The Marty Center Series on Religions in the Americas lecture series will bring leading scholars in the field to focus on critical topics and key debates, using a variety of methodological approaches.
Tuesday, November 5 Pamela Klassen, University of Toronto: "Recognizing Religion and Siting the Secular"
Abstract: Religion is a highly naturalized category that is used rather freely in many public contexts, but it is also a term that is the focus of a great deal of scholarly and legal debate. Increasingly, the same can be said for the term “secular,” a category at once floating in discourse and fixed to specific times, nations, and bodies.This paper explores ceremonial and legal contexts, including marriage, oath-taking, and treaty-making, in which the process of recognizing religion and siting the secular has very real consequences for people or groups, beyond those of scholars arguing over the genealogies of these terms. I pay particular attention to the politics of recognizing religion in historically Christian-dominant settler-colonial nations, especially Canada and the United States, whose sovereignty rests on spiritual claims transformed into secular lawswhich rarely recognized Indigenous peoples as having religion.<br /><br /><strong>Date:</strong> November 5, 2019<br /><strong>Time:</strong> 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM<br />
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