Sites of Civic Engagement Workshop
In recent decades, the United States has seen a remarkable decline in religious affiliation and, correspondingly, the emergence of "spiritual-not-religious" as an alternative index of identity. Concomitant with these phenomena is a widespread premonition—and anxiety—that such transformations of the religious topography of the United States mark a turn toward an insidious individualism and the dissolution of those forms of civic engagement and political participation thought to have traditionally sustained American democracy. In the interest of challenging such assumptions and, in so doing, developing a sharpened analytic perspective from which scholars can engage questions of American spirituality and politics in new ways, the participants in the Sites of Civic Engagement Workshop came together for two days of vigorous debate and discussion focused on the historical emergence of spirituality as an articulation of individual and collective identities, the construction and deployment of discourses of the spiritual in the public sphere today, and the optimal methods for the study of spirituality in both its historical and present-day configurations.
Workshop Participants:
Courtney Bender, Columbia University
Carolyn E. Chen, Northwestern University
William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University
Tracy Fessenden, Arizona State University
Marla Frederick, Harvard University
Paul C. Johnson, University of Michigan
Kathryn Lofton, Yale University
Elizabeth McAlister, Wesleyan University
Omar M. McRoberts, University of Chicago
John Lardas Modern, Franklin and Marshall College
Andrew J. Perrin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Wade Clark Roof, University of Southern California
Leigh Eric Schmidt, Harvard University
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, SUNY Buffalo
Peter van der Veer, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religion and Ethnic Diversity
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