Photos from Our 40th Anniversary

Top row:
Left: Jonathan Rouner, son of longtime IPR Director Leroy Rouner, joined us for a tribute to his father’s work in the institute.
Right: The 40th anniversary cake.

Middle row:
Left: Professor Emeritus James Purvis, one of the IPR’s founders, and Professor M. David Eckel, former director.
Right: The IPR’s 40th anniversary was celebrated in style at the Castle.

Bottom row:
Left: IPR Assistant Lynn Niizawa and Director Allen Speight.
Middle: Professor Alice MacLachlan (York), IPR contributor and volume co-editor.
Right: Professor Ray Monk (Southampton), a conference speaker, and IPR Director Allen Speight at the 40th-anniversary celebration.

Announcing the Institute for Philosophy & Religion 2012–13 Lecture Series:

Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical and Theological Construals of Art

The institute’s lecture series will offer an interdisciplinary examination of the relation between aesthetic and other forms of value in the modern world, including the nature of beauty and sublimity, the rise and fall of aesthetics as a discipline, and the claims of the “end” of art. In addition to the lecture series, a parallel undergraduate/graduate seminar will be offered in the fall semester. Students interested in these topics can register for the seminar under several cross-registrations (PH 456/656 = RN 397/697 = STH TT 819). For more information, contact Professor Speight.

“Political Theology and Biblical Atheism: Revisiting the Schmitt-Strauss Debate in Weimar,” John McCormick (University of Chicago)

Thursday, March 29, 2012
Boston University Photonics Center Colloquium Room
8 Saint Mary’s Street, Ninth Floor

http://www.bu.edu/maps/?id=320

Moderator: John Berthrong (School of Theology, Boston University)

John P. McCormick is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching interests include political thought in Renaissance Florence (specifically, Guicciardini and Machiavelli), 19th- and 20th-century continental political and social theory (with a focus on Weimar Germany and Central European emigres to the U.S.), the philosophy and sociology of law, the normative dimensions of European integration, and contemporary democratic theory. He is the author of Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge, 1997) and Weber, Habermas and Transformations of the European State: Constitutional, Social and Supranational Democracy (Cambridge, 2006). His latest work is Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge, 2011).

Supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities.

“Politics, Religion and Violence: The Maccabean Wars,” Jan Assman (University of Konstanz, Germany)

Wednesday, April 4, 5 pm.
Boston University, Boston University School of Law, Barristers Hall

Supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities and cosponsored by the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies.

Moderator: Michael Zank (Acting Director, Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University)

Professor Jan Assmann taught Egyptology at Heidelberg University from 1992 until 2003 and has been Honorary Professor of Cultural and Religious Studies at Constance University since 2005. His wide-ranging work explores ancient Egyptian religion, literature and history, cultural theory and memory, the reception of Egypt in Europe, and historical anthropology. He has taught as a visiting professor in Paris, Jerusalem, and several American universities including Rice, Yale, and Chicago. His books in English include Moses the Egyptian (1997), The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (2002), Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (2006), and The Price of Monotheism (2009).

“American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us,” Robert Putnam (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard)

Thursday, March 1, 6 p.m.

Moderator: Robert Hefner (Director, Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs, Boston University)

This event is co-sponsored by Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs and supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities.

Robert D. Putnam is Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. He was the 2006 recipient of the Skytte Prize and has served as an adviser to presidents and national leaders around the world. He has written more than a dozen books, including Bowling Alone and Making Democracy Work, both among the most-cited publications in the social sciences in the last half century. The London Sunday Times has called him “the most influential academic in the world today.” Putnam’s most recent book, American Grace, co-authored with David Campbell of Notre Dame, focuses on the role of religion in American public life. Based on data from two of the most comprehensive national surveys on religion and civic engagement ever conducted, American Grace is the winner of the American Political Science Association’s 2011 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs.

“Jurgen Habermas and the Social Significance of Religion,” Peter Gordon (Amabel B. James Professor, Harvard University)

Wednesday, February 1, 5 p.m.

Supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities and cosponsored by Boston University’s Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies.

Respondent: Hugh Baxter (Department of Philosophy and School of Law, Boston University)
Moderator: Michael Zank (Acting Director, Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University)

Jurgen Habermas is indisputably the most consequential social theorist of postwar Germany. Trained in the traditions of Western Marxism and post-Kantian German Idealism, he is known chiefly for his tireless work in theorizing the philosophical foundations for rational discourse in modern democratic society. In his most recent writings, to the surprise of many observers, he has begun to appreciate the considerable contribution of religious discourse, and he has developed the rudiments of a theory according to which religious participants in modern democratic polities should be permitted to participate in public debate, provided they engage in the cooperative effort of “translating” their religious insights into terms that are intelligible to any and all participants in the public sphere. This theory has developed against the background of serious legal and political controversies in Germany, controversies that concern both the historical legacy of Christianity and the new presence of Islam. Professor Gordon will address the political context of Habermas’s theory, and he will explore the ways that Habermas’s theory both engages but also modifies major theories of secularization that have played a prominent role in postwar German social thought.

Peter E. Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University, and specializes in modern European intellectual history from the late-eighteenth to the late-twentieth century.

This event is free and open to the public.

“On Being a Mediocre Believer in an Age of Extremities,” Charles Mathewes (Department of Religion, University of Virginia)

Thursday, January 26, 5 p.m. Boston University, Boston University School of Law, Barristers Hall, 765 Commonwealth Ave, First Floor

Supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities.

Moderator: John Berthrong (Associate Professor of Comparative Theology and Deputy Director of the Division of Religious & Theological Studies, Boston University)

Professor Mathewes’s research and teaching are broadly in the areas of Christian thought, comparative religious ethics, and religion, culture, and politics. He has recently written A Theology of Public Life During the World (Cambridge, 2008), on religion’s role in public life in pluralistic democracies, and Understanding Religious Ethics (Wiley, 2010), the first undergraduate textbook that attempts to compare Jewish, Christian, and Islamic ethics, in the context of a variety of contested moral issues. Together with two of his graduate students he is currently completing a four-volume Major Works collection for Routledge Publishers on Comparative Religious Ethics, and he is working on a project exploring the nature of the challenges to religiously and morally sound life in our age, across several traditions.

This event is free and open to the public.

“Confronting Spinoza’s ‘Theologico-Political Treatise’: Hermann Cohen vs. Franz Rosenzweig,” Myriam Bienenstock (University Francois Rabelais at Tours, France)

Thursday, December 7, 5:00 pm Boston University, Boston University School of Law, Barristers Hall, 765 Commonwealth Ave, First Floor

Supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities and cosponsored by the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies.

Moderator: Michael Zank (Acting Director, Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University)

Abstract: Hermann Cohen’s virulent criticism of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise always remained for Leo Strauss a puzzling issue. Interestingly enough, however, Strauss never mentioned, in his many studies on the subject, an early article of Cohen, in which Spinoza fulfills a central role: “Heinrich Heine and Judaism” (1867). In that early article, Cohen had displayed a strong enthusiasm for Spinoza, who according to him had remained a Jew throughout his life, even after the “herem.” Most often, the article is disregarded by commentators, in particular, Franz Rosenzweig, who deemed it a “sin”: the “Spinozian sin” of Cohen’s younger years. Professor Bienenstock’s contention is that trying to interpret the late criticism without taking into account the early enthusiasm condemns us not to understand Cohen’s rage and its causes, as well as Cohen’s aims. In this lecture, she will explain what Rosenzweig saw as a “sin,” and why Rosenzweig did not agree with Spinoza, nor with Cohen.

Myriam Bienenstock is professor and chair of philosophy at the University Francois Rabelais at Tours, France. She has published widely on German and Jewish philosophy and on authors ranging from Kant, Herder, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel to Rosenzweig and Levinas. At present, she is working on a book to be titled Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig: A Debate on German Thought.

This event is free and open to the public.

Michael Gillespie (Duke University): “The Anti-Trinitarian Sources of Liberalism”

Thursday, December 1, 5:00 p.m., Boston University, Boston University School of Law, Barristers Hall, 765 Commonwealth Ave., First Floor

Supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities.

Moderator: John Berthrong (School of Theology, Boston University)

In this paper, Gillespie builds on his argument in The Theological Origins of Modernity, arguing that liberalism is not only not irreligious but is founded on an Antitrinitarian interpretation of scripture developed first by Michael Servetus and then developed in Transylvania and Poland before being carried by refugees from religious persecution to Holland, Britain, and America where it came to serve as the backbone of liberal thought.

Michael Gillespie (PhD, University of Chicago) is the Jerry G. and Patricia Crawford Hubbard Professor of Political Science at Duke University, and the author of The Theological Origins of Modernity. He is also co-editor of Nietzsche’s New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics, and Ratifying the Constitution, and has published articles on Montaigne, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and various topics in American political thought, as well as on the relation of religion and politics. He is currently completing a book entitled Nietzsche’s Final Teaching. Professor Gillespie is the Director of the Gerst Program in Political, Economic, and Humanistic Studies. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Templeton Foundation, the Liberty Fund, and the Earhart Foundation. This event is free and open to the public.

Benjamin Pollock (Michigan State University): “World-Denial and World Redemption: Franz Rosenzweig’s Early Marcionism”

Wednesday, October 26, 5:00 p.m., Boston University, The Photonics Center, Room 206, 8 Saint Mary’s Street, Second Floor

This event has been co-sponsored by Boston University’s Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies and supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities.

Ben Pollock will present a new account of one of the foundational narratives of modern Jewish thought and a decisive moment in the intellectual biography of Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), one of the most remarkable Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. The story is of Franz Rosenzweig’s near conversion to Christianity in 1913 and his subsequent decision, three months later, to commit himself to Judaism. In sharp contrast to the account of Rosenzweig’s crisis that has dominated the literature for the last sixty years, Pollock will claim that what lies at the heart of Rosenzweig’s 1913 crisis is not a struggle between faith and reason, but rather a skepticism about the world and a hope for personal salvation, which Rosenzweig came to identify with the figure of Marcion. As Pollock argues, Rosenzweig was severely tempted by Marcion’s world-denial but converted to a novel, post-modern affirmation of the goodness of existence.

Professor Pollock is associate professor of religious studies at Michigan State University, and received his doctorate in Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His book, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2009), was awarded the Salo W. Baron Prize for Outstanding First Book in Jewish Studies by the American Academy of Jewish Research.