2001
Forthcoming
The Uses of Religion
Call for Papers
Deadline: May 1
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Currently religion generates grist for critical writing, as evidenced by recent publication of work on religion, spirituality and the sacred by Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, Paul Ricoeur, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Zizek, and by the proliferation of calls for scholarship relating to religion that appear so often on public list-serves and bulletin boards. Crossings seeks essays that explore interconnections between religion, science, art, cultural politics, philosophy and critical methods. We invite essays on religion as a nexus for disciplinary power, or arguments about how religion functions as a discursive practice among others relevant to the production of subjectivity and technologies of the self. We encourage papers that discuss how re-definitions of the disciplines, and dialogues between the sciences, humanities, and other disciplines, might interpret religion in terms of its language, social practices, and epistemic relays. How has religion undergone re-inscription or redefinition throughout the postmodern paradigm shift? How might we understand religion, its disciplines, and disciplinarity through expositions of global transnational captial and the and the recent advancement of such critical projects as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire? In what ways has religion always been affiliated with imperial desire for a complete global territory? Does the recent revelation of Empire’s having gone beyond national interests provide any sacred “safe place” for the writing of praxis beyond or beneath secular humanist efforts for social justice? Or has the critical terrain itself been colonized by the judgement of God? Has global Latin-ization marked a stoppage of thought at the place where Roman and Christian conflict begins? Does secular faith in rights of intervention present new dangers? Are the tools ready-to-hand merely blunted coal-shovels from humanist dustbins? Will we understand power for what it is, or will a new league of faithful post-humanists prove unable to resist temptations by schizophrenic serpents?
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