Alternative Visions Lecture

What role is religion playing in the 2016 presidential campaign? How is this similar to or different from previous elections? What does the future of religion and politics hold—either in elections or in day-to-day political life? These are a few of the questions that will be discussed in the Center's next Alternative Visions event, taking place in the Old Main Carson Ballroom on the ASU Tempe campus at 4:30pm on Thursday October 20, 2016. The event will feature a panel discussion on religion...

Jacques Berlinerblau a Professor and Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He holds separate doctorates in ancient Near Eastern Languages and Literatures (New York University, 1991), and in Sociology (The New School for Social Research, 1999). "Secularism" is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the entire American political lexicon. For some, it is a synonym for “atheism.” For others, it is a code word...

This September will be fifteen years since the attacks of 9/11. How has our view of the relationship between religion, politics and conflict changed since then? Does this change how we remember the attacks, and what they represent in the public consciousness? How we study the wars and conflicts that resulted, and what this means for U.S. policy? How has our view been impacted by lone wolf and organized terrorist attacks in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, and how does the rise in nativism...

Over the last two decades the human rights discourse has become increasingly hegemonic and become increasingly prominent in the humanitarian sector. Many lead aid agencies have been quite ambivalent about this development. Some have embraced a “rights-based” orientation. Others, though, have exhibited considerable anxiety, worrying that human rights might corrupt humanitarianism. Why the anxiety? What is at stake? Through a comparative examination of their practices, and the growing role of...

"The age of humanitarian intervention to protect civilians is not over, because civilians keep dying."–Michael Ignatieff, 2014 Michael Ignatieff is an outspoken public intellectual and a prolific writer on political philosophy, international affairs and conflicts caused by ethnic and religious strife. A politician and a scholar, he has applied his unique perspective to the study of war, religion, ethnicity and politics. His writings have addressed conflict in many countries including...

“For the last four decades, Harvey Cox has been the leading trend spotter in American religion.”—Stephen Prothero, author of Religious Literacy Harvey Cox's book The Secular City, first published in 1965, is an international bestseller and widely regarded as one of the most influential books of Protestant theology of the last 50 years. His research and teaching interests focus on the interaction of religion, culture, and politics. Until his retirement in 2009 from Harvard University, Cox...

Eric Bain-Selbo is the Department Head of Philosophy and Religion at Western Kentucky University and Co-Founder of the WKU Institute for Citizenship and Social Responsibility. In this presentation, Bain-Selbo highlights the religious dimensions of violence and the role of violence in the religion and culture of the South. Extending into popular culture, he then will make the case that sport—particularly American football—has been a cultural phenomenon in the South that has close ties with...

Almost 15 years after the beginning of the United States’ War on Terror, many would describe the American global counterinsurgency effort as a bloody quagmire. To try and find peace for people to whom the US government remains committed requires changing strategies based on what has and has not worked. For acclaimed journalist and writer Anand Gopal, those solutions might lie in the most confusing and troublesome anti-terror effort to date: the War in Afghanistan. In his recent book, No Good...

Religious self-identification is on the decline in the United States. Some analysts have cited the cause as being a post-9/11 perception that faith in general is a source of aggression, intolerance, and divisiveness. But how accurate is that view? In her new book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Karen Armstrong sets out to discover the truth about religion and violence in each of the world’s great traditions, taking us on an astonishing journey from prehistoric times to...

Marginalized and vulnerable individuals and communities often face multiple forms of violence--economic, cultural, physical, and psychological. How are these groups constructed as the Other, and how are these concepts circulated and naturalized? This panel discussion will examine a range of questions about these topics in order to explore the lived experiences of vulnerable communities: • What is the relationship of historical and economic processes to the creation of marginal...

As religious violence erupts around the world, we often question how people can coexist in peace when their basic religious identities seem irreconcilable. Benjamin J. Kaplan, a historian and professor of Dutch history at University College London, looks for answers in the religious history of early modern Europe, when issues of religious toleration were no less pressing than today. The standard histories of religious conflict in Europe claim that by the eighteenth century, under the...

Alice Kang is an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She received her B.A. in Economics and International Relations from Brown University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published on global trends in women's political representation, women's activism in Africa, and the gendered consequences of oil production. Lecture details: Gender equality in predominantly Muslim...

Gabriele M. Schwab is Chancellor's Professor of Comparative Literature in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, where she is also associate faculty in the Department of Anthropology, associate faculty in Women's Studies, and core faculty in the Program in Theory and Culture. In this presentation, Schwab explores representations of what Ward Churchill calls the "radioactive colonization“ of indigenous lands by the extractive economy that developed during the Cold...

The media shapes our perception of the world, oftentimes advancing stereotypes and partial truths. Nowhere does this seem more true than in relation to women in the Muslim world. Join us for a panel discussion with a group of Pakistani women to hear their stories without the filter of the media. The five panelists are all faculty of English Literature at Kinnaird College for Women, which has been educating Pakistani women at its Lahore campus for over a century. They are in residence at ASU...

The past decade has seen a noticeable upswing in extreme acts of violence perpetrated in the context of radical social and religious movements: from the Taliban shooting of young school children, to the kidnapping of girls and wholesale rampaging of villages by the Boko Haram in Nigeria, to the brutal violence of ISIS in Iraq. The acts of violence, the targets, and the rippling impact of global and government responses is tearing communities apart across the Muslim world. The headlines are...

How does an accomplished neuroscientist and bestselling writer of fiction view issues of religion and conflict? Dr. David Eagleman, author of "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" and "SUM" presents a fresh take on these topics based on his award-winning research into the workings of the human mind. In a style all his own, Eagleman weaves science, philosophy, and art to address the existential questions that have galvanized thinkers for centuries. Eagleman directs the Laboratory for...

Stephen Graham Jones, Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will be reading from his novel Ledfeather (2008). It tells the story of an Indian Agent whose decisions have impacted the lives of generations of Blackfeet Indians in present-day Montana. Jones is the author of sixteen novels, including The Fast Red Road (2000), All the Beautiful Sinners (2005), and The Bird is Gone (2005), and of six short story collections. His publications from 2014 include Floating Boy...

Luis Cabrera is Associate Professor in the School of Government & International Relations at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He has published widely on ethical issues related to migration, poverty and economic integration between nation-states. His most recent monograph, The Practice of Global Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2010), was awarded the 2011 Yale H. Ferguson prize from the International Studies Association-Northeast. For it, he interviewed hundreds of...

Matthias Riedl is an associate professor of history and holds the privately supported Chair of Comparative Religious Studies at Central European University (Budapest, Hungary). Before coming to CEU Budapest, he taught at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, and Duke University. His research interest is the comparative history of religion, with a focus on the relation of religion and politics. Lecture Details: The analytical category of "apocalyptic violence" has been...