‘Welcome’ from Dr Graham Harvey

graham-harveyWelcoming new students is one of the greatest pleasures of being Head of Department. So, along with my colleagues in Religious Studies, I’m pleased to welcome nearly 300 students now starting on A217 “Introducing religions” and nearly 400 on A332 “Why is religion controversial?”. Although the team the Open University’s Milton Keynes campus doesn’t often meet the undergraduate students for whom we’ve prepared teaching and learning materials, we are honoured to know that so many are interested in studying with us. We don’t know how many OU students studying at level 1 will continue with Religious Studies in later stages of their studies, but we’re enthusiastic about our involvement with the various modules available there too (i.e. AA100 “The Arts past and present” and A105 “Voices, texts and material culture”). We are equally pleased that we have students completing their Masters degrees with us and look forward to reading their dissertations and, we hope, discussing possible PhD projects with them. This year, we also have four new students commencing research towards their PhDs. These are Aled Thomas researching “The Transition of Auditing from Psychiatric Practice to Religious Ritual: Social and Religious Developments in the Church of Scientology”,Claire Wanless researching “Secularisation and Religious Transmission: Communities of Practice, Networks and the Rise of Postmodern Religion“, Theo Wildcroft researching “Yogic-animist ritual: witnessing emergent embodiment” and Kasia Kowalska researching “Universalism and Particularism in Jewish Prayer in the Orthodox, Reform and Liberal Movement in the United Kingdom”. They will join a community of existing PhD students at various stages of their research. We wish all our students every success in their studies with us.

We are also celebrating the nomination of researchers within our team for a Times Higher Education award under the the “Widening Participation or Outreach Initiative of the Year” category. You can read more about the Building on History: Religion in London project at https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/boh .

Times Higher Education awards

We have excellent news – the Building on History: Religion in London project, which involves John Wolffe, John Maiden and Gavin Moorhead from the department, has been shortlisted for the ‘Widening Participation or Outreach Initiative of the Year’ category of the Times Higher Education Awards 2014! Many thanks to all our project collaborators and stakeholders who made it such as success. See more details at: www.the-awards.co.uk.

For more details on the project please visit http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/research/religion-in-london/

‘Wars of religion’: A career opportunity in Religious Studies?

 For those who maintain that Religious Studies has an identity and concerns distinct from those of Theology, it is galling to find the higher education sector and the media, which reports it, subsuming Religious Studies under Theology. I came across this again most recently in a Sunday newspaper supplement on UK university places available through the clearing scheme. I doubt whether it would have helped recruitment to Religious Studies – catching the attention of prospective students who might be ill-advised enough actually to look for places under Religious Studies. But then a number of other disparate reports that bear upon the prospects and concerns of Religious Studies have made me ponder of late. For example, a recent, routine emailing about research opportunities headlined a new career direction for researchers in the study of religions – charting the decline of religion in Western Europe; hardly new waters, more back to familiar debates about secularisation theory. It is not, perhaps, the career opportunity to persuade a new generation of potential researchers that Religious Studies is a vibrant and durable discipline, which offers new, unfolding frontiers to explore.

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Opinion: Violence, Information and the Radicalisation of the Last Men

Between Friedrich Nietzsche’s despair at the Last Men (1961) who revere nothing and who have fallen into nihilism, and Francis Fukuyama’s crass celebration that the Last Men’s wants have been satisfied under the liberal democratic settlement (1992) – between in short, cynicism and complacency – there is a lesson. How will the government respond to a British citizen apparently beheading two American journalists in Islamic State (IS) propaganda videos? What is it that draws British citizens to fight in Syria and Iraq for organisations like IS? What is radicalisation and how does it occur?

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IHR modern religious history seminar

Two members of the department, John Maiden and John Wolffe, co-convene the IHR Modern Religious History seminar. The programme for 2014-15 will be as follows. 22 October 2014, Kristan Tetens (University of Leicester), ‘Hall Caine’s Mahomet: Religion, Empire, and Dramatic Censorship in Late-Victorian Britain’.

5 November 2014, Dr Robert Saunders (Queen Mary, University of London), ‘“Come to pray on referendum day”: The Church and the European Referendum, 1975’.

19 November 2014, Dr John Maiden (Open University), ‘An “anticipation of heaven”? Black and white Christian relations in England during the 1970s’.

3 December 2014, Professor John Coffey (University of Leicester), ‘Missionary Millennialism and British Antislavery, 1790-1840’.

11 February 2015, Dr Alana Harris (Oxford), ‘”The Writings of Querulous Women”: Contraception, Conscience and Clerical Authority in 1960s Britain’.

25 February 2015, Dr Maria Power (Liverpool), ‘A new model of ecumenism: the practice of the Common Good in the partnership of Bishop David Sheppard and Archbishop Derek Worlock’.

11 March 2015, Dr Alexander Lock (British Library), ‘The Grand Tours and Conflicting Identities of Eighteenth-Century English Catholic Travellers: Sir Thomas Gascoigne (1745-1810) and Henry Swinburne (1743-1803)’.

25 March 2015, Dr Andrew Atherstone (Oxford), ‘Farewell to Anglicanism: Evangelical Seceders from the Church of England 1964-76’.

The seminars are held in room 104, 1st floor, IHR, Wednesdays, 5.15.pm. It would be good to see you!

 

Some points on the Caliphate Past and Present

For non-Muslims the word caliph might bring to mind Harun al-Rashid, a caliph who features in a number of the fantastical tales of The Thousand and One Nights, as well as in for instance poems by Alfred Tennyson (‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights’) and W.B. Yeats (‘The Gift of Harun al-Rashid’), and in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The office of caliph and the institution of the caliphate have a complex and fascinating history. The recent proclamation by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), of a caliphate in Syria, prompted me to say a bit about this and comment on its current significance.

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The BSA Sociology of Religion Annual Conference (2-4 July 2014, University of Sussex)

This was my first Socrel Conference and I have to say that I found it such a valuable and engaging experience that I joined the group straight away on my return. It certainly was an intensive programme with early starts and late finishes, and I must admit that I wondered beforehand whether I would find enough to interest me. However I actually found myself facing very hard decisions about which panel to miss.

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Narendra Modi and the BJP surge in the 2014 Indian general election

Those watching the televised coverage of the victory in the 2014 Indian general election of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under the leadership of Narendra Modi will have witnessed the sheer jubilation of his supporters. Modi was expected to do well and to emerge in a position where he would be able to lead a coalition government. As we now know, Narendra Modi at the head of the BJP secured an outright majority over the Congress Party, which had so long dominated post-Independence Indian politics, and the first outright majority since the 1980s when Rajiv Gandhi was elected at the head of the Congress Party. But that election followed after the assassination in 1984 of Rajiv Gandhi’s mother, Indira Gandhi, herself prime minister at the time of her death. The scale of Rajiv Gandhi’s victory was explicable to some extent in terms of popular revulsion prompted by this mother’s murder and sympathy for his loss, which is why it has been claimed that Modi’s victory in 2014 puts him a position of power more comparable to that of Indira Gandhi at the height of her popularity.

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