1st Biennial Religion and American Culture Conference

1st Biennial Religion and American Culture Conference
June 4-7, 2009
Omni Severin Hotel, Indianapolis

The Religion and American Culture Conference is scheduled for June 4-7 at the Omni Severin Hotel in downtown Indianapolis. The first of a series of biennial conferences to be sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture and Religion & American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, this meeting will provide a summit to take stock of the study of religion in North America and discuss potential future directions of the field.

Participating panelists range in background from departments of history, sociology, religious studies, and political science, as well as from various teaching backgrounds, including divinity schools, law schools, schools of government, and schools of public policy. Panelists will each take 15 minutes to offer their ideas, then each session will operate as a town hall meeting, with total audience participation in order to broaden the conversation.

Conference Schedule

Thursday, June 4

Registration 6:00-7:30 p.m. Reception, Severin Ballroom

Friday, June 5

9:15-11:15
How did we get here? A discussion of disciplinary lines, how we in American religious studies are divided into groups and subgroups, the forces that keep us separated or encourage interdisciplinarity, the role of funding in all of this.

Welcome: Philip Goff, Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture and Department of ReligiousStudies, IUPUI

Host: Stephen Stein, Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University-Bloomington

Panel: Jon Butler, American Studies, History, and Religious Studies, Yale University; Jay Demerath, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Paula Kane, Department of Religious Studies, University of Pittsburgh

1:15-3:00
Competing and complementary approaches in American religious history. How seriously do historians take religion, or religious studies scholars take history? Whence goeth monographs? The rise of ethnography. What about grand narratives?

Host: Peter Thuesen, Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture and Department of Religious Studies, IUPUI

Panel: John Corrigan, Department of Religious Studies, Florida State University; Dennis Dickerson, Department of History, Vanderbilt University; Robert Orsi, Department of Religious Studies, Northwestern University

3:30-5:15
Competing and complementary approaches in Social Scientific studies of religion in America. Are the important divisions less those between social scientists and humanists and instead those that divide social scientists into quantitative and qualitative? What role do non-sociological social sciences play in the larger picture?

Host: Arthur E. Farnsley II, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, IUPUI

Panel: Penny Edgell, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota; Rhys Williams, Department of Sociology, University of Cincinnati; Jerry Park, Department of Sociology, Baylor University

Saturday, June 6
8:30-10:00
Explaining Religion in America: What can we learn from each other? What can those working in the humanities learn from social scientists, and vice-versa? How do we view one another? What do we consider the other to be doing right and wrong?

Host: Brian Steensland, Department of Sociology, Indiana University-Bloomington

Panel: Courtney Bender, Department of Sociology, Columbia University; David Hall, Harvard Divinity School; Stephen Prothero, Department of Religious Studies, Boston University

10:30-12:15
Politics, Secularization, and the Public Square
Host: Sheila Suess Kennedy, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, IUPUIPanel: Daniel Walker Howe, Department of History, UCLA and Oxford University; Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, University at Buffalo Law School; and Mark Silk, Department of Religious Studies, Trinity College

2:00-3:45
Race, Ethnicity, and Religious Pluralism

Host: Edward Curtis IV, Department of Religious Studies, IUPUI

Panel: Helen Rose Ebaugh, Department of Sociology, University of Houston; Rudy Busto, Department of Religious Studies, UCSB; David Wills, Department of History, Amherst College

4:15-5:15
Where do we go from here?
Host: Sylvester Johnson, Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University-Bloomington
Panel: James Lewis, Louisville Institute, Louisville Theological Seminary; Amanda Porterfield, Florida State University

6:00-7:00 Reception

7:00-8:30 Hosted Dinner, Severin Ballroom
Guest speaker: Daniel Walker Howe, 2008 Pulitzer Prize Winner

Sunday, June 7 Depart

Register for the conference