As we are pressed by advances in technology and biology, on the one hand, and by rapid social and political change, on the other, theology and religious studies promise a space of reflection, perspective, and new possibilities. Funded by grants from the Luce Foundation and the Office of the Vice Provost at Indiana University Bloomington, the Center for Religion and the Human supports interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research on religion which attends to these new realities while being rooted in IUB’s traditions of excellence in humanist, social-scientific and historical scholarship.
Theologies: An Online Exhibit of Photography
by Emily Stratton
Emily Stratton's work appears as the cover image of Theologies of American Exceptionalism.
"In my work at large, I consider a city’s visual and material culture to be both reflective and generative of social norms, identities, and conceptions of world (including cosmological) order. In Accra and elsewhere in Ghana, 'America' is abundant."
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Cooper Harriss receives IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Award
Religion and Literature Workshops to be held in 2021
“R&L” is a series of workshops that bring together scholars working at the nexus of religion and literature in a wide range of literary and religious traditions in a variety of historical and geographical contexts: from contemporary poetics of the Black Sacred to those underlying Chinese Confucianism, from colonial Latin America to medieval Europe and Japan, from poetry, plays, and novels to picture books.
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The first volume in our book series is now online!
Theologies of American Exceptionalism is a collection of fifteen interlocking essays reflecting on the vagaries of exceptionalist claims in and about the United States. Loosely and generatively curious, these essays bring together a range of historical and contemporary voices, some familiar and some less so, to stimulate new thought about America. A print version of this volume will be available in summer 2020.
Access it here!
Welcoming our first Postdoctoral Fellow
The Center for Religion and the Human is excited to welcome its first postdoctoral fellow to Bloomington this fall. Evander Price received his PhD in American Studies from Harvard University in 2019, with expertise in American Literature and American Art History, and with a particular fascination with time, end-times, future time, and the normative implications of the various temporalities we inhabit.
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The Iris Book Award
Nominations due December 15
The Iris Award is an annual prize of $2000 given to an outstanding work at the intersection of science, religion, and technology. Specifically, the prize recognizes scholarship that, in explicit or implicit ways, offers new insights into the meaning and status of the human being in relation to powerful cultural and historical forces emanating from religion/theology, nature, science and/or technology.
Learn more.All in-person public events sponsored or hosted by the Center will be on hold until further notice.
In keeping with campus-wide directives, all public events and meetings hosted or sponsored by the Center for Religion & the Human have been put on hold. Follow IU campus updates regarding COVID-19. In the meantime, we continue our core activities: planning the Being Human Summer Institutes (2021-2023), welcoming our postdoctoral fellow, and celebrating the first volume in our book series.