2016-2017
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Lucas Lognion
Title: The Authentic Monk: A Study of ‘Authenticity’ within the Works of Thomas Merton
Wednesday, November 9th, 2016
Micahel Connelly
Title: Religion in Crime Dramas
John Sheridan
Title: Lived Religion and Separation from the World
Celetia Liang
Abstract: New religious movements occupy contested and subversive space within society, and their growing prominence is a confusing phenomenon to many. Using the new religious movement Urantia as a case study, this essay explores the creation of a culture which allows unorthodox new religious movements to exist despite their marginalization. The cultural shift away from “organized” religious traditions and towards an ideal of individualized spirituality has resulted in a larger market for alternative religious options. The draw of new religious movements lies in the combined appeal of a community in which social bonds can be formed, and “spiritualities” which allow individuals to express their authentic selves. Popular rhetoric about the dangers of cults, though not unsubstantiated by any means, does make it difficult for new religious movements to gain footing. Legitimacy is ascribed by the observer, and the differing opinions create the liminal space that many new religious movements exist in; recognized by members and supporters as legitimate and desirable religions, but also rejected by wider society.
Lucas Lognion
Title:Racist Rationality: How a Certain Form of Rationality Was Used to Justify European Supremacy and Hegemony
Alex Reppe
Title: The Virtual Reality of Religious Studies
Thursday, October 6th 2016
Alex Reppe
Title: How Prayer Affects Emotions
Israel Dominquez
Title: Book Review: The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi by William C. Chittick
2015
Friday, 11 September 2015
Scott Brown
Title: "Made in Her Image?: Problems of Imagining Women as Goddesses and Goddesses as Women"
Abstract: In this paper, I explore the visual representations of South Asian women through Hindu goddess imagery and the problems that come with equating humans to divinities. I use the work of Kalyani Menon to examine Delhi’s Hindu nationalist movements that use the popularity of Hindu goddesses to argue that feminism is unnecessary for India. I will also locate the use of goddesses in Indian visual media: of particular interest is the work of Sumathi Ramaswamy on the visual representations of the Indian nation as a goddess, Bharata Mata, and a popular Indian campaign against domestic violence that has used goddesses to challenge abuses against human women. I elucidate the problems of divinization, as in nationalist discourse that promotes it as a superior option to the "equality" sought by feminism. Through this inquiry, I challenge western feminist assumptions about goddesses and problematize the correlation between divine gender and human power.
Kathryn Huether
Title: "A Reflection of Society: An Assessment of Music as a Theoretical Approach in the Process of Understanding of Jewish Identity"
Abstract: This paper examines how contrasting understandings and definitions of Jewish music emerge through historically situating each in a broader framework. I attempt to demonstrate how each notions’s development is actually directly reflective of the contemporary sociopolitical order in which it holds its origins. By examining the conception of nationalism and its role in the formation of 19th century nationalistic music, I show how each definition is in fact determined by a pre-existing social and cultural ideals-including perceptions of religion and race-rather than being solely based on musical elements.
2014
Wednesday, 19 November 2014
Tyler Lehrer
Title: "Victorian Gender Roles and Christian Women's Identity in British Colonized South Africa, 'Quiet and Useful Neighbours': Mid 1800s-1920s"
Abstract: Examines missionary life for indigenous and settler women in British colonized South Africa from the mid 1800s to the 1920s. It explores women's education, work, religious and social identity, and their integration into missionary religious and economic life. Through an investigation of historical archives as well as historiographical secondary literature, discourses of female inferiority, domesticity, and the supposedly humanitarian ideology of Christianity's civilizing influence will be brought to bear on indigenous and settler women's involvement in missionary life in South Africa. Through an investigation of three distinct missionized spaces, this paper examines the influence and application of Victorian ideologies of gender and gender roles, as well as their efficacy in inculcating Christian values of domesticity, subservience, and the value of productive labor. Finally, the transnational discourse by which the success of Christianity's 'civilizing' discourse, with its roots in Victorian ideologies of the gendered separation of public and private life, served to validate and reinforce those very ideologies in the metropole.
Jonathan Peterson
Title: "Preliminary Gestures toward a Comparative Study of the Jñāna-Jñātṛ Relationship: Śaṅkarācārya and Abhinavagupta"
Abstract: This paper traces three moments in the long and complicated history of South Asian epistemological conversation. The three instances outlined here have a common theme, namely how to account for knowledge both material and immaterial in relation to the knower who is invariably imbricated with the world. The textual traditions presented in this paper grapple with questions of the relationship between knowledge, the knower, and the world, each with respective results. There are certainly salient differences between the thought espoused by Gauḍapāda, Śaṅkara, and Abhinavagupta, including inevitable differences one would expect from approximately half a millennium of historical distance. Yet these differences surface from what seems to be common interrogative impulses. The notion of māya (illusion), as will be demonstrated, was a central concern for thinking about the knower in relation to the world. As such, this paper first attempts to demonstrate how the notion of māya was operative in Gauḍapāda, Śaṅkara, and Abhinavagupta’s theories of knowledge. From this, their respective epistemologies can be understood as attempts to account for the relationship between the knower, the world, and the divine. Using the notion of māya as a starting point for a comparative study of their respective theories of knowledge, one can understand through three specific examples how epistemology and metaphysical speculation were coupled in South Asian philosophical thought
Wednesday, 8 October 2014
Jonathan Dickstein
Title: "Richard Garbe, German Indology, and the Messiness of (A)Theistic Sāṃkhya"
Abstract: This paper explores how a particular period in the history of German Indology generated highly strategized interpretations of the Sāṃkhya tradition, arguably the oldest strain of structured religio-philosophical speculation in ancient India. I examine how the historically close association between Sāṃkhya and Yoga facilitated theological conclusions regarding the former to be easily, though not seamlessly, transposed to the latter. The main subject of the essay is Indologist Richard Garbe, whose comments regarding theism in Sāṃkhya and Yoga are still quite relevant, for “the conventional wisdom expressed by Garbe in the late nineteenth century is still the conventional wisdom in the early twenty-first.”
Meghan Zibby
Title: "Constituting the Terrorist Subject: Dissecting Jean Elshtain's 'Reflection on the Problem of Dirty Hands'"
Abstract: TBA