Upcoming
On Wednesday, 18 April 2012 at 5:00pm, the Centre for Research on Religion will sponsor the launch of The Slavonic-English Analytical Catalogue of Liturgical Manuscripts in Ukrainian Repositories (SEACLMUR), edited by Peter Galadza, CREOR Visiting Fellow during the 2011-2012 academic year. The presentation will be held in the Senior Common Room 100, Birks (3520 University).
Paul’s Cross and the culture of persuasion, 1520 – 1640
Conference at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 16 – 18 August 2012
The open-air pulpit situated in the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral, commonly known as ‘Paul’s Cross’, counts among the most influential of all venues for public discourse between rulers and ruled in early-modern England. In a world where the sermon served as the principal means of adult education, as well as a major instrument of ethical guidance and political control, Paul’s Cross was the pulpit of pulpits; indeed it was the preeminent pulpit in England. The audience gathered there was to a great extent representative of the whole realm and frequently numbered in the thousands. By long tradition this was a place for the announcement of proclamations both civil and religious. Here authorised speakers expounded government policy and denounced heresy and rebellion. Yet, unlike the royal Abbey of Westminster, St Paul’s belonged more to subjects than to princes. Despite official regulation, Paul’s Cross provided a popular forum for the articulation of diverse viewpoints in a turbulent ‘market’ of religious and political ideas. From as early as the thirteenth century the cathedral churchyard had been one of the favoured settings for popular protest—a place where public grievances could be aired, a stage where vital affairs of the nation were enacted. It has been said that the English Reformation was accomplished from Paul’s Cross. What was the precise role played by the public sermon in the formation of the fluctuating religious identities of early-modern England? Who were the principal agents and players? Who constituted the audiences? And what elements of continuity and change can be observed in the employment of this most public of pulpits in the unfolding series of reformations and counter-reformations, from the middle years of the reign of Henry VIII through that of James I?
Papers will be presented on various aspects of this famous pulpit in the life of early-modern England, and especially with respect to the prominent role played by preaching at Paul’s Cross in shaping England’s early-modern religious and political identities. Our goal in particular is to initiate a reappraisal of the formation of sixteenth-century popular opinion on the hypothesis that Paul’s Cross sermons played a vital role in promoting the growth and development of a nascent ‘public sphere’ in Tudor and early-Stuart England.
conference_programme
Conference Steering Committee
Torrance Kirby (McGill) and Paul Stanwood (University of British Columbia) Contact: Torrance Kirby, Birks Building, McGill University, 3520 University Street, Montreal, Canada, H3A 2A7 Tel (514) 398-4128 / Fax (514) 398-6665 / Email torrance [dot] kirby [at] mcgill [dot] ca
The Legacy of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ġazālī (1058-1111) in the History of Western Thought
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 18 - 20 May 2012
The aim of the workshop is to examine the unique contribution of the great medieval Muslim theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ġazālī to the history of Western theological, philosophical, legal and political thought. This year marks the nine hundredth anniversary of Ġazālī’s death. The workshop comes as a contribution to the celebrations of this important anniversary. Ġazālī, as ˛ujjat alIslam, the defender of Islamic teaching, was a true giant of medieval Islam. His influence on the history of Islamic thought was manifold and various; he disclosed diverse ways by which subsequent Muslim thinkers were able to interpret both the Koran and the Hadith, as well as establish a model by which the subsequent tradition was able to systematize a coherent salvation history. As a scholar, a theologian, a jurist and a Sufi, Ġazālī has long been praised for his contribution to the core principles whereby classical Sunni Orthodoxy came to be established, chiefly by blending together hitherto diverse strands of knowledge.
Workshop Description; ghazali_workshop_programme.pdf
Conference organized by CREOR Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Yazid Said, Tantur Institute, Jerusalem
Conversion and Modernity Lecture Series, Fall 2012
The notion of “conversion” is commonly taken to denote a specifically religious phenomenon. In its broad definition, however, conversion refers to a “turning” with respect to position, direction, or destination which results in a recasting of basic orientation. “Conversion” can signify a fundamental alteration of character, a change of nature, form, or function, that is to say, a process of turning or being turned towards or even into something else, as in metamorphosis. Conversion can enable an elemental transformation of perspective in both real and metaphorical space. The origins of secular modernity can be traced back to an occurrence of shared cultural conversion, a turning or radical shift in orientation with respect to the widely assumed “horizon” of knowledge and meaning—in Greek metanoia or, as some have recently termed it, a conversion of “cognitive ecology”. The cognitive and cultural shift which gives rise to modernity is customarily associated with intellectual, religious, and aesthetic movements designated by historians as “Renaissance”, “Reformation”, and “the Baroque”. With an emerging modernity manifold forms of conversion have translated the horizon lines of knowledge and redrawn the world-pictures of individuals and whole communities. In short, our theme takes as its premise that modernity itself can be viewed as the manifestation of a broadly based “conversion” of world-view. In tracing the birth of modernity the phenomenon of religious conversion provides an effectual point of departure for a wider discussion of diverse “forms of conversion”—geographical, socio-cultural, material, linguistic, literary and artistic, human-animal, sexual, cognitive and affective, as well as religious. By treating these forms of conversion across disciplinary boundaries as a nexus of movements, translations, and transformations, we hope that these lectures will contribute to developing an understanding of religious, cultural, and cognitive change that will in turn provide insight into the emergence of the modern world.