Registration Link: https://psu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEod-mgrz4uEtCFDLmMh-q6QIUM-KvAkuIS

You are invited for a timely roundtable discussion on religion and Covid-19. Scholars will address pressing questions about the role religion has played in an array of responses to the pandemic within Muslim, Jewish, Evangelical, Native American, and African American communities in the US. Details are below. Please share widely with colleagues and encourage your students to attend.

Friday, Feb 12, 10:30-noon; https://psu.zoom.us/s/92238842890 

You are invited for a timely roundtable discussion on religion and Covid-19. Scholars will address pressing questions about the role religion has played in an array of responses to the pandemic within Muslim, Jewish, Evangelical, Native American, and African American communities in the US. Details are below. Please share widely with colleagues and encourage your students to attend.

Religious Responses to COVID-19 in the US

Friday, Feb 12, 10:30-noon

https://psu.zoom.us/s/92238842890 

Speakers:

Brenda Child (University of Minnesota), “When Native Art is Medicine”

Travis Cooper (Butler University), “Evangelicals in Quarantine: Pandemic Responses Mainstream and Marginal”

Marcia Hermansen (Loyola University, Chicago), “American Muslim Negotiations of Authority in a Time of Coronavirus Precarity”

Terri Laws (University of Michigan, Dearborn), “Black Coronavirus Vaccine Hesitancy?”

Shaul Magid (Dartmouth), “Politics and Fear: Jewish Responses to COVID-19″

Questions? Contact jvanbirk@psu.edu.

Abstracts: 

“When Art is Medicine,” Brenda Child (University of Minnesota) When Art is Medicine considers the origins of the Ojibwe Jingle Dress Dance tradition in the influenza pandemic of a century ago, and how the healing tradition continues to empower women across Native North America today. Child’s new documentary provides American Indian perspectives on pandemics, past and present. Jingle Dress Dancers in the Modern World has been widely used in classrooms since its September debut. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F-1S71fHKs

“Evangelicals in Quarantine: Pandemic Responses Mainstream and Marginal,” Travis Cooper (Butler University) American evangelicals have seen and continue to experience a particularly fragmented response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The ongoing biomedical crisis throws into relief the social, ideological, and political tensions that threaten to undermine the existence of evangelicalism as a religious collective and social entity. At the same time, the pandemic has allowed for increased experimentation with theologically controversial digital rituals and has encouraged evangelicals in developing new, thickly mediated practices of togetherness and connectivity.

“American Muslim Negotiations of Authority in a Time of Coronavirus Precarity,” Marcia Hermansen (Loyola University, Chicago) Historians have observed that the impacts of plagues on religious communities leave in their wake long lasting or even permanent adjustments to theologies and institutions. This presentation will provide examples of both challenges to and reassertions of religious authority among American Muslims in response to recent pandemic-induced social and existential uncertainty.

“Do We Really Want to Be Made Well?” Terri Laws (University of Michigan, Dearborn) This will be a discussion of the relevance of the narrative embedded in Black coronavirus vaccine hesitancy and the social discourse that is missing from the conversation.

 “Politics and Fear: Jewish Responses to COVID-19,” Shaul Magid (Dartmouth) COVID-19 is a modern-day plague and Jewish literature, from the Talmud to modern times, is replete with advice about plagues, mostly how to avoid them. But plagues also raise theological questions such as “Is this plague divinely ordained?” “Is it a punishment for sin?” “Or is this an arbitrary event?” And if so, what are the theological implications of the arbitrary? In addition, COVID also has become a political issue as well and many Jews have been compelled to believe that their communities are being treated unfairly and singled out by the authorities. The admixture of the medical, theological, and political makes for a complicated story in the Jewish communities, especially traditional ones.

Wednesday 14 October 2020 12:15-1:15

Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz

Associate Professor, Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies & Asian Studies

How to Hinduize a Hindu in One Text and Two Languages in Three Phases over 500 Years

(ZOOM, for link email Cathy Wanner cew10@psu.edu)

Wednesday 11 November 2020, 12:15-1:15

Nicholas de Warren

Associate Professor, Departments of Philosophy and Jewish Studies

The Trauma of the Good and the Anarchy of Forgiveness

(ZOOM, for link email Cathy Wanner cew10@psu.edu)

Tuesday, August 27, 3-4:30 p.m. Foster Auditorium 

Sylvia Chan-Malik
Associate Professor, Departments of American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies
Rutgers University

“Being Muslim: Women of Color in American Islam.”

In this lecture, Professor Chan-Malik will focus on the lives, subjectivities, and labors of U.S. Muslim women as a means to understand Islam’s historical presence in the United States as both Black protest religion and universal faith tradition. Drawing on archival images, cultural texts, popular media, and interviews, she addresses how communities of American Islam became sites of safety, support, spirituality, and social activism, and how women of color were central to their formation. By accounting for American Islam’s rich histories of mobilization and community, she will highlight the forms of resistance that U.S. Muslims, and in particular, U.S. Muslim women, have engaged, and continue to engage, in the 20th-21st-century United States. Through engagement with lineages of Black and women-of-color feminism, liberation theology, and social justice movements, Chan-Malik offers a new vocabulary for understanding U.S. Muslim communities and identity formation that is as conscious of race, gender, sexuality, and nation, as it is region and religion.

Thursday, March 28, 12-1:30 p.m.  102 Weaver

Society for the Study of Religion seminar with Tinu Ruparell

“Professionalising Religious Studies”

Catherine Wanner responding

Light lunch will be served.

Monday, Feb 4, 12:30-1:30 p.m. Sparks 124

Sarah Garibova, Assistant Teaching Professor in Jewish Studies

“Jewish Burial Culture and the Exhumation of Holocaust Mass Graves in Postwar Belarus and Ukraine”

This talk will examine Soviet Jews’ post-Holocaust efforts to reconcile traditional parameters of proper burial with the catastrophic burial landscape created by the Nazi and Romanian occupations of Eastern Europe. These survivors’ frequent use of grave exhumations complicates overly-simplistic narratives of both “tradition” and “secularization.”

Christopher Heaney responding

Light lunch will be served.