With Arindam Dutta

At the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, realization grew that, at several times the level of annual revenue, the Public Debt had become a permanent institution to be serviced in perpetuity. This talk looks at land and socialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in light of this “financialization” of the British economy, a process that would have a spiraling effects across the globe. The objects under investigation here are the follies of garden Britain, Ireland and America, compared with the Zamindari bagan-baris and thakur-baris (garden estates and estate-temples) of colonial Bengal as a coterminous type. The follies and thakur-baris can be read as differential markers in a dispersed set of concerns and anxieties over nature, economy, government and religion, all of these headings being themselves synthesized and systematized into new epistemic fields through the course of the long eighteenth century. The talk looks at the entanglement of two of these new epistemic fields – “economy” and “religion” – in this context, particularly in the places where the singular, secular temporal expectancy of a ballooning, perdurable Public Debt was seen as interjecting into eschatologically-defined conceptions of obligation and existence. The shards of the Mughal Empire in India, and the “Augustan Age” of eighteenth-century Britain, abruptly joined into a single system by the fact of global capital, present signal comparisons and contrasts in their constructions of time even as they are bound by the same temporal devices of debt and finance. It is as if folly and thakur-bari, signifiers of disparate tempos of memory and divinity, speak to each other through a kind of imperfect translation, a heteroglossia called the economic.

A workshop on The Phenomenology of Muslim Prayer

The purpose of this workshop is to explore from many different angles the meanings of the ways in which Muslims pray God. How and why was the commandment of prayer established? What is its significance in connection with the Prophet’s Ascent (Mi’raj)? How should we comprehend the time of prayer as different from the serial time of our works and days? How should we understand also the different times of the five prayers? For example the systematic grouping of zuhr and asr on the one hand, maghrib and isha on the other hand by Shi’i Muslims while such a grouping is exceptional among Sunni Muslims? What interpretations for the very gestures accomplished during a prayer? How do we decipher the signs that are written by the praying body?

With Josef Sorett, Randall Jelks, Lerone Martin, Frances Negrón-Muntaner & Carla Shedd

The history of religion in the African diaspora is a history of movement. But what happens when religion is on the move? This panel will explore how an interdisciplinary approach to migratory experiences in the African diaspora — on United States soil, in the Caribbean, and across the Atlantic divide — might attune us to how mobility is not only an aspect of religious experience across traditions, times and spaces, but is also constitutive of religious beliefs, practices and communities. By treating religion as an embodied and spatial phenomenon that intersects with racial, gendered, political and economic structures in complex and often unexpected ways, this panel aims to broaden the our theoretical and methodological repertoire for future studies of religion in the African diaspora inclusive of movement, migration, missions and new media.

With Amy Gottlieb, Douglas Thompkins and Jordan Flaherty

Putting immigrant rights advocate Amy Gottlieb, scholar Douglas Thompkins, and journalist Jordan Flaherty in conversation, this round-table discussion focuses on the intersections of incarceration, immigration policies, and the practices of the carceral state. The panel discussion will be moderated by Rosemary Hicks, Visiting Scholar at the Bard Prison Initiative.

With John Torpey

The distinguished British sociologist of religion David Martin has argued, above all on the basis of the global spread of Pentecostalism, that we are living through a period comparable in significance to the Protestant Reformation.  This lecture seeks to evaluate that claim by examining a number of other major “points of departure” in human history, most of them associated with the birth of major world religions.  Professor Torpey will seek to identify patterns in these other episodes that might help us set our own time in a broader perspective and hence to make better sense of it.

With Dr. Seyed Masoud Noori

Dr. Seyed Masoud Noori will explain the relationship between Shariah and state law in Muslim-majority countries’ constitutions approved since 2000, as well as the role of Shariah in basic and fundamental codes in those countries. He will focus on Iraq’s and Egypt’s constitutions, as these two models balance Shariah and state law, and he will examine how these models affect human rights issues.

With Winnifred Sullivan and Julio Medina

This talk will focus on religious mobility within confined spaces, focusing on religious conversion within the American penal system. This conversation will not only explore the complexities of conversion within prisons, but also the ways in which religious faith -and activism- are integral components of the modern prison-industrial complex. Moderated by Brett Dignam, Clinical Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.

With Eddie Glaude and Josef Sorett

In this lecture, Eddie Glaude will consider how the “blind spots” in African American religious historiography block the way to a more nuanced engagement with the powerful phenomenon of celebrity preachers and their mega churches. More specifically, he will examine W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic essay, “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” as a paradigmatic example of the evasion of forms of African American Christian expression that complicate traditional narratives of the prophetic role of black churches in African American politics. Glaude maintains that a different story must be told about the relationship between African American religion and political debate if we are to understand more fully how shifts and changes among African American Christians today affect the form and content of black public debate about political questions. Too often certain rigid assumptions about that relationship impede inquiry. His aim then is not so much to engage in a close reading of the ministries of celebrity black preachers but, rather, to open up conceptual space for a fuller understanding of the political significance of African American mega churches and their pastors at the beginning of the 21st century.

With Guy Ben-Porat

Between State and Synagogue, The Secularization of Contemporary Israel

With Jackie Vimo

Please join us for a screening of Sin Nombre, a 2009 film that tells two powerful intersecting stories of immigration through Mexico to the US border. Written and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, and shot in Mexico, the film “is an elegant, heartbreaking fable, equal parts Shakespearean tragedy, neo-Western and mob movie but without the pretension of those genres.”

With Alyshia Gálvez

This talk asks: How do spaces of devotion become spaces of activism? What role does faith play in the construction of civic spaces and civil society among recent immigrant groups? What are the limitations of these forms of social mobilization? This talk will explore a decade of Guadalupan-based devotion and activism for immigration rights among recent Mexican immigrants in New York City. Based on Gálvez’s extended ethnographic research in New York City and many years of activism and advocacy, she will reflect on the changing immigrant rights movement and its intersection with faith based institutions and organizations.

With Emmanuelle Saada

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is usually associated with totemic religion in faraway places, but in writing it, Durkheim had in mind a social world much closer to hand in the France of his time. Sociologist Karen Fields will adapt Durkheim’s methodology to explore curious features of that world and our own. Karen Fields borrows from the method of Emile Durkheim in her research exploring the invisible ontology of the social world. Her publications include a re-translation of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995), and Racecraft (with Barbara J. Fields, forthcoming).

With Jose Casanova

The talk will explore, first, the concept of diffused “civil” religion in contradistinction to differentiated “eclesiastical” or “denominational” religion. It will then examine the pattern of congruent relations between “civil” and “denominational” religion in America in comparison to two divergent European patterns: the French laicist oppositional model between civil and Catholic religion and the Nordic secular integrational model between civil and Lutheran religion. Finally, it will examine the conditions under which both “civil” and “denominational” religions in America may turn “uncivil,” ending with some critical reflections about the contemporary culture wars around gender and sexual mores. Jose Casanova is a professor at the Department of Sociology at Georgetown University, and heads the Berkley Center’s Program on Globalization, Religion and the Secular.

With Andrew Preston

From the first colonists to the presidents of the 21st Century, religion has always shaped America’s relationships with other nations. During the presidency of George W. Bush, many Americans and others around the world viewed the entrance of religion into foreign policy discourse, especially with regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a “new” development. Despite the official division between church and state, the presence of religion in American foreign policy has been a constant. Yet aside from leaders known to be personally religious, such as Bush, Jimmy Carter and Woodrow Wilson, few realize how central faith has always been to American governance and diplomacy–and indeed to the idea of America itself. This paper will trace some of the main themes of the relationship between religion and American foreign relations, and use two more detailed case studies — John Foster Dulles and international organization; and missionaries and the establishment of a human rights discourse — by way of example.

With Genevieve Fraisse and Etienne Balibar

As concepts of citizenship are challenged not only by processes of globalization but also by renewed demands of recognition and rights, do our understandings of consent as an essential underpinning of democratic societies demand rethinking?

With Christophe Jaffrelot, Laurent Gayer, Karen Barkey and Anupama Rao

Numbering more than 150 million, Muslims constitute the largest minority in India, yet they suffer the most politically and socioeconomically. Forced to contend with severe and persistent prejudice, India’s Muslims are often targets of violence and collective acts of murder.

While the quality of Muslim life may lag behind that of Hindus nationally, local and inclusive cultures have been resilient in the south and the east. Within India’s cities, however, the challenges Muslims face can be harder to read. In the Hindi belt and in the north, Muslims have known less peace, especially in the riot-prone areas of Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Jaipur, and Aligarh, and in the capitals of former Muslim states — Delhi, Hyderabad, Bhopal, and Lucknow. These cities are rife with Muslim ghettos and slums. However, self-segregation has also played a part in forming Muslim enclaves, such as in Delhi and Aligarh, where traditional elites and a new Muslim middle class have regrouped for physical and cultural protection.

With Reverend Jesse Jackson, Katrina vanden Heuvel and  Obery Hendricks

A wide-ranging discussion with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the legendary civil rights leader and first major African American presidential candidate, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, the acclaimed social critic and publisher ofThe Nation magazine, on matters of race, religion, and politics in America today. With the election just days away, this timely discussion will explore the critical intersections of race and religion in the 2012 presidential campaign and their implications for America’s political future. The conversation will be moderated by  Obery Hendricks, Visiting Scholar in the Department of Religion at Columbia University.

With Karen Barkey and Humeira Iqtidar

The workshop builds on recent research that attempts to reconceptualize the place of tolerance and toleration in contemporary politics and their relationship to liberalism. In particular, participants will examine versions of toleration, both in the contemporary context and historically, which cannot be contained within current definitions of liberalism.  Convened by Karen Barkey (Columbia) and Humeira Iqtidar (Kings College London), participants include: Ira Katznelson (Columbia), Jeremy Menchik (American University Beirut), Uday Mehta (CUNY), Timothy Shah (Georgetown), and Lorenzo Zucca (Kings College London).

With Rebecca Solnit and Mark C. Taylor

A conversation with best-selling author, journalist, and political activist Rebecca Solnit on the subject of apocalyptic fantasies, visions, and predictions and the politics of the End Time. Author of thirteen books about art, landscape, public and collective life, ecology, politics, hope, meandering, reverie, and memory, her most recent publications include A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster and Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics. Moderated by Mark C. Taylor, co-director of the IRCPL and Chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University. He has written over twenty books, the most recent of which are titled Rewiring the Real and Refiguring the Spiritual.