2 April 2009

Titles and Abstracts

Speakers

Penny Edgell, Professor of sociology, University of Minnesota (11.35-12.25)
Beliefs, Believers, and Believing: The Landscape and Pathways of Inquiry
From a scholarly perspective, why does religious "belief" present an interesting subject for inquiry? Why does it strike us that now is the time to rethink the nature and status of belief, and its role in social life? I consider the reasons why it is useful to reconsider the question of religious belief, outline some of the potential pitfalls to avoid in such an inquiry, and identify promising avenues for future research. I draw particular attention to the multi-faceted nature of belief, the interplay between scholarly and popular uses of "belief" and "believer," the penchant for nostalgia in much social scientific theorizing of religion and belief, and the changing relationship between individuals, institutions, and beliefs.

Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University (6.00-6.50)

Panels

Ways of Believing (9.30-11.30)

Responding: Courtney Bender

Abby Day, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex (UK)
Believing in Belonging: Relocating Belief to the Social
This paper draws on empirical research exploring mainstream Christian religious belief and identity in Euro-American countries. I researched religion without asking overtly religious questions or selecting people on the basis of their interest in religion or spirituality. The aim was to probe beliefs amongst three generations of people from a wide cross-section of society. Starting from that qualitative study based in northern England, and then broadening the data to include Europe and North America, I argue that many people ‘believe in belonging’.

This contrasts with much established theory that asserts that most people are ‘unchurched’ or ‘nominalist’ while privately maintaining beliefs in God and other ‘spiritual’ phenomena. Those approaches are sustained by certain assumptions about belief that remain strikingly unexplored. My findings helped explain apparent anomalies where, for example, three-quarters of the UK population selected ‘Christian’ as their religious identity on the 2001 national census (the first time it had been asked on a census), yet fewer than eight per cent attend church regularly or participate in other Christian rites such as baptism, confirmation, weddings and funerals. Comparing European and American affiliation and practice, it would be fair to say that three quarters of US Christians do not attend church weekly; in the UK and most of continental Europe the figure approaches 90 per cent, but ‘nominalism’ is high in both regions.

Through a nuanced exploration of belief, I considered what people ‘believe in’, arguing that many people who self-identify as Christian when asked (and often only when asked) may not believe ‘that’ God or Jesus gives meaning to their lives, but they believe ‘in’ Christianity as an institution that symbolises their perception of their roots, their ‘culture’ and other social forms of belonging.

Shane H. Hockin, PhD student, Florida State University
Belief Against Absolutism: the Political Implications of Jean Meslier's Atheism

Fatma Tutuncu, Visiting scholar in Women and Gender, Harvard University
Do’s and Don'ts for Saving Two Worlds: The Islamist Life Coaching in Secular Turkey
Inspiring from Michel Foucault’s theoretical perspectives on the construction and disciplining of modern subjects and from Agnes Heller’s reflections on the meaning of morals, ethics of personality and proper conducts in modern times, which revolve around the questions "What is the right thing to do?" and "How should I live?", I will analyze the emergent Islamist life coaching as a new brand of religious preaching in Turkey. I question the Islamist claim of authenticity through exposing the embedded "Western" values at the very heart of different Islamist discourses. I will show that pious Muslims are not exempt from daily conundrums of modern subjects, who have to ask for guidance for choosing their ways of doing, acting and believing in the turmoil of modern everyday life.

Grace Yukich, Ph.D. student, Sociology Department, New York University
What Counts As Religion and Who Decides?: Perceptions of Religion and Activism
Sociological treatments of the relationship between "religion" and "activism" usually conceptualize them as two separate entities. Religious institutions and beliefs are seen as a "resource" for activism, for example. However, it is not clear that religious followers themselves actually make these same divisions, that they perceive the boundaries of religion in this way. With distinctions between the "religious" and the "secular" being challenged in public life and academe, it is increasingly important to ask: How do religious people think about what it means to be religious- specifically, do their definitions of religion include activism? What explains their perceptions? Using in-depth interviews, I examine the perceptions of 70 religious people, half of whom are activists in the New Sanctuary Movement. I find that, though some religious people conceive of religion in ways that are in sync with common sociological definitions, many have more complex views about what counts as religion. There are "secular" activities that some people experience as religion and even consider to be religious duties, including (perhaps especially) activism. Because this finding has significant implications concerning what counts as religion and therefore where the line between church and state gets drawn in public life, I argue for the necessity of a new way of framing theory and research on this topic. I also offer explanations for the diversity of perceptions of religion, including variation in activist experience and in opportunities for theological education and reflection.

Theorizing Belief (9.30-11.30)

Responding: Mark Taylor

Patrick Arnold, Graduate Student, Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan
Confessing and Expressing: The Nature of Belief and the Cognitivism/Noncognitivism Divide in Christian Theology
What role does religious belief, specifically theological or doctrinal belief, play in Christianity? "Confession of faith is of the essence of the church," writes theologian Douglas John Hall, yet for as many theologians who would agree with this statement, a near equal number would interpret it differently. My goal in this paper is to map-out a fundamental divide in Christianity concerning the meaning and function of belief, between what I will refer to as the expressing versus the confessing models of belief, the former exemplified most notably by Schleiermacher, and the latter by Herman Bavinck and the Old Princeton theologians. I will first argue that this divide in theology parallels a much clearer one in 20th century metaethics on the nature of moral judgments and beliefs, between, broadly, the cognitivists and noncognitivists. An understanding of this debate in metaethical philosophy can go a long way in helping us clarify the differing views on the role of doctrinal belief in Christian theologies. I then consider a recent proposal emerging from postmodern Christian theology offered by John Franke and the late Stanley Grenz, who reject both ends of the expressing and confessing spectrum and attempt to develop a postmodern alternative to understanding religious belief, building off George Lindbeck, Pannenberg, and Peter Berger specifically. Although my main goal will be one of clarification and comparison, I will briefly argue that their postmodern adaptation ultimately reduces to a subjectivistic but community centered belief-as-expressing view, a type of theological error theory, or both.

Mara Brecht, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Theology, Fordham University
Meeting the Challenge of Conflicting Religious Belief: A Naturalized Epistemological Approach to Interreligious Dialogue
As the encounter with the religious other becomes an increasingly common experience, it is necessary for believers to reflect on religious belief. Religious diversity raises a crucial epistemological question: what happens to religious belief given conflicting religious belief? This essay seeks to assign a positive epistemic value to the encounter with religious diversity by exploring interreligious dialogue as a site at which religious beliefs are formed and strengthened rather than as a site at which beliefs are undercut.

Some epistemologists of religious disagreement argue that the awareness of opposing religious claims should lead one to have less confidence in belief. Other epistemologists argue, more strongly, that one should let go of her belief entirely given conflicting claims. According to these approaches, if one critically reflects upon her beliefs in light of opposing beliefs, it will be impossible for her to understand her own belief as right or uniquely true. These epistemologists contend that suspending belief is thus the most epistemically responsible response.

People who actually participate in interreligious dialogue do not seem to reach such conclusions. Rather than growing more doubtful about their own beliefs, interreligious dialogue participants learn to approach others’ beliefs with humility and grow more fully in their own beliefs. In short, they are not as epistemically troubled as the epistemologists would have them.

How is it possible to account for the disparity between the practical experience of encountering the religious other and scholarly discourse on it? This paper argues that the conflict between normative epistemological claims about certainty of belief and the experiences of interreligious dialogue can be resolved by developing a naturalized epistemology that takes the distinct belief-forming practices of interreligious dialogue seriously.

Adam Eitel, PhD candidate, Princeton Theological Seminary
Wittgenstein and the Scholar: What Religious Scholarship Does
Many contemporary scholars of religion theorize that the "real meaning" of religious credos are concealed beneath the surface of the ordinary meanings given to them by their confessors. The scholar’s job, according to such a view, is to therefore unearth the "real meaning" of religious beliefs by tracing their apparent meaning back to (what the scholar considers to be) more basic sources of causation—e.g. social mechanisms, physiological drives, various "inner states", etc. What the scholar says religious belief does varies from theory to theory, typically though she says that it somehow expresses one or more of these basic causal factors. By these lights, the scholar might suggest that religious belief gives utterance to the "survival" of pre-scientific explanatory and technical strategies, universal neuroses, repressed desire, the ressentiment and "bad conscience" of popular morality, and so on. One common (sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit) conclusion drawn from such theories is that the religious person is mistaken about what she is really up to as a believer.

Such theories, according to the later Wittgenstein at least, are bursting with irony. For when the scholar attempts to explain religious belief with recourse to such theories, she illudes herself; it is precisely by theorizing that the religious scholar (and not the religious believer) is deeply mistaken about what she is really doing, says Wittgenstein. After explaining and defending Wittgenstein’s remarks, I suggest that they are not finally damning for the academic study of religion. They do, however, suggest a more critical, self-reflective approach to the scholarly grammars that force themselves upon us. In short, I argue that to ask what religious belief does, we must first know what we are doing as scholars of religion.

Erin Yerby, PhD student, Cultural Anthropology, Columbia University
Belief in the World
This paper propels itself along the surface waters of a problem – the problem of belief. Conceptualized as a surface-problem, belief concerns neither digging into the depths of subjective interiority, nor ascending to the transcendent heights of an absolute outside. It concerns instead the sacred within the profane imaginaries and habits that proliferate upon the surfaces of life. To follow the injunctive made by Deleuze in Cinema II, what is needed is belief, "not in a different world, but in a link between man and the world, in love or life, to believe in this as in the impossible, the unthinkable, which none the less cannot but be thought." It is this call for belief in the world as an impossible possibility that seems to draw out the central paradox of belief itself – namely its orientation toward the unseen, the imperceptible and thus the futural, on the one hand, and its ritualization in the lived reality of the everyday, the banal, the commonsensical, on the other.

The evasive missing link that joins belief to the world, I argue, concerns something like what Walter Benjamin had in mind with his concept of Experience, which is at once the most intimate and extimate of our possessions. Certain mediations, technological and otherwise, of modern life, seem to block, according to Benjamin, the possibility of transforming everyday life – what happens to us – into Experience. It is within this impossible possibility of transforming the everyday of "what happens" into Experience, that belief, as a problem, comes most strikingly into view, making sense of the claim that "the intolerable is no longer a serious injustice, but the permanent state of a daily banality" (Deleuze). The problem of belief must thus be turned back to world, and thus the sacred within the profane, to confront this most intolerable yet insipid form of violence – the violence that reduces life to a "daily banality."

Counting Believers (1.45-3.45)

Responding: Penny Edgell

Jon Argaman, PhD candidate, Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
Beliefs, Secularism, and the "Muslim Question"

James Hare, PhD Candidate, Religion, Columbia University
Canonization, Colonialism, and Community: Nabhadas's Bhaktamal and the Study of Religion
Hinduism as we know it today took shape during the nineteenth century. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how an unequal negotiation between India's British rulers and its elite, colonized subjects resulted in a notion of modern Hinduism rooted in devotional religiosity and roughly comparable to Christianity and Islam. While this argument is compelling, it fails to properly acknowledge continuity between pre-colonial tradition and colonial modernity. In the centuries preceding colonial rule, Hinduism was already on a trajectory of consolidation. This paper considers one strand of this trajectory and its implications for our understanding of the historical basis of modern Hinduism.

A major ingredient in this consolidation was Nabhadas's Bhaktamal. This late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century collection of hagiographies praises the qualities of over 900 saints and thereby sets the boundaries of a devotional community that far exceeds the sectarian context in which its author wrote. Beginning with the Bhaktamal's earliest known commentary we witness a debate over the boundaries of a religious community. This debate would continue throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through manuscripts, recitation, and performance. By the arrival of print on a mass scale during the late nineteenth century, a variety of communities of interpretation had emerged around this text.

This paper considers the implications of this trajectory for the study of religion. In the Bhaktamal tradition, it is not belief in the sense of affirmation of doctrinal statements that defines the relevant religious community. It is shared participation in bhakti, but bhakti is defined by its exemplars, who are described and praised by Nabhadas, Priyadas, and their subsequent commentators. It is not the belief of these canonized devotees that defines this community. It is belief in these saints that plays a major role in defining the broad devotional community that we now know as Hinduism.

Fareen Parvez, PhD Candidate, Sociology, University of California at Berkeley
Counting French Muslims: Belief, Practice, and Political Stakes
Islam is the second largest religion in France, a staunchly secular country that has been reluctant to recognize its Muslim population. The ban on headscarves in public schools and bureaucratic obstacles to Islamic institutions such as mosques and schools are two examples of France’s relationship to Islam. As French Islamic associations are demanding greater religious freedoms and support for worship, questions of “who is a Muslim” and thus, the number of French Muslims, become important political questions. In line with French secularism (“laicité) and nationalism, the national census does not include religious or ethnic categories. Estimates of the number of French Muslims therefore vary widely, from 3 to 6 million. Those wishing to discount the population tend to cite surveys focused on strict religious practices. Others, with interest in claiming larger numbers of Muslims, point to self-identification or family origins, and take a more ambiguous approach to religious belief. This case shows the politicized nature of the question of belief and community membership, as there are always parties with opposing interests at stake in defining a religious community. Moreover, issues of belief versus practice and identity are deeply vexed within religious populations. While the French state may have an interest in minimizing its Muslim population by pointing to factors like low incidence of prayer, ultra-orthodox Muslim parties might also consider such factors as antithetical to what it means to be Muslim. Many “Muslims,” however, may identify as such (but not in all contexts) despite the inconsistencies of their beliefs and practices. Such realities, I argue, are not properly captured in survey research. Drawing on ethnographic research in Lyon, France, this paper argues that emphasizing doctrinal belief as definitive belies the continually contested nature of religious doctrine itself.

Michelle Smirnova, PhD Candidate, University of Maryland-College Park
Doubly Defined, Doubly Rejected: How Russian Jews Self-Construct An Identity of Their Own
Russian Jews are not "Russian" by the standards of Russians nor are they Jewish by the definition of Jews abroad, consequently, as such a population who has been doubly rejected by those larger populations associated with their two-part identity, they are motivated and/or forced to engage in self-authorship in order to create a group identity. The first part of the rejection was enacted through "the historical power of the fifth line of Soviet passports" (Laitin, 2004) which caused Jews in Soviet Russia to be born into a legally circumscribed, culturally reified identity despite the absence of any "thick" culture to warrant a distinct label. The second phase of rejection was enacted by the US Jewish population, who did not consider these Russian Jews to be of their religion since they did not share the same beliefs, engage in the same rituals or engage in the same culture, as a result these immigrants were unable the "Russian" off of the label "Russian-Jew". Though never considered "Russian" when living in Russia, they now are not considered "Jewish" in this new land. This paper seeks to explore whether this group might be considered Jewish based on faith and blood alone, and how the definitions from without (by Russians or by other Jews) might serve to motivate other religious choices—some of those who remained in Russia convert to the "Jews for Jesus" movement, immigrants to the US adopt the form of Judaism practiced by American Jews or chose construct their own distinct form of religious identity. Bio: Michelle Smirnova is currently PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Maryland, College Park where she received her Master’s in the Spring of 2008. Her Master's thesis focused on the aesthetic component to the life-extension project (the biomedical ideology which equates longer life with a better life, subsequently advocating any and all means by which to promote health and extend one's life). Her current work focuses on Soviet and post-Soviet identities and the civil sphere. She has also served as the managing editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture during her graduate studies.

Belief and the State (1.45-3.45)

Responding: Joshua Dubler

Deepa Das, Graduate Student, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago
Legislating Belief: Performance and Politics in the Practice of Sati
This paper explores official attempts at reconstituting widow immolation, or sati, as suicide or murder. Referencing procedural prescriptions codified under colonial rule as well as historical and sociological scholarship of the late twentieth century, politicians, activists, and the news media sought to deny the satihood of widows who had ostensibly chosen to die on their husbands' funeral pyres. Allegations of incorrect ritual practice were put forward as evidence of the widows' insincere belief, and insincere belief was in turn understood to invalidate the acts themselves. In most cases, it was maintained that the highly calculated and intentional nature of the widow's act was incommensurate with understandings of the true sati as a woman who acted spontaneously and unselfconsciously because, if she believed the narrative of immolation, she had already transcended the self. Examining five case studies that occurred in India between the years 1999-2006, I show how the emphasis on false or mistaken belief was used to resolve the apparent incongruity between a clearly agentic widow and the figure of the sati as a woman 'beyond' or 'out of control'. Using Rousseau's concept of the citizen-subject, where the individual-as-citizen partakes in the very sovereign power which is imposed upon the individual-as-subject, I further argue that the transcendent yet tangible self of the sati problematizes understandings of subjectivity upon which the Indian state is constructed.

Hannah Farber, PhD student, History, University of California-Berkeley
The House of Representatives Considers Fortune Telling: A Historical Case Study on the Strategic Definition of Belief
Between the 1850s and the 1920s, occultism enjoyed a renaissance in the United States. At the same time, legislative activity against certain forms of occult practice - generally termed "fortune telling" - intensified. By the late 1920s, nearly every state and at least thirty-four cities had passed laws against fortune telling.

The legal movement against fortune telling peaked in 1926, when a member of the House of Representatives proposed a bill banning fortune telling in the District of Columbia. H. R. 8989 defined fortune telling as the exchange of money for purportedly occult information or services. Since the bill specifically targeted commercial exchange, its star witness Harry Houdini argued that it did not threaten the cherished American freedom of religion.

At public hearings on the bill, the District of Columbia's palmists, astrologers, and Spiritualists argued against the bill on a variety of different grounds. Some asserted that they were not fortune tellers; others explained why their practices merited specific exemptions. Several argued that their practices were actually grounded in science. In the end, the most powerful arguments were those of the Spiritualists, who claimed that spirit mediumship deserved protection under the First Amendment. As the hearings continued, the congressmen began to doubt that a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of spirit mediumship could be identified. The bill died in subcommittee.

The congressional hearings on H. R. 8989 offer us insight into how Americans of the early 20th century conceptualized and assigned value to the categories of belief and practice. The congressmen believed that practices associated with religious or even scientific belief systems deserved protection. But they could not agree on the criteria or contexts by which "legitimate" practices might be identified. They were stymied by the occultists of the District of Columbia, whose arguments demonstrated that the difference between a forbidden act of fortune telling and a legitimate expression of faith was far from clear.

Eamonn McGrattan, Doctoral student, Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge (UK)
Catholic Ultra-Resistance to the Vietnam War and the Challenge of Everyday Belief
At the height of the Vietnam War in October 1967, four Catholic pacifists entered a local Baltimore Selective Service office. After locating the draft cards of local Baltimore youths, Father Philip Berrigan and his accomplices proceeded to destroy hundreds of the 1-A draft eligible cards by covering them with blood. Having achieved their dramatic goal, the Baltimore 4 as they became known then remained in front of the office passively awaiting arrest. While out on bail some months later, two of the Baltimore 4 would participate in another draft board raid at Catonsville with seven new accomplices. On this occasion the protesters burned hundreds of draft cards using homemade napalm. The Catonsville 9 would in turn be followed by the Milwaukee 14 and the Chicago 15. Indeed by the end of 1969 an active underground movement of draft board raiders had sprung up all across the East Coast and the Midwest. As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the Chicago 15 action, this paper looks again at an anti-war movement that has been considerably neglected by historians. With the aid of interviews with some of the key participants, this paper focuses on how these actions sprang from a complex and thoughtful understanding of belief and the obligations it placed upon believers within modern society. It looks at the ways in which ultra-resisters sought to make the courtroom a stage for the public hearing of the morality of those laws and government policies that in everyday experience remained invisible. By making manifest the concreteness of worldly pain and suffering, these activists rejected the idea of belief as an opium or abstraction that eased the burdens of daily life. Instead they insisted that there were times when everyday life simply must not be allowed to proceed as normal.

Erica Weiss, Graduate Student, Department of Anthropology, Princeton University
Pacifist? Prove it! The Case of the Secular Conscience and the Israeli Military
This paper will consider the case of the Israeli military Conscience Committee as an example of a situation in which belief, here specifically a pacifist conscience, as a result of its divorce from practice, is evaluated differently than religious belief. The Israeli military provisionally allows exemption from the universal military requirement for reasons of conscience only in the case of absolute pacifism. In order to administer this policy, the military has created what is portentously named the Conscience Committee, which is meant to interview applicants for exemption, examine the evidence, and judge applicants' conscience. In this, they are meant to separate the real pacifists from those who are trying to "shirk" military duty by exploiting military policy. This is the same committee that judges the release for Jewish women who are sufficiently religious to forbid their participation in the military, who are also exempt from military service. In the case of religious women, the evidence for their release is mostly based on practice: whether or not they follow religious law, dress in a manner appropriate to their claims, participate in religious education, follow dietary restrictions and so on. The evaluation for the exemption based on pacifist conscience differs greatly. One of the main reasons is that the modern construction of conscience makes such secular beliefs very hard to judge, because they are conceived of as interiorities. Pacifism is not a belief that necessitates active practices. Rather it is defined negatively: to not engage in violence, and the applicant is asking for an exemption for the not-yet acts they would be required to participate in during military service, which would violate their beliefs. As a result, there is very little evidence for pacifism, which makes the Committee evaluations somewhat Kafkaesque, and often based on trickery.

Based on discussions with Conscience Committee members, applicants to the Committee, and friends and relatives of applicants, the paper will explore the way the Conscience Committee criteria and evaluation of this "dis-empracticed" belief reveals differences in the Committee's understanding of secular conscience from religious belief. In some ways, the understanding of secular conscience is strongly related to the rights associated with religion, for example in the way conscience is likewise considered to be inviolable and is protected similarly to religion. Sometimes the understanding of pacifism is a compensation for the lack of visible practice, for example in the requirement of evidence of a "visceral" aspect to the belief. And sometimes the understanding is the opposite of that for religion. For example, in the case of pacifism if there is too much conformity with written sources, or too much learned understanding of this belief, this puts the authenticity of the belief into doubt, which is the opposite of religion. This way of evaluating secular belief structures the acceptable ways of testifying, and thus affiliating with the pacifist group. Consequentially, this has an effect on how people conceptualize their own belief.

Belief and Science (3.50-5.50)

Responding: Wayne Proudfoot

Jason Blum, PhD Candidate, Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Discourses of (Un)Belief: Equivocal Constructions of Belief in The God Delusion
In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins employs two mutually exclusive constructions of belief." I argue that this ambiguity allows Dawkins to construct belief in opposed fashions that underscore both his scientific apologetics and his polemic against religion. In the first construction, scientific belief emerges as indefeasible faith in the explanatory capacities of science. Apparent failures of explanation are construed as temporary frustrations due to lapses in human understanding, destined to be overcome through methodical application of evolving scientific method and theory. Evidence of limitations to science’s explanatory power are hermeneutically defused, and the possibility of contradicting science’s ability to explain any phenomenon is thereby systematically preempted. In the second formulation, Dawkins reads religious belief or respect thereof into various forms of unbelief. Scientists who evince respect for religion or religious belief are interpreted as feigning unnecessary and unwarranted deference; scientific endorsements of religion thereby become dissembling gestures rather than sincere intellectual positions. Similarly, theologians who contest Dawkins’s critique are interpreted not as basing their objections on different and potentially more defensible understandings of God, but as relying on meager protestations of impropriety, shielding beliefs they tacitly recognize as inherently indefensible. Through these constructions, Dawkins achieves the rhetorical purpose of apotheosizing scientific belief and subverting its religious counterpart. These maneuvers in The God Delusion exemplify the potentially polemical role of "belief" in discourse about science and religion, and the rhetorical power inherent in the construction and deployment of the notion.

Garner Gollatz, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University
Sacred Science, Legitimation, and the Body: The Fate of Healing at Lourdes
The discourse of miraculous healing at the French sanctuary of Lourdes dates back to 1858, when pilgrims to the site began reporting uncanny cures of intractable ailments soon after Bernadette de Soubirous’s famous visions of the Virgin Mary. Not only did these events lift Lourdes to national and worldwide prominence, but they inaugurated a series of debates over faith and scientific knowledge that have continued up to the present. This paper explores how this tradition has developed, especially in recent years, and how it reflects the ongoing project of reconciling Christian faith with secular modernity. A central institutional actor in this process is the Medical Bureau, the body of professional physicians charged with evaluating claims of miraculous healing in light of modern biomedical knowledge as well as long-established procedures laid down by the Vatican.

In such ways, the production of authoritative knowledge plays a special role in reconciling faith in miracles with science and legitimating the search for healing at Lourdes. Yet the Medical Bureau and other institutions at Lourdes, despite their remarkable stability over time, have had to face new pressures in recent decades. The authentication of miracles has drastically slowed, and in 2006 the authorities at Lourdes changed their criteria for evaluating cures for the first time in their history. Do such developments signal the absolute decline of healing at Lourdes? Or can we see producers of sacred knowledge at Lourdes adapting to new conditions, and even taking advantage of them to contribute to contemporary Catholic understandings of body, mind, and soul? The answer can only emerge from a careful evaluation of how the legitimation of miracles works at Lourdes, and how it is evolving in dialogue with lay believers, Catholic thought in France and beyond, and the growing authority of biomedical science.

Anthony Shenoda, PhD candidate, Social Anthropology and Middle East Studies, Harvard University
Skepticism, Science, and Miracles: Debating Belief among the Copts
Based on five years of research among Coptic Christians in Egypt this paper explores the intersections of science and religious belief, arguing that what these two categories represent is an underlying tension between faith and skepticism among religious Copts. How are science, skepticism, and faith linked? What role does science play in promoting people’s belief in God, saints, and miracles? What serves as proper evidence of the truth of God, saints, and the miracles they perform? By sharing several vignettes from my fieldwork in Egypt and exploring debates around the miraculous among Copts, I argue that miracles and science have come to work together rather than in opposition to one another. Yet, it is skepticism that calls for the corroboration of miracles by scientific means. This indicates that there is a tension between belief and science among many Copts. But instead of allowing belief and science to work against each other many leaders of the Coptic Church have appropriated science as a means of bolstering belief and faith in the efficacy of God and the saints. This appropriation enables science to work in the service of belief in the efficacy of God and the saints, rather than against it. In the final analysis, I corroborate Michael Taussig’s argument that faith and skepticism are two sides of the same coin rather than polar opposites, and that it is through debate prompted by skepticism that one can actually get a handle on various aspects of belief. Science augments belief, and it is the skeptic who can be thanked for this.

Josh Vaillancourt, PhD Student, Religion and Critical Thought, Department of Religious Studies, Brown University
Keeping Religion in Mind: Cognitive Science, Religion, and the Issue of 'Belief'
The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) offers empirically grounded ways of (re)conceptualizing 'belief' and 'believing' which contribute to the study of religion and meliorate related issues therein.

The starting point here is a taxonomy of "belief," between "intuitive" and "reflective" varieties (Sperber, Barrett), with important substantive and functional differences between the two. In brief, intuitive beliefs are or may be tacit, spontaneously generated, and inferred through behavior, while reflective beliefs are consciously held, propositional, and deliberately formed. This distinction in the religious context strikingly is born out in, and justified by, not-uncommon instances of "theological incorrectness," wherein contradiction between one's intuitive and reflective beliefs and reasoning is observable (Barrett, Slone).

Intuitive beliefs are argued to be central and essential to religion. This is quite different from viewing religion as a set of doctrines or propositions to which religious persons assent and from which they reason and act. Illustrating instances of the role of intuitive religious belief are of participant understanding of religious ritual action (Lawson and McCauley) and the universality of god-concepts, or "counterintuitive agents," in religion cross-culturally (Boyer).

Cognitive contributions to the issue of belief in the study of religion serve to strengthen theories and meliorate debates, such as those between belief and body, the individual and the cultural, and intellectualist, symbolist, and functionalist theorizing. Beliefs are key demarcative and explanatory factors of religion, when aptly understood. If belief is rejected, so too "religion." The only way, so to speak, to keep religion in mind, is to keep religion in mind.

Belief vs. Practice (3.50-5.50)

Responding: Zareena Grewal

Kevin Buckelew, MA student, Religion, Columbia University
Compassion and Emptiness in the Chan Buddhist Tradition
The emptiness doctrine offers a tool for critically scrutinizing any and all absolute assertions: because every 'thing' that exists is always changing and never static, and because every 'thing' must be dependent for its existence upon something else, no such 'thing' could possibly exist in and of itself. On the other hand, the bodhisattva, who has vowed to liberate all sentient beings, is instructed to maintain an extremely high standard of compassionate practice and to work tirelessly for others. Buddhist scholars have puzzled over the apparent contradiction between these two principal elements of Mahayana Buddhism: if everything is inherently empty, what sentient beings are there to liberate? Why would someone who has thoroughly understood the significance of emptiness exert special effort to save unreal beings?

This issue is particularly salient in the Chinese Chan tradition, which pushes the 'rhetoric of immediacy' to the extreme and eschews skillful means in favor of sudden awakening to one's true nature . While Chan discourse records and koan literure seem to imply a total disregard for monastic rules, studies in the last several decades have shown that no such radical break with traditional practice ever actually occurred. Should we assume, then, that this constitutes a concession to conventional truth?

In my paper, I seek to determine whether or not a logical connection can be forged between the emptiness doctrine and the lofty ideal of the compassionate bodhisattva. I focus on how this apparent disconnect is drawn out in Chan literature, but in the process of working through the questions posed I also bring in a series of other Buddhist texts. Finally, I conclude that the contradiction lies in our set of presuppositions, not in the texts themselves.

Joe Blankholm, PhD student, Religion, Columbia University
Branding Belief
The Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement has long been eager to use new media technology to improve its outreach efforts. First with print, later with radio and television, and now through their website, Chabad.org, Lubavitchers have carefully manicured their public image, both with respect to the larger Jewish community and the wider public. My paper focuses specifically on Chabad.org as one major way in which Chabad refines its brand identity. Because Chabad intends its website primarily for consumption by those outside their Hasidic sect, they necessarily try to shape the outside world’s perceptions of them while establishing a niche for themselves, particularly in the larger Jewish community. My paper will outline the major components of Chabad’s brand identity and explain their theological underpinnings.

Concomitantly, I hope to begin an exploration of what it means for a religion to position itself on the internet using the same techniques that a commercial venture would. Though it has become common sense that businesses and organizations should have websites, it often remains unclear just how that institution ought to represent itself on the web. Institutions that previously thought merely having a site was enough have now come to realize that the image their site portrays is crucial for their success and is directly related to how those interacting with the site see their institution as a whole. For an organization like Chabad that is extremely invested in the concept of "outreach," their website presents them with a unique opportunity to reach a much wider audience, but it also necessarily brings them within the rubric of what a good website ought to be and what function it serves. In other words, I am curious how the very act of representing itself through its website shapes the Chabad organization.

John-Charles Duffy, Doctoral candidate, Religious Studies, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Belief Matters to the Religious Right: Evangelical-Mormon Interfaith Dialogue and the Mitt Romney Campaign
Sociologists Robert Wuthnow and James Hunter have suggested that during the late twentieth-century "culture wars," religious beliefs that traditionally separated denominations became less important than a conservative-liberal divide cutting across denominations. However, the ability of religious conservatives to forge potent interfaith coalitions on the right is constrained by the reluctance of evangelical Protestants to cooperate with religious others. More than other religious conservatives--e.g., Catholics or Mormons--evangelicals need to be persuaded of creedal commonalities with would-be political allies. Beginning in the 1990s, some evangelical intellectuals have tried to clear the path to closer political cooperation with other religious conservatives through interfaith dialogues that elucidate shared theological ground, a surprising tactic give evangelicals' antipathy to liberal ecumenism.

This paper examines recent dialogues of this type advanced over the last ten years between Mormons and evangelicals, two groups who would seem natural political allies but who have been alienated from one another by an anti-Mormon animus fostered by evangelical countercult ministries. I show that despite irenic gestures from prominent evangelical theologians and lobbyists, persistent animus among the evangelical rank-and-file, arising from opposition to Mormon theology, hindered Mitt Romney's efforts to build a multireligious conservative constituency backing him as the "candidate of faith." I suggest that while Mormon-evangelical dialogues on subjects such as salvation by grace or expanding the scriptural canon may seem irrelevant to public policy, these dialogues' implications for electoral politics, as exemplified by the Romney campaign, call for understanding these theological discussions as constitutive of the public sphere.

Jennifer Swanson, PhD student, Department of Sociology, Syracuse University
The Spirit and the Land: How Ethics and Religious Beliefs Influence Local Politics in Southeastern Utah
Residents in Grand and San Juan Counties, Utah are engaged in severely polarized debates about regional planning. Most of those engaged in these dialogues assert a profound love of the land, yet their opinions about appropriate land uses diverge wildly. In part, these debates can be viewed as struggles over class, power, and access to resources. The differing perspectives can also, however, be understood as manifestations of deeply-rooted religious beliefs that influence conceptions of land, work, and the relationship between humans and nature. This paper will consider the ways that religious beliefs shape local perspectives on land use in this region. Originally inhabited by multiple Native Americans tribes, the area was colonized by members of the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) in the last 150 years and remains home to many Navajo and Mormons today. In more recent decades, environmentalists with a wide range of spiritual practices have located in the area. Recognizing how differing cosmologies are threaded into the underlying dynamics of the region is critical for understanding the social conflicts, yet often these are overlooked in contemporary scholarship. This paper will analyze a variety of contemporary debates using a framework that considers religious belief and ethics as a primary motivating factor for individual and collective decision-making. In this sense, it will consider the ways that religious beliefs are embedded into the politics of this region and the ways that religious beliefs are mobilized to encourage social action, making the larger claim that these beliefs do indeed influence individual and collective behavior.