Video Gallery
2012
God(s): A User's Guide: Religion and Immigration
God(s): A User's Guide: Religion, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Society
God(s): A User's Guide: Religion in Public Institutions
God(s): A User's Guide: Multiculturalism in Canada: Secularism and Reasonable Accommodation
2011
Daniel Boyarin: Nominalist "Judaism" and the Late-Ancient Invention of Religion
James Beckford: Religious freedom, religious diversity, and prisons
Gérard Bouchard: Interculturalism and the Management of Ethno-Cultural Diversity in Québec
Jeff Spinner-Halev: Religiously Justified Discrimination
Kim Knott: Spaces of Religious Diversity and Encounter: Research, agenda-setting and policy intervention
2010
Danièle Hervieu-Léger: La fabrique des identités religieuses dans des sociétés de haute modernité
Gurpreet Mahajan: Religious Diversity and Multicultural Accommodation
Rajeev Bhargava and Peter Beyer: On Secularism
James Tully: On Responsible Citizenship
Veit Bader: Constitutionalizing Secularism, Alternative Secularisms or Liberal Democracy?
Winnifred Sullivan: Spiritual Governance: The New Establishment
2009
William Connolly: Belief, Spirituality and Time
Ann Pellegrini: Sexual Freedom, Religious Exemptions, and Secular Citizenship: Constitutional and Civic Challenges in the Contemporary United States
God(s): A User's Guide:
Religion and Immigration
April 5, 2012
Canadian Museum of Civilization
Session:
Featuring Panelists:
Peter Beyer (University of Ottawa)
Paul Bramadat (University of Victoria)
Patrice Brodeur (Université de Montréal)
Glen Choi (University of Ottawa)
God(s): A User's Guide:
Religion, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Society
March 15, 2012
Canadian Museum of Civilization
Session:
Featuring Panelists:
Pamela Dickey Young (Queen's University)
Donald Boisvert (Concordia University)
Heather Shipley (University of Ottawa)
Nancy Nason-Clark (University of New Brunswick)
God(s): A User's Guide:
Religion in Public Institutions
March 1, 2012
Canadian Museum of Civilization
Session:
Featuring Panelists:
James Beckford (University of Warwick)
Sheryl Reimer-Kirkham (Trinity Western University)
Pascale Fournier (University of Ottawa)
Remi Warner (Ontario Human Rights Commission)
God(s): A User's Guide:
Multiculturalism in Canada: Secularism and Reasonable Accommodation
February 16, 2012
Canadian Museum of Civilization
Session:
Featuring Panelists:
Charles Taylor (McGill University)
Solange Lefebvre (Université de Montréal)
Natasha Bakht (University of Ottawa)
Lori G. Beaman (University of Ottawa)
Critical Thinkers in Religion, Law and Social Theory:
A Lecture by Daniel Boyarin (University of California, Berkeley)
Nominalist "Judaism" and the Late-Ancient Invention of Religion
December 8, 2011
University of Ottawa
Lecture:
Q & A:
Daniel Boyarin is the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. His research is multi and interdisciplinary, with interests in the Talmud, Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity, religion and systems of sex and gender, rhetoric of interpretation, politics of rhetoric/philosophy in antiquity, and women, gender, and sexuality. Professor Boyarin’s recent publications include Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (co-edited with Daniel Itzkovitz and Ann Pellegrini, Columbia University Press, 2003); Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Socrates & the Fat Rabbis (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Critical Thinkers in Religion, Law and Social Theory:
A Lecture by James Beckford (University of Warwick)
Religious freedom, religious diversity, and prisons
November 4, 2011
University of Ottawa
Lecture:
Q & A:
James A. Beckford is a Fellow of the British Academy, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Warwick, and the 2010-11 President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. The focus of his research is on sociological aspects of religions, with a special emphasis on the position of minority religious movements in various countries including the UK, the USA, France and Japan. The study of religion in prisons has been at the centre of his research for the past two decades, producing Muslims in Prison: Challenge and Change in Britain and France (2005), with D. Joly and F. Khosrokhavar. Among his many publications are The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, co-edited with Jay Demerath in 2007, Social Theory and Religion (2003) and the classic Cult Controversies (1985). In 2008 a collection edited by Eileen Barker was published celebrating Beckford’s contribution to the field titled The Centrality of Religion in Social Life: Essays in Honour of James A. Beckford.
Critical Thinkers in Religion, Law and Social Theory:
A Lecture by Gérard Bouchard (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi)
Interculturalism and the Management of Ethno-Cultural Diversity in Québec
September 23, 2011
University of Ottawa
Lecture:
Q & A:
Gérard Bouchard holds a Canada Research Chair in the Comparative Dynamics of Collective Imaginaries at the University of Québec à Chicoutimi, where he has taught since 1971. He has been a visiting professor at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and Harvard University, Department of Sociology. Bouchard served with Charles Taylor as Co-Chair of the Québec Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences from 2007-2008 and co-wrote with Taylor the final report entitled Building the Future. A Time for Reconciliation (2008). Additional recent publications include: La culture québécoise est-elle en crise? with Alain Roy (2007); Mythes et sociétés des Amériques, edited with Bernard Andrès (2007) ; and La pensée impuissante. Échecs et mythes nationaux canadiens-français (1850-1960) (2004).
Critical Thinkers in Religion, Law and Social Theory:
A Lecture by Jeff Spinner-Halev (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Religiously Justified Discrimination
March 4, 2011
University of Ottawa
Lecture:
Q & A:
Jeff Spinner-Halev is the Kenan Eminent Professor of Political Ethics at UNC–Chapel Hill. He received his BA and PhD from the University of Michigan. He is author of The Boundaries of Citizenship Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in the Liberal State (Johns Hopkins, 1994) and Surviving Diversity: Religion and Democratic Citizenship (Johns Hopkins, 2000) and co-editor of Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Right and Diversity (Cambridge, 2005) and also responsible for many book chapters and journal articles. He is currently working on a book called Enduring Injustice. Spinner-Halev has been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, also at the Hebrew University.
Critical Thinkers in Religion, Law and Social Theory:
A Lecture by Kim Knott (University of Leeds)
Spaces of Religious Diversity and Encounter: Research, agenda-setting and policy intervention
February 11, 2011
University of Ottawa
Lecture:
Q & A:
Based at the University of Leeds in the UK, Kim Knott is director of the Research Programme on Diasporas, Migration and Identities, a multimillion-dollar research program funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Together with Sean McLoughlin, she is co-editor of the recently published book Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities (Zed 2010). Knott is currently preparing both publications and events that bring together and analyze the theoretical and empirical advances of the Diasporas program and will maximize the impact of the program. Alongside this work, her personal research focuses on the development of a spatial methodology for locating religion; for examining its engagement with other social and cultural institutions, activities and issues; and for breaking open the “secular.” In her book The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis (Equinox 2005), she considers the application of socio-spatial theory in the study of religious, secular and post-secular relations, and applies her methodology to the first of several case studies, the left hand. Subsequent studies have included an examination of the location of religion and secular values in an English medical centre, in urban multicultural landscapes and in the disciplinary relationship between theology and religious studies. She is currently directing research on British media portrayals of religion and the secular sacred, a longitudinal study that compares media coverage and representations from the early 1980s with those of today. She was involved in the creation of and was actively involved in the early development of the European Association for the Study of Religion and has participated in a variety of national and international research projects and consultations on religion, migration, communities and diversity.
Critical Thinkers in Religion, Law and Social Theory:
A Lecture by Danièle Hervieu-Léger (Centre d'Études Sociologiques et Politiques Raymond Aron)
La fabrique des identités religieuses dans des sociétés de haute modernité
November 26, 2010
University of Ottawa
Lecture:
Q & A:
Danièle Hervieu-Léger est diplômée de l'Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, licenciée en Droit (Faculté de Droit de Paris), Docteur en sociologie (EPHE Vie section), Docteur d'État en Lettre et Sciences Humaines, elle a commencé sa carrière au Groupe de Sociologie des Religions du CNRS, comme chargé, puis directrice de recherche, de 1974 en 1992. Directrice d'études à l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales à partir de 1992, elle y dirige le Centre d'Études Interdisciplinaires des Faits Religieux de 1993 à 2004. Elle a été rédactrice en chef de la revue Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions de 1986 à 2004. Elle a été Présidente de l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales de 2004 à 2009. Actuellement membre du Centre d'Études Sociologiques et Politiques Raymond Aron, elle est présidente du Conseil d'Administration de l'Institut National d'Études Démographiques depuis 2009. Parmi ses nombreux ouvrages et articles consacrés à l'exploration sociologique de la modernité religieuse, et spécifiquement du christianisme contemporain, on peut citer : Le pèlerin et le converti. La religion en movement (1999) ; La religion en miettes ou la question des sectes (2001) ; Catholicisme, la fin d'un monde (2003). Elle travaille aujourd'hui à une sociologie du temps chrétien en modernité, à partir du dossier des (re)fondations, réformes et créations monastiques contemporaines en Europe.
Critical Thinkers in Religion, Law and Social Theory:
A Lecture by Gurpreet Mahajan (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Religious Diversity and Multicultural Accommodation
September 24, 2010
University of Ottawa
Lecture:
Q & A:
Rajeev Bhargava (University of Delhi) and Peter Beyer (University of Ottawa) on ‘Secularism’
A public session on Secularism with Rajeev Bhargava and Team Member Peter Beyer took place on Thursday September 23, 2010, at the University of Ottawa. Click below to hear the audio from the event.
Critical Thinkers in Religion, Law and Social Theory:
A Lecture by James Tully (University of Victoria)
On Responsible Citizenship
April 9, 2010
University of Ottawa
Lecture:
Q&A:
James Tully is the University of Victoria Distinguished Professor of Political Science. His recent publications include Public Philosophy in a New Key (2 Volumes, 2008), with Alain-G. Gagnon, ed., Multinational Democracy (2001), and Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (1996). Tully, who teaches and studies contemporary political thought and its history, is working on a collection of essays on peace and freedom he also co-edits, with Quentin Skinner, the Ideas in Context Series at Cambridge University Press.
Critical Thinkers in Religion, Law and Social Theory Series:
A Lecture by Veit Bader (Professor Emeritus at the University of Amsterdam)
Constitutionalizing Secularism, Alternative Secularisms or Liberal Democracy?
March 12, 2010
University of Ottawa
Lecture:
Q&A:
Veit Bader is professor emeritus of sociology and professor emeritus of social and political philosophy. He is currently involved in the IMES research line on the Governance of Ethnic and Religious Diversity. He is also the coordinator of the Dutch partnerships in the FP7-funded projects Tolerance, Pluralism and Social Cohesion: Responding to the Challenges of the 21st Century in Europe (TAPIS) and RESECEURIA (Religious Diversity and Secular Models in Europe–Innovative Approaches to Law and Policy).
Critical Thinkers in Religion, Law and Social Theory:
A Lecture by Winnifred Sullivan (SUNY - Buffalo Law School)
Spiritual Governance: The New Establishment
January 29, 2010
University of Ottawa
Lecture:
Q&A:
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is associate professor of law and director of the Law and Religion Program at the University at Buffalo Law School. She is also the author of Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Critical Thinkers in in Religion, Law and Society:
A Lecture by William Connolly (Johns Hopkins University)
Belief, Spirituality and Time
November 13, 2009
University of Ottawa
William E. Connolly is Krieger Eisenhower Professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches political theory. His recent books include Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed; Pluralism; and Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. His book The Terms of Political Discourse won the Lippincott Award a few years ago for a book "of exceptional quality that is still considered important at least fifteen years after its date of publication". A new book now in production is entitled A World of Becoming.
Critical Thinkers in Religion, Law and Social Theory:
A Lecture by Ann Pellegrini (New York University)
Sexual Freedom, Religious Exemptions, and Secular Citizenship: Constitutional and Civic Challenges in the Contemporary United States
October 23, 2009
University of Ottawa
Professor Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University, where she also directs NYU's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (1997); co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (2003); co-editor, with Daniel Boyarin and Daniel Itzkovitz, of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (2003); and co-editor, with Jakobsen, of Secularisms (2008). Her essays have appeared in such journals as GLQ, Critical Inquiry, Camera Obscura, American Quarterly, and American Imago.