Author Archives: Jim

Call for Papers Christianity and the Rule of Law in Chinese Societies

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Dates: March 29-31, 2019 (arriving on 28th and departing on April 1st)

Place: Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

The Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University invites papers that examine the relationship between Christianity and the rule of law in a Chinese society. We welcome both scholarly research papers of empirical, historical, or case studies, and personal reflection papers by Christian practitioners of the law (lawyers, judges, legislators, law enforcement agents, etc.).  A personal reflection paper by a law practitioner should reflect on one’s own conversion, Christian beliefs, and the impacts of faith on the practice of the law. A scholarly paper may address any of these topics below and the analysis may be at the micro, meso, or macro levels, but they must be on Christianity in one of the Chinese societies.  We particularly welcome papers on the following topics:

  • Christian roles in the making or remaking of the constitution in the ROC or PRC, or the Basic Law in Hong Kong or Macau
  • Christian roles in the development of the modern judiciary system
  • Christian roles in the making of some particular law or regulation
  • Christian roles in the defense of civil rights or human rights
  • Christian perceptions of the rule of law
  • Christian organizations and civil society
  • Christianity and the legal culture in Chinese societies
  • Christianity and public theology regarding the rule of law
  • Faith and law practice among Christian lawyers, legislators, judges, or enforcement agents (such as police)

Based on submitted abstracts, we will select 20 participants to make presentations. Hotel expenses of the presenters will be covered. A limited number of travel funds is available to subsidize transportation costs for those who apply.

Deadline to submit abstracts: October 31, 2018. The abstract should be between 500 and 1,000 words. Please include a brief c.v. and a note about whether or not applying for a travel subsidy and if so, how much. We will notify the selected participants of acceptance and travel funds by November 30, 2018.

Deadline to submit draft full paper: February 28, 2019. The paper should be no less than 5,000 words, with proper footnotes and referenced bibliography. We plan to publish a volume of the edited papers.

Please submit your abstract, c.v., note about travel subsidy, and full paper to Lily Szeto lszeto@purdue.edu

ICSOR NEWSLETTER (2/2018)

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May-August 2018: Study Visits

The ICSOR hosted at its headquarters two scholars: Nanlai Cao of the Renmin University of Beijing and Renée de la Torre of the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (Mexico). The two scholars have stayed in Rome for visiting studies, participation in national and international conferences, bibliographic and field research. The ICSOR has always encouraged these activities by providing its headquarters for short and long stays and promoting exchanges and relationships between scholars, academics and researchers. In the coming months the ICSOR will open its doors to Cristián Parker, Vice Rector of the University of Santiago de Chile.

August 2018: International Summer School on Religions

On the occasion of the XXV Edition of the International Summer School on Religions organized by CISRECO and held in San Gimignano and Tavarnelle Val di Pesa (Italy) from 22 to 25 August 2018, the ICSOR has provided 3 scholarships for 3 young researchers: Martina Lippolis, Davide N. Carnevale and Cecilia Galera.

As in previous editions of the Summer School, a space has been dedicated exclusively to young researchers and promoted and maintained by the Section of Sociology of Religion of the Italian Association of Sociology, in collaboration with the EPOS Agency and the ICSOR. The Sociology of Religion Section has offered 2 scholarships and the EPOS Agency 4.

The young scholars presented their research and discussed it with the scholars, teachers, experts and academics.

Renée de la Torre, guest of the ICSOR, also took part in the Summer School of San Gimignano with her paper.

SECOND EDITION OF THE SAFSOR, SCHOOL OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

After the success of the first edition, the ICSOR has organized, in cooperation with the Section of Sociology of Religion of the AIS and as part of its research and training activities, the SCHOOL OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION (SAFSOR) to be held at its headquarters, in Viale delle Milizie 108, in Rome, from 19 to 21 December 2018.

The School intends to offer a particularly thorough and updated preparation specifically aimed at scholars of sociological disciplines who want to improve their theoretical, methodological, empirical and applicative knowledge in the field of research on religious phenomena.

The participation to the SAFSOR is foreseen for graduates and professionals with a university degree of at least four years in the disciplines of social sciences, for a maximum of 15 students, which can be increased to 20.

At the end of the activities of SAFSOR the ICSOR will issue a Certificate of Attendance and Participation. Attendance is free of charge, while travel and accommodation expenses will be borne by the participants.

Also for this edition, the SAFSOR will cover the areas of sociological theories, methodology and techniques, qualitative and quantitative empirical research.

The SAFSOR call can be consulted and downloaded at: http://www.icsor.it/blog/bando-safsor-2018/

The detailed programme can be consulted and downloaded at: http://www.icsor.it/blog/programma-safsor-scuola-di-alta-formazione-in-sociologia-della-religione-2018/

Registration is open until September 29.

ICSOR – Application for Membership

You can download the application to join the ICSOR from http://www.icsor.it/blog/icsor-domanda-di-adesione/. The application must be completed, signed and sent to rciprian@uniroma3.it

Please note that the ordinary fee is € 10 to be paid by bank transfer to INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION – IBAN: IT57R052160322900000000015096

The Junior registration, provided for those who have a maximum age of 39 years, is free. 

Journal Issue: Sociology of Islam

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Volume 6, Special Issue: Unregistered Muslim Marriages: Regulations and Contestations, 2018

http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/22131418/6/3

Call for Papers: “Tracking the ritual year: On the move in different cultural settings and systems of values”

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The paper submission for the 14th SIEF congress in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (14-17 April 2019), “Track Changes: Reflecting on a Transforming World” is currently ongoing.

You are all warmly invited to submit your papers to the panel organized by our working group: (Reli06) Tracking the ritual year on the move in different cultural settings and systems of values

Convenors: Irina Sedakova and Laurent Fournier

https://nomadit.co.uk/sief/sief2019/conferencesuite.php/panels/7122

Looking forward to seeing you in Bucharest, in a couple of months, and next year in Santiago,

Irina Stahl,
Researcher, Institute of Sociology, Romanian Academy
Secretary of “The Ritual Year” Working Group,
ritualyear@siefhome.org

Call for Papers: The Fifth Biennial Christian Congregational Music:

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CALL FOR PAPERS: The Fifth Biennial Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives Conference
Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford, United Kingdom
30 July-2 August 2019

Congregational music-making is a vital and vibrant practice within Christian communities worldwide. It reflects, informs, and articulates convictions and concerns that are irreducibly local even as it flows along global networks. The goal of the Christian Congregational Music conference is to expand the avenues of scholarly inquiry into congregational music-making by bringing together world-class scholars and practitioners to explore the varying cultural, social, and spiritual roles music plays in the life of various Christian communities around the world. We are pleased to invite proposals for the fifth biennial conference at Ripon College in Cuddesdon, near Oxford, United Kingdom between Tuesday, July 30 and Friday, August 2, 2019. The conference will feature guest speakers, roundtables and workshops that reflect the ever-broadening scope of research and practice in Christian congregational music-making around the world. 

Paper proposals on any topic related to the study of congregational music-making will be considered, but we especially welcome papers that explore one or more of the following themes: 

Congregational music and the Black Atlantic

Choir and congregation

Voice and vocality

Beyond the congregation

Practices of power

Comparative religious musical ontologies

We are now accepting proposals (maximum 250 words) for individual papers and for organised panels consisting of three papers. The online proposal form can be found on the conference website: http://congregationalmusic.org/content/proposals. Proposals must be received by 14 December 2018. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 31 January 2019, and conference registration will begin on 15 February 2019. Further instructions and information is available on the conference website at http://congregationalmusic.org.

Call for Chapter Proposals: Religious urbanization and moral economies of development in Africa

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Abstracts are invited for an interdisciplinary volume on Religion urbanization and moral economies of development in Africa, edited by David Garbin (University of Kent), Simon Coleman (University of Toronto) and Gareth Millington (University of York). The volume will critically explore how processes related to religious urbanization intersect with different notions of development in African contexts. Cities are taken to be powerful venues for the creation and implementation of models of development whose moral, temporal, and political assumptions need to be examined, not least as they intersect with religious templates for the planning and reform of urban space.

The themes and problematics to be discussed in this volume reflect the broader focus of the Religious Urbanization in Africa project (see https://rua-project.ac.uk/). These include (but are not limited to):

  • The ways urban faith-based practices of ‘development’ – through for example the provision of basic infrastructure, utilities, housing, health and educational facilities – link moral subjectivities with individual and wider narratives/aspirations of modernization, change, deliverance or prosperity
  • The ideals of belonging and citizenship promoted by religious visions of the ‘ideal city’ and how these are materially articulated in concrete urban developments
  • How models of infrastructural development mobilized by religious actors may conflict or cohere with existing regimes of planning in specific urban contexts as well as with international development discourses
  • The ways in which religious actors and groups may provide resources to negotiate unpredictability and socio-economic uncertainties through production of urban/infrastructural space

We welcome empirically-grounded qualitative case studies or comparative approaches (including but not limited to Islam or Christianity), in particular chapters linking urban change in African context(s), religious place-making, and ‘development’ discourses and practices at various scales.

The proposal for this volume has been invited for the Bloomsbury book series, ‘Studies in Religion, Space and Place’.

Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words no later than 20 November 2018 to ruaproject@kent.ac.uk

Accepted chapters in full (6000-7000 words) will be due by 1 June 2019.

Call for Session & Paper Proposals: EASR Conference, June 2019

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17th Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) ’Religion – continuations and disruptions’

25-29 June 2019 in Tartu, Estonia
https://easr2019.org/

Religions are works in progress. New ideas, doctrines and practices have appeared time and again and often spread across cultural and confessional boundaries. Some of the changes have been intentional, introduced by powerful individuals and institutions, others have emerged more spontaneously as vernacular reactions to innovations imposed from ?above?. Some elements in religions have persisted for centuries, some have disappeared and some reappeared in completely new forms or acquired new meanings. Similar processes can be observed around us in contemporary societies as well.

Yet, oftentimes scholars of religion have struggled with studying such constantly changing and transforming phenomena. This leads us to ask how many disruptions or interruptions can a tradition adapt or even embrace, while still maintaining its identity. At the same time studying change (or the lack thereof) arises several conceptual and methodological problems. First of all, how does one conceptualize change without implying a static research object? This is also a problem of evaluation and rhetorical power ? who has the authority to claim that something is extinct or that a new tradition has been established? What is the scholar?s responsibility for the field of studies? When and to what extent do scholars have to take into account the views of insiders in reflecting upon religious traditions or in drawing boundaries between them?

Aside from ?conventional? religion and religiosity, considering various ?spiritualities? and the rise of the numbers of people with no clear religious affiliation, how does one study a phenomenon which has lost its visibility or moved into the private sphere?  Or how does one make sense of the continuities and disruptions in a world where more and more people simultaneously participate in several traditions, either religious or secular?

The conference will focus on these and related questions, examining religious traditions worldwide. In addition, it calls for reflecting upon continuities and disruptions in the history of religious studies. Our conceptual tools, theoretical frameworks, methodologies and even the category of religion have been changing. Is it necessary to strive for unity in the discipline or rather celebrate the pluralism in the study of religions? And how to depict change, so that the complicated dynamic of religious transformation is also reflected through the conceptual tools we use?

Papers may include (but not be limited to) following topics:

  • – conceptual and theoretical reflections on terms and models
  • – methodological challenges in the study of ?invisible? religion and nonreligion
  • – transformation and persistence in and of religious education
  • – social, political and gendered aspects of religious change
  • – tradition and creativity in vernacular religions
  • – discursive and ritual practices: continuity, change, disruption
  • – encounters and interactions between religious communities
  • – entanglements of media, digital world and religiosity
  • – inspirations, actions and reactions between religion and migration
  • – psychological, ecological and cognitive aspects of religious change and continuity
  • – agents and victims of change and disruption
  • – religious liminality and residuality
  • – materiality of religion

Important dates

  • Call for session proposals: 15th of September 2018 – 31st of October 2018
  • Notification of acceptance of panels on the 10th of November 2018
  • Call for individual papers: 15th of November 2018 – 15th of December 2018
  • Notification of acceptance: 15th of January 2019

Registration:

  • Early bird registration 1st of February – 31st of March 2019
  • Standard registration  1st of April – 31st of May 2019

New Book: Governing Islam Abroad

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Governing Islam Abroad: Turkish and Moroccan Muslims in Western Europe

Bruce Benjamin

2018, Palgrave Macmillan

About the book

From sending imams abroad to financing mosques and Islamic associations, home states play a key role in governing Islam in Western Europe.  Drawing on over one hundred interviews and years of fieldwork, this book employs a comparative perspective that analyzes the foreign religious activities of the two home states with the largest diaspora populations in Europe: Turkey and Morocco. The research shows how these states use religion to promote ties with their citizens and their descendants abroad while also seeking to maintain control over the forms of Islam that develop within the diaspora. The author identifies and explains the internal and foreign political interests that have motivated state actors on both sides of the Mediterranean, ultimately arguing that interstate cooperation in religious affairs has and will continue to have a structural influence on the evolution of Islam in Western Europe.

Reviews

“Governing Islam Abroad is an authoritative guide to the nuances of transnational religious cooperation. Bruce uses extensive fieldwork to offer a multi-dimensional view of sending states and receiving states. It is a thought-provoking contribution to the debate over what constitutes a country of origin.”

Jonathan Laurence, Professor of Political Science, Boston College, USA

“Winner of the Rémy Leveau prize, this study provides a remarkable comparison of the public management of Islam abroad between Turkey, Germany, Morocco and France. Bruce’s exceptional work explores the implications of this new kind of foreign policy and migratory diplomacy, opening up new paths for research in comparative politics and on theories of public governance beyond borders.”

Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, CNRS Senior Researcher Emeritus, CERI, Sciences Po, France

Link: https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319786636

The Donner Research Prize 2018 to Henni Alava

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The Donner Institute for Research in Religious and Cultural History in Turku has awarded Dr Henni Alava the 2018 prize for outstanding research into religion. Dr Alava is awarded for her book ’There is Confusion.’ The Politics of Silence, Fear and Hope in Catholic and Protestant Northern Uganda (Development Studies, University of Helsinki, 2017).

The Donner Institute Prize is awarded annually for outstanding research into religion conducted at a Nordic university. It is intended for researchers in the field of religious studies for a significant and relatively newly published monograph or article in print or digital form. The prize sum is 5,000 Euros.

More information:

Svenska: https://www.donnerinstitute.fi/aktuellt-3/donnerska-institutets-pris-for-framstaende-religionsforskning-till-henni-alava/

English: https://www.donnerinstitute.fi/en/current-3/the-donner-research-prize-2018-to-henni-alava-2/

On behalf of the Donner Institute Board,

Turku, 1 October 2018

Tage Kurtén, Chairman

Ruth Illman, Secretary

Call for Papers: The International Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Conference

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The International Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Conference (IRTP) organized by the Institute for Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage (IRTP) in conjunction with the International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage (IJRTP) and Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia invites abstracts for their 11th International Conference to be held from 26th – 29th June 2019 at the Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia.

The aim of the conference is to provide both empirical and personal insights into the changing nature of religion in society and to further the debate for both policy-makers and academics to consider these evolving challenges within the future development of faith tourism and pilgrimage. The main emphasis for acceptance at this event is based on participants presenting papers, which apply to the main themes of the conference.

The key themes of the conference include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • * Theory and Theology of Religious Tourism
  • * Pilgrimage as Process
  • * Secular v Ritual Tourism
  • * Virtual Religious Experience
  • * Risks and Conflicts of/at Sacred Sites
  • * Motivation of Pilgrimage and Religious Tourism
  • * Media and Cultural Challenges for Pilgrimage
  • * Pilgrimage Routes Modern and Ancient
  • * Pilgrimage, Spirituality, Religion and Tourism
  • * Promoting and Experiencing Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage
  • * Religious and Culture Tourism

Important Dates:

  • Abstract submissions: 31st January 2019
  • Notification of Abstract Acceptance: 28th February 2019
  • Conference Registration Deadline and
  • submission of extended abstract: 15th May 2019
  • Full Paper Submission: 15th July 2019

The conference takes place at the Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia – Boulevard Peka Dapčevića (Kumodraška St., 261a). The University is located in two locations (Danijelova St., 32, and Boulevard Peka Dapčevića (Kumodraška St., 261a – our event location). To see the location, follow this link

The international “Nikola Tesla” airport in Belgrade is 15-20 minutes away from the city centre. There are various transfers available to and from the airport. We suggest mini bus line A1 which takes you to the city centre (Slavija square) or a taxi service. A flat-rate taxi service can be booked in the arrivals hall for approximately 20 Euro. For more information see the airport website. Taxis are available throughout the city of Belgrade, especially at the airport, train station and hotels.

All detailed information about the Conference can be found in the attached Call for papers or at our web site: www.irtp.co.uk