[Asec] CFP: In the Shadows of Religious Experience: Hostility, Violence, Revenge | Oct 6-8, online conference

Wed Apr 7 16:03:20 UTC 2021

*In the Shadows of Religious Experience: Hostility, Violence, Revenge *

*CFP - Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience, Oct 6-8, 2021
Conference (Online), Hosted by the University of Vienna, Institute for
Philosophy, and in association with the FWF project "Revenge of the Sacred:
Phenomenology and the Ends of Christianity in Europe" *

Recent advances in the study of religion successfully have demonstrated the
positive, community-building potentials of religious experience in terms of
its material practices, psychological models of coping with pain/crisis,
and embodied habits that help individuals establish more heteronomous, and
less autonomous forms of reason in order to have a more grounded, and
socially coherent epistemology.

Without disregarding or disagreeing with the innumerable potential effects
and benefits of having and creating religious experiences, in this
conference we wish to focus more so on how the ambivalence of religious
experience simultaneously can lead it to bear its discontents and negative
socialities, namely, in the forms of hostility, violence, and revenge.
Although
violence is not the necessary product of hostility, it always looms as a
threat.  And although revenge is not a necessary response to an act of
violence, individuals and groups quite often resort to it in order to
appease aggrieved individuals and parties.  Of course, this trifecta of
hostility, violence, and revenge takes place in human activities
irrespective of religious traditions and engagements.  Yet in some cases,
this trifecta becomes even more pronounced due to the way and means by
which individuals and groups have, and choose to have, religious
experiences.

Can we describe phenomenologically the core motivations for why hostility,
violence, or revenge are preferred in some cases over peaceful interactions
with others?  Does a certain entitlement or perverse freedom arise from a
sense of representing divine power, stemming from unconditional claims?  To
what degree does the dialectic between purity and compromise play a role in
the will to act aggressively and violently towards others? Could the
clear-cut orders of the sacred and the secular possibly contribute to a
dualism that inevitably leads to the propulsion towards establishing
equilibrium through revenge? Further, if religious experience does not
necessarily invite the irrational (or on the contrary, hyper-rational)
responses of seeking the harm or injury of others, in what way do forms of
religious experience contribute to these negative socialities? What kind of
role might the presence of a non or a-religious community or politic, as a
"secular" and confused modernity that acts as a counterweight to those
professing religious experiences, create spaces of opposition that might
lead to hostility, violence, or revenge?

We invite reference to the whole phenomenological movement, including
post-phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction; historical and
contemporary research with the engagement of phenomenology,
experienced-based comparative studies like cultural anthropology of
experience, qualitatively based sociology of religion, as well as
theological and psychological perspectives that utilize phenomenological
research methods. Abstract and Paper proposals on the following topics
would be most welcome:

- Critiques of the relationship between religion and 'secularism' as a
social, political, and epistemological separation.

-Analyses of the role religious experience might play in academic, social,
and political discourse(s) on hostility, violence, or revenge.

-Developments of accounts of religious experience that clearly demonstrate
its ambiguous role in how it fundamentally is constitutive of the human
condition.

-Depictions of social imaginaries that nourish the habitus of cultures of
violence.

-Descriptions of how the break-down of meaning, and the advent of apathy
and nihilism have influenced religious communities.

*Please submit* papers of no more than 600 words, formatted for anonymous
review, before July 10, 2021. Enclose you biographic information in the
body of email. Send the paper to vienna2021 at sophere.org. You should receive
a response acknowledging your submission. Notifications of acceptance will
be emailed by July 20, 2021.

*The format of presentation*: 30 minutes including question and answer
period, i.e. a paper of approximately 3500 words.

*Selected papers will be considered for publication in special guest-edited
issues of well-known journals in philosophy and religion.*

*Contact:*

Jason Alvis jason.wesley.alvis at gmail.com  <J.WESLEY.ALVIS at gmail.com>

Michael Staudigl michael.staudigl at univie.ac.at

*Please feel free to distribute. *

Olga Louchakova-Schwartz, M.D. Ph.D. (Neuroscience)
Clinical Professor, VCF
Founding President, Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience
www.sophere.org

Dept. of Public Health Sciences
UC Davis School of Medicine
Med Sci 1C, Davis, CA 95616-8638
Fax:(530)752-3239
Tel:(916)254-9959
Email:olouch at ucdavis.edu
<Email%3Aolouch at ucdavis.edu>

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