HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL

December 9, 2022

James Room, Swartz Hall

45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge

 

 

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

 

This initiative seeks to provide a forum for conversation around these questions: from our scholars' particular research and disciplinary vantages, when did the secular emerge as a category and why? What problems or questions did it set out to solve? What historical conditions were relevant at the time? And furthermore, is "secular" still useful? Why or why not, and under what conditions? What terms or discourses may have emerged as more useful or accurate to the relevant research questions and problems?

 

Click here for full list of abstracts

 

Panelists

 
Todd Weir - University of Groningen
Albert Wu - Academia Sinica
Victoria Smolkin - Wesleyan University
Eric Gregory - Princeton University
Lucia Ruth Hulsether - Skidmore College
Cemil Aydin - University of North Carolina
K. Healan Gaston - Harvard University
Justine Quijada - Wesleyan University
Amy Alemu - Scripps College
Susanna Ferguson - Smith College
 
 
 
Conference Flyer. December 9, 2022, in the James Room of Swartz Hall.

 

Organizers

Michelle C. Sanchez

michelle sanchezAssociate Professor of TheologyHarvard Divinity School

 

Sanchez received her doctorate in the study of religion in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. Her first book, Calvin and the Resignification of the World: Creation, Incarnation, and the Problem of Political Theology was released by Cambridge University Press in 2019. It closely reads Calvin's 1559 Institutes with attention to how its genre and pedagogical strategies shape its doctrinal arguments in a material context and with an eye to embodied activity. It also places the text in conversation with contemporary theorists of religion, ritual, secularization and political theology.

Her next book project examines how Christianity became pedagogically reconfigured as a “worldview” in the twentieth century, with special attention to the role of nineteenth century Calvinist theologians.

Her research interests include the Christian movements of reform and complicated legacies of Protestantism, and the complex interrelationships between theology, politics, and rapid social change that marked sixteenth-century Europe. She also studies ways of reading theology that are attentive not only to the traditions themselves, but also to how theological writing responds to concrete historical conditions and general human concerns.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Daniel Steinmetz-JenkinsLecturer, Wesleyan University

 

 

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins is a global historian of 20th century intellectual and political thought. He is currently at work on two book projects: The first is titled, The Neoconservative Moment in France: Raymond Aron and the United States (Columbia University Press), which looks at the larger transatlantic intellectual origins of the neoconservative movement. The second is tentatively titled, The Rise and Fall of Global Secularism since the Cold War. Daniel has published scholarly articles in The Journal of the History of Ideas, Modern Intellectual History, Global Intellectual History and elsewhere. He is currently coediting two books: Michel Foucault, Neoliberalism and Beyond (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) with Stephen Sawyer; and Christianity and the New Historiography of Human Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2020) with Sarah Shortall.

His general audience commentary has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Times Literary Supplement, Dissent Magazine and elsewhere. He currently serves as an editor for The Tocqueville Review and is the Europe editor for H-Diplo. At Jackson he will be teaching classes on religion and global politics, and history and theories of global development.

His personal website can be found here: danieljenkins.me.

 

Justin Reynolds

Justin ReynoldsLecturerHarvard University

 

Justin Reynolds is a Lecturer on Social Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, where he taught in the Core Curriculum before coming to Harvard. His research interests include the history of political thought, international order in the 19th and 20th centuries, Christian theology and missions, and the history of environmentalism. He is currently preparing articles and a book manuscript based on his dissertation, an international history of the Protestant-led ecumenical movement from 1900 to the 1960s. The project examines the rise and fall of anti-secularism as concept and practice of international organization to recast debates about the history of "secularization" in the North Atlantic world. His second project looks at the relation between decolonization and environmental thought. His work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, and other institutions.

SPONSORS

The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc.

 

CONTACT US

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