Religious Studies

Events

Living Humanism: Material Culture and the Remaking of Religion

Date: February 23 2012 3:30pm Location: Gregg Pavilion - Gregg Pavilion

 What’s this religion in material culture? How does the performativity of religion in material cultural practices often remake religion into forms of humanist expressions? Although the Pacific Northwest, in particular, has been dubbed the ‘None Zone’ due to low rates of institutional religious participation, scholars have suggested that the cultural cartography of religion points towards a more “spiritual” remaking of religion. What does this landscape look like, especially among young people in Portland, Oregon? 

     

     This one day symposium brings scholars together, whose scholarship, in divergent ways, gives thought to the shifting context, understanding, classification, and modalities of how material culture (broadly understood), reshapes how we think about the category of religion, both theoretically and methodologically. The shape shifty landscape of contemporary culture offers a robust terrain to interrogate and rethink how we give thought to categories such as religion, as expressed in the multiplicities of material cultural products. 
     

     This symposium is dedicated to the theme “Living Humanism” to consider the complex ways in which religion and religious rhetorical housing often provides a space to negotiate human interests, means, and ends. Here, we consider how material culture, as both product and context, forces a rethinking of how religion is remade, often providing a cosmology of Humanism as both practice and posture in seemingly un/conscious ways.


3:30 - 5:00 Panel Discussions:

       Patricia O’Connell Killen, Gonzaga 
       University

       Cassie Trentaz, Warner Pacific 
       College

       Susanna Morrill, Lewis & Clark 
       College

       Diabolus Rex, Chaos Imperium

       Monica Miller, Lewis & Clark 
       College

7:30pm Dr. Anthony B. Pinn, Keynote Speaker
What Are We to Each Other?
Thoughts of Ethics in the Age of “None”