LTI Newsletter Summer 2009

From the Director, Peter M. Scott: Welcome to the Summer 2009 issue of the Institute’s newsletter, with its reports on LTI’s activities over the last year. It has been another frenetic year at the Institute, with some projects coming to a conclusion and new projects beginning. Elsewhere in this newsletter, you will find reports on the three LTI projects that are currently underway: the first phase of the Future Ethics has been completed and the second phase is now beginning. A new project, Belonging & Heimat, led by the Institute’s new honorary research fellow John Rodwell, has begun. And the head of steam in the third project, Divinity after Empire, continues to build as the project attracts additional partners. A number of publications by members of the Institute have also appeared; please click here to download the rest of the newsletter.

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Priest, Scientist Bags National Award

An acclaimed ecologist from The University of Manchester is to receive a prestigious award by one of the discipline's leading bodies.

Anglican Priest Professor John Rodwell will be presented with the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management's President's Medal for his services to ecology and conservation this week (25 June).

He follows in the footsteps of Sir David Attenborough who won the award for his contribution to the public understanding of ecology in 2006 and Professor Tony Bradshaw, for his lifelong work on land restoration in 2007.

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Spring 2009 Doctoral Seminar

This coming Wednesday, 27 May, we will be hosting our last doctoral seminar for this academic year. Please click here for a PDF with further details of time, location, the abstracts and short bios of the students involved. This time, we will address the question, "What constitutes otherness?" from the various philosophical, theological and socio-political perspectives being researched by doctoral students associated with the Centre for Religion and Political Culture. Paper topics include Dostoyevski's Demons, a critique of Milbank's recent discussion of Hegel in the Monstrocity of Christ, Bishop Ting's understanding of distinctive "Chinese Christianity," an analysis of Carl Schmitt and Mau Tse-tung's understanding of the friend enemy distinction, the concept of otherness in relation to effective action research, and myth-making as the boundary-defining mechanism in the formation of national identity and the politics of memory. Lastly, if you're interested in participating in future seminars, we will kick off the next academic year and welcome new students to the Centre in October 2009.

Winter 2009 Doctoral Seminar

Wordle representation of the seminar abstractsThis coming February, we're hosting our first doctoral seminar for students at the CRPC and some of its affiliated centres here at the University of Manchester. This will be a relatively informal chance for everyone to share current research interests and make new connections both relationally and intellectually. For further details on the kinds of research taking place at the CRPC, we've posted two PDFs which list the abstracts as well as short biographies of those attending. Short bios are also available in our study here pages in the menu bar above.

German Translation of True Religion

Kohlhammer press has recently published a German translation of Graham Ward's 2003 book, True Religion. Auf der Suche nach der wahren Religion: ReligionsKulturen 4, was translated by by Annerose Karkowski and was made available in December, 2008. Here's a brief abstract:

Vom religiösen Fundamentalismus bis zum Konsum religiöser Spezialeffekte im Holy Land-Abenteuerpark in Florida: Religion steht einmal mehr auf der Liste der wichtigsten Themen der Gegenwart. Doch wie verhält sich die gegenwärtige Wiederkehr des Religiösen zur Wahrheit der Religion? Ward skizziert die Genealogie der Suche nach der "wahren" Religion in der westlichen Welt. Er macht auf die Wandlungen dieser Suche im Wechselspiel mit den Entwicklungen des modernen Säkularismus, Liberalismus und Kapitalismus aufmerksam. Für die Gegenwart kommt er zu dem überraschenden Fazit: Zurück zur Theologie!

Graham Ward ist durch seine Beiträge zu Diskursen postmoderner Theologie international bekannt geworden und gilt als einer der kreativsten Theologen der Gegenwart.

The New Visibility of Religion

New Publication!

The New Visibility of Religion: Studies in Religion and Cultural Hermeneutics is the latest in the Continuum Studies in Religion and Political Culture series edited by Graham Ward and Michael Hoelzl and will be published in early October.

Synopsis

This is a unique collection of essays that brings together contributions from theology, aesthetics, social and political science, philosophy and cultural theory to examine the surge in the public visibility of religion.Since the late 1980s, sociologists have been drawing our attention to an international surge in the public visibility of religion. This has increasingly challenged two central aspects of modern western European culture: first, the assumption that as we became more modern we would become more secularised and religion would disappear; and secondly, that religion and politics should occupy radically differentiated spheres in which private conviction did not exert itself within the public realm. The new visibility of religion is not simply a matter of what Keppel famously called 'The Revenge of God', that is, the resurgence of Christian, Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism. Religion is permeating western culture in many different forms from contemporary continental philosophy, the arts and the media, to the rhetoric of international politicians.This collection of essays brings together a unique collection of voices from theology, aesthetics, social and political science, philosophy and cultural theory in an exploration of four major aspects of this new visibility of religion: the revision of the secularisation thesis, the relationship between religion and violence, the new re-enchantment of reality and the return of metaphysics.

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