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Papers: Emergent Spheres of the Secular

The following papers will be presented at Martin Ramstedt's workshop on "Emergent Spheres of the Secular in Colonial Asia" (26-28 September) here at the KFG. The workshop is open to a limited number of listeners, please contact Johannes to register if you are interested.

• Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs: "Freemasonry, Catholicism and British Colonialism"

• Isaac Lubelsky: "Theosophy and Indian Nationalism"

• Nahid Mozaffari: "Rabindranath Tagore in Iran and Iraq: 'Dialogue among (Asian) Cultures' on Modernity, Nationalism, Religion, and Tolerance

• Rinku Lamba: "An Analysis of Rabindranath Tagore's Views on Religion and Nationalism"

• Hans Martin Krämer: "Pan-Asianism: A New Imaginary between Religion and the Secular"

• Ruth Streicher: "Constructing the (Buddhist) Secular in Imperial Siam" 

• Marieke Bloembergen: "Ancient Buddhist Sites, Heritage Formation, and Spiritual and Scholarly Knowledge Networks in Late Colonial South and Southeast Asia"

• Martin Ramstedt: "New Spaces for “the Secular” and the Javanese Awakening"

Workshop on the Bureaucratization of Islam

The Emmy Noether Group "Bureaucratization of Islam" at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale) organises a Workshop on "Conceptualizing the Bureaucratization of Islam: anthropological and transdisciplinary perspectives" from 7 to 8 September 2017. For more information contact Dominik Müller.

CfA: Postdoc Fellowships

The Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies invites applications for Postdoctoral Fellowships for the calendar year 2018: "We are interested in attracting outstanding postdoctoral researchers who are engaged in research projects relevant to our research focus. The call is open for recent postdocs (not more than four years after submission of thesis) in the humanities and the social sciences." 

CfP: Nature and Beyond: Transcendence and Immanence in Science and Religion

All those attending the 17th European Conference on Science and Theology (ECST) (Lyon, France, 17-22 April 2018) are invited to offer a paper on this conference theme for presentation in a short paper session.

Science is the systematic and empirically testable study, description and explanation of natural phenomena. Methodological naturalism seems to be part and parcel of the pursuit of science, insofar as any scientific object of investigation must be identified by reference to natural entities, and any scientific explanation can only refer to natural causes, leaving out categories such as God(s), angels, immaterial souls and the like. However, how far does this methodological naturalism take us? Does it imply that nature in a purely scientific understanding is all we have? Is nature itself pointing beyond nature when it brings about living and self-reflective beings? And what kind of answers do religious traditions provide when they refer to what is transcendent to our natural world? Or is God fully immanent within the natural world? These and other related questions are ones we want to discuss.

Papers related to these issues are welcome. Papers on other aspects of the interaction between science and theology may also be offered.