Religion and Conflict

Alternative Visions Lecture

What role is religion playing in the 2016 presidential campaign? How is this similar to or different from previous elections? What does the future of religion and politics hold—either in elections or in day-to-day political life? These are a few of the questions that will be discussed in the Center's next Alternative Visions event, taking place in the Old Main Carson Ballroom on the ASU Tempe campus at 4:30pm on Thursday October 20, 2016. The event will feature a panel discussion on religion and politics in the context of the presidential election. Moderated by Center Director Linell Cady, the panel will include Edward E. Curtis IV from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Robert P. Jones from the Public Religion Research Institute, and Laura R. Olson from Clemson University. The Religion and Conflict: Alternative Visions speaker series brings nationally and internationally recognized experts such as Michael Ignatieff, Karen Armstrong, Andrew Bacevich, David Eagleman, and Reza Aslan to campus to address the sources and dynamics of conflict and strategies for its resolution. The series is supported by a grant from philanthropist John Whiteman.

Jacques Berlinerblau a Professor and Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He holds separate doctorates in ancient Near Eastern Languages and Literatures (New York University, 1991), and in Sociology (The New School for Social Research, 1999). "Secularism" is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the entire American political lexicon. For some, it is a synonym for “atheism.” For others, it is a code word for “tyranny.” And for still others, secularism is a political principle centered around separation of church and state. In this lecture, we will trace the complex evolution of the American secular idea, focusing first on its pre-modern roots in Christian political philosophy. Once we understand the intriguingly religious origin of American secularism, we can better appreciate the many ways in which we argue about it today. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the composition of the Hebrew Bible, to the sociology of heresy, to modern Jewish intellectuals, to African-American and Jewish-American relations. His articles on these and other subjects have appeared in Biblica, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Semeia, Biblical Interpretation, Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages, Hebrew Studies, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and History of Religions. He has published five books, the most recent being How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom. His previous works include Thumpin' It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today's Presidential Politics, Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibility of American Intellectuals, and The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously.

This September will be fifteen years since the attacks of 9/11. How has our view of the relationship between religion, politics and conflict changed since then? Does this change how we remember the attacks, and what they represent in the public consciousness? How we study the wars and conflicts that resulted, and what this means for U.S. policy? How has our view been impacted by lone wolf and organized terrorist attacks in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, and how does the rise in nativism impact our responses? Have we moved any closer to peace? Can we? Join the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict and the Center on the Future of War for a special panel discussion on these and other questions. Panelists include: • John Carlson, associate director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, associate professor of religious studies, and author of From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence and America • Anand Gopal, journalist and author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes • Daniel Rothenberg, co-director of the Center on the Future of War and co-editor of Drone Wars: Transforming Conflict, Law, and Policy • Delia Saenz, associate professor of psychology, former Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion, with expertise in intergroup relations and social identity Linell Cady, director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, will moderate the discussion, asking each of the panelists to respond briefly to a series of questions and leaving plenty of time for the audience to raise questions and enter into the conversation.

Over the last two decades the human rights discourse has become increasingly hegemonic and become increasingly prominent in the humanitarian sector. Many lead aid agencies have been quite ambivalent about this development. Some have embraced a “rights-based” orientation. Others, though, have exhibited considerable anxiety, worrying that human rights might corrupt humanitarianism. Why the anxiety? What is at stake? Through a comparative examination of their practices, and the growing role of legal discourse in human rights in contrast with the moral and technical discourse of humanitarianism, Michael Barnett will argue that these two cosmopolitan projects contain very different valences of power and views of global ethics. Barnett is one of the world's leading authorities on humanitarianism – its history, its trajectory, and its relationship with religion. In 2012 he co-edited the book Sacred Aid: Humanitarianism and Moral Imagination which examines the dynamic relationship between the secularization and sanctification of humanitarianism. He is also the author of an extensive history of the subject in Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. Barnett's latest book, The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews, will be released in March 2016. Michael Barnett is University Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the recipient of many grants and awards for his research. He most recently served as the Harold Stassen Chair of International Relations and professor of political science at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.

"The age of humanitarian intervention to protect civilians is not over, because civilians keep dying."–Michael Ignatieff, 2014 Michael Ignatieff is an outspoken public intellectual and a prolific writer on political philosophy, international affairs and conflicts caused by ethnic and religious strife. A politician and a scholar, he has applied his unique perspective to the study of war, religion, ethnicity and politics. His writings have addressed conflict in many countries including Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Kosovo, Serbia, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Between 2006 and 2011, he served as a Member of Parliament in Canada and then as Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition. He is a member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and holds eleven honorary degrees. Ignatieff is the author of seventeen books including Virtual War, winner of the Orwell Prize in 2001, and The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2005). Other major titles are The Needs of Strangers (1984), Scar Tissue (1992), Isaiah Berlin (1998), The Rights Revolution (2000), Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (2001), and Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (2013). He is the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and also serves as Centennial Chair at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York. This lecture is supported by a grant from John Whiteman and is part of the series Religion and Conflict: Alternative Visions at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at ASU.

“For the last four decades, Harvey Cox has been the leading trend spotter in American religion.”—Stephen Prothero, author of Religious Literacy Harvey Cox's book The Secular City, first published in 1965, is an international bestseller and widely regarded as one of the most influential books of Protestant theology of the last 50 years. His research and teaching interests focus on the interaction of religion, culture, and politics. Until his retirement in 2009 from Harvard University, Cox taught extensively on the intersection between Christianity and Islam and the rise of fundamentalism in both religions. In his book The Future of Faith (2009) he discussed the rise of fundamentalism in the ever-changing world, and why he thinks it will ultimately fail. "Harvey Cox is the most important liberal theologian of the last half century."—E.J. Dionne, Jr., author of Souled Out, and columnist for The Washington Post "Harvey Cox has been a voice of both reason and faith in our cynical times."—Deepak Chopra, author of Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment

Eric Bain-Selbo is the Department Head of Philosophy and Religion at Western Kentucky University and Co-Founder of the WKU Institute for Citizenship and Social Responsibility. In this presentation, Bain-Selbo highlights the religious dimensions of violence and the role of violence in the religion and culture of the South. Extending into popular culture, he then will make the case that sport—particularly American football—has been a cultural phenomenon in the South that has close ties with religion and violence. Indeed, American football has come to play a central role in the civil religion of the South, fueled in part by its violent nature. Dr. Bain-Selbo will conclude by drawing important lessons from this case study—lessons that will help us to see both religion and sport in a new light.

Almost 15 years after the beginning of the United States’ War on Terror, many would describe the American global counterinsurgency effort as a bloody quagmire. To try and find peace for people to whom the US government remains committed requires changing strategies based on what has and has not worked. For acclaimed journalist and writer Anand Gopal, those solutions might lie in the most confusing and troublesome anti-terror effort to date: the War in Afghanistan. In his recent book, No Good Men Among the Living, Gopal details the stories of three Afghans caught in the crossfire of US military intervention. By highlighting American triumphs and pitfalls in the early stages of the war, the book reveals the human toll exacted upon the Afghan population as well as the role the US itself played in the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. In this lecture, Gopal will discuss the time he spent in Afghanistan as well as the current work he is doing more generally on the Middle East, especially the Syrian conflict. Gopal served as the Afghanistan correspondent for both The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor. He contributes frequently to Harper’s and Foreign Policy, and also runs a blog on his website (http://anandgopal.com/).

Religious self-identification is on the decline in the United States. Some analysts have cited the cause as being a post-9/11 perception that faith in general is a source of aggression, intolerance, and divisiveness. But how accurate is that view? In her new book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Karen Armstrong sets out to discover the truth about religion and violence in each of the world’s great traditions, taking us on an astonishing journey from prehistoric times to the present. While many historians have looked at violence in connection with particular religious manifestations (jihad in Islam or Christianity’s Crusades), Armstrong looks at not only Christianity and Islam, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Judaism. Karen Armstrong is one of the most original and inclusive speakers on the role of religion in the modern world. In her public speaking and bestselling books, including A History of God, she examines the differences and profound similarities between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and their impact on world events. A former Catholic nun who left the convent to study literature, Armstrong is an authority on world faiths, religious fundamentalism, and monotheism. She was a key advisor on Bill Moyers' landmark PBS series on religion, has addressed members of the U.S. Congress, and was one of three scholars to speak at the UN's first ever session on religion. Select Bibliography: Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence A History of God The Battle for God The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions The Bible: A Biography

Marginalized and vulnerable individuals and communities often face multiple forms of violence--economic, cultural, physical, and psychological. How are these groups constructed as the Other, and how are these concepts circulated and naturalized? This panel discussion will examine a range of questions about these topics in order to explore the lived experiences of vulnerable communities: • What is the relationship of historical and economic processes to the creation of marginal communities? • Which cultural values are used to accommodate or reject vulnerable groups? • What strategies, values, and resources do different vulnerable groups summon as social critique, transformative discourse, or to carve out protective spaces?

As religious violence erupts around the world, we often question how people can coexist in peace when their basic religious identities seem irreconcilable. Benjamin J. Kaplan, a historian and professor of Dutch history at University College London, looks for answers in the religious history of early modern Europe, when issues of religious toleration were no less pressing than today. The standard histories of religious conflict in Europe claim that by the eighteenth century, under the influence of Enlightenment thinkers, Europeans had embraced reason and toleration and turned their backs on religious fervor. In recent years, this textbook version of western history has increasingly been challenged. In this lecture, Benjamin Kaplan will further challenge this view by offering a case study of bitter religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics that persisted far into the eighteenth century. Much of Kaplan’s research has focused on religious toleration and religious conflict in European history. He is the author of Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe, and Cunegonde's Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment. Kaplan's lecture is part of the center’s Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Speaker Series on Religion and Conflict, which honors the lifelong commitment of Maxine and Jonathan Marshall to promoting the arts, education, civil liberties, and world peace. Selected publications: Cunegonde's Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 2014) Boundaries and Their Meanings in the History of the Netherlands, ed. with Marybeth Carlson and Laura Cruz (Brill, 2009) Catholic communities in Protestant states: Britain and the Netherlands, c. 1570-1720, ed. with Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop, and Judith Pollmann (Manchester , 2008) Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Harvard University Press, 2007)

Alice Kang is an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She received her B.A. in Economics and International Relations from Brown University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published on global trends in women's political representation, women's activism in Africa, and the gendered consequences of oil production. Lecture details: Gender equality in predominantly Muslim countries has been in a state of intense debate over the past decades. Scholars from a variety of perspectives have examined these debates, with some concluding that women are less likely to gain equality in Muslim-majority countries—particularly poor, agrarian countries—as long as men and women remain attached to what they call Islamic doctrine and traditional values. Others point to the agency of female Muslim artists, political party activists, religious scholars, and workers. Others still differentiate between authoritarian Muslim-majority states that collude with religious and traditional leaders and those that do not. Yet few have examined contestation over women’s rights in Muslim democracies. This study focuses on conflict over women’s rights in the Republic of Niger and finds that how civil society mobilizes and the domestic political context are central to understanding women’s rights debates.

Gabriele M. Schwab is Chancellor's Professor of Comparative Literature in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, where she is also associate faculty in the Department of Anthropology, associate faculty in Women's Studies, and core faculty in the Program in Theory and Culture. In this presentation, Schwab explores representations of what Ward Churchill calls the "radioactive colonization“ of indigenous lands by the extractive economy that developed during the Cold War, predominately on reservations in the United States. Drawing on Martin Cruz Smith's Stallion Gate, a novel about the first nuclear tests in New Mexico, as well as on Joseph Masco's ethnography Nuclear Borderlands, the talk examines the impact of an emergent nuclear politics on individual protagonists and their collective struggles for survival. This work foregrounds a cultural climate of secrecy and deception as well as the emergence of "nuclear subjectivities" that are marked by transgenerational nuclear trauma and psychic toxicity which parallels the radioactive poisoning of bodies and land. Schwab's books include Haunted Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (2010), The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language (1996), Subjects Without Selves (1994), Entgrenzungen und Entgrenzungsmythen (1987), and Samuel Becketts Endspiel mit der Subjektivitat (1981). She is the editor of Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis (2007) and co-editor, with Bill Maurer, of Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood (2006). Her wide ranging essays encompass numerous topics including critical theory, literary theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, 19th and 20th century literatures in English (including Native American and African American), as well as 19th and 20th century literatures in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

The media shapes our perception of the world, oftentimes advancing stereotypes and partial truths. Nowhere does this seem more true than in relation to women in the Muslim world. Join us for a panel discussion with a group of Pakistani women to hear their stories without the filter of the media. The five panelists are all faculty of English Literature at Kinnaird College for Women, which has been educating Pakistani women at its Lahore campus for over a century. They are in residence at ASU this semester as part of a three year exchange program on “Globalizing Research and Teaching of American Literature,” resulting from the partnership of the ASU Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict and Department of English, the Department of English Literature at Kinnaird College, and the US State Department's Embassy in Islamabad. These scholars will discuss their experiences, as well as their perceptions of the U.S., before and after their arrival. The audience will have the opportunity to pose questions to the panel about life in Pakistan. The discussion will be led by Neal Lester, Foundation Professor of English and Director of ASU Project Humanities. The panelists are: Tehreem Arslan Aurakzai, who holds a graduate degree in English Literature from Kinnaird College. She teaches courses in English language, communication, and literature at Kinnaird, including a course on war literature. Her research interests include cultural studies, gender and sexuality, and diaspora studies. Zahra Hamdani is a lecturer in English Literature at Kinnaird, where she also completed her graduate studies. Her research and teaching interests include South Asian diaspora literature, the South Asian novel, cross-cultural and transnational studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Kanza Javed has completed her M.Phil in English Literature from Kinnaird College where she is also a lecturer in the English Department. Her research interests include American drama and poetry, gender and sexuality studies, race and ethnicity studies, and transnational and cross-cultural studies. In addition to her scholarly work, she is also the author of several short stories and a novel. Mahwish Khan has graduate degrees in English Literature from Kinnaird College and Beaconhouse International University. She teaches courses in English Literature at Kinnaird and at Lahore School of Economics. Her research interests include diaspora and transnational studies in American and South Asian literatures, literatures of migration, race and ethnicity studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Aisha Usman has graduate degrees in English Language Teaching and English Literature from Kinnaird College for Women and the University of the Punjab. She is a member of the faculty in English Literature at Kinnaird College. Her specialties and interests include American literature, gender and sexuality studies, and transnational and cross-cultural approaches to US and South Asian literature.

The past decade has seen a noticeable upswing in extreme acts of violence perpetrated in the context of radical social and religious movements: from the Taliban shooting of young school children, to the kidnapping of girls and wholesale rampaging of villages by the Boko Haram in Nigeria, to the brutal violence of ISIS in Iraq. The acts of violence, the targets, and the rippling impact of global and government responses is tearing communities apart across the Muslim world. The headlines are replete with images of self-proclaimed protectors of Islam perpetrating heinous crimes against other Muslims. How can we begin to understand this rising tide of extremist violence? How might we explain the appeal to young people to join ISIS despite the images of horrific violence and un-Islamic acts? Where do these groups gain their financial and material support? What is the future of these groups? And, significantly, how can we in the United States develop effective policies to address and counter these trends? Join our panel of experts for an informative discussion on the emergence and implications of these radical extremist movements. Chad Haines Assistant professor of Religious Studies and Global Studies (panel moderator) Abdullahi Gallab Associate professor of African and African American and Religious Studies Ibrahim Hassan Visiting Fulbright scholar, senior lecturer in religious studies at University of Jos Raza Rumi Writer and public policy specialist based in Pakistan

How does an accomplished neuroscientist and bestselling writer of fiction view issues of religion and conflict? Dr. David Eagleman, author of "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" and "SUM" presents a fresh take on these topics based on his award-winning research into the workings of the human mind. In a style all his own, Eagleman weaves science, philosophy, and art to address the existential questions that have galvanized thinkers for centuries. Eagleman directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action at the Baylor College of Medicine, where he also directs the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. He is best known for his work on time perception, synesthesia, brain plasticity, and neurolaw. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a winner of the McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication, a Next Generation Texas Fellow, Vice-Chair on the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Neuroscience & Behavior, a research fellow in the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Chief Scientific Advisor for the Mind Science Foundation, and a board member of The Long Now Foundation. He was named Science Educator of the Year by the Society for Neuroscience, and was featured as a Brightest Idea Guy on the cover of Italy's Style magazine. He has been profiled on the Colbert Report, NOVA Science Now, the New Yorker, and CNN's Next List. He appears regularly on radio and television to discuss literature and science, and he is the writer and host of the upcoming 6-hour PBS series, The Brain. Selected publications: > Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (2012) > SUM: 40 Tales of the Afterlives (2010) This lecture is supported by a grant from John Whiteman and is part of the Religion and Conflict: Alternative Visions lecture series. The series brings to ASU nationally and internationally recognized writers, scholars, and policy experts concerned with the dynamics of religion and conflict and strategies for resolution.

Stephen Graham Jones, Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will be reading from his novel Ledfeather (2008). It tells the story of an Indian Agent whose decisions have impacted the lives of generations of Blackfeet Indians in present-day Montana. Jones is the author of sixteen novels, including The Fast Red Road (2000), All the Beautiful Sinners (2005), and The Bird is Gone (2005), and of six short story collections. His publications from 2014 include Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly (Chi-Teen, with Paul Tremblay), After the People Lights Have Gone Off (Dark House), Not for Nothing (Dzanc), and The Gospel of Z (Samhain). Jones received an NEH Fellowship in Literature, a Writers League of Texas Fellowship, the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, and the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction. Besides fiction writing, his areas of interest include horror, science fiction, fantasy, film, comic books, pop culture, technology, and American Indian Studies. Jones is currently at work on a werewolf novel, a crime novel, and a comic book.

Luis Cabrera is Associate Professor in the School of Government & International Relations at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He has published widely on ethical issues related to migration, poverty and economic integration between nation-states. His most recent monograph, The Practice of Global Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2010), was awarded the 2011 Yale H. Ferguson prize from the International Studies Association-Northeast. For it, he interviewed hundreds of unauthorized migrants, anti-immigration civilian border patrollers, and migration officials in Arizona, parts of Mexico, and Western Europe. His current book project is The Humble Cosmopolitan: Rights, Diversity and Trans-State Democracy. It explores ways of protecting rights and appropriately accommodating diversity within shared rule from the local to the global level. Research for the book has included street interviews with Turkish pro-democracy protesters, with anti-immigration political leaders, and with scores of dalit (former untouchables) human rights activists in India. In this talk, Cabrera will examine ways in which faith communities and their allies have sought to protect migrants, and how some civil society and government actors reject ideas of global citizenship and seek to take direct action against unauthorized immigration in the name of protecting the value of national citizenship.

Matthias Riedl is an associate professor of history and holds the privately supported Chair of Comparative Religious Studies at Central European University (Budapest, Hungary). Before coming to CEU Budapest, he taught at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, and Duke University. His research interest is the comparative history of religion, with a focus on the relation of religion and politics. Lecture Details: The analytical category of "apocalyptic violence" has been frequently applied in recent studies of terrorism, sectarian violence, and revolutionary action. As the psychologist Robert J. Lifton put it: "Apocalyptic violence denotes the readiness to cause enormous destruction in the service of spiritual purification. A world must cease to exist in order to make space for a better one." However, as Riedl will discuss, the category is by no means self-explanatory, since apocalyptic literature is traditionally deterministic and dissuades the readers from taking action. A historical overview will demonstrate that revolutionary and violent forms of apocalypticism emerge only in early modernity, when mystical and humanist influences undermine the determinist creed. Riedl therefore argues that apocalyptic violence, despite its references to an ancient symbolic tradition, is a decidedly modern phenomenon.

Professor Scott Atran is Research Director in Anthropology at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, Institut Jean Nicod-Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris. He also holds positions as Presidential Scholar, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York; Adjunct Professor Psychology and Public Policy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and Director of Research, ARTIS Research and Risk Modeling. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University (and an M.A. in social relations from Johns Hopkins). His research interests include the cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion, and the limits of rational choice in political and cultural conflict. He has repeatedly briefed NATO and members of the U.S. Congress and the National Security Council staff at the White House on the Devoted Actor versus the Rational Actor in Managing World Conflict, on the Comparative Anatomy and Evolution of Global Network Terrorism, and on Pathways to and from Violent Extremism. He has been engaged in conflict negotiations in the Middle East, and in the establishment of indigenously managed forest reserves for Native American peoples. Selected publications: Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (HarperCollins, 2010) In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2002)

Professor Scott Atran is Research Director in Anthropology at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, Institut Jean Nicod-Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris. He also holds positions as Presidential Scholar, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York; Adjunct Professor Psychology and Public Policy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and Director of Research, ARTIS Research and Risk Modeling. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University (and an M.A. in social relations from Johns Hopkins). His research interests include the cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion, and the limits of rational choice in political and cultural conflict. He has repeatedly briefed NATO and members of the U.S. Congress and the National Security Council staff at the White House on the Devoted Actor versus the Rational Actor in Managing World Conflict, on the Comparative Anatomy and Evolution of Global Network Terrorism, and on Pathways to and from Violent Extremism. He has been engaged in conflict negotiations in the Middle East, and in the establishment of indigenously managed forest reserves for Native American peoples. Selected publications: Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (HarperCollins, 2010) In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2002)

Evelyn Bush is an associate professor of sociology at Fordham University. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University, and her research focuses on religion, globalization, gender, and human rights. She is currently a core collaborator on the "Religious NGOs at the United Nations" research project, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and housed at the University of Kent. She is also currently engaged in research on religious freedom and U.S. foreign policy, and the influence of institutional classification on the gendered application of religious freedom and human rights principles. Lecture Details: Drawing from a 3-year study of religious participation and influence at the United Nations, this presentation will cover a variety of challenges that researchers confront in collecting and interpreting transnational data on religious NGOs. First, it examines differences among religious and secular NGOs in terms of the external influences that bear upon NGO decision-making. For example, it will show how a focus on the broadly-framed distinction between the “religious” and the “secular” masks important differences between NGOs that are formally affiliated with religious institutions and those that are not. Unaffiliated religious NGOs share more in common with secular NGOs than with their affiliated religious counterparts, with the latter being relatively shielded from market pressures that typically influence NGOs decision-making. Second, the presentation will examine how, due to cross-national variation in religion-state relations, religious NGOs present with unique “GONGO” problems that not only have implications for interpreting the kinds of power being exercised through religious NGOs, but also make it difficult to collect reliable international data on religious mobilization and influence.

Human rights concerns continue to occupy a central role in contemporary politics and NGOs. They also appear frequently in the teaching and research of university faculty. But do policy makers and professors speak the same language when they discuss human rights? This talk looks at the assumed breakdown in the discourses of human rights practitioners and humanities theorists, and shows that the insights of human rights theory indeed play a major role in human rights policy. By analyzing a series of key humanities approaches to the study of human rights, McClennen argues that advocacy for human rights depends on humanistic inquiry. Sophia McClennen directs Penn State's Center for Global Studies as well as its Latin American Studies program and has ties to the departments of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Women's Studies. She has published seven books and has three in process. Her most recent books include Colbert's America: Satire and Democracy (2012), which studies the role of Stephen Colbert in shaping political discourse after 9/11, and Is Satire Saving our Nation? Mockery and American Politics (2014, with Remy Maisel). She is in the process of completing a co-edited volume on Human Rights and Literature to be published by Routledge in 2014. And her next major media studies project is Globalization and Latin American Cinema, which focuses on the ways that a number of films from Latin America reflect national and international cultural policies, shifts in production and consumption of cinema, and changing identity constructions. In addition to her books she has edited a number of journal special issues and published over 50 essays on a range of topics all of which coalesce around the question of how culture, politics, and society intersect. Her work often analyzes the links between political events and their media representations, which has led her to critique the relationship between mainstream culture, political praxis, stereotypes, and social injustice. She also publishes on cultural responses to social conflict such as those associated with war, imperialism, state formation, immigration and exile, dictatorship, patriarchy, and globalization. She regularly writes for Huffington Post and has had pieces in Alternet, Truthout, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Counterpunch. She has appeared on Huffington Post Live as well as the Wall Street Journal Live and has done numerous interviews in print and radio. You can also read her blog at sophiamcclennen.com.

American power around the world is facing new challenges, and our government is often paralyzed by gridlock. How did we get here, and how do we fix it? Andrew Bacevich, a former Army officer, bestselling author, and professor of international relations and history at Boston University, will address these questions in his free public lecture “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.” The lecture, part of the Center's Alternative Visions lecture series, will take place Thursday, October 23, at 1:30 pm in Old Main’s Carson Ballroom. Time has called him, “one of the most provocative—as in thought-provoking—national security writers out there today.” Bacevich’s bestselling books have offered critical insights into America’s military industrial complex, decades of foreign policy, and the way ordinary citizens relate to the military. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he received his doctorate in American diplomatic history from Princeton University. Before joining the faculty of Boston University, he taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins. In 2004, Bacevich was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He has also held fellowships at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times, among many other news outlets. His books include: Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War

The death of Pat Tillman elicited both heart-felt eulogy and white-hot controversy from a nation divided by war, politics, and religion. In this talk, Jonathan Ebel offers a framework for making sense of the Tillman tragedy and its aftermath, a model that encourages us to see Tillman not as exceptional or unique, but as a twenty-first century embodiment of a figure, the G.I. Messiah, who has loomed large in American perceptions of the soldier since the early twentieth century. Jonathan Ebel (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is associate professor of religion at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research involves religion and war, religion and violence, and lay theologies of economic hardship all within the American context. He is the author of Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton, 2010) and co-editor of From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America (California, 2012, with John Carlson). Ebel is currently at work on two book-length projects, G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion, and A Wandering Oklahoman Was My Father: Religion and Migration in America’s Great Depression. He teaches courses on U.S. religious history, emphasizing themes and movements that can be traced from century to century: diversity, discord, and dialogue, religion and violence, revivalism and evangelicalism, immigration and migration, as well as more focused seminars on the religious culture of early-twentieth-century America. This lecture is co-sponsored by ASU’s Office of Veteran and Military Academic Engagement and the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict.

Samuel Moyn is the James Bryce Professor of European Legal History in the Department of History at the University of Columbia. He works primarily on modern European intellectual history–with special interests in France and Germany, political and legal thought, historical and critical theory, and Jewish studies–and on the history of human rights. He is the co-director of the New York area Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History as well as the Editor of the journal Humanity, and has editorial positions at several other publications. His most recent book is Human Rights and the Uses of History (2014). In addition to co-editing several books he has authored: The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2012), Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics (2005), and A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (2005).

Amyn B. Sajoo is a scholar-in residence at Simon Fraser University, where he lectures in politics, history, and ethics. As a specialist in civic culture and law, his current research is at the interface of human rights, public ethics, and religion (notably Islam), including issues of minority citizenship and bioethics. He has served as the editor since 2009 of the Muslim Heritage Series, in which A Companion to Muslim Cultures is the most recent volume. Educated at King's College London and McGill University, Montreal, his early career was with the Canadian departments of Justice and Foreign Affairs in Ottawa. Dr. Sajoo is the author/editor of Muslim Ethics: Emerging Vistas (2004), Civil Society in the Muslim World: Contemporary Perspectives (2002), Muslim Modernities: Expressions of the Civil Imagination (2008), A Companion to the Muslim World (2009) and A Companion to Muslim Ethics (2010). He has contributed extensively to scholarly journals and anthologies, and his writings have appeared in the Guardian, Open Democracy, Globe & Mail, Asian Wall Street Journal, Times Higher Education Supplement, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Dr. Ranabir Samaddar is the Director of the Calcutta Research Group, and belongs to the school of critical thinking. He has pioneered, along with others, peace studies programmes in South Asia. He has worked extensively on issues of justice and rights in the context of conflicts in South Asia. The much-acclaimed The Politics of Dialogue (Ashgate, 2004) was the culmination of his work on justice, rights, and peace. His particular researches have been on migration and refugee studies, the theory and practices of dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labor control. He authored a three-volume study of Indian nationalism, (Whose Asia Is It Anyway – nation and The Region in South Asia, 1996, The Marginal Nation – Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal, 1999, and A Biography of the Indian Nation, 1947-1997, 2001). His recent political writings published in the form of a 2 volume account, The Materiality of Politics (Anthem Press, 2007), and The Emergence of the Political Subject (Sage, 2009) have challenged some of the prevailing accounts of the birth of nationalism and the nation state, and have signaled a new turn in critical post-colonial thinking.

Zillah Eisenstein has been Professor of Politics at Ithaca College in New York for the last 35 years and is currently a Distinguished Scholar in Residence. She at present writes regularly for Al Jazeera.com and FeministWire.com. Throughout her career her books have tracked the rise of neoliberalism both within the U.S. and across the globe. She has documented the demise of liberal democracy and scrutinized the growth of imperial and militarist globalization. She has also critically written about the attack on affirmative action in the U.S., the masculinist bias of law, the crisis of breast cancer and AIDS, the racism of patriarchy and the patriarchal structuring of race, the new nationalisms, corporatist multiculturalism, and the newest gendered and classed formations of the planet. In addition to her recent publication, The Audacity of Races and Genders: A Personal and Global Story of the Obama Campaign (2009, Zed Press, London; Palgrave, U.S.), her most current books include: Sexual Decoys, Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy (London, Zed Press; New York, Palgrave, 2007); Against Empire, ibid.; Hatreds, Racialised, and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century (Routledge, 1996); Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism and the Lure of Cyberfantasy (NYU PRESS, 1996); and Manmade Breast Cancers (Cornell Univ. Press, 2001).

Michael E. Zimmerman (PhD, Tulane, 1974) is Professor of Philosophy and former Director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Since his undergraduate years, Michael has been concerned about anthropogenic environmental problems. His research examines the metaphysical, cultural, ethical, cognitive, political, and religious dimensions of such problems. Like many others in the field of environmental studies, Michael maintains that a multi-disciplinary approach is needed both to comprehend and to propose effective solutions for environmental problems. Natural science is crucial for characterizing, making predictions about, and providing alternative scenarios regarding existing and emerging environmental problems. Anthropogenic environmental problems, however, arise from human activities that are usually best studied by researchers from the social sciences, humanities, and the arts. Although criticizing the command-and-control attitude toward nature that has characterized modernity, Michael has also warned of the dangers posed by the anti-modernist attitudes that characterize some versions of environmentalism. Michael asks: How to retain what is noble about modernity, including the freedoms connected with politics, research, and religion, while correcting its shortcomings, including serious environmental problems? In what has been called “post-normal” science, researchers must not only deal with problems characterized by complexity and thus uncertainty, but must also integrate multiple perspectives, many of which operate at different scales, with different assumptions, and in light of different value concerns. Environmental policy formation will become increasingly effective as it develops the conceptual models needed to identify crucial methods and perspectives and to show their relationships to one another, as well as to specific problems. This lecture is supported by the project, "The Transhumanist Imagination: Innovation, Secularization and Eschatology," led by Profs. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Ben Hurlbut, and funded by a grant from The Historical Society's program in Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.

Kenneth D. Wald is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the Samuel R. "Bud" Shorstein Professor of American Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Florida. He has written about the relationship of religion and politics in the United States, Great Britain, and Israel. His most recent books include Religion and Politics in the United States (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, 6th ed.), The Politics of Cultural Differences: Social Change and Voter Mobilization Strategies in the Post-New Deal Period (Princeton University Press, 2002, co-authored), and The Politics of Gay Rights (University of Chicago Press, 2000, coedited with Craig Rimmerman and Clyde Wilcox). He has been a Fulbright Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting scholar at the University of Strathyclyde (Glasgow), Haifa University (Israel), Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the Centennial Center for Political Science & Public Affairs in Washington, DC. He has lectured widely at academic institutions in the United States and abroad and given talks in such disparate locales as the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, throughout China for the U.S. Information Agency, and at two House Democratic Message Retreats in Congress. Together with David C. Leege, he coedits the Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Religion and Politics for Cambridge University Press. He has edited a special issue of the International Political Science Review and served on the editorial board of Political Behavior and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. He current serves on the editorial board of Politics and Religion. At the University of Florida, he served as Chair (1989-1994) and Graduate Coordinator (1987-1989) of the Department of Political Science. From 1999 through 2004, he served as director of the Center for Jewish Studies. In 2011, he received the University's highest faculty award, Teacher/Scholar of the Year. Dr. Wald received his BA from the University of Nebraska, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and earned his graduate degrees at Washington University in St. Louis.

Rami Khouri is the Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Dubai School of Government, as well as a columnist at the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper. With family in Beirut, Nazareth, and Amman, and involvement with leading research centers in the US, Khouri brings a nuanced understanding of the diverse local, regional, and international issues that make conflict in the Middle East conflict so complex. He has been a visiting scholar at Stanford, Syracuse, Tufts, Mt. Holyoke and Northeastern universities.Khouri is a co-recipient of the Pax Christi International Peace Award, and a member of the Brookings Institution Task Force on U.S. relations with the Muslim World. Khouri’s voice is also heard frequently in the international media, including commentary and appearances in media outlets such as BBC radio and television, NPR, Al-Jazeera International, the Charlie Rose Show, the Washington Post, Time magazine, the Financial Times, and the Guardian/Observer. See more of Rami Khouri's work at his website: agenceglobal.com

Members of Apple Hill's Playing for Peace ensemble will be on-hand to participate in a panel discussion at the Center on February 11, 2014. They will also be performing as part of the ASU Gammage BEYOND series on Saturday, February 15, 2014. The Playing for Peace program gets musicians from around the globe together and has them communicate in ways that would not ordinarily happen in their regions or native countries. The panel discussion—moderated by Yasmin Saikia, the Hardt-Nickachos Chair in Peace Studies—will reflect on these important questions: What is unique about music as a method of peace building? Since chamber music has a history and popularity in some cultures more than others, how does it create genuine cross-cultural exchanges all over the world? What peacebuilding skills are developed when pursing musical excellence and performing at events? How is music transformative for the performer? How has the experience of interacting with people through this program changed your concepts of peace and/or peacebuilding? What is the future of music as a tool for peacebuilding? Each of the panelists will be asked to respond briefly to a series of questions, leaving plenty of time for the audience to enter into the conversation. The panelists will include: > Leonard Matczynski - Apple Hill Director > Kinan Azmeh - clarinet > Sally Pinkas - pianist > Kareem Roustom - composer More on Playing for Peace™ Apple Hill believes that the pursuit of musical excellence leads to the development of confidence, creativity, and ambition, thus sparking positive social change in the individuals and the communities we serve. Central to the mission of Apple Hill is Playing for Peace™, an innovative program founded in 1988 where Apple Hill travels to the “hot spots” of the world—Turkey, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, and West Bank/Palestine in the Middle East, England, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland, Greek and Turkish areas of Cyprus, the Caucuses area of Russia, and inner city neighborhoods of the US—and places musicians from each community together, in small chamber ensembles. We coach them in the skills of chamber music—listening, watching, adjusting, and being flexible—that concludes with the students performing in a public concert. These particular musicians from areas of conflict or misunderstanding are given a task—to learn a piece of music together. The goal is to use the skills of chamber music to communicate with each other, which would not ordinarily happen in their regions or native countries. Over the years, Apple Hill has formed partnerships with music programs and institutions around the globe as part of the Playing for Peace™ program. In Spring 2014, ASU Gammage is bringing the Playing for Peace™ program to ASU. The centerpiece of the project is a new commission by Syrian composer Kareem Roustom that uses the unique sound of Apple Hill String Quartet and combines them with Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh and Israeli pianist Sally Pinkas.

Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His areas of interest include the re-visioning and renewal of the comparative method in the study of religion, the comparative erotics of mystical literature, American countercultural translations of Asian religious traditions, and the history of Western esotericism from ancient Gnosticism to the New Age. He focuses on the more informal modern world of the "spiritual but not religious,” an increasingly popular orientation that Kripal calls the "religion of no religion." Kripal is a prominent advocate for including the paranormal in religious studies which he contends is an untapped source of insight into the sacred. He believes that by tracing the history of psychical phenomena through the last two centuries of Western thought we can see its potential centrality to the critical study of religion. Kripal’s lecture is part of the center’s Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Speaker Series on Religion and Conflict, which honors the lifelong commitment of Maxine and Jonathan Marshall to promoting the arts, education, civil liberties, and world peace. Major Works: Comparing Religions (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (Chicago, 2011) Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago, 2010) Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago, 2007) The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago, 2007) Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago, 2001) Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago, 1995)

Ira Chernus is a journalist, author, and professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. As a journalist, he has written extensively on peace, war, foreign policy, and nationalism in the United States, as well as the Israel-Palestine conflict and U.S. Middle East policy. He studies issues on war and peace and U.S. foreign policy from the perspective of a historian of religions. The former co-director of UC-Boulder’s Peace and Conflict Studies program, his research focuses on discourses of peace, war, foreign policy and nationalism in the United States. Professor Chernus is the author of nine books and numerous articles and essays. His most recent books include Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin (2006), in which he examines the symbols and stories of American culture in ways that shed surprising light on the interrelationship of terms such as “conservative moralism” and “liberal interventionism,” and American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea (2004), which covers the history of nonviolence from colonial times to the present. In addition, Prof. Chernus has written comprehensively on the religious and symbolic dimensions of the nuclear age and the impact of nuclear weapons upon U.S. society and culture. His research on the Eisenhower years has lead him back to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt for an examination of the origins of what he calls the “national security state.” An active radio commentator and op-ed writer, Professor Chernus provides perceptive and clear analyses that are lively, engaging and accessible to academics and general audiences alike. He is a contributor to the Huffington Post, Common Dreams, TomDispatch, AlterNet, Truthout, Foreign Policy in Focus, and Religion Dispatches. In 2012 he started a new blog, MythicAmerica.us, and published online MythicAmerica: Essays. His recent writings on Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. are also collected on a separate blog. He received his doctorate in religion from Temple University, specializing in the history of rabbinic Judaism. In addition to his own website (http://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus), he also has a blog devoted to his popular writing on Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. (http://chernus.wordpress.com) . Selected Bibliography: Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity. Stanford University Press, 2008 Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006. American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2004.

Though America is deeply religious, Americans know shockingly little about religion. Without a grasp of religions, we are ill-equipped to understand world affairs or the motivations of our political leaders. Stephen Prothero—“a world religions scholar with the soul of a late night comic” (Newsweek)–offers an illuminating corrective. In his latest book, The American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation, Stephen Prothero considers lesser known texts that have sparked our war of words and informed our national identity. In his provocative book, Religious Literacy, Prothero addresses a national crisis—that religious ignorance is not bliss—and offers solutions. One of them is mandatory academic study of world religions in public schools. In his book, God is Not One, Prothero looks at the differences between religions and how they have shaped the world. Prothero argues that Religious plurality, or the idea that each religion is just a "different way up the same mountain", is a dangerous belief. Prothero provides a timely and indispensable guide to understanding the great religions, from Islam to Daoism. What makes each tick? What are the similarities between them? But more importantly, what are the differences? It's on this last point -- the differences -- that Prothero offers the greatest illumination. He is convinced that the way to real and enduring interreligious understanding, especially after 9/11, lies not with "pretend pluralism," but with a clear-eyed knowledge of religious difference. The sooner we can understand the differences between religions, the more we can figure out how to achieve religious tolerance and co-existence. Can citizens understand the War in Iraq without knowledge of Islam? Can they debate gay marriage or stem-cells without knowledge of the Bible? In his talks, Prothero shows us that Americans don't know much about their own religions—much less those of others. He then makes an argument for why religion must become the "fourth R" of education. Only by teaching students in high school and in colleges about the Bible and the world's religions (in an academic sense), can we equip them to understand American politics and world affairs. Prothero is a Professor of Religion at Boston University. He earned his PhD in Religion from Harvard, and is a specialist in Asian religious traditions in the United States. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute's Museum of American History. His bestselling books have inspired a Time cover story and landed him on Oprah, The Daily Show, The Today Show, The Colbert Report, The O'Reilly Factor, and at the White House as a speaker on religious literacy. He is a regular contributor to CNN.com's Belief Blog, a frequent guest on NPR, and has written for Salon.com and The New York Times. Selected Bibliography Prothero, Stephen. The American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation. HarperOne, 2012. Prothero, Stephen. God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter. HarperOne, 2010. Prothero, Stephen. Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know-And Doesn't. HarperOne, 2007.

Dr. Laurence R. Iannaccone is a professor of economics and Director of the Institute for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Society (IRES) at Chapman University in Orange County. He is also the President of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture (ASREC). He is considered one of the pioneers of the field, and one of its most staunch advocates. In more than fifty publications, Iannaccone has applied economic insights to study denominational growth, church attendance, religious giving, conversion, extremism, international trends, and many other aspects of religion and spirituality. His articles have appeared in numerous academic journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Journal of Sociology, and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. He is currently writing two books on the on the economics of religion. Dr. Iannaccone's education includes a master’s in mathematics and his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago. Recent Creative, Scholarly Work and Publications: "Extremism and the Economics of Religion." The Economic Record (Journal of the Economic Society of Australia) 88 (June, 2012), pp. 110–115. “Funding the Faiths: Toward a Theory of Religious Finance” (with Feler Bose). The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion, edited by Rachel McCleary. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 2011, pp. 323-342. “Lessons from Delphi: Religious Markets and Spiritual Capitals” (with Colleen E. Haight and Jared Rubin). Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 77:3 (March, 2011), pp. 326-338. “Economics of Religion.” (with William S. Bainbridge). The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, Second Edition, edited by John Hinnells. Routledge: 2010, pp. 461-475. “The Economics of Religion: Invest Now, Repent Later?” Faith and Economics 55 (Spring 2010): pp. 1-10. “Economics of Religion.” (with Eli Berman). Chapter in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, edited by Stephen Durlauf and Lawrence Blume. 2008

Najeeba Syeed-Miller, professor at Claremont School of Theology and director of the Center for Global Peacebuilding, is a recognized leader in the field of peacemaking. Her published research has focused on mediation between law enforcement and communities, the intersections of law with religious minority communities, and interfaith peacemaking. Her track record as a peacemaker has made her a sought out advisor for state, federal, and White House initiatives, and in international conflicts in Guam, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, India, and France. Along with colleagues she has developed training modules in Islamic conflict resolution and mediation that were presented at Harvard Law School. She is a regular blogger for Muslim Voices, Feminist.Com, Huffington Post, and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, NPR, PBS, and the Tavis Smiley show. Her lecture is part of the Center’s lecture series on Religion, Conflict and Peace Studies, and she will focus on her experience in the field as an engaged peacemaker and expert at conflict resolution. Recent publications: “Towards a Gendered Understanding of Just Peacemaking,” in Formation for Life: Just Peacemaking and 21st Century Discipleship, edited by Glen H. Stassen, Rodney L. Peterson and Timothy A. Norton (Pickwick Publications, forthcoming) . “Public Diplomacy and Transnational Blasphemy Controversies,” in Religion and Public Diplomacy, edited by Philip Seib (Palgrave Macmillan Publications, 2013). “Strengthen the United Nations and International Efforts for Cooperation and Human Rights: Muslim Reflection,” in Interfaith Just Peacemaking: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives on the New Paradigm of Peace and War, edited by Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite (Palgrave Macmillan Publications, 2012).

The role of religion in intergroup and international conflict has been the subject of vigorous debate in the media and among scholars in recent years: Does religion merely serve as a mask for struggles that are really about power and resources? Or do religions create incompatible values that lead directly to such clashes? Is the role of religion in conflict largely organizational,providing an institutional framework for funneling human and financial resources towards the perpetuation of existing conflicts? Or do religious messages of peace and tolerance reduce conflict and promote better intergroup relations? In this talk and the discussion to follow, Steve Neuberg will try to answer these questions based on the findings of the Global Group Relations Project, an interdisciplinary, multi-year project funded by the National Science Foundation that was started with seed funding from the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict.

Brice Laurent graduated from the School of Mines and the Graduate School of Social Sciences. He is an engineer in the Corps des Mines and teaches at Sciences Po Paris. In 2008, he joined the Centre for Sociology of Innovation where he completed his thesis devoted to nanotechnologies (Democracies on trial. Assembling nanotechnology and Its problems): the problematization of nanotechnology in Europe and the United States, in places like science museums, public debates or regulatory arenas. He has previously studied the role of consulting companies in industrial research and works now on nanotechnology and public policy, with a special interest on public engagement. He is interested in the ways public approaches are framed in the US and France. Brice will be a visiting Fellow at Harvard's Program on Science, Technology and Society in Spring 2013. He currently holds a M.Sc. from the Ecole des Mines de Paris and a M.A. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, both with high honors.

Akeel Bilgrami is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and the former Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities, at Columbia University. He holds a bachelor's in English literature from Bombay University, a bachelor's in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, with a dissertation, "Meaning as Invariance," on the subject of the indeterminancy of translation and issues concerning realism and linguistic meaning. He joined Columbia University in 1985 after spending two years as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Bilgrami has two relatively independent sets of intellectual interests--in the Philosophy of Mind and Language, and in Political Philosophy and Moral Psychology especially as they surface in politics, history, and culture. In the former, he has published a book in 1992 called Belief and Meaning (Blackwell) and another book published in 2006 called Self Knowledge and Resentment (Harvard University Press). He is presently working on a book on the relations between agency and practical reason. In the latter, Bilgrami has written extensively on issues of secularism, identity, and also on a range of issues that emerge from Gandhi's philosophy, such as the transformation of the concept of nature into the concept of natural resources. His collection of essays called Politics and The Moral Psychology of Identity was released in 2011 from Harvard University Press. He is also contracted to publish two small books in the very near future, one called What is a Muslim? (Princeton University Press) and another on Gandhi's philosophy, situating Gandhi's thought in seventeenth century dissent in England and Europe and more broadly within the Radical Enlightenment and the radical strand in the Romantic tradition (Columbia University Press). In this lecture, Bilgrami will address the issue of modern political thought from the point of view of the countries of the global South, where there is far less secularization than there is in the West and North. Gandhi's religiousity and its views and modern political assumptions will frame the talk.

Peter Bergen is a print and television journalist and author of a number of significant books on terrorism and national security. He is the director of the national security studies program at the New America Foundation in Washington D.C., a fellow at Fordham University’s Center on National Security, and CNN’s national security analyst. He has held teaching positions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book, a New York Times bestseller, is Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for bin Laden, from 9/11 to Abbottabad. The book is being translated into eight languages and HBO is producing a theatrical release documentary based upon it. The film, for which Bergen is the executive producer, is in the Sundance Film 2013 competition. The Washington Post, named Manhunt one of the best non-fiction books of 2012 and The Guardian named it one of the key books on Islamist extremism.

Winnifred F. Sullivan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University. Trained as a lawyer and an historian of religion, she is interested in religion as a broad and complex social and cultural phenomenon that historically both generates law and is regulated by law. She is the author of three books analyzing legal discourses about religion, primarily in the context of actions brought to enforce the religion clauses of the First Amendment and related legislation: Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States (Harvard 1994), The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton 2005), and Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton 2009). Her fourth book, Ministries of Presence, under contract with the University of Chicago Press, focuses on the legal regulation of government chaplaincies such as those within VA hospitals, and explores the ways in which partnerships between government and private organizations combine to create an understanding of the nature of the religious needs of Americans. It argues that as religious authority has shifted from institutions to the individual a new kind of religious universalism is emerging in these private-public partnerships. She is also editor (with Robert A. Yelle and Mateo Taussig-Rubbo) of After Secular Law (Stanford, 2011).

Fred R. Dallmayr is Packey J. Dee Professor in the departments of philosophy and political science at the University of Notre Dame. He has been a visiting professor at Hamburg University in Germany and at the New School for Social Research in New York, and a Fellow at Nuffield College in Oxford. He has been teaching at Notre Dame University since 1978. During 1991-92 he was in India on a Fulbright research grant. He is a past president of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (SACP). He is currently the Executive Co-Chair of "World Public Forum - Dialogue of Civilizations" (Vienna/Moscow) and a member of the Scientific Committee of "RESET - Dialogue on Civilizations" (Rome). Selected Publications: Peace Talks - Who Will Listen (2004) Small Wonder: Global Power and Its Discontents (2005) In Search of the Good Life: A Pedagogy for Troubled Times (2007) The Promise of Democracy: Political Agency and Transformation (2010) Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (2010) Comparative Political Theory: An Introduction (2010)

James Morone (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is professor and chair of political science at Brown University. Described as a born "color commentator" on religion, culture and American politics, Morone is widely recognized for his outstanding teaching, having been awarded the Hazeltine Citation by students in the Brown University classes of 1993, 1999, 2001, 2007 and 2008 for being the professor that most inspired them. Morone has long been at the forefront of writing on American government, politics and culture. His first book, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government, was named a “notable book of 1991” by the New York Times and won the Political Science Association’s Kammerer Award for the best book on the United States. His 2003 book, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History, has been featured on C-span, named book of the month by the History News Network, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book, The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office from Roosevelt to Bush (2009, co-written with David Blumenthal, M.D.), returned him to an issue that shaped much of his scholarly work and was featured on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Morone has written over 150 articles, essays, and book reviews and regularly comments on political issues for shows like The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, CBS, Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood, Fox News, C Span, NPR’s Market Place, Morning Edition, Science Friday and other shows. He writes regularly for The London Review of Books, The American Prospect Magazine, and The New York Times. Morone has been president of the New England Political Science Association and the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association. He was distinguished Fulbright lecturer to Japan in 2005, has served on the editorial board of eight scholarly journals (chairing two of them), and has testified before the U.S. Congress numerous times, most recently in January 2009 when he addressed the newly elected members of Congress on health reform. Morone is the only scholar to receive two Senior Investigator Awards from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Morone grew up in Rio de Janeiro and New York, received his bachelor's degree from Middlebury College and his doctoral degree from the University of Chicago, and continues to examine the sources and dynamics of religion, culture, and identity in American politics in three current book projects, George Washington’s Regret: Timeless Debates that Define America, In Search of American Culture, and Who Are We?.