CALL FOR PAPERS

RELIGION AND NATION

A NEXUS Interdisciplinary Conference

Please note the new deadline for submissions: February 10, 2006.

University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Friday April 7 - Saturday April 8, 2006
Keynote Speaker: John D Caputo (Syracuse)
"Beyond Sovereignty: The Weakness of God and the Postmodern Situation"
Reading by Diane Glancy (Macalester College)
Website: http://web.utk.edu/~nexus/
Deadline for Submissions: February 10, 2006

In the January 7 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanley Fish
wrote, "When Jacques Derrida died I was called by a reporter who wanted to
know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and
class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a
shot: religion." In recent years inquiries into faith, spirituality, and
religious practice have begun to multiply in the academy, and post-secular
studies in a wide range of disciplines have reintroduced religion as a
province within rather than a refusal of intellect. However, in today's
globalized political climate, religion can connote terror, fundamentalism, and
what John Caputo calls "impossible people.

This conference aims to study the role and the value of religion in a
post-secular academy as well as in the formation and maintenance of the
nation, nationhood, and national identity.

We welcome submissions from all disciplines, including activists and scholars
without academic affiliation. Abstracts (250-300 words) are invited on a
broad range of topics including but not limited to the following:

*Religion and Globalization
*Postsecularity and Film
*Literary Religions
*Religion and Science
*Religion, the Body, and Nation
*Narrating Spirituality
*Religion in the Post-9/11 US
*Ritual Building
*Fundamentalism
*Religion and Pedagogy
*Sacred Spaces in the Arts
*Saints and Martyrs
*The Queering of Religion
*Sacred Aesthetics
*Religion and Social Change
*The Institutionalization of Christianity
*Religion and Critical Theory

Please email proposals for a twenty-minute paper or presentation as a .doc
attachment to Elaine Childs at echilds_at_utk.edu or Misty Krueger at
mkrueger_at_utk.edu or mail to Elaine Childs, Department of English, University
of Tennessee, 301 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996. Deadline for
submissions is February 10, 2006.

All general inquiries about the conference may be directed to Elaine Childs.
The NEXUS series is organized and hosted by the Graduate Students in English.

****
Radical difference is the difference of the One with regard to itself, the noncoincidence of the One with itself, with its own place. -Zizek

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Received on Tue Jan 24 2006 - 17:17:50 EST