Locations:

• April 4 - Niles Gallery (9AM - 1:30PM)
• April 4 - Library Multipurpose Room (3-5PM)

Religions have received much bad press in this new age of anxious states. Theorists of globalization, world economic uncertainty, and ‘national security’, for example, publicly worry about the role politicized Islamic religiosity might be playing in the press-termed ‘Arab Spring’ and its connection to violence. Other thinkers and policy mavens, particularly those associated with the burgeoning field of ‘risk analysis’, are increasingly edgy about religiously inflected Hindu and Buddhist nationalisms in South Asia, the rise of new forms of Christianity in Africa, or the possibly ‘destabilizing’ consequences of new religious enthusiasms in Russia and China. In this conference we seek to explore the many ways religions as practices are participating in the lives of people and groups living within the increasingly fragile and unsettling developments of our hyper age.