The Religious Studies Project has disseminated a Call for Papers on behalf of Per Smith in the hope of creating a group within the American Academy of Religion yearly program that discusses topics such as irreligion, nonreligion, and secularism:
Society is always in flux, a fact that could hardly be missed in
2011, the year of the protester. As such, social change has become a hot topic in a variety of academic disciplines. Those dealing with religion are asking questions about how religious belief systems envision utopia, how religious institutions promote or stifle transformations of society, and how social change in turn transforms religion; but what about irreligious institutions, nontheistic belief systems and secularism? How do they relate to and interact with social change? This panel was born out of the belief that it is also important to investigate the relationship between social change and “the secular.” Paper topics may include but are not limited to nontheistic moral philosophies and worldviews, irreligious communities, institutions and individuals, or secularism as ideology and practice. We hope to get proposals from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives and papers will be selected based on thematic relevance and methodological diversity.
Those interested in participating should send an abstract (no more than 500 words) to smithp@bu.edu by February 13, 2012. You can find more information about the Call for Papers here.