Author Archives: Mark Porter Webb

Joanna Tice- Learning to Feel God: The Experience of Subjectivity in 21st Century Evangelical Political Thought

December 03, 2014
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Committee for the Study of Religion

Abstract: What is the political thought of early 21st century evangelicalism? Political scientists have written about evangelical influences on Christian right policy in the late 20th century, but how has the movement shifted in the new millennium? This paper focuses on a revival that began among evangelicals in the late 1990’s and continues today, seeking to reestablish evangelicals as primarily [read more»]

Peter Gottschalk- “Globalized Islamophobia: Nonsense, Commonsense, or Imperial Origins?”

November 19, 2014
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Committee for the Study of Religion

Abstract: Despite historical and geographical variations, similar sentiments toward Muslims and Islam have become evident in Anglophone cultures over four centuries. During their empire, Britons developed domestically and abroad tropes of Muslim invasion and Islamic tyranny, Muslim valor and Islamic piety. Officials, missionaries, colonists, and their descendants have referenced “the Muslim” as a foil and extreme by which to gauge [read more»]

Marcin Wodzinski–‘Space and Belief: toward a geography of Hasidism’

November 05, 2014
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Committee for the Study of Religion

The aim of this lecture is to suggest potential sources, approaches and conceptual frames in which one could research chrono-spatial aspects of Hasidism and, more generally, any modern religious movement. Is it true that Hasidism dominated most of East European Jewry already by the end of the eighteenth century? How could we measure it? What were the borders of Hasidic [read more»]

Kyle Francis—Civilizing Settlers: Faith, Foreigners, and Contesting French Identity in Colonial Algeria, 1867-1883

October 29, 2014
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Committee for the Study of Religion

This paper examines the contested space occupied by Catholic missionaries in the French government’s attempt to mold a cohesive community out of a heterogeneous group of European settlers in Algeria between 1867 and 1883. It argues that this effort constituted an alternate civilizing mission in which the aim was not to assimilate indigenous colonial subjects, but rather to spread French [read more»]

Yaakov Ariel—“An Unexpected Fascination: The Strange Case of Christian Zionism”

October 22, 2014
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Committee for the Study of Religion

Christian Zionism is an unusual phenomenon with no other like it in the history of interactions between religious traditions. In no other case have adherents of one community of faith looked upon members of another ethnic-religious group as chosen by God to play a decisive role in bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth. Conservative Christians who insist that [read more»]