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.
Far from the madding crowd: Glastonbury’s spiritual side
Here is Marion Bowman talking about the spiritual aspect of the Glastonbury festival: https://theconversation.com/far-from-the-madding-crowd-glastonburys-spiritual-side-28239 .
A notice of a forthcoming attraction…
In September Boydell and Brewer will be publishing (in their Studies in Modern British History series) a new volume co-edited by John Maiden (OU) and Andrew Atherstone (Oxford) – Evangelicalism and the Church of England in the twentieth century: reform, resistance and renewal.
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.
PhD successes!
One of the vital features of the life of a department of religious studies (and of every other field or subject) is supervising PhD students. Since 2001 we have celebrated the successful completion of PhDs by twenty of our students. Our most recent PhD graduates were awarded their degrees at a ceremony in London’s Barbican Centre in March 2014. They were Dr Sarah Flew and Dr Max Fras. Sarah’s thesis was about the finance of Anglican home missions in late Victorian London. Max’s was about the Catholic Church and public life in post-Communist Poland. We look forward to seeing publications arising from these theses soon.
Religious Studies at the OU
Money, austerity and debt
On the 11th February in the midst of some of the most serious flooding the country has seen, Prime Minister David Cameron declared “money is no object”. Keen to justify ‘austerity’, Cameron had previously encouraged a household budget mentality that could count, save and spend a tangible and sensual money as a means of avoiding or erasing debt. To hear him speak of money as something intangible and beyond sensual apprehension forced pause for thought. So if money is “no object”, what is it?
Islamic finance has something to teach us all and may have more freedom to flourish here in the UK
During the last days of 2013 I found myself trying to explain to an old acquaintance why, although a non-Muslim myself, I have spent the last few years researching and writing about Islamic finance. Evidently I didn’t make a very good job of it, because eventually he pronounced that the only thing Islamic culture has ever contributed to the world is ‘some nice blue tiles’. Leaving aside any personal offence I may have taken, and without invoking the much disputed term Islamophobia (which I find problematic), this left me wondering why some people of Christian heritage seem so determined to deny that the Islamic tradition has anything to teach us at all. I believe that the area of finance and economics is one where an encounter with the Islamic tradition can be very rewarding for those not brought up in it.
The Votives Project
Our friends Emma-Jayne Graham and Jessica Hughes over at Classical Studies run
a blog on their Votives Project, which explores votive offerings to the Greek and Roman gods and to the present day. Please check out their website which you can find at http://thevotivesproject.wordpress.com/us/ . Incidentally, the cover image for Marion Bowman and Ulo Valk’s new edited volume (pictured) features votive offerings at the Divine Mercy Shrine, Lagiwniki, Cracow, Poland.
Animal religious slaughter and the politics of the multicultural
In the last few weeks the issue of religious slaughter of animals has again been widely discussed in the media, sparked it appears by an interview for The Times newspaper by John Blackwell, president-elect of the British Veterinary Association. In the background of the broader debate is the recent decision by the Danish government to ban religious slaughter for the production of kosher and halal meat. The point of this comment piece is not particularly to address the rights or wrongs of or dhabh, or consider their status from a philosophical, religious or political science point of view, but rather to reflect both historically and in the context of wider debates concerning British ‘multiculturalism’.