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.
Scholar of Black religion named co-director of Center for Religion and the Human
J. Kameron Carter
J. Kameron Carter, professor of religious studies at Indiana University Bloomington, has been appointed as co-director of the Center for Religion and the Human.
"Recently, the center has taken up challenges of earth, social, and political justice by attending to race and anti-Black violence," Sullivan said. "A focus on Black religion will enhance our capacity for rethinking the human, rethinking justice, and ultimately rethinking the world otherwise."
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TRiP: Scripture Series
Starts Tues, Feb 2 at 1pm
The Scripture series of Teaching Religion in Public (TRiP) explores the pedagogical stakes of canonization and reverence. How do we teach texts deemed uniquely authoritative without being constrained by questions of authority or power dynamics? What can be learned by shifting attention from specific scriptures to the category itself?
Join our email list (thehuman@indiana.edu) to receive the readings and Zoom link.
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Dabru Emet: 20 Years Later
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In the late 1990s, the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies (ICJS – now Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies) hosted the National Jewish Scholars Project. After several years of meeting in Baltimore, four interdenominational Jewish scholars published Dabru Emet (“Speak Truth”) as a full-page statement in The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, and other major newspapers and religious websites on September 10, 2000.
ICJS partners with our journal American Religion to present this 20th anniversary forum welcoming scholars and thinkers from around the world and across disciplines to revisit Dabru Emet (“Speak Truth”), to engage in critique as well as commemoration; historical reflection as well as reframing; rigorous inquiry as well as creative imaginings.
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Watch the virtual roundtable: "Is Islam American Religion?"
FROM Thursday, October 15
Why is American Islam is so rarely framed as an “American religion” in the field of religious studies? Can Islam be “American religion”? What would it mean to say so and work in light of this understanding? Enjoy our recording of this exciting virtual roundtable. Closed captioning provided.
Watch it here.
Enjoy our recording of the Iris Book Award!
from Saturday, September 26
The Center for Religion & the Human presents the Iris Book Award: Prize Ceremony, Reading, and Discussion with author David George Haskell, and guest speakers Kocku von Stuckrad and David Abram, moderated by Lisa Sideris. Funded by a grant from the Luce Foundation.
Watch it here.
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.
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.