With Mehammed Mack, Patrick Blanchfield and Suzanne Schneider

America is still reeling from last month’s Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando. The largest single-perpetrator mass shooting in the nation’s history has left politicians, pundits, and everyday people reaching for answers. Our struggle to understand Orlando has often relied on tired frames and rhetoric – simplistic narratives about religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and terror. But the event itself resists these frames and demands we rethink our assumptions and understanding of the different kinds of violence existing in contemporary America.

A closed workshop on identifying boundaries

In recent years, shared sacred sites have gained increased attention as a focus of interdisciplinary study. This interest has resulted in many productive and valuable studies, including our own Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites collected volume, but these works have largely remained couched in the disparate language of specific disciplines and geographical perspectives. The concepts involved in shared sacred sites as an analytical category remain flexible and relatively ambiguous, and two studies concerning different shared sacred sites can often talk about two strikingly different interactions. In fact, different types of sharing are often present at the same site and we have to find ways to analytically organize such occurrences. We wish to investigate the viability of shared sacred sites as an analytical category and are organizing this workshop in order to identify the boundaries involved in the study of shared sacred sites.

With Ruth Braunstein

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a (conservative) Tea Party group and a (progressive) faith-based community organizing coalition, I demonstrate that despite all of their differences, these groups shared a number of economic and political concerns. Namely, they felt the economy served a few at the expense of the many, and that ordinary people like them were not included in decisions about how to chart a course back to the world they had been promised. In the wake of the financial crisis, both groups mobilized in order to refocus politicians’ attention on these concerns.

With Melissa Bilal, Alessandra Ciucci, Francesca Cassio, Jane Huber, Francesca Cassio, Parminder Singh Bhamra and Nirvair Kaur Khalsa

What does focusing on the listener’s role, on hearing, tell us about agency? When is hearing the ‘feminine’ culturally determined?  How do women’s voices embody religious minorities – their struggles and historical traumas?  What is the relationship between the sacred and secular in music performed by female singers? What is the function of women’s voices and women’s bodies at the intersection of religion and national politics? What does it mean to silence the feminine? Discussion will be followed by a question and answer session with the audience, and a concert of Gurbānīkīrtan, a particular example of Hearing the Feminine from the Sikh tradition, performed by Francesca Cassio with Parminder Singh Bhamra and Nirvair Kaur Khalsa.

With Rachel Adams, Ester Fuchs, Maya Sabatello, Carol Sanger and Josef Sorett

The Center for the Study of Social Difference and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Council are co-hosting a spring 2016 Keywords Roundtable Discussion on the keyword “choice.”

The emphasis in the Keyword Conversations is, indeed, on conversation, so we ask each participant to prepare only about ten minutes of critical reflections, which are followed by dialogue among participants and audience members.

With Sudipta Kaviraj, Bahar Tabakoglu, Marko Vekovic, Vatsal Naresh and more

Religion: Dynamics, Processes and Change, a one day conference at Columbia University will bring together IRCPL affiliated fellows to take up the theme of religion from various critical perspectives that engage with the following topics: democratic processes, states, ideologies, making of identities, gender, social class, space, symbols and meaning constructions. Areas of focus include Turkey, Egypt, India, Balkans, Greece, Russia and U.S. The workshop aims to facilitate an active intellectual exchange and provide a comparative understanding of the multi-layered sociopolitical dynamics behind religion in various societies.

With Karen Barkey, Manan Ahmed, Koray Çalışkan, Faisal Devji, Uday Mehta and more

"Democracy and Religious Pluralism," a two-day conference at Columbia University, will bring together academics, journalists and politicians working on nations that have historically faced the challenge of fashioning democratic institutions in societies with long-standing religious traditions: India, Pakistan, Turkey and Senegal. We will begin a conversation on two issues of contemporary and historical significance. First, we intend to question how these nations have negotiated the balance between the claims of religious groups and modern democratic institutions. We hope to identify the terms and bounds of this negotiation across many different spheres of the respective societies in question including law, intellectual history, and politics. Second, we will critically examine democratically elected regimes that pose challenges to pluralism and coexistence. We intend to provoke critical dialogue between scholars, journalists, and politicians in order to facilitate an exchange from which change can occur.

With Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, Ira Katznelson, Samuel Moyn, Rajan Menon, Nadia Urbinati

Book Launch for:Relativism and Religion: Why Democratic Societies Do Not Need Moral Absolutes, by Carlo Invernizzi Accetti

With Manoël Pénicaud and Dionigi Albera

Pénicaud and Albera, curators of the recent Shared Holy Places exhibit at the MuCEM, will be coordinating with the IRCPL's researchers for a closed workshop on shared sacred sites before joining Karen Barkey at SUNY Stonybrook's Nov 12-14 conference, The Idea of the Mediterranean.

With Kate Bowler

In this era of American megaministries, churches have become vast businesses that rise and fall on the reputation of the pastor and, increasingly, his wife. The pastor’s wife has become a bonafide celebrity who shares the ministry, the spotlight and the earnings of her leading man. This talk explores the rise of the market for the pastor’s wife since the 1970s and her transformation into a branded icon of Christian womanhood.

With Nina Ansary

The Barnard Center for Research on Women and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University are proud to host author and Barnard/Columbia University alum Nina Ansary in a conversation with Richard Bulliet, Columbia Professor of History and Middle East Studies, on Ansary’s widely anticipated book Jewels of Allah. Based on her doctoral thesis on the women’s movement in Iran, Jewels of Allah shatters stereotypical assumptions and the often misunderstood story of women in Iran today. Challenging the dominant narrative of the demise of women and their downward spiral into passive submission since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Ansary argues that “despite the current regime’s best laid plans to redirect women into the private domain, the female population in Iran is distinguished by an unprecedented surge in female literacy and a flourishing feminist movement against the boundaries of traditional religious prescription.” Join us for an engaging discussion of what Ansary describes as “the unanticipated consequences of measures undertaken by the Islamic regime, which ironically ended up empowering women.”

With Jesús R. Velasco, Elisheva Carlebach and Simon R. Doubleday

The Hispanic Institute for Latin American and Iberian Cultures and Book Culture and thrilled and honored to invite you to the release of Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (University of Chicago Press) by Seth Kimmel.

With George Rupp, Kenneth Roth, Scott Pelley, Wayne Proudfoot and Kati Marton

In his newest book, Beyond Individualism: The Challenge of Inclusive Communities, George Rupp pushes modern individualism beyond its foundational beliefs to recognize the place of communal practice in our world.  While individualism is a powerful force in Western cultures and a cornerstone of Western foreign policy, it elicits strong resistance in traditional communities. Drawing on decades of research and experience, Professor Rupp advocates new solutions to such global challenges as conflicts in the developing world, income inequality, climate change, and mass migration.

With Daniel Vaca

In the wake of 2014's Hobby Lobby decision, observers of American society have objected to the contemporary entanglement of religious and corporate activity. And yet religion has animated business structures and decisions for over a century. Drawing especially upon histories of American evangelicalism and its media industry, this talk illustrates how evangelicalism not only has shaped corporate activity but also has developed through it. Beyond suggesting why a relationship between business and religion has made sense to Supreme Court justices, this history of evangelicalism helps explain why corporations find the religious mode useful when telling stories about themselves.

With Rafik Abdessalem and Alfred Stepan

Could ISIS Allies Destabilize the Tunisian Democratic Transition?
How, and Why? What Could the US Do to Help Tunisian Democrats?

With Erin Runions

Biblical studies scholar Erin Runions shows how biblically coded discourse and affect is used to try to contain, localize, and hierarchize bodies for capital. She considers how the Bible, and in particular the figure of Babylon, has been used to promote the market conditions and political subjectivities (the subject of interest) that legitimate graduated sovereignty, while still maintaining the fiction of unified national sovereignty. The Bible is deployedin ways that both sacralize and naturalize the securitizing and regularizing processes of biopolitics. Seemingly disconnected and even countervailing impulses—e.g., nationalism, militarism, the focus on the family, involvement in globalized markets, graduated sovereignty, and the economized political subject—fit together and are made to seem coherent in the national discourse through reference to the Bible and to Babylon/Babel.

Sufism in India and Pakistan: Rethinking Islam, Democracy, and Identity

In contemporary politics, Sufis have been very much a part of the discourse, politics, and practice of Islam in the modern world. Western analysts often perceive Sufis as potential allies, and many incidents of violence against Sufis reinforce the notion that Sufism can be the antidote to intolerant and fundamentalist Islam. Yet Sufi practices and politics are much more complicated than these simple assertions would suggest.

With Joan Walsh, Edouard Tétreau, Andrew Revkin, Erin Lothes, and Anthony Annett

On the occasion of Pope Francis’ visit to the U.S., invited panelists discuss the implications of the papal encyclical on climate change and the pope’s call for drastic changes in “lifestyle, production and consumption” from unsustainable practices to more prudent care of “our common home” in order to avert environmental catastrophe.

With Bruce B. Lawrence

"god is not Great," according to the late Christopher Hitchens, and to even question Islam is to be labeled a heretic, according to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but beyond the titles of their bestselling books, there is the everyday experience of millions of Muslims.

While Allah does not belong to Muslims, Allah is supreme in the Islamic tradition. Allah creates, motivates, and sustains the universe as well as humankind. Allah is a name invoked over 2500 times in the Holy Qur’an. Allah is the basis of the ‘witness’ (or shahada), a creed as foundational for Islam as is the Shema for Jews or baptism to Christians.

With George Rupp

George Rupp has served as dean of Harvard Divinity School and as president of Rice University, Columbia University, and the International Rescue Committee. As an activist and educator, he is committed to shaping fair institutions and building inclusive communities in both the developed and the developing worlds. His articles have appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and he is the author of five books, most recently Globalization Challenged: Conviction, Conflict, Community.