Category Archives: Religion

New episodes of The Issue is Not The Issue

The Issue is Not the Issue: A Podcast with Hans-Georg Moeller and Dan Sarafinas

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfs0MY7rs8J6jWlCdneoPVQ

 

Hans-Georg Moeller and Dan Sarafinas discuss contemporary debates on “political correctness” and related moral and social issues. They point to concepts such as virtue speech (“virtue signalling”), civil religion, “profilicity,” and the role of critique to better understand their nature.

 

Episode 3—Critique:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W1m0Bez8vU

Philosophy today runs the risk of once more becoming the “handmaiden of theology” by being put in the service of civil religion. The Kantian concept of critique is revived to reflect on contemporary dogmatism and associated power structures that lead to phenomena such as “competitive wokeness” in entertainment (Taylor Swift) or the need to write “diversity statements” in academia. The idea of a therapeutic rather than a normative philosophy is suggested and it is explained how society, along with critique, evolves rather than progresses.

 

Episode 4—Profilicity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Yz1C0-mtWI

Why do we need to produce “virtue speech”? We need it to be competitive in society and to bolster our public profiles. A new profile-based identity paradigm, called “profilicity,” is on the rise. It is replacing other identity paradigms such as sincerity and authenticity and provides not only individuals but also institutions (political parties, companies, universities, etc.) with identity value.

New book: Heaven is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to “Religion” and Empire in Ancient China by Filippo Marsili

SUMMARY

Heaven is Empty offers a new perspective on the relationship between religion and the creation of the first Chinese empires. Heaven Is Empty offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China’s early empires (221 BCE–9 CE) and shows how the unification of the Central States was possible without a unitary and universalistic conception of religion.

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The Issue is Not the Issue: A Podcast with Hans-Georg Moeller and Dan Sarafinas

Hans-Georg Moeller and Dan Sarafinas discuss contemporary debates on “political correctness” and related moral and social issues. They point to concepts such as virtue speech (“virtue signalling”), civil religion, and the role of critique to better understand their nature.

Episode 1–Virtue Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pg8H-b87Cs;

The phenomenon of virtue speech (“virtue signalling”) has become a central feature in recent outrage movements pervasive throughout the West. Virtue speech, which is implicitly tied to accusations of hate speech, is a form of moralistic discourse setting speech examples that make it difficult to openly discuss elements of our culture without falling into the trap of moralizing.

Episode 2–Civil Religion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EDEuXCPHOQ

Civil religion plays a central role in the virtue speech, or political correctness, discourse. The history of the concept is discussed as well as the structure of the American form of civil religion and how tenets of civil religion are constantly being performed and re-enacted, particularly in current social media outrage movements.

 

New issue of Journal of Chinese Religions

Vol. 46, no. 2 (November 2018) of the Journal of Chinese Religions is now online at https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/yjch20/current?nav=tocList. Read on for the Table of Contents, which includes reviews of Michael Ing’s The Vulnerability of Integrity in Early Confucian Thought and Geoffrey Redmond’s translation of The I Ching, among others.

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Job in East Asian Religions at Oberlin

COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES, OBERLIN COLLEGE

FACULTY TENURE TRACK POSITION AVAILABLE

Title:  East Asian Religions

Job Summary:

The East Asian Studies Program and Religion Department at Oberlin College invite applications for a full-time tenure track faculty position in East Asian Religions in the College of Arts and Sciences. Initial appointment to this position will be for a term of four years, beginning fall of 2019, and will carry the rank of assistant professor.

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Database of Religious History

Prof. Ted Slingerland writes…

Some of you may know about our relatively new project, the Database of Religious History (DRH; www.religiondatabase.org). If you had contact with the project in our early days, it has evolved considerably in the last year or two. My recent co-authored piece about it in JAAR gives a basic overview:

https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/85/2/312/3068834

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CFP: ISCP at AAR 2018

ISCP Call for Papers: 2018 AAR Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado, November 17-20, 2018

The AAR 2018 meeting is going to be held in Denver, CO, hosted by the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion. More detailed information can be found at AAR website: https://www.aarweb.org/annual-meeting

The ISCP typically host one session at the American Academy of Religion. If you wish to participate in this event, please send your proposal to Yong Huang at yonghuang@cuhk.edu.hk.

You can choose one of the two following submission methods:

  • paper proposal ( with your name, the title of the paper, and an abstract of 250-300 words)
  • panel proposal (your name and the names of the panelists; the title of the panel, and the abstract of the panel in 250 words; please also include the title of each individual paper with an abstract of 200 words)

Deadline: May 20th, 2018