarly theoretical and historical engagement with primary sources and art works in the museum. Then we will shift methodologies to experiment with performance and participatory experience (for both presenter and audience alike). Space is limited, so please register in advance —no medieval, monastic, Christian, or religious familiarity required.

On Zoom

Speakers: Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton); Ruth Ben-Ghiat (New York University); Jemar Tisby (Simmons College)

Moderator: Tsveta Petrova (Columbia University)

Cosponsors:  Harriman Institute, Department of Religion 

For well over a decade, journalists and academics have been tracing the rise of Viktor Orbán and his particular brand of “illiberal democracy” in Hungary. So, too, have right-wing activists and politicians here in the United States. As last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas made clear, Orbán is something of a hero, and even playbook-setter for the American Right. A crucial element of this shared approach to populist politics is the appeal to Christianity. The aim of this panel at IRCPL is to explore and lay bare the project that Orbán is enacting, and provide comparative analysis with dynamics in the United States.

Speaker: Kathryn Lofton (Yale University)

Chair: Sharon Marcus (Columbia University)

Cosponsors: Department of Religion; Department of English and Comparative Literature; Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Sensitivity is a problem and a porthole. It ascribes virtue to scientific instruments and is an epithet for reactivity. It labels physical reality and intuitions, facts and vibes, data scientists and empaths. Reflecting on its religious past, this talk argues for sensitivity’s queer political future.

Registration recommended, but not required.

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?

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.

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.