Mika
Between Rawls and Religion: IRNRD Annual Conference 2010
Just a heads up on the activities of the International Research Network on Religion and Democracy (IRNRD). LUISS and John Cabot University are hosting the annual event in Rome this year. It's next week and has a highly distinguished lineup of participants -- check out poster below:
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LEARNING TO LIVE FREE: Minnesota Laestadian Sex Abuse Case
Apparently -- and indeed unfortunately -- laestadian abuse cases are not confined to Finland. Learning to Live Freereports of a case in the OALC in Minnesota:
AFAIK the Finnish press has thus far failed to notice this case. Päivi Räsänen keeping the religion beat busy I suppose.
Mika
Minnesota Laestadian Sex Abuse Case: "Apparently sex abuse is still happening in Laestadian circles in the United States as well, as attested to in this article regarding a case that hit the news last July involving a volunteer at the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church on Rowland Road in Minnetonka, Minnesota."
AFAIK the Finnish press has thus far failed to notice this case. Päivi Räsänen keeping the religion beat busy I suppose.
Mika
Laestadian Abuse -- Story Continues
The leading national broadsheet Helsingin Sanomat ran a story on the 29th of September reporting that an influential member of the SRK has been in custody since July on child abuse charges. Helsinki Times ran a similar report in English. Allegations of abuse were picked up by the media in the spring, but shows little signs of quieting down after the summer.
According to Kaleva the head of SRK Olavi Voittonen dissociated the accused from all of the Central Committee's activities. He also made the argument that among the laestadians there are no more paedophiles than in the rest of the society, and the current furor against the movement has been raised by the media. Voittonen firmly denies hushing down the scandal and emphasises that child abuse is not an internal matter, but all cases should be reported to the police.
The odds are this piece of news will not be going away in the short term.
Mika
According to Kaleva the head of SRK Olavi Voittonen dissociated the accused from all of the Central Committee's activities. He also made the argument that among the laestadians there are no more paedophiles than in the rest of the society, and the current furor against the movement has been raised by the media. Voittonen firmly denies hushing down the scandal and emphasises that child abuse is not an internal matter, but all cases should be reported to the police.
The odds are this piece of news will not be going away in the short term.
Mika
New blog on the block
Hope you had a good summer! With September just around the corner it is time to get back to business.
There is a new blogger on matters laestadian: Laestadianleaks.
What is it about exactly is early to tell since the site has been up about a day or so. It does seem to emulate its namesake inasmuch the first posts out some of SRK's political connections. Interesting stuff, indeed. With posts like these the blog is likely to get noticed.
Mika.
There is a new blogger on matters laestadian: Laestadianleaks.
What is it about exactly is early to tell since the site has been up about a day or so. It does seem to emulate its namesake inasmuch the first posts out some of SRK's political connections. Interesting stuff, indeed. With posts like these the blog is likely to get noticed.
Mika.
New book on Habermas and the problems of the "post-secular" condition
Péter Losonczi & Aakash Singh (eds.): Discoursing the Post-Secular: Essays on the Habermasian Post-Secular Turn has been published by the LIT Verlag (2010, 184 pp).
"This collection of fresh and lively essays analyzes the Habermasian post-secular turn as it has been evolving over the last decade triggering intensive debates in social and political theory, but at the same time aims to situate the arising postsecular discourse(s) within the larger intellectual environment shaped by the complex influence of the alleged 'return' of religion or the religious. The volume includes studies from as diverse fields as cultural theory, social theory, political philosophy, and theory of religion, as well as theology and bioethics. Key issues such as tolerance, the nature and challenges of modernity, pluralism, knowledge and faith, human dignity, ritual, idolatry or transcendence are brought into the discussion in an inventive way, and Habermas's work is reflected upon in comparison with figures like Levinas, Vattimo, and Agnes Heller." (Publishers blurb.)
Table of contents:
Editors’ Introduction
1. John Rundell: "Multiple Modernities, Sacredness, and the Democratic Imaginary: Religion as a Stand-in Category"
2. Devrim Kabasakal: "The Relevance and the Limits of the Notion of a Post-Secular Age In Jurgen Habermas’s Theory of Toleration"
3. Patrick Loobuyck & Stefan Rummens: "Beyond secularization? Notes on Habermas’s Account of the Postsecular Society"
4. Aakash Singh: "Habermas' Postsecularism: The Penetration/Preservation of the (European) Political Public Sphere"
5. Péter Losonczi: "Habermas, Levinas and the Problem of the Sacred: Postsecular Strategies in Resonating Divergence"
6. Matthias Riedl: "The Permanence of the Eschatological: Reflections on Gianni Vattimo’s Hermeneutic Age"
7. Nicholas Adams: "Habermas on Religion: The Problem of Discursive Extraterritoriality"
8. Edmund Arens: "What is Religion, and What is Religion For? Toughts in Light of Communicative Theory and Communicative Theology"
9. Michael Hoelzl: "Towards a Thicker Description of Transcendence"
10. Gábor Viktor Orosz: "Human Dignity and Genetics in a Postsecular Age: Habermas’s Ideas Concerning Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis and Enhancement in the Context of Theological Tradition".
"This collection of fresh and lively essays analyzes the Habermasian post-secular turn as it has been evolving over the last decade triggering intensive debates in social and political theory, but at the same time aims to situate the arising postsecular discourse(s) within the larger intellectual environment shaped by the complex influence of the alleged 'return' of religion or the religious. The volume includes studies from as diverse fields as cultural theory, social theory, political philosophy, and theory of religion, as well as theology and bioethics. Key issues such as tolerance, the nature and challenges of modernity, pluralism, knowledge and faith, human dignity, ritual, idolatry or transcendence are brought into the discussion in an inventive way, and Habermas's work is reflected upon in comparison with figures like Levinas, Vattimo, and Agnes Heller." (Publishers blurb.)
Table of contents:
Editors’ Introduction
1. John Rundell: "Multiple Modernities, Sacredness, and the Democratic Imaginary: Religion as a Stand-in Category"
2. Devrim Kabasakal: "The Relevance and the Limits of the Notion of a Post-Secular Age In Jurgen Habermas’s Theory of Toleration"
3. Patrick Loobuyck & Stefan Rummens: "Beyond secularization? Notes on Habermas’s Account of the Postsecular Society"
4. Aakash Singh: "Habermas' Postsecularism: The Penetration/Preservation of the (European) Political Public Sphere"
5. Péter Losonczi: "Habermas, Levinas and the Problem of the Sacred: Postsecular Strategies in Resonating Divergence"
6. Matthias Riedl: "The Permanence of the Eschatological: Reflections on Gianni Vattimo’s Hermeneutic Age"
7. Nicholas Adams: "Habermas on Religion: The Problem of Discursive Extraterritoriality"
8. Edmund Arens: "What is Religion, and What is Religion For? Toughts in Light of Communicative Theory and Communicative Theology"
9. Michael Hoelzl: "Towards a Thicker Description of Transcendence"
10. Gábor Viktor Orosz: "Human Dignity and Genetics in a Postsecular Age: Habermas’s Ideas Concerning Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis and Enhancement in the Context of Theological Tradition".
The Biopolitics of Development: A Symposium at September 9--10 at Kolkata, India
Keynote Speakers
- Michael Dillon (Sehir University, Turkey)
- Manas Ray (CSSSC, India)
- Julian Reid (University of Lapland, Finland)
- Ranabir Samaddar (Calcutta Research Group, India)
Organized by the University of Lapland and the Calcutta Research Group. Funded by the Finnish Academy
How can we understand the historical and contemporary function of development doctrine in the propagation and expansion of liberal regimes of governance? How has the strategic function of development changed in the transition from liberal to neoliberal rationalities of governance? And what is the relevance of the shift from development to sustainable development for the increasingly global hegemony of neoliberalism? Answering these questions requires examining the fundamental and complex correlations of economy, politics and security with life in liberal doctrine. For it is the reification of life which has permitted liberalism to proliferate, like a poison species, taking over entire states and societies in the wake of their disasters, utilizing their suffering, as conditions for its spread, installing markets, commodifying anything it can lay its hands on, monetizing the value of everything, driving peoples from countryside into cities, generating displacement, homelessness, and deprivation.
Neoliberalism is widely understood as a theory of political economic practices proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade. Less understood, however, is how its claims to be able to increase wealth and freedom became correlated with claims to increase the prosperity and security of life itself. For life was triangulated with capital and labour within liberal regimes of governance from the very earliest emergence of liberal political economy’s competition and conflict with the Cameralism and Mercantilism of Polizeiwissenschaft. Life, in the form of species existence, rather than nature, specifically the political and economic nature in particular of rational Man whose dual nature derived much more from European scholasticism than many of its early modern proponents conceded, has progressively emerged as a singularly important a priori for liberal political economy.
Neoliberalism breaks from earlier liberalisms and traditions of political economy in so far as its legitimacy rests on its capacities to correlate practices for the increase of economic profitability and prosperity not just with practices for the securing of the human species, but with the life of the biosphere. These correlations of economy, well-being, freedom, security and biospheric life in and among neoliberal regimes of practice and representation comprise some of the foundations of its biopolitics. As this symposium will explore, we cannot understand how liberalism functions, most especially how it has gained the global hegemony that it has, without addressing how systematically the category of life has organized the correlation of its various practices of governance, as well as how important the shift in the very understanding of life, from the human to the biospheric, has been for changes in those practices. Today it is not simply living species and habitats that are threatened with extinction, and for which we must mobilize our care, but the words and gestures of human solidarity on which resistance to biopolitical regimes of governance depends. A sense of responsibility for the survival of the life of the biosphere is not a sufficient condition for the development of a political subject capable of speaking back to neoliberalism; nor a mere humanistic sense of responsibility for the life of human amongst other beings. What is required is a subject responsible for securing incorporeal species, chiefly that of the political, currently threatened with extinction, on account of the overwrought fascination with life that has colonized the developmental as well as every other biopoliticized imaginary of the modern age.
This symposium seeks to explore a range of responses to this problematic. It invites papers from across the disciplines and from a variety of theoretical perspectives that address any aspect of the biopolitics of development. This will be a two-day symposium with about 20-25 participants marked by presentation of views, papers, roundtable discussions, and question-answer sessions. Paper proposals aiming to respond to this problematic should be submitted to Julian Reid (reidjulian@gmail.com) and Ranabir Samaddar (ranabir@mcrg.ac.in).
Deadline: July 31, 2010.
- Michael Dillon (Sehir University, Turkey)
- Manas Ray (CSSSC, India)
- Julian Reid (University of Lapland, Finland)
- Ranabir Samaddar (Calcutta Research Group, India)
Organized by the University of Lapland and the Calcutta Research Group. Funded by the Finnish Academy
How can we understand the historical and contemporary function of development doctrine in the propagation and expansion of liberal regimes of governance? How has the strategic function of development changed in the transition from liberal to neoliberal rationalities of governance? And what is the relevance of the shift from development to sustainable development for the increasingly global hegemony of neoliberalism? Answering these questions requires examining the fundamental and complex correlations of economy, politics and security with life in liberal doctrine. For it is the reification of life which has permitted liberalism to proliferate, like a poison species, taking over entire states and societies in the wake of their disasters, utilizing their suffering, as conditions for its spread, installing markets, commodifying anything it can lay its hands on, monetizing the value of everything, driving peoples from countryside into cities, generating displacement, homelessness, and deprivation.
Neoliberalism is widely understood as a theory of political economic practices proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade. Less understood, however, is how its claims to be able to increase wealth and freedom became correlated with claims to increase the prosperity and security of life itself. For life was triangulated with capital and labour within liberal regimes of governance from the very earliest emergence of liberal political economy’s competition and conflict with the Cameralism and Mercantilism of Polizeiwissenschaft. Life, in the form of species existence, rather than nature, specifically the political and economic nature in particular of rational Man whose dual nature derived much more from European scholasticism than many of its early modern proponents conceded, has progressively emerged as a singularly important a priori for liberal political economy.
Neoliberalism breaks from earlier liberalisms and traditions of political economy in so far as its legitimacy rests on its capacities to correlate practices for the increase of economic profitability and prosperity not just with practices for the securing of the human species, but with the life of the biosphere. These correlations of economy, well-being, freedom, security and biospheric life in and among neoliberal regimes of practice and representation comprise some of the foundations of its biopolitics. As this symposium will explore, we cannot understand how liberalism functions, most especially how it has gained the global hegemony that it has, without addressing how systematically the category of life has organized the correlation of its various practices of governance, as well as how important the shift in the very understanding of life, from the human to the biospheric, has been for changes in those practices. Today it is not simply living species and habitats that are threatened with extinction, and for which we must mobilize our care, but the words and gestures of human solidarity on which resistance to biopolitical regimes of governance depends. A sense of responsibility for the survival of the life of the biosphere is not a sufficient condition for the development of a political subject capable of speaking back to neoliberalism; nor a mere humanistic sense of responsibility for the life of human amongst other beings. What is required is a subject responsible for securing incorporeal species, chiefly that of the political, currently threatened with extinction, on account of the overwrought fascination with life that has colonized the developmental as well as every other biopoliticized imaginary of the modern age.
This symposium seeks to explore a range of responses to this problematic. It invites papers from across the disciplines and from a variety of theoretical perspectives that address any aspect of the biopolitics of development. This will be a two-day symposium with about 20-25 participants marked by presentation of views, papers, roundtable discussions, and question-answer sessions. Paper proposals aiming to respond to this problematic should be submitted to Julian Reid (reidjulian@gmail.com) and Ranabir Samaddar (ranabir@mcrg.ac.in).
Deadline: July 31, 2010.
CALL FOR PAPERS: Between Rawls and Religion: Liberalism in a Postsecular World
LUISS University and John Cabot University host an IRNRD event in Rome on December 16--18, 2010.
This conference will bring together scholars in philosophy, sociology, political theory, legal theory, religious studies, and theology to discuss the problematic relationship between religion and politics in contemporary public life. It will focus particularly on John Rawls’ influential treatment of liberalism in pluralist societies and on the challenges posed to such a treatment by the re-emergence of religions in public life and the development of what some have called a postsecular world. The conference will thus consider such topics as:
- Religion in Rawls
- Political liberalism in a postsecular world
- Religious doctrines and the idea of public reason
- Religions and overlapping consensus
- Liberalism and political theology
- The philosophical and political foundations of postsecular pluralism
- Redefining the relations and boundaries between religion and public life
- Accommodating religious identities in liberal societies
Speakers include: Tariq Modood (Bristol) (tbc), Stephen Macedo (Princeton), Sebastiano Maffettone (LUISS), Paul Weithman (Notre Dame), Maeve Cooke (Dublin), Joh. Van Der Ven (Nijmegen), David Rasmussen (Boston), Andrew March (Yale)(tbc), and Alessandro Ferrara (Rome).
Submission guidelines:
A paper suitable for presentation in 20 minutes and a 500-word abstract, both prepared for blind review, should be sent by 1 October 2010 to the following email address: infophd@luiss.it
Notice of acceptance will be provided by 15 October 2010.
Selected papers will be considered for publication
Enquiries: infophd@luiss.it
This conference will bring together scholars in philosophy, sociology, political theory, legal theory, religious studies, and theology to discuss the problematic relationship between religion and politics in contemporary public life. It will focus particularly on John Rawls’ influential treatment of liberalism in pluralist societies and on the challenges posed to such a treatment by the re-emergence of religions in public life and the development of what some have called a postsecular world. The conference will thus consider such topics as:
- Religion in Rawls
- Political liberalism in a postsecular world
- Religious doctrines and the idea of public reason
- Religions and overlapping consensus
- Liberalism and political theology
- The philosophical and political foundations of postsecular pluralism
- Redefining the relations and boundaries between religion and public life
- Accommodating religious identities in liberal societies
Speakers include: Tariq Modood (Bristol) (tbc), Stephen Macedo (Princeton), Sebastiano Maffettone (LUISS), Paul Weithman (Notre Dame), Maeve Cooke (Dublin), Joh. Van Der Ven (Nijmegen), David Rasmussen (Boston), Andrew March (Yale)(tbc), and Alessandro Ferrara (Rome).
Submission guidelines:
A paper suitable for presentation in 20 minutes and a 500-word abstract, both prepared for blind review, should be sent by 1 October 2010 to the following email address: infophd@luiss.it
Notice of acceptance will be provided by 15 October 2010.
Selected papers will be considered for publication
Enquiries: infophd@luiss.it
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