Masterclass with visiting Fellow on ‘Critical Religion’

This event was held on Wednesday 4 December 2019

Naomi Goldenberg

The Centre for the Study of Violence invites all postgraduate, honours and undergraduate students to a Masterclass on ‘Critical Religion’ – How Theory that Deconstructs the Category of ‘Religion’ Can Lead to Better Research with visiting UON Fellow Professor Naomi Goldenberg, Professor of Classics and Religious Studies University of Ottawa, Canada.

The Masterclass will be held 10am - 12.30pm at Room X301 New Space City Campus, University of Newcastle, December 4, 2019.

Register your attendance by email to Kathleen.mcphillips@newcastle.edu.au.

Abstract:

Over the last two decades, a growing number of academics who study ‘religion’ have noticed that the idea that is foundational for their scholarship is fiction.  I mean fiction in the Latin sense of factusas signifying something that is made, built, or constructed.  This insight opposes notions of ‘religion’ as a thing or phenomenon that has always existed everywhere in one form or another and that continues to manifest itself in different traditions and configurations throughout the globe. Proponents of “critical religion” understand religion to be a somewhat incoherent, rather recent concept that is projected as an anachronism onto history.  According to this view, ‘religion’ is a modern, discursive product of differing, context-specific, dynamics of power with particular relation to the politics of colonialism and statecraft.  Attendant terms and ideas such as ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’ are looked at similarly.

“Critical religion” is sometimes dismissed as mere semantics and/or as irrelevant to ‘the real world’ in which religion is assumed to exist and is treated as a powerful force in law, culture and experience.  Professor Goldenberg disagrees and will argue that better thinking about government, public policy and scholarly research depends on recognizing the confusion adhering to ‘religion’ as a category of analysis and rejecting it in favor of more coherent concepts.

Professor Goldenberg will use her own work on government and feminism to demonstrate how critical religion can be productively applied.  To prepare for the masterclass, participants will be asked to read two of her papers and then during the masterclass be invited to think about their own research projects in terms of this deconstructive approach.

Bio:

Professor Goldenberg’s specialties are: religion and popular culture, religion and gender, and religion and psychoanalysis. Lately, she has been drawn to the emerging field of “critical religion,” a new sub-discipline that focuses on the construction of the category of religion and its relationship to other categories such as the secular and politics. These topics and themes are prominent in her classes, lectures and writings. She began her academic training as a classicist, but switched to religious studies as a graduate student in order to study how myths, symbols and images take on meaning in both personal and cultural contexts. The flexibility and inclusiveness of religious studies as a discipline has provided a hospitable forum for her passions and commitments as a scholar, writer, critic and educator.