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.
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.”
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.
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?
