How can philosophy of religion address its historical disregard of reality? What might a philosophy of material, lived or everyday religion look like?

Call for Papers for a one-day workshop on Philosophy, Religious Studies and the Impact Agenda (abstract deadline March 11 2013), hosted by the Philosophy and Religious Practices Network at the University of Liverpool on May 9th 2013.

Link to the Call for Papers for the new Philosophy and Religious Practices Network event, “The Humanities and Lived Religion: Philosophy, Religious Studies and the Impact Agenda” (May 9th 2013). Deadline for abstracts March 11th 2013.

“My atheism gets on in the churches, all the churches, do you understand that?” -- Jacques Derrida

Subverting the Norm — a two-day event that brings together pastors, theologians, philosophers, church practitioners, and researchers in religion — asks a follow-up question:Can postmodern theology live in the churches? As such, we are interested in presentations that explore the relationship between radical theologies and the church.

Call for Papers (deadline Jan 15) for an interdisciplinary conference featuring Adrian Johnston, Dorothea Olkowski, and Michael Naas as keynotes. I’m thinking about submitting a paper on the translation of realist French thought through the medium of religious ritual.

Call for Papers (deadline Feb 1st 2013) for the 18th Villanova Philosophy Conference (Apr 12-13 2013), featuring confirmed speakers Mladen Dolar, Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič. 

Flyer and Call for Papers for “The Wisdom and Foolishness of God: Reconsidering 1 Corinthians 1-2,” University of Geneva, Switzerland, May 23-25 2013. Keynote speakers include Jack Caputo.

Sadly this conference is on at the same time as the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture’s conference in Copenhagen on Cultures of Transition, at which I hope to speak. I might submit abstracts to both, though, and see if I get accepted to either.

Another Call for Papers, this time for “Alternative Salvations,” a day conference at the University of Chester on September 18 2012.

To speak of salvation is, broadly, to speak about transformation from one present reality into a new, transformed and better reality. While the language of salvation itself is not necessarily found in every religious tradition, the hope of, or incentive to work towards, such transformation is a widespread characteristic of many religious traditions.

In Christianity, there are a number of dominant perspectives on salvation associated with particular traditions, usually expressed in grand future eschatological narratives. But what of alternative approaches to salvation that have developed outside of established religious orthodoxies?

This conference will explore:

• how ‘unorthodox’ readings of sacred texts inform salvation experience;
• how life transformations outside of religious contexts might be considered spiritual;
• how ideas of this-worldly salvation are politicised;
• how ideas of salvation are simultaneously secularised and infused with new power;

and will ask:

• what alternative salvations can be discovered within Christianity and how might they be practised?

In particular, conference organisers are seeking to explore the ways that alternative religious, spiritual and secular understandings of the notion of salvation already shape, and have the potential to shape, how people live and act in Christian and post-Christian contexts.

The deadline for abstracts (200 words) is April 16 2012. See here for submission details. 

Again, my post-doc project could fit quite nicely with this conference theme, so I’m going to have a think about submitting an abstract for this one too.

The “Haunting Memories” workshop is being organised by members of the Crossing Cultures Research Group in the School of Arts and Humanities at Stirling University (external website here) and will take place on May 18 2012 from 10am until 4pm.

They’re looking for 10 minute presentations that address cultural expressions intersecting conceptions of place, memory and identity.

Themes that might be addressed include:

• dealing with trauma; the need to mourn; the pursuit of justice;
• is haunting (memory) an essential element of the modern condition of creating place and identity?
• Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ – what constitutes interpretation of the ‘rotten’ in terms of identity creation?
• haunting as the opening of a space for identity creation; and
• individual and collective expressions of haunting memories.

Since I’m trying to get feedback from various academic audiences on my post-doc project on the emerging Christian practice of suspended space (see one of my funding bid abstracts here), I think I’ll submit an abstract for this conference, especially on the intersection of hauntology, religion without religion, identity suspension, and subjective transformation.

Abstract (300 words max) and bio (100 words max) by the deadline (April 18 2012) - submission details here.

The 2nd Power of the Word conference (organised jointly by the Institute of English Studies and Heythrop College, University of London) will be on the theme of Poetry and Prayer: Continuities and Discontinuities. (Senate House, University of London, 29-30 June 2012).

Here’s the Call for Papers:

Prayer is the little implement
Through which Men reach
Where Presence—is denied them

Emily Dickinson

The second Power of the Word conference focuses on the theme of poetry and prayer. It seeks to promote further the dialogue, begun successfully at Heythrop College in last June’s conference, between theologians, philosophers, literary scholars and creative writers about the following questions:

What do poetry and prayer share?

How do they differ?

In what ways do they relate to each other?

The International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture (ISRLC) is hosting its 16th biennial conference from Oct 19-21 2012 at the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The conference theme is “Cultures of Transition: Presence, Absence, Memory” and here’s the Call for Papers:

Today, culture is largely understood to be in transition. While national, regional, religious and local cultures had previously been described, in their various forms, as more or less stable entities, they are now increasingly perceived as determined by developments, influences, changes and conflicts related to secularisation, industrialisation, globalisation, migrations of various kinds, and many other politico-economic, cultural and religious forces. From this perspective, culture takes shape by processes in constant flux, as it negotiates between the presence of new conditions, values, ideas and beliefs on the one hand, and the presence of previously dominant ones on the other.

Individual as well as group identities have come under these pressures of transition, and as a result the notion of memory has taken on increasingly central significance: individual and collective memory provide connections and perform functions that are both indispensable and problematic in processes of identity formation, as manifested in literary, religious, philosophical and other conceptual and imaginative forms of expression.

The Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion are hosting their second international conference, “Thinking the Absolute: Speculation, Philosophy, and the End of Religion,” June 29th - July 1st 2012, at Liverpool Hope University, UK.

Keynote speakers include Catherine Malabou, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Levi Bryant.

Here’s the Call for Papers:

“The contemporary end of metaphysics is an end which, being sceptical, could only be a religious end of metaphysics.” Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008).

Meillassoux identifies the ‘turn to religion’ in contemporary continental philosophy with a failure of thinking. The Kantian refusal to think the absolute leads to scepticism about reality in itself. Ironically, this lends itself to ‘fideism,’ the decision to project religious meaning on to the unknowable beyond.

According to Meillassoux, a philosophy obsessed with mystery becomes the accomplice of irrational faith. The solution is to find ways of once more thinking the absolute in its reality, severed from its dependence upon a knowing subject, or upon language and social norms. At the same time, new possibilities for thinking religion (exemplified by Meillassoux’s own Divine Inexistence) are emerging.

The Society for the Study of Theology is hosting its 61st annual conference, on the theme of ”The Holy Spirit.”

How does the Spirit shape human life and history? How is the Spirit present to the Father and the Son? How is the Spirit active in the Church? Does the Spirit elude representation?

Plenary speakers will include Valerie Cooper, Rachel Muers, Alan Sell and Amos Yong, and Graham Ward will deliver his Presidential Address.

The SST invite proposals for short papers (2,000 words) on the conference theme and for seminar papers on a range of ongoing topics (seminars running in 2012 include: Church, Theology and Ministry; Doctrine after Christendom; Philosophy and Theology; Theological Anthropology; Theological Ethics; Theology and the Arts; Theology, Feminism and Gender; and Trinity and Christology). There’s also a bursary fund.

I’m going to submit something around my work extending Slavoj Zizek’s notion of the Holy Spirit.