Upcoming Events

The Strange End of the Catholic-Protestant Conflict and the Genesis of Europe’s Harsh Religious Pluralism 968 726 Tom Carlson

The Strange End of the Catholic-Protestant Conflict and the Genesis of Europe’s Harsh Religious Pluralism

Monday, December 9, 2019 at 6 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

A series of recent controversies has raised many questions about Europe’s treatment of its religious minorities. Why do societies that claim to respect religious freedom and tolerance so routinely discriminate against Muslims, Jews, and others? This talk will explore the origins of Europe’s contemporary thinking about religious pluralism to the recent peace between Catholics and Protestants. It will show how this development, which unfolded between the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and the era of decolonization in the 1960s, helped shape both the scope and rigid limits of the continent’s religious landscape.

Udi Greenberg is an associate professor of history at Dartmouth College. He is the author of the award winning The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton 2015) as well as many articles on religion and politics.

Perfection and Disaster 1024 768 Tom Carlson

Perfection and Disaster

Friday, December 6, 2019 at 2 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

In this essay I am less concerned with developing a cogent and persuasive argument than I am in posing and exploring a question. My question is a simple one: what’s the sense in talking about moral or political perfectionism in a world facing cataclysmic environmental collapse? At what kind of perfection might one aim in a world fundamentally out of balance: a world of mass extinction and dwindling biodiversity, collapsing ecosystems, super-sized droughts and storms, extreme heat waves, rising and rapidly warming and acidifying oceans and seas, massive displaced populations, increasingly limited access to clean water and adequate food, spreading pandemic disease, and the economic collapse and political chaos that such cascading disasters will bring in their wake?

Reading

Andrew Norris, “Perfection and Disaster.”

Modalities of the Perhaps: Secularity, Post-humanism, Uncertainty 1024 767 Tom Carlson

Modalities of the Perhaps: Secularity, Post-humanism, Uncertainty

Monday, December 2, 2019 at 6 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

Even as multispecies and post-humanist scholarship expands definitions of being, it nonetheless restricts other-than-humans to entities that previously went under the sign of the “natural.” Secular attachments to the material and the visible as the site of the real make it difficult to think the “supernatural” alongside nature-culture. And yet, many otherwise-secular folk consistently have stories – experiences – that do not square with secular- modern notions of the real. What might these stories tell us about the secular, about the ghostly undercurrents that weave back and forth beneath its stark distinction between natural and supernatural, visible and invisible, reality and superstition, truth and falsity? How might post-humanism, read against the grain and alongside other non-secular traditions, offer a framework to rethink non-human worlds and our entanglements with them? Might a true post-humanism propose that there exist nonhuman worlds we cannot possible know, given our sensory limitations? Finally, how might we as scholars write this uncertainty in ways that refuse the terms of secular academic narrative, including the quest for certainty and argument?

Mayanthi Fernando is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests include Islam and secularism; liberalism and law; gender, sexuality, and the body; and humanism and its others. Her first book, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke University Press, 2014) examines the intersection of religion and politics in France. She is currently working on a second book on the secularity of post-humanism and the possibilities for thinking the nonhuman more capaciously and less secularly.

Attending to the Lessons of the Pond: Henry David Thoreau’s “Revery” 1024 768 Tom Carlson

Attending to the Lessons of the Pond: Henry David Thoreau’s “Revery”

Thursday, November 21, 2019 at 2 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

In the forced labor camp of attention that is society today, many find that being attentive leads to distractedness, their mind literally pulled apart. Looking carefully at the inverse, one might suspect, then, that some of what gets called distraction or daydreaming might belong to a deep attentiveness and focus. In 1845, for two years, Henry David Thoreau made his life an experiment in such a hypothesis when he stepped back from everyday life in Concord, Massachusetts, and went into the woods to live in the neighborhood of Walden Pond and learn from it….what exactly? To hoe seven miles of beans? To contemplate the shifting colors and vague shapes on the surface of a lake? Distraction or attention?

Reading

Author of the award-winning Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity—Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and of Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion(Indiana University Press, 2001), and translator of several works by Jean-Luc Marion (most recently, In The Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, Stanford University Press, 2012), Jeffrey L. Kosky is Professor of Religion at Washington and Lee University.

Meaning and Melancholia: Leo Tolstoy, Max Weber, William James 150 150 Tom Carlson

Meaning and Melancholia: Leo Tolstoy, Max Weber, William James

November 15, 2019 at 2 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

For a century now, Max Weber’s famous description of the genesis of the modern world as a gradual process of “disenchantment,” offered in a 1917 lecture entitled “Science as a Vocation,” has been adopted as a shorthand for the withdrawal of religious traditions. With the phrase, Weber had sought to name the effect of the extension of calculation to all domains of human life—and more specifically a crisis of meaning in the sciences created by a concept of progress. But the paradigm of this crisis of meaning Weber finds, oddly, in Leo Tolstoy’s Confession, which recounts the writer’s crisis of faith and his eventual return to God.

Fifteen years before Weber’s lecture, the American philosopher William James, in a set of lectures published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, wrote at length about Tolstoy’s Confession, identifying it as a paradigm of religious melancholy, and as a state of mind that can lead to an experience of regeneration. James, too, spoke of “disenchantment” but he parsed the fact/value distinction differently, because he sought not to substitute religion with the ethics of teaching but to establish a permanent place for religion alongside science in human life.

In this seminar, we will discuss Tolstoy’s text, and the divergent interpretations formulated by Weber and James. Those pressed for time should focus on Lectures VI and VII in The Varieties of Religious Experience, where the Tolstoy is cited at length.

Reading

Leo Tolstoy, A Confession (Oxford, 1940).

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Longmans, Green, and Co, 1902), Lectures VI and VII: “The Sick Soul”; Lecture XX: “Conclusions”.

Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, ed., Max Weber: The Vocation Lectures (Hackett, 2004).

Denying Reality: A Polanyian Theory of the Contemporary Crisis 810 455 Tom Carlson

Denying Reality: A Polanyian Theory of the Contemporary Crisis

November 8, 2019 at 2 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

The present global environmental situation seems to be one of crisis, a failure to secure a human future. Is this fundamentally a failure of knowledge or of affect (care, love)? I use Michael Polanyi’s conception of (tacit) knowledge, reality, and discovery to suggest that understanding our present situation involves appeal to conditions that are not only empirical but normative and, in some sense, religious—as indicated by the growing discourse of “climate apocalypse”—and that it makes sense to think of this normative dimension as part of the reality of our situation (and that a failure of affect might profitably be conceived as a failure to recognize some reality). I also want to propose, using Polanyi’s ideas of inquiry and research, that that an adequate comprehension of that situation demands a disciplined practice of attention and integration—not only of its practical components (environmental, psychological, political etc.) but also art, literature and other cultural productions which both refer to and constitute “our humanity,” and especially of those works that reflect the deep and threatening tensions within the human, from Moby-Dick to the art of Lee Bontecou. Finally, I argue that the failure to attend to our humanity as a historical and normatively conditioned reality is itself an integral aspect of the crisis.

Reading

Lin Atnip, “Denying Reality: A Polanyian Theory of the Contemporary Crisis.”

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, Preface & Chapter 4: Skills.

Recommended

Farhad Manjoo, “It’s the End of California as We Know It,” New York Times, October 30, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/opinion/sunday/california-fires.html.

Environmental Humanities Seminar and Lecture Series (I) 1024 576 Barbara Del Mercato

Environmental Humanities Seminar and Lecture Series (I)

The Center for the Humanities and Social Change is organising a series of seminars and lectures revolving around the Environmental Humanities from a wide array of perspectives.

Upcoming events:
13 Novembre/November, 10.30 a.m. Ca’ Bottacin
Anu Kannike, Food for Thought: Museums as Agents of Food Heritage (*seminar – ENG) Cancelled due to extraordinary weather conditions

25 Novembre/November, 5.30 p.m. Ca’ Bottacin
Emanuele Montibeller, Arte Sella: l’arte incontra la natura (ITA)

5 Dicembre/December: 5.30 p.m. Ca’ Bottacin
Grazia Francescato, L’arte eretica della sostenibilità (ITA)

10 Dicembre/December, 2.00 p.m. Ca’ Bottacin
Alessandra Chiricosta, Reframing Ecofeminism in a Posthuman Era (*seminar – ENG)

13 Gennaio/January, 4.00 p.m. Ca’ Bottacin
Marco Armiero, Storia ambientale, ovvero come godersi un po’ di riconoscimento accademico senza essere (troppo) disciplinati (ITA)

29 Gennaio/January, 5.30 p.m. Ca’ Dolfin
Amitav Ghosh. L’isola dei fucili (Neri Pozza 2019) L’autore discute con/The author discusses with Anna Nadotti (ENG/ITA)

Venues:
Ca’ Bottacin, Dorsoduro 3911.
lectures: Aula A
seminars: Aula seminari HSC (primo piano)/ HSC seminar room (1st floor)

Ca’ Dolfin, Dorsoduro 3825/D
Aula Magna Silvio Trentin

L’iscrizione ai *seminari è obbligatoria/
Registration is required for *seminars:
hsc@unive.it

The calendar will continue into July 2020, so please check back for updates on the second part of the series, starting in February 2020

Endless Happiness: Confessions of a Recovering Addict 889 1024 Tom Carlson

Endless Happiness: Confessions of a Recovering Addict

November 1, 2019 at 2 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

I set out to write about how to be happy, and my questions about happiness led me to a consideration of addiction because I began to notice a fundamental similarity: Like addicts, we mortals suffer a dependence on finite substances for our happiness, and their passing away always brings a comedown. To think through the implications of this parallel, I went to Augustine’s Confessions—one of the most poignant and impactful reflections on the relationship between death and happiness in the Western tradition. My original research question, “What does it mean for a human to be happy?” transformed through my readings of Augustine into “If being human is a ‘condition’, then what are its symptoms, and, furthermore, what would it mean to recover from it?” In this essay, “Endless Happiness,” I analyze Augustine’s own attempt to come to terms with the fact that, for us mortals, being happy means having something to lose.

Reading

Luke McCracken is a PhD student in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in existential philosophy and the history of Christian thought. His research focuses on questions of happiness, mortality, coping with loss, and nihilism. His published work includes, most recently, an article with the Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory, “A Note on Pre-Positions: Methodology in the Continental Philosophy of Religion,” and a translation of Emmanuel Falque’s The Loving Struggle: Phenomenological and Theological Debates.

Environmental Humanities Seminar and Lecture Series. A seminar with Elizabeth DeLoughrey: The Postcolonial Roots of the Environmental Humanities 1024 576 Barbara Del Mercato

Environmental Humanities Seminar and Lecture Series. A seminar with Elizabeth DeLoughrey: The Postcolonial Roots of the Environmental Humanities

Venice, October 18 – 2.00-4.00 p.m.
Ca’ Bottacin (Dorsoduro 3911), HSC seminar room (1st floor)

Registration is necessary: please email hsc@unive.it

The Center for the Humanities and Social Change is dedicating its third year to the role that the humanities can play in tackling the climate crisis affecting the planet. After the lecture by Serenella Iovino, we inaugurate our seminars with Elizabeth deLoughrey, Associate Professor in English and at the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles, who will discuss The Postcolonial Roots of the Environmental Humanities.

Please sign up if you would like to attend: hsc@unive.it

Preparatory reading here (Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan,  A postcolonial Environmental Humanities – Introduction to Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan (eds.) Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities. Postocolonial Approaches, Routledge, London 2015.

 

A seminar with Elizabeth deLoughrey: The Postcolonial Roots of the Environmental Humanities

October 18, 2019, 2.00-4.00 p,m. 

This seminar is in English/Seminario in lingua inglese

Registration is necessary: please email hsc@unive.it

With the World at Heart: Studies in the Secular Today 682 1024 Tom Carlson

With the World at Heart: Studies in the Secular Today

October 18, 2019 at 2 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A

Based on a reading of key chapters from Thomas A. Carlson’s With the World at Heart: Studies in the Secular Today (University of Chicago Press, 2019), and touching on a range of thinkers from Saint Augustine through Martin Heidegger to more recent theorists of “secularization,” this seminar discussion with the author will aim to explore and elucidate 1) the different understandings of time—and especially of the future—that most decisively shape contemporary debate about the meaning of “secular” modernity; 2) the role of human affection, and of love specifically, in the human enterprise of world-building; and 3) the work of education in shaping our affective relations to the world and its futures.

The seminar will be followed by a reception.

Reading

Thomas Carlson, With the World at Heart: Studies in the Secular Today, Introduction, Ch. 5, Ch. 7 & Conclusion.

Those pressed for time should focus on Chapter 5 and the concluding “Last Look.”

For those interested, the entire book is available on reserve in the Davidson Library under the call number BD 436 .C375 2019.