Author Archives: Jim

New Book: Being Catholic in the Contemporary Philippines:

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Being Catholic in the Contemporary Philippines:
Young People Reinterpreting Religion (Routledge, 2016)

Published under the Routledge Religion in Contemporary Asia Series
This book, based on extensive original research, examines the nature of Catholicism in the contemporary Philippines. It shows how Catholicism is apparently flourishing, with good attendance at Sunday Masses, impressive religious processions and flourishing charismatic groups, and with interventions by the Catholic hierarchy in national and local politics. However, focusing in particular on the beliefs and practices of young people, the book shows that young people are often adopting a different, more individualised approach to Catholicism. It considers the features of this: a more personal and experiential relationship with God; a new approach to morality, in which right living is seen as more important than right believing; and a critical view of what is seen as the Catholic hierarchy’s misguidedness. The book argues that this reinterpreting of religion by young people has the potential to alter fundamentally the nature of Catholicism in the Philippines, but that, nevertheless, young people’s new approach involves a solid, enduring commitment and a strong view of their own Catholic, religious identity.
Jayeel Serrano Cornelio is Director and Assistant Professor of the Development Studies Program at the Ateneo de Manila University, the Philippines. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

https://www.routledge.com/Being-Catholic-in-the-Contemporary-Philippines-Young-People-Reinterpreting/Cornelio/p/book/9781138803343
https://www.amazon.com/Being-Catholic-Contemporary-Philippines-Reinterpreting/dp/1138803340?ie=UTF8&Version=1&entries=0

Job Opening: Lecturer on Muslims in Europe

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Dear All,

Please check the link below for information about a vacancy at the Alwaleed Centre, University of Edinburgh  for a Lecturer in Muslim in Europe:

https://www.vacancies.ed.ac.uk/pls/corehrrecruit/erq_jobspec_version_4.display_form

With best wishes

Sariya

Dr Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor
Research Fellow in Faith and Peaceful Relations

Web Officer for the British Association for Islamic Studies

Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations (CTPSR)

Coventry University

CFP: Fourth Annual Conference of the British Association for Islamic Studies

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BRAIS 2017 Call for Papers

Fourth Annual Conference of the British Association for Islamic Studies

Tuesday 11 April (5pm) – Thursday 13 April (5pm) 2017

Chester Centre for Islamic Studies, University of Chester

Call for panels and papers

Following BRAIS’s successful conferences in Edinburgh (April 2014) and London (April 2015 and April 2016), the organisers invite proposals for whole panels or individual papers on any aspect or sub-discipline of Islamic Studies, for the Fourth Annual Conference of BRAIS. Islamic Studies is broadly understood to include both Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority contexts as well as historical, textual, and contemporary anthropological and sociological approaches.

Pre-arranged panels are particularly welcome on themes within the subject area, such as:

  • Qur’anic studies
  • Sociology of Islam
  • Law
  • Muslims in Britain/Europe/North America and other minority contexts
  • History, Medieval and Modern
  • History of Science
  • Philosophy and Theology
  • Muslims in Africa and Asia
  • Intellectual History
  • Islamic Art and Architecture
  • Diversity within Islam
  • Economics and Finance
  • Education
  • Gender Studies
  • Islam in the Media
  • Interreligious Relations

Individual proposals will also be considered, and, if accepted, will then be grouped with similar submissions by the conference organisers. 

How to submit you panel/paper proposal

For panels, a 200-word outline of the theme of the panel, together with 200-word abstracts of each paper and the details of each presenter, should be submitted using the form which is availableHERE. Please save the document as follows: “Surname of panel chair_first name of panel chair_panel”. Example: “Smith_John_panel”.

For individual papers, a 200-word abstract of the paper should be submitted using the form which is available HERE. Please save the document as follows: “Your surname_your first name_paper”. Example: “Smith_John_paper”.

ALL PANEL AND PAPER SUBMISSIONS MUST BE IN ENGLISH. SUBMISSIONS IN LANGUAGES OTHER THAN ENGLISH WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED.

All completed forms should be sent by email attachment to brais@ed.ac.uk by 5pm (UK time) on Wednesday 30th November 2016. You will receive an email notification confirming the receipt of your form.

IF YOU DO NOT RECEIVE A NOTIFICATION RECEIPT, PLEASE CONTACT US.

All panel and individual paper proposals will be reviewed (double blind) by two members of the BRAIS Conference Committee. We will contact you at the end of January 2017 to inform you as to whether your panel/paper has been accepted.

If you have any questions, please contact the Conference Committee on: brais@ed.ac.uk. 

Plenary sessions at the conference

The conference committee is very pleased to announce that plenary lectures at the conference will be delivered by Prof Bryan Turner (Australian Catholic University) on ‘Can there be a “Sociology of Islam”?’; Profs Humayun Ansari (Royal Holloway, London) and Ron Geaves (Cardiff University) on ‘The History of Muslims in Britain’; and Profs Everett Rowson (New York University) and Gudrun Krämer (Free University of Berlin) on the new edition of The Encyclopaedia of Islam (kindly sponsored by Brill).

Travel to/from Chester

Chester is easily accessible, either by train from London Euston (2 hours) or via Manchester Airport and Liverpool John Lennon Airport.

Symposium: Religions: Fields of Research, Methods and Perspectives.

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The Jagiellonian University Institute for the Study of Religions and the Jagiellonian Centre for the Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture invite you to participate in 

The Fifth International Kraków Study of Religions Symposium: Religions: Fields of Research, Methods and Perspectives.

The symposium will take place between 7th and 9th November 2016 in Kraków and the submission deadline has been extended to 14th Semptember.

The event, titled Understanding and Explanation in the Study of Religions, will be dedicated to the memory of Walter Burkert. Three excellent keynote speakers will deliver their lectures.

Keynote speakers:

  • Jan N. Bremmer (University of Groningen, Emiritus)
  • Ralph W. Hood, Jr. (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
  • Joanna Jurewicz (University of Warsaw)

Please find an overview of the conference, as well as the list of proposed topics, in the attachment.

Please send paper proposals in doc. format, including name and affiliation of the candidate, paper title, and abstract (up to 200 words) to religions.confer@gmail.com.

Submission deadline is 14th September 2016.
Submissions will be evaluated by The Academic Committee by 21th September 2016.

Participation fee (payable upon paper acceptance, until 1st October 2016) is 70 EUR / 300 PLN.

http://www.religions.confer.uj.edu.pl/en_GB/home

Call for Papers: Unregistered Muslim Marriages – Regulations and Contestation

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Organizers:
Dr Rajnaara Akhtar, De Montfort University, Leicester
Prof. Annelies Moors, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Institute for
Social Science Research

Venue and date: De Montfort University, Leicester, 24-25 April 2017

Theme: Non-state registered Muslim marriages

Non-state registered Muslim marriages or ‘unregistered marriages’ have increasingly become the focus of public policy debates both in Muslim-majority countries and in settings where Muslims are a minority. While the regulation and registration of marriages have a long history tied up with the emergence of the modern nation-state, during the last decades both state institutions and religious authorities have shown a renewed interest in debates about registration, the validity of non state-registered marriages and the effects of non-registration.  An often-simultaneous discourse has also emerged pertaining to the private informal space occupied by couples who choose to circumvent registration, and the manner and form of intervention within this private space by other interested parties, including by parents, kin, community and/or religious bodies.

This two-day multidisciplinary symposium will bring together researchers who have engaged in concrete empirical research on unregistered marriages.

For more information, see: http://wp.me/p4uVdC-i2
Best regards,
Martijn de Koning

Conference: Penser les religiosités en perspective de genre : axes, approches et problématisations

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Pour info :
http://historiadelasmujeres2017.filo.uba.ar/
[MT 66]Penser les religiosités en perspective de genre : axes, approches et problématisations

Résumé:

Analyser le social à partir d’une perspective de genre implique inéluctablement de rendre compte de l’historicité politique et épistémologique du concept. Le genre comme catégorie heuristique reste très fortement liée aux débats et aux luttes des mouvements des femmes, ainsi qu’aux tentatives de systématisations à partir des théories féministes. Dans cette perspective, la difficulté pour le savoir féministe –approche théorique et praxis politique- réside en ceci qu’il ne s’avère guère facile d’analyser et repenser le binôme genre et religion. Plus encore, si nous employons ces deux catégories dans le contexte latino-américain qui nous oblige à poser la question de la relation entre genre et pouvoir : pour paraphraser Spivak (1985), « les femmes peuvent-elles parler ? », « Quelles positions occupent-elles face à la colonialité du pouvoir (Lugones, 2008) ? Comment son monde-communauté (Segato, 2014) se conforme à la coloniale-modernité ?

Cette table ronde se veut un espace de réflexion sur la relation complexe entre les études du genre et les études sur le phénomène religieux (Tarducci, 2002). Nous cherchons à problématiser le peu d’intérêt que les ces dernières montrent vis-à-vis des expériences et processus religieux, du fait de leur lien explicite ou sous-jacent entre une idéologie hétéro-normée, la suprématie – ou domination selon Bourdieu (1998) – masculine et les différents systèmes de croyance. Bien que nous devions reconnaître la faiblesse de la production scientifique sur la religion à partir d’une perspective de genre, par rapport au développement de la sociologie, de l’histoire et de l’anthropologie des sciences, il nous apparaît essentiel de réaliser une étude des pratiques, discours, et représentations de la religion à partir d’une perspective glocale et de genre. De même, il apparaît intéressant de comprendre la portée de la subjectivité et la corporalité comme dimensions et catégorie d’analyses dans le cadre d’une perspective de genre et des études sur la religion.

Aussi, nous invitons à participer ceux qui – dans le cadre de l’anthropologie, la sociologie, l’histoire, la littérature et les disciplines connexes, abordent des questions et problématiques comme :

  • 1)    Les processus de gestion et/ou résistance de la normativité religieuse à partir d’une perspective de genre ;
  • 2)    Les pratiques et les sens donnés au respect et/ou à la transformation de la normativité sexuelle et familiales dans le cadre des différentes cosmovisions religieuses à partir d’une perspective interdisciplinaire ;
  • 3)    La construction de la féminité et de la masculinité religieuse et l’existence de différentes formes d’agencements et de religiosités selon le genre ;
  • 4)    Mouvements et théologies féministes et LGTBQI dans le cadre des différentes traditions et mouvements religieux ;
  • 5)    Processus de conversion religieuse, transformation du self, identité et subjectivités dans une perspective de genre ;
  • 6)    Les différentes formes que le corps sexué traverse performance, rituels, leadership, et sociabilités religieuses ;
  • 7)    Erotismes, sexualités et récits amoureux dans différentes traditions et/ou communautés religieuses ;
  • 8)    Les défis, débats et contributions théorico-méthodologiques à partir d’une approche transdisciplinaire et intersectionnelle dans les différentes champs d’études.

Coordinatrices :

First International Congress of the Chilean Society for the Sciences of Religions

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Conference Theme: Dialog, education and religious tolerance

Concepción – Chile From May 23 to 26, 2017

For the first time, the Chilean Society for the Sciences of Religions will organize a congress dedicated to the dissemination of research works from the academic world. It is important to promote a continuous progress in the research on the religious phenomenon in Latin America from a non-denominational stance. For this reason, we think it is important to create spaces for disseminating the work of Chilean and foreigner researchers. In accordance with the requests received from several colleagues, in this Second Call we invite you to send free papers. Thematic lines for the symposium papers

  • 1) Theory and methodology in the study of religions
  • 2) Phenomenology of religions
  • 3) Symbology and Art in religion
  • 4) Islam and Islamophobia
  • 5) Modern religious movements
  • 6) Anthropology and sociology of religions
  • 7) History of religious institutions
  • 8) Literature and religion: Sacred texts
  • 9) Religion, politics and gender studies
  • 10) Psychology of religions
  • 11) Education and religion
  • 12) Ecclesiastical law
  • 13) Religions in classical antiquity
  • 14) Church-state relationships in Latin America
  • 15) Archeology and religiosity in prehistoric times
  • 16) Iconography and religious cultural heritage
  • 17) Religions and human rights
  • 18) Far East Religions
  • 19) Philosophy of religions
  • 20) Popular and ethnic religiosity in Latin America

Presentation of papers On the www.schcr.cl website, you can look into the “Simposios Aceptados” section in order to send a summary of your paper proposal to the coordinator of each working group. In case your paper proposal does not fit any of the symposia, it must be sent as a free paper, which will be assessed by the Scientific Committee of the Congress, and included in special symposia coordinated by the Organizing Committee.

The e-mail for sending free papers is: schcr2017@gmail.com IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU READ THOROUGHLY THE DESCRIPTION OF THE ACCEPTED SYMPOSIA, SO THAT YOU CAN SEND THE PAPER PROPOSAL DIRECTLY TO THE COORDINATORS. Only in case no symposium fits your proposal, this must be sent to the organization as a free paper.

MORE DETAILS AT http://www.schcr.cl/circular/SecondCallSCHCR.pdf

University Professorship: Study of Religion with a focus on History of Christianity’s Interrelations

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The Institute of the Study of Religion and Related Didactics in the department of Cultural Studies at the University of Bremen invites applications for the position:

University Professor with Tenure
salary scale W2/W3

in the field

Study of Religion with a focus on 
History of Christianity’s Interrelations

Ref.: P315/16

The appointee will be responsible for research and teaching in the field of Study of Religions and will be expected to introduce the abovementioned focus into the Institute’s school-based and non-school-based Bachelor and Master study programs.

He/she will introduce a research focus into the area History of Interrelations of Christianity and a non-European religious tradition (Buddhism, Hinduism, African religions, or similar). In this respect the appointee will also bring into his/her teaching both (1) history of Christianity as well as (2) history of interrelations of religions in a global perspective (e.g. colonial and missionary history, globalization, migration, flight) and (3) historical method.

The appointee will be expected to pro-actively support the Institute’s internal networking and internationalization activities as well as the further development of the subject area as part of enhancing the University of Bremen’s profile in research and academic education. He/she will also be expected to have gathered experience in applying for third-party funding of research projects.

The appointee must be capable of addressing issues of gender differences in the context of subject-specific research and education with particular sensitivity.

The appointee should meet the following minimum requirements

Ø successful completion of a full course of university education; a doctoral degree with excellent results; postdoctoral experience of teaching and/or research in the subject Studies of Religion or History, or possibly in a neighbouring discipline, e.g. in connection with a junior professorship or non-university occupation,

Ø relevant experience of teaching and research,

Ø suitable pedagogical aptitude.

Applications from abroad are especially welcome! There will be possibilities for delivering courses in English, and this will be desired for a non-school-based Master. Nevertheless, after two years the appointee will be expected also to deliver some courses in German.
The University of Bremen seeks to increase the proportion of women involved in research and teaching and therefore particularly welcomes female applicants. International applications and applications from academics with a migration Background are explicitly welcome. Applicants with severe disabilities with essentially equal qualifications and personal aptitude will be prioritized.

Closing date for applications is 04.11.2016. Please send your application by surface mail with mention of the above reference number and together with the usual documents to the following address or by email (a combined pdf): bewerbungen.fb9@uni-bremen.de

Universität Bremen
Dekanin Fachbereich Kulturwissenschaften (FB 9)
Frau Prof. Dr. Dorle Dracklé
Postfach 33 04 40
28334 Bremen

(bewerbungen.fb9@uni-bremen.de)

Conference on “Remembering Beliefs – the shifting worlds of religion and faith in secular society”

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The Annual Conference of the Oral History Society in conjunction with Newman University and Leeds Trinity University

Conference Topic: Remembering  Beliefs – the shifting worlds of religion and faith in secular society

Friday, 14th and Saturday, 15th July, 2017 at Leeds Trinity University, Horsforth, Leeds, LS18 5HD

In recent years, belief and non belief have developed new significance. What might once have been valued as something individual and private in many contexts only a generation ago can now be a matter of open identification and even confrontation and judgement. In seeking to understand what has changed, memory has an important part to play: identifying how belief and non belief have played out at the level of family, community and society; recognising how people engage in the practices of belief and experience the institutions of organised religion. For reasons perhaps of prejudice, perspective and communal difference oral historians have largely neglected the topic of belief and non belief.

Going beyond studies which have focused on those with religious conviction, oral history offers the possibility to move debate outside the confines of institutionalised religion both conceptually and practically, pushing the boundaries of what is meant by belief. Indeed, it offers the ideal approach to understanding manifestations of belief and secularism at an individual level while tracking their relationship to shifting expressions of broader cultural norms and the conferment of identity. Tackling this exciting agenda, the remit of the Conference will be broad but contributions should focus on an oral history in relation to the following:

  • methodological challenges in understanding belief, secularism and religion
  • understanding the process of secularisation through oral history testimonies
  • inter-subjectivity in interviews on belief and non belief
  • the role belief plays in shaping memory
  • exploring the interface of religion, belief and cultural/ national identities
  • belief and education
  • belief and non belief in social, political and cultural transformations
  • shifting the narratives of religion away from an institutional base
  • gender and established religious institutions
  • sects and movements

Keynote speakers: Professor Callum Brown, University of Glasgow; Dr Abby Day, Goldsmiths, University of London; Dr Tina Block, Thompson Rivers University, British Columbia. After-Dinner Speaker, Friday, 14 July: Bruce Kent

Download the conference Call for Papers here.

All proposals for oral history-based contributions, including papers, panels, presentations, workshops, posters and displays should be submitted by 16th December 2016 to OHSConf2017@ohs.org.uk

SISR/ISSR July 2017 Conference moved to Lausanne; Call for Session Proposals Extended to October 25th

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Dear Colleagues:

We are writing to let you know that the SISR/ISSR Executive has made the decision to hold the 2017 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland from 4-7 July 2017, instead of in Melbourne Australia. Only very recently has it become clear that a conference in Melbourne would not be possible for financial reasons. The Executive has had to decide quickly in order to be able to guarantee a conference in 2017.  

We thank the Australian local committee and its president, Bob Dixon, for their efforts and energy and we will be able to use a considerable amount of their work for the Lausanne conference. We also hope that a ISSR conference in Australia will be possible some time in the future.

The conference in Lausanne will keep the theme “Religion, Cooperation, and Conflict in Diverse Societies”.

Because of the relocation, we make a second call for session proposals to give members a chance who would consider coming to Lausanne but would not have been able to go to Melbourne.

You can again propose until October 25th:

  • Thematic session – A session with papers on a common theme. If the theme attracts many papers, the thematic session may stretch over several slots.
  • Working Group session – A session of papers presented by those who work together on a specific project.
  • New Research Forum – Intended for students and young researchers (PhDs). The NRF usually have two sessions with a common theme and a session for free papers that do not fit into     the other ISSR thematic sessions.
  • Author Meets Critics session – A session in which an author meets scholars who criticize his/her book and responds.

The conference is bilingual.  Sessions may be in French, in English, or both.

Please submit your session proposals via our system: http://sisr-issr-conference-submission-2017.com/index.php/test/rccds2017   Before doing so, please consult instructions for conference submissions: https://www.sisr-issr.org/en/conference/instructions-for-registration-on-the-open-conference-system-religion-cooperation-and-conflict-in-diverse-societies

Attention: This is not yet the call for individual paper proposals. The call for paper proposals will be opened in mid-November.

This is a late change of plans and we apologize for any inconvenience to our members. We are convinced, however, that the ISSR conference at the new venue in Lausanne will be a success and we hope very much to meet you there.

With best wishes,

Jörg Stolz
President of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion