[Asec] Please post: Reminder: Religious Experience and Description, Valparaiso, Indiana, submission deadline July 1
Olga Louchakova-Schwartz
olouchakova at gmail.com
Mon Jun 3 17:40:03 UTC 2019
*Reminder: Call for Abstracts: “Religious Experience and Description" *
*Second Regional Conference of the Society for the Phenomenology of
Religious Experience*
October 10-12, 2019 Valparaiso University, Indiana, USA
Conference is co-hosted by the Departments of Psychology, Philosophy, and
Theology
*http://sophere.org/conferences/regional-conference-indiana-2019/*
<http://sophere.org/conferences/regional-conference-indiana-2019/>
*Keynote Speakers*: Bruce Ellis Benson(Logos Institute, University of St.
Andrews); Peter Costello (Providence College); Lea Schweitz (Lutheran
School of Theology, Chicago, and Zygon Center for Religion and Science, to
be confirmed)
*Confirmed speakers*: James Hart, Michael Barber, Olga
Louchakova-Schwartz, Thomas Ryba.
*Presidential address*: Martin Nitsche (Institute of Philosophy, Czech
Academy of Sciences)
*Conference Directors*: Jim Nelson, Ph.D., Psychology (Jim.Nelson at valpo.edu),
Aaron Preston, Ph.D., Philosophy (Aaron.Preston at valpo.edu)
The purpose of this conference is to examine possibilities and
difficulties, and the theoretical problems and hands-on solutions arising
in the description of religious experience. Does religious experience
harbor concealed empirical and phenomenological complexity, and how do we
address complexity in a focused description which aims at revealing the
essence of experience? We invite an interplay between pragmatics of
describing religious experience, philosophical and theological issues
involved in creation of description, and theoretical models of how
religious and spiritual experience may be described. The conference
accepts papers dedicated to description of perception, imagination,
body-awareness, recollection, social cognition, self-experience,
temporality etc. in the context of religious experience. How does
phenomenological description of religious experience translates into
ecology, history, or natural science? What are cultural influences in the
description of religious experience? The papers should provide not just the
description of experience *per se*, but an analysis of the process or
outcome of description and reflection on what description of religious
experience *per se *entails. Such reflections must employ phenomenological
philosophy, such as e.g. in the work of Anthony Steinbock or Jean-Luc
Marion, but can also draw on contemporary dialogues between
phenomenological philosophy and other philosophical and theological
traditions, such as we see in the work of researchers like Espen Dahl,
Matthew Ratcliffe, Dan Zahavi, Stanley Cavell, or Evan Thompson, to name a
few. We welcome paper proposals related to but not necessarily bound by
the initial themes which are listed below:
*I. Creating Descriptions of Religious Experience*
- How does one actually describe religious experience? What difficulties
and delights are in this process? How do we clarify such descriptions?
- How does the process/outcome of describing religious experience differ
from of ordinary experience?
- How does one approach the negative (absences) and the positive
(presences) in these descriptions?
- How does description capture embodied, affective, and metaphysical
aspects of experience?
- What are the relationships between the description and the essence of
religious experience. What determines experience as religious, or
spiritual, and gives it a unique character, intelligible to others?
- How do the questions of otherness or strangeness play out in
description and understanding a description of religious and spiritual
experience?
- Who can understand a description of religious experience? Academic
researchers? Religious practitioners or authorities? Informed consumers?
Contemporaries or successors?
- Can religious and spiritual experience be described by means of
natural language, or does it require some kind of special language?Do
neologisms clarify or do they obfuscate religious experiences?
- What are the functions of language in description of religious or
spiritual experience?
- How does historicity impact a description of religious experience?
- What are the communicological virtues in description of religious
experience?
- What are the relationships between the description and the phenomena
“in excess”?
- What are the purposes of description of religious experience, and how
intentions in communication already presuppose the structure of description
of religious experience we find in texts?
*II. Models for Descriptions of Religious and Spiritual Experience*
- How do phenomenological theories and frameworks influence description
of religious experience? For example, would a description intended to serve
as a ground of phenomenological analyses along the lines of Husserl’s
phenomenology be identical with a description of experience in the
phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion or non-intentional phenomenology of Michel
Henry? Or can such a description reflect a “view from nowhere”?
- What role do religious beliefs play in religious experience, and can
phenomenology provide a clarification of religious presuppositions?
- How, and to what extent, can disciplines other than phenomenology
(e.g. psychology, psychiatry, neurology, anthropology, theology) provide
person-level descriptions of phenomenological relevance?
- How can the phenomenological description of religious experience
change existing models and theoretical assumptions in other fields of
knowledge or in phenomenology itself? For instance, can empirical findings
in religious experiencing refine and improve classical phenomenological
analyses?
- Can religious experience be subjected to constitutive phenomenological
analysis, and can a phenomenological account of any given aspect of
religiosity provide an accurate or adequate description of religious
phenomena? How do claims to presuppositionlessness affect such accounts?
- How does the question of authority play out in first person
description and the analysis of second person description in texts? What
ethical limitations exist in descriptions or discussions of religious
experience from either a first or second-person standpoint?
- Can common-sense metaphysics support the demands in description of
religious experiencing?
*III. Description of religious experience, and ecology, environmental
studies, health sciences, natural sciences, history, business studies,
etc. *
*Scientific Committee*: Jason Alvis (University of Vienna), Michael
Barber (Saint Louis University), Neal DeRoo (The King’s University,
Canada), Olga Louchakova-Schwartz (Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara
University and UC Davis), Kristof Oltvai (The University of Chicago).
*Submission:* abstract of approximately 300 words to
*conferencevalpo at sophere.org* <conferencevalpo at sophere.org> . You can also
enclose a paper of 3000 words (i.e. 30 min reading time). Submissions with
ready papers will be given a priority. Session proposals with at least
three presentations are also welcome, and must include abstracts of at
least three presentations, a clear title of the session, a name of its
chair, and a short description of the session. Abstracts have to be written
in English. Submission should have two copies of the abstract: a .doc file
which includes your name, paper title, affiliation, up to five key words,
and full contact information, and a .pdf file formatted for anonymous
review. Submission deadline July 1, 2019. Notifications of acceptance will
be issued by August 1, 2019.
Selected papers from the conference will be invited for publication in the
topical issue of Open Theology, De Gruyter, “Phenomenology of Religious
Experience IV: The Description”, planned for 2020.
For more information on the conference or the OT publication, email Olga
Louchakova-Schwartz
at olouchakova at ucdavis.edu. This topical issue, *Phenomenology of Religious
Experience IV: Religious Experience and Description*, is also open for
regular submissions (open access processing charges will apply).
--
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS, ""Religious Experience and Description
<http://sophere.org/conferences/regional-conference-indiana-2019/call-for-papers/>
"
SoPheRe second regional conference, Valparaiso, Indiana
October 10-12, 2019
_______________________________________________________
Olga Louchakova-Schwartz (ed.)
The Problem of Religious Experience
<https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783030215743>:
Case Studies in Phenomenology, with Reflection and Commentaries,
V.1 and 2 (Springer, 2019, forthcoming)
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