[Asec] CFP | Oct 6-8 2021| In the Shadows of Religious Experience: Hostility, Violence, Revenge

[Olga Louchakova-Schwartz]

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



*CFP - Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience, 2021
Conference (Online), Hosted by the University of Vienna, Department of
Philosophy, and in association with the research grant "Revenge of the
Sacred: Phenomenology and the Ends of Christianity in Europe" (FWF P-31919)*



Recent advances in the study of religion successfully have demonstrated the
positive, community-building potentials of religious experience in terms of
its material/performative practices, psychological models of coping with
pain/crisis, and embodied habits that help individuals establish more
co-creative forms of reason in order to develop more grounded social
imaginaries and epistemologies.



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 irrevocable 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 is often motivated by various processes of
*enmification*.  And although revenge is not a necessary response to some
preceding 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 very often is invoked in
political activities irrespective of religious traditions and engagements.
Yet in all too many cases, this trifecta becomes even more pronounced due
to the ways and means individuals and groups have, and choose to have,
religious experiences and use religious narratives to justify violent
responses.

Can we describe phenomenologically the core motivations for why hostility,
violence, or revenge too frequently are preferred over peaceful
interactions and phronetic engagements with others?  Does a certain
entitlement or perverse freedom arise from a sense of representing divine
power, stemming from unconditional claims that are promoted “in the name
of” a transcendent principle?  To what degree does the dialectic between
purity and compromise play a role in the will to act violently towards
others who one deems to embody a “threat of disorder,” a stain of impurity,
or are simply passed by indifferently? Could the clear-cut orders of “the
sacred” and “the secular” possibly contribute to deepening an age-old
dualism or desire for equilibrium through revenge? Further, if religious
experience does not necessarily invite the irrational (or on the contrary,
hyper-rational) responses of seeking the harm, injury, or “correction” of
others, in what way do forms of religious experience contribute to the
(re)production of negative socialities that revolve around imaginations of
threat and disorder? What kind of responsibilities might the presence of a
non or a-religious community or politic play in creating spaces of
opposition and conflict?



In order to find constructive answers to such questions, we invite
reference to the whole phenomenological movement, including
post-phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction; historical and
contemporary research with the engagement of phenomenology, theological
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 that is prone to deepen
habits of hostility, legitimize violence, and motivate revenge;

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

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

- Depictions of the theologico-political undercurrents of late modern
social imaginaries that nourish the habitus of “cultures of violence”;

- Descriptions of how the break-down of meaning in a) the maelstrom of
globalization, b) the advent of apathy and indifference in a modernity
spinning out of control, and c) the social construction of murderous
consent to neoliberal exploitation and the resulting nihilism of a
commodified society committed to the myth of progress all have influenced
religious communities and their contemporary self-understanding.



*Please submit* papers of no more than 600 words, formatted for anonymous
review, before July 10, 2021. Enclose your biographic information in the
body of email. Email for the submission is vienna2021 at sophere.org. You
should receive an acknowledgement of your submission. Provisional
notifications of acceptance will be emailed by July 20, 2021. Authors whose
submissions are provisionally accepted must become members of SPHS before
acceptance is confirmed  https://sophere.org/membership/



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



*Selected papers will be published in a special issue of Religions and
other venues.*



*Contact:*

Jason Alvis jason.wesley.alvis at univie.ac.at

Michael Staudigl michael.staudigl at univie.ac.at



*Please feel free to distribute.*

Vienna 2021 Poster
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Vienna 2021 Poster 2
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https://sophere.org/conferences/vienna-2020-call-for-abstracts/
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