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Spring 2008 Faculty Seminars
• Time and Modernity: Organized by Wayne Proudfoot and Jonathan Schorsch, Professors of Religion
For phenomena connected with religion, few things may be more central than time. The notion of sacred time; the eternality of god; the mystical attempt to transcend time; the end (of) time itself—these are just some of the ways this seminar looks at how time and religion ground one another. Yet few phenomena are directly studied and discussed as little as time. This seminar seeks to address some of these elusive themes in the hope of stimulating thought about one of the ways scholars construct religion and religion constructs its world. It will look at calendars, millenarianism, ritual, philosophy of history, and literature to try to illumine some of the relations between religions and time(s).
• Blood: Organized by Courtney Bender, Associate Professor of Religion, and Gil Anidjar, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature in Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures.
The language of a "bygone culture" sometimes sounds off-key given the notable presence and mark of blood in common discourse, scholarly work, religious activity. Blood seals or rends diverse relations between varied social and fleshy bodies; blood consecrates, contaminates, circulates, and flows. It is categorically registered in modern conceptions of violence, trauma and purity. Whether construed as a thing of the past, that which makes ambiguous the boundary between the modern and the religious, or something else altogether, the blood this seminar will aim to read could be described as a “religious fact.” The seminar’s bibliography broadly engages anthropological, historical, scientific, social, political and theological dimensions of blood in order to understand both of these terms – religious, fact – when it comes to blood.
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