Thematic Forums

This forum features essays from the Postdoctoral Research grantees of the Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellowship, which aims to explore the place of religion and spirituality as they relate to current scholarly and public conversations about renewing democracy in the United States. (2023)

This conversation features essays by leading scholars and policy analysts who consider the entanglements of law, religion, and state building across times and places—and the consequences of these entanglements for global politics and social justice. (2023)

The forum on “National identity, nationalism, and the politics of religion” draws together scholars with research expertise in the Middle East, North America, South Asia, and Europe to examine different facets of religious nationalism. (2023)

In this forum, contributors lead readers through the lived experiences of Asian Americans and what these experiences reveal about the religio-racial fabric of the United States. (2023)

This forum examines the rise of far-right movements and actors through a global lens with Hindutva and the Hindu right at the center of this inquiry. (2022)

This forum builds and expands on conversations originally convened at McGill University in which the featured contributors consider how “the old women’s modality of inhabiting Islam” compels scholars to rethink limits to our understanding of gender, knowledge, and power. (2022)

In this forum, scholars explore religious histories and spiritual practices that have been left out of representative accounts of Black life. (2022)

This essay series features the 2020 cohort of the Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellowship, which aims to explore the place of religion and spirituality as they relate to current scholarly and public conversations about renewing democracy in the United States. (2022)

Contributors explore the meaning and consequences of death, burial practices, mourning, and commemoration across societies and time periods. (2021)

This forum draws together scholars of religion, state, and society to initiate a conversation around translation and its place within the academic enterprise. (2021)

In this forum, scholars discuss the corporate form, including questions around corporate histories, corporate cultural production, and corporate ethics. (2021)

Through a series of paired conversations, scholars in this forum query the meaning of apocalypse during this critical moment in history. (2021)

Scholars in religious studies and theology contribute to this conversation at the intersection of public health, US politics, and the Movement for Black Lives. (2021)

The strange and often contradictory ways that phenomenology has been woven into and through diverse religious traditions are the subject of this forum. (2020)

This forum invites scholars to question narratives of progress, perfection, and triumphant secularism that are threaded through contemporary discussion of modern reproductive practices. (2020)

This forum draws together scholars across the social sciences and the humanities to address various questions raised or renewed by Covid-19, and its effects on religious and public life globally. (2020)

This series is intended to stage a playful, yet serious, encounter between two writers. (2019 – )

A conversation around the purchase and pitfalls of investing our collective political hopes and anxieties in the manifold figurations of the people as the crowd, the mob, the migrant, or the minority. (2020)

What is the ‘religious left’ and what are its prospects for responding to the current moment of authoritarian populism? (2019)

Nancy Levene and Mona Oraby cocurated this forum on the oath, “the promise, the pledge, the vow, equally the curse, the malediction, the blasphemy.” (2019)

Contributors to this forum consider why, when, and where certain understandings of charity and philanthropy have proven persuasive and powerful. (2019)

Following the 2018 forum on divine fatherhood, we invited scholars with expertise in various cultural and religious contexts to reflect on this theme of divine motherhood. (2019)

This forum explores a set of interlocking questions concerning how we approach the study of public religion. (2019)

This series of essays aims to open up, with respect to the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, the ridiculously large question, “What does law have to do with it?” (2019)

This forum asks scholars to imagine new standards of excellence in religious studies pedagogy and research that take deep diversity and concern for justice seriously. (2019)

Scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds were invited to consider the ways in which the legal distinction between belief and believer is negotiated socially and jurisprudentially across a range of contemporary political contexts. (2018 – 2019)

Contributors to this forum comment on themes of sexuality, aesthetics, power, and many other aspects of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s Spring 2018 exhibition, Heavenly Bodies. (2018)

We invited scholars from varied disciplinary backgrounds, with varied regional and religious expertise, to reflect on what it means to treat fathers as God-like and what it means to treat God as father-like. (2018)

With contributions from historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, sociologists, and scholars of religion, this forum takes two new books as sparks for a broader conversation about sex, gender, religion, nationalism, secularism, neoliberalism, and the public sphere. (2018)

This forum draws on a range of historical and contemporary case studies to show that conversions rarely converge on the question of belief or sincerity alone. (2018)

Authors attend to how religious individuals and groups balance their responsibilities as members of particular faith communities and as citizens of a religiously diverse nation. (2018)

This forum aims to reconstruct a positive way of imagining irreligion, on its own terms. (2017)

This forum seeks to explicate the various ways in which the ideas of the Muslim world and the Muslim country have been taken up in scholarship and political discourse more broadly. (2017)

A collection of essays focusing on religious life in Haiti, with particular emphasis on how religion and spirituality weave a narrative in the post-earthquake crisis. (2010)

During the campaigning leading up to the 2008 election, scholars reflect on the role of religion in American politics. (2008)

This forum creates a space to explore how scholarly discussions of settler colonialism, nationalism, race, and secularity might productively inform each other. (2017)

A discussion of the deeply ambiguous heritage of US exceptionality. (2017)

Scholars respond to the SSRC project Frequencies, considering its shape and contents, its limits and potentialities. (2012)

These essays show how groups in Western Europe and the United States draw on religious and secular symbols when determining belonging. (2016)

Scholars and journalists consider their respective crafts and the media through which they practice. (2015)

We have invited scholars and practitioners from various disciplines to take up the wider issues raised by US Supreme Court actions concerning the free exercise of religion in the United States. (2014 – 2015)

How might studying negative prayer influence our understanding of prayer more broadly? (2014)

Exploring the regimes of representation and social engagement through which various communities create, maintain, contest, and materialize their visions of the public sphere. (2014)

Scholars try to shed some light on the complex situation unfolding in Egypt and to help illuminate potential paths forward. (2014)

The starting point for this exchange is the observation that, while “the secular” has been subjected to thorough conceptual critique, the concept of religion has remained remarkably vague. (2014)

We have invited scholars to offer readers their visions of the state of religion in China, past, present, and future. (2013)

This exchange calls attention to the growing group of evangelicals who have “left the right.” (2013)

This discussion seeks to interpret the sex abuse scandal as a subject for the study of religion. (2012)

What is religious freedom, and why are we talking about it now? (2012 – 2013)

A discussion based on an SSRC Working Paper, “Secularism: Its Content and Context,” written by Akeel Bilgrami. (2011 – 2012)

Reflections from scholars on the Egyptian revolution in 2011. (2011)

An initiative that attempts “to get at the purpose and nature of liberal arts education by asking what it means for a liberal arts campus to unabashedly call its practices “secular.” (2010 – 2011)

This TIF interview series presents conversations with some of the leading scholars, activists, and public intellectuals who are changing how we think about the lines between sacred and secular. (2009 – 2013)

Reflections from SSRC graduate students. (2010; 2011)

Sociologists engage in critical reflection of the evolving state of the sub-discipline of religion. (2010)

In this forum, scholars interrogate Robert Bellah’s 1967 thesis of an “American civil religion.” (2010)

A critical discussion of studies on America’s growing “no religion” population and the manifestations of spirituality and spiritual movements in political life. (2009 – 2010)

Scholars provide contrasting analyses of a controversial facet of American foreign policy. (2010)

A critical discussion of Barack Obama’s 2009 Inaugural Address and reflections on American civil religion. (2009)

This is a collection of responses to the terrorist attacks in India in November 2008. (2008)

A discussion from various perspectives on how people understand and apply a contested religious category. (2008)

Scholars untangle the past and future of the family in this forum. (2008)

This series brings history, philosophy, and literature to bear on the question of what scientific explanations of religious experience and belief really stand to offer. (2008)

Scholars in this discussion weigh in on the social implications of secularism and political change in Turkey. (2008)

Colleagues and scholars reflect on Benazir Bhutto’s life and legacy, and the larger political and religious landscape in which she lived and died. (2007 – 2008)

Scholars reassess a longstanding debate regarding the expression and interdiction of religion in the public sphere. (2007 – 2008; 2010 – 2011)

Scholars in this series examine the histories, contexts, and assumptions of critique. (2007 – 2008)

One of the earliest discussions on The Immanent Frame taking the conversations around secularism to a new level. (2007 – 2013)