What does it mean to be healthy? Are we responsible for the health of others? Are we responsible for our own? The concept of health in the United States is slippery, built on an ever-shifting foundation of scientific, religious, and moral ideas. As the Covid-19 pandemic made painfully clear, moments of health crisis surface competing visions of health, revealing the ways our existing systems of care ignore the needs of the disabled, people of color, and the LGBTQ community. This conversation brings together historians of religion, science, and sexuality in the twentieth century to situate our current moment in a longer history of health and disability in the United States as both a scientific and religious question.

Attention is a valuable commodity. The capacity not only to keep distractions at bay, but also actively to pay attention to particular people, works of art, ideals, and politics is in constant tension with the attention claimed by mass media, consumption, and the wired ecosystem of our daily lives more broadly. Drawing into the present our year-long exploration of the relationship between devotion and distraction at various moments in the past, this final panel discussion turns to the places occupied by spirituality, self-help, and various other types of subject formation within the contemporary attention economy. Contemporary seekers are experimenting with strategies to counter distraction while at the same time competing for the time and attention of like-minded people who also desire deeper meaning and balance in their lives. What are these strategies and the coalitions in which they take shape? What do they share with attention techniques of the past? How have the dramatic technological and social changes of the last few years reshaped both the attention economy and the ways that we imagine ourselves as ethical and engaged individuals?

Our national conversation remains divided: does religion advance civic causes and community based action or serve as a source of social difference and potential disruption? But the idea that religion either helps or hurts our civic life doesn’t capture the full picture. How can we push past hero-villain narratives to consider the ways religious forms and communities shape and share knowledge. Join IRCPL for a conversation with scholars and policymakers as we think together about the positives and the perils of viewing religion as a resource.

Ideas about what is natural pervade American public life. From mesmerism to phrenology, and even the invention of the Graham cracker, Americans have long struggled to sift through conflicting and contradictory claims about “natural” health and wellness regimes, family structures, and gender dynamics. While internet subcultures today offer one way of cutting through the noise, Americans regularly encounter shifting definitions of the normal that blend scientific and pseudoscientific claims with moral prescriptions. Join us in a conversation with historians of religion and medicine as they unpack the stakes behind these competing senses of “natural.”

What imprint do we leave behind on physical and digital landscapes? From monuments to museums, and from rituals to remembrance, perspectives from the study of American religion can help us understand the narratives we tell ourselves about the present. Join IRCPL for a conversation about the public stakes of preservation and erasure in our current moment.

In a simple story that we now tell ourselves about secularization, the European Enlightenment plays a key role: It’s the period when scientific inquiry and rational thought became ascendent, while religious practice receded to a more limited private sphere, a shift that coincided with new paradigms of toleration and liberty. The truth is of course more complicated, as theologians from various religious communities reimagined both religious practice and belief in dialogue with the philosophical and political trends of the moment. Along with their neighbors from other religious communities, how did participants in the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, come to view the new distractions, technological transformations, and dream of universal knowledge that characterized modern life before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?

With the sense of possibility occasioned by each new technology of the written word, the aspiration to know all that there is to know takes on new life. But even as the printing press or the e-book have at the moment of their invention promised to increase access, they also have led to an exponential increase in new texts. Moreover, although strategies of information management have shifted over time, the feeling of information overload is recurrent and transhistorical. It certainly is not unique to the age of print culture or the internet era. Medieval and early modern Islamic scholars, working with manuscripts and pursuing research across a range of interrelated encyclopedic genres, honed myriad techniques for organizing and retrieving knowledge. How might we weave together these histories of information management and the religious sciences?

Topics at the intersection of religion, culture, and public life have taken on special urgency in our current moment of social and political upheaval. Join us for an online conversation with recent IRCPL list authors to reflect on what scholarship has looked like in recent years, and to think together about where it could or should head in the future. 

When it comes to health and wellness, Americans are divided on whether religion is healing or harming. Recent years have shown how our bodies can become sites of vulnerability and contestation, but do our religious identities and communities serve as sources of dignity and individual autonomy or as barriers to access and accurate information? The “American Religion is…Healing” program offers new perspectives on how we can move past this kind of binary thinking, focusing instead on how ideas about religion and spirituality shape not only American public health approaches, but also the information we classify as credible or conspiracist. Join us for a conversation about what it means to feel well and to live well in precarious times.

Topics at the intersection of religion, culture, and public life have taken on special urgency in our current moment of social and political upheaval. Join us for an online conversation with recent IRCPL list authors to reflect on what scholarship has looked like in recent years, and to think together about where it could or should head in the future.

From a keystroke to a commute, our seemingly private, and innocuous, actions rarely remain unobserved. Emerging digital technologies, changing forms of media, and new configurations of public spaces have made many aspects of our daily lives hyper-visible. American religious communities are no strangers to such visibility, with a long histories of entanglement with law enforcement and securitization, including as targets of surveillance or as requesters of increased monitoring to protect gathering spaces. IRCPL’s “American Religion is…Surveillance” helps us think together about what it means to watch, to be watched, and to witness, in our present moment.

We tend to think of the problem of paying attention while being bombarded with an overwhelming quantity and variety of information and seduced by ever more invasive forms of distraction as a uniquely contemporary one. But medieval monks, pious early modern poets, and others from the past developed strategies to focus during what they perceived as their own moments of distraction or information overload. What were the pious practices of attention that these medieval and early modern Christians cultivated? How might better understanding these practices from the past help us to think critically about focus and distraction today in both sacred and secular contexts?

In our current moment in the United States, the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) people are under threat. For LGBTQ+ survivors of relationship abuse or “intimate partner violence” (IPV), the erosion of human rights is unfortunately linked to IPV prevalence and dynamics, as well as to barriers to safety. You are invited to a talk on these important issues by researcher Dr. Adam Messinger, author of LGBTQ Intimate Partner Violence: Lessons for Policy, Practice, & Research (2017, UC Press) and co-editor of Transgender Intimate Partner Violence: A Comprehensive Introduction (2020, NYU Press). Come learn how, together, we can build a more inclusive, compassionate future for trans and queer survivors of abuse

From competing claims over authenticity to solidarities forged among neighbors, the notion of “the local” has long been a site of contestation, collaboration, and frankly, confusion. In a time of increasing boundary drawing, it is more urgent than ever to consider what we mean, enable, and foreclose when using the term local in relation to religion. This gathering brings together participants to consider the infrastructures—the relationships and resources—that shape local religious forms and engagement with communities in our own neighborhoods. Join IRCPL for a conversation with scholars and policy practitioners about building community based knowledge, and equitable and effective partnerships.

The talk provides an overview of the problematic history of police response to survivors’ desperate calls for protection and assistance and the role of survivors and their allies in advancing reforms in New York State and nationally to improve law enforcement’s response to domestic violence.  The three speakers will explore the systemic impunity conferred on perpetrators of intimate partner violence by legal regimes over centuries; the role of the domestic violence survivors’ advocacy movement in challenging this state of affairs; highly publicized legal cases of police failure to protect that galvanized the movement; the arguments it advanced in support of new policies; and critical analysis of these policies and some unintended consequences that precipitated a new set of policy reforms. The talk concludes with an assessment of current conditions experienced by domestic violence survivors and the extent to which New York State’s laws curtailing police discretion remain responsive to their needs for protection and justice.  

“Ancestor worship” is a classic category of analysis in religious studies, one that has come to be taken for granted in both academic writing and public discourse as a minoritarian form of religious practice. This talk examines the complexities of imposing the frame of religion on ancestors by examining the relational dimensions of ancestral practices in Zimbabwe that also raise questions about kinship. Drawing on missionary, colonial, and ethnographic archives, the talk interrogates how ancestral practices came to be a minoritized form of “religion” over the past two centuries. In the precolonial world, ancestral spirits were fundamental to local knowledge systems, played a central role in everyday life, and formed the bedrock of social and political power. The talk traces how British colonists worked to demonize, marginalize and ultimately minoritize ancestors in Zimbabwe, configuring them first as “superstition” and later a kind of religion that would become a minority form of religious practice. Ultimately, the talk argues that these processes transformed ancestors into a minority “religion” while erasing their relational dimensions, a struggle that played out in many contexts and continues to limit understandings of ancestors and ancestral practices. At the same time, the talk makes the case for a relational approach to ancestral spirits by examining how people in Zimbabwe continue to imagine, resist, and rework the meanings of both ancestors and religion. This talk draws on material from Raffaella Taylor-Seymour’s book project, titled Ancestral Intimacies: Queerness, Relationality and Religion in Zimbabwe.

For more than forty years, criminalization has been the primary approach to addressing intimate partner violence in the United States.  Intent on ensuring that intimate partner violence was treated like any other crime, anti-violence feminists campaigned for stronger enforcement of the criminal law against those accused of violence.  Bolstered by billions of dollars in federal funding, states have enacted laws and policies mandating arrest and prosecution in cases involving domestic violence and increasing sentences for crimes of violence.  But criminalization has not decreased or deterred intimate partner violence.  Instead, criminalization exacerbates the correlates of intimate partner violence and has serious consequences for the people that it was meant to help.  This talk will argue that we should shift our policy responses to intimate partner violence away from criminalization and instead look at the problem through the lenses of economics, public health, and community intervention.

What if the selfish gene theory is actually a poor model of human reproduction?  Female mammals’ sex organs seem to spend most of their time avoiding fertilization, not the other way around—which can give us better directions in women’s health research and a better way of telling the story of the female body. (Spoiler alert: it might also save male lives, too.)

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 explores 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 and secular responses to the climate crisis.

The series involves four events structured around the elements—Earth, Water, Fire, and Air—each of which will take one element as a lens for engaging with specific climate struggles and the religious debates they ignite. In the final event, an online program on the theme of “Air,” Sophie Chao (University of Sydney) and Nikita Simpson (SOAS, University of London) will discuss their work on climate change, atmospherics and spirits in West Papua, India, and the U.K. This conversation will explore both the religious dimensions of air and atmospheres in these contexts, and the ways contemporary climate change emerges out of longer histories of environmental destruction.

In this talk, based on extensive ethnographic research in Italy, Dr. Parmigiani will focus on representations of women and gender-based violence in contemporary Italy. She will describe and analyze the politics of representation enacted by the Italian feminists of UDI (Unione delle Donne in Italia), the oldest Italian feminist group, in the context of the pervasive representations of women as victims portrayed by the Italian media, Catholic pro-life movements, and hegemonic patriarchal discourses. By analyzing UDI's motto “'We are witnesses, not victims," she will address the strengths and weaknesses of the "ethos of survivorship" and suggest other possible empowering ways to reframe discourses and representations around women and violence, in Italy and elsewhere.

Obstetric violence is characterized by medical neglect, unconsented intervention, and demeaning treatment of pregnant and birthing people. It is a particular, and particularly gendered, form of institutional and social violence that both stems from, and exacerbates, other oppressions and vulnerabilities. For example, obstetric racism is one form of obstetric violence that partially accounts for the unacceptably high rate of maternal mortality among Black, Latino, and Indigenous women in the United States. This talk will place Mexico within a transnational history of obstetric violence. It offers a new genealogy of the concept, beginning with the priest-surgeons of Spain’s late Bourbon empire, during which time the Spanish Crown declared that the spiritual life of an embryo was of greater importance than the corporeal life of its mother. Moving throughout scientific racism in the nineteenth century and to eugenics in the early twentieth century, the talk explores how Catholic theology affected— and was affected by—developments in maternal/fetal science. Even during periods of Church-state conflict, the religious valences of experimental surgery manifested in embodied expressions of racialized, and often-coercive, medical science. Examining this history underscores the long history, and persistent legacy, of religious prerogatives in the provenance of reproductive healthcare.

Cattin, a teenaged enslaved girl brought to France by her enslaver in 1746, experienced extraordinary levels of physical abuse during her seven month stay. This talk explores her world through a micro-microhistory that examines the intersections of Catholicism, slavery, and intimate violence in Nantes, France’s largest slave port. As Cattin pursued fugitivity, her interactions with enslavers, priests, nuns, Hôtel-Dieu bureaucrats and godparents as well as free Black and enslaved women shaped her experiences of intimate violence and communities of care in a Catholic city immersed in racial capitalism.

 Years after critiques of the understanding of religions as texts to be interpreted, decoded, or translated, the notion of religion as belief-based still looms large in public discussion, teaching about religion, and policymaking. What are the remaining implications for the study of religion in our classrooms and civic spaces? In what ways are narratives, dispositions, bodily practices, and material culture overlooked—and with what consequences for American religion? Join IRCPL for a conversation with scholars and policy practitioners about the pitfalls and possibilities of understanding the category of religion in terms of belief.

American responses to the rise of AI have been mixed: is Artificial Intelligence our friend, or our foe? Hope for the future, or our undoing? IRCPL's "American Religion is…Human" program offers new ways of thinking about AI, humanity, and religion, going past the utopian-dystopian binaries that our public discourse is stuck in. We will think together about how the rise of potentially destabilizing AI technology might intersect productively with current efforts to rethink humanistic pedagogy and scholarship. Join IRCPL as we interrogate assumptions about religion’s “human-ness” and considerations of hierarchy and supremacy raised by the notion of religion as an innately human concept.

Islamophobia has posed a serious threat to religious freedom and human rights in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. This event will bring together experts and civil society leaders to explore effective strategies and foster international collaboration in combating Islamophobia. The goal is to serve as a catalyst for change, inspiring a region-wide commitment to protecting the dignity and rights of Muslim communities.

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. The series consists of four events structured around the elements—Earth, Water, Fire, and Air—each of which takes one element as a lens for engaging with specific climate struggles and the religious debates they ignite. Join IRCPL for an in-person conversation on the theme of “Water” with Naveeda Khan (Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University) and Jinah Kim (History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University), who will discuss their work on water, riverine ecosystems, and religion in South Asia. The conversation will explore cosmologies of water, religious struggles taking place around rivers, and the complexities of taking action to prevent environmental destruction. The event will be introduced and moderated by Raffaella Taylor-Seymour (IRCPL, Columbia University).

Patriarchal violence in the home has a long and profoundly troubling history. Recent and contemporary American law and culture have made great strides in identifying and responding to acts of violence in the home. But progress has been slow, and slowing down in the face of new mechanisms and technologies of abuse. In order to understand and respond to current modes and forms of domestic violence, we need to look back—way back to the English Middle Ages—to see the practical and ideological origins of domestic violence. Getting into the core religious and social beliefs that medieval people held about women's rights to autonomy and safety in the home sheds an uncomfortable but important light on social values and jurisprudence since the 1960s.

Monsters have always overflowed with meaning, crying out for interpretation. But some periods become obsessed with monsters: early modern Europe was one such monster moment, and the contemporary United States seems to be another. In the early modern period monsters could be individuals—people or animals with congenital anomalies—or self-reproducing species. In both cases their differences from their non-monstrous counterparts were easily visible, evoking emotions ranging from horror or terror to wonder, and the frameworks for interpreting them were primarily religious; they could be signs of divine disapproval or emblems of God’s power and creativity. In contrast, modern monsters are almost always species: humanoid ones like zombies and vampires, who may not be immediately recognizable and who evoke emotions of fear or horror, and non-human species, who can be benign. Moralized interpretations have largely replaced theological ones. These premodern/ modern contrasts and connections are the starting point for thinking about how monsters magnetize attention and what the current monster moment says about who we are now.