About
The Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life supports academic research, teaching, and scholarship on the study of religion, culture, and social difference at Columbia University. In addition, it convenes academic conferences, public forums, and collaborative programming to support and extend academic and scholarly understanding of these topics, and to disseminate and distribute such new understandings to broader publics and communities.
The Institute actively supports scholarship, teaching and public programming across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as well as in the University more broadly under the auspices and oversight of the Department of Religion.
What’s New
Events
RELIGION, Culture AND PUBLIC LIFE
Our core event series, Religion, Culture and Public Life, provides a platform for exploration and debate of both pressing current events and the often overlooked ways in which religion can figure in the different aspects of society, the economy, and the arts. In recent years, we have discussed the rise of populism and conspiracy theories, White Christian gun culture in the United States, the sexual politics of Black Churches, and the atrocities against the Uyghur in Xinjiang.
Interfaith: The Practice, History, and Politics of Dialogue
Dialogue across religious lines entails a certain degree of hopefulness, some optimism that members of communities with distinct histories, rituals, theologies, and even politics will find enough common ground to be able to better understand each other. From this perspective, interfaith dialogue is a subset of a much broader range of conversations and collaborations aimed at softening if not resolving disagreements. But dialogue also entails rules and presuppositions that can exclude some people or render some perspectives invisible. Dialogue can be polemical and combative, too. The events in this series explore this tension, balancing the approaches of contemporary practitioners and proponents of interfaith dialogue with views of historians and theorists of tolerance and intolerance.
Religion and Climate
IRCPL’s Religion and Climate series is animated by calls to reimagine human relationships with and responsibilities to the environment in an age of planetary crisis. As the impact of climate change is increasingly but unevenly felt, religion is emerging as a site of epistemological doubt, struggle, and possibility. This series will explore the cosmological underpinnings that shape diverse understandings of the environment and examine how religious subjects react to and act upon the ecological upheavals they face, challenging exclusively technocratic or secular responses to the climate crisis.
American Body Politics
What does it mean to be healthy? To live naturally? To be an American? IRCPL’s American Body Politics series explores how questions of health, fitness, and family have shaped our current moment by situating them in a longer history of religion and medicine in the United States. The series brings together historians of religion, medicine, and health policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through shared conversations, we will consider how scientific and religious ideas about the body and bodily difference have shaped the contours of American public life – and what legacies remain.
Rebellious Religion
Activism takes many forms. It can be loud, quiet, hateful, joyous, liberatory, world-renouncing, world-affirming, and even revolutionary. During moments of social upheaval and civic unrest, should we engage, detach, or do something else entirely? What are the risks and benefits of identifying as an activist? Scholars, practitioners, faith leaders, grassroots organizers, and students—across cultures, geographies, and histories—have grappled with such questions. When searching for new sites of moral authority and guidance, religion often emerges in public discourse as either a driver of collective action or as a source of division. But this binary understanding doesn’t capture the full range of possibilities. Through the intersection of religion and countercultural movements, this series helps us think together about alternate mechanisms for social change.
Grantee Spotlight
Opportunities
Joint projects
IRCPL will fund projects by Columbia University faculty that aim to understand the role of religion in the contemporary world and its historical roots. Joint Project funding may be applied to research projects, seminars, conferences, working groups, and other programs that bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars.
student fellowships
Every year, IRCPL awards a number of research fellowships to students traveling over the summer to complete their dissertation or other research projects:
Undergraduate Summer Fellowships
THE CLAREMONT PRIZE
The Claremont Prize in the Study of Religion is dedicated to the publication of first books by early career scholars working in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences. Prize-winners will be invited to IRCPL to participate in a workshop and the books will appear in IRCPL’s series, “Religion, Culture and Public Life,” published by Columbia University Press.