Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 21:12:27 -0500 (EST)
Subject: SPOON-ANN: CFP: The Uses of Religion


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Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 09:22:46 -0500 (EST)
Reply-To: Kristin Sanner <sannerk1-AT-uofs.edu>

Call for Articles:  _Crossings:  A Counter-Disciplinary Journal_

Deadline: April 1, 2001

THE USES OF RELIGION

Currently religion generates grist for critical writing, as evidenced by
recent publication of work on religion, spirituality, and the sacred by
Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, Paul Ricouer, Michel Foucault, Giorgio
Agamben, and Slavoj Zizek, and by the proliferation of calls for
scholarship relating to religion that appear so often on public
list-serves and bulletin boards.  Crossings seeks essays that explore
interconnections between religion, science, art, cultural politics,
philosophy, and critical methods. We invite essays on religion as a nexus
for disciplinary power, or arguments about how religion functions as a
discursive practice among others relevant to the production of
subjectivity and technologies of the self.  We encourage papers that
discuss how re-definitions of the disciplines, and
dialogues between the sciences, humanities, and other disciplines, might
interpret religion in terms of its language, social practices, and
epistemic relays.  How has religion undergone re-inscription or
redefinition throughout the postmodern paradigm shift?  How might we
understand religion, its disciplines and disciplinarity through
expositions of global transnational capital and the recent advancements of
such critical projects as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire?  In
what ways has religion been affiliated with imperial desire for a complete
global territory?  Does the revelation of imperialism's having gone beyond
national interests provide any sacred "safe place" for the writing of
praxis beyond or beneath secular humanist efforts for social justice?  Or
has the critical terrain itself been colonized by the judgment of God?
Has global Latin-ization marked a stoppage of thought at the place where
Roman and Christian conflict begins? Does secular "faith" in rights of
intervention present new dangers?  Are the tools ready-to-hand merely
blunted coal-shovels from humanist dustbins? Will we understand power for
what it is, or will a new league of faithful post-humanists prove unable
to resist temptation by schizophrenic serpents?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Current terrains of power in the Holy City
The Second Ecumenical Council (Vatican II)
Religion and Disciplinarity
Religion and resistance, disruption, apocalypse
Religion and quantum mechanics
Translations of Religion
Divine Rights to History
Historical Justice
Rights to intervention and "just wars"
Imperial crusades, jeremiads, missions
Technology as sacramental discourse
Medicalisation of the flesh
Post-Modern Gothic
Religion and sovereignty
Holy Roman Empire
Textuality, sacred texts
Society and the sacred
Religion and liminal experience / "the sublime"
Radical evil and philosophy

Send manuscript submissions to:

Michael Logan
Crossings (Submissions)
Department of English
Binghamton University
Binghamton, NY  13902-6000
xings-AT-binghamton.edu

Visit the Crossing website at: http://english.binghamton.edu/crossings