[Asec] CFP Community, Art, and Religious Experience, corrected deadline

[Olga Louchakova-Schwartz]

*Community, Art, and Religious Experience*

*Panel of the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience, an
Affiliated Group of the American Philosophical Association*

*Jan 4-7, 2021,  New York City, APA Eastern Division Conference*

https://sophere.org/conferences/community-art-and-religious-experience/

How can religious experience be described phenomenologically as an
experience of community?  Outside of phenomenology, in natural or naïve
life, we can often speak of religious communities.  And many religious
texts speak directly about the divine opening up or revealing itself to a
people or to a group that the divine brings together.  But what can
phenomenological method and research bring to the lived experience of the
religious, or to a religious reading of sacred texts, to show whether and
how religious experience is communal, as opposed to private or personal?

Again, in everyday life, when we turn to the role of community and
religious experience in art or literature, we see some indications.  An
architectural creation—say at the border of two religious peoples or two
nations—draws pilgrims from both.  A piece of music that one calls a mass
or a psalm expresses some deep emotinal chord, a pre-reflective longing
toward transcendence.  A painting—or even a postcard—shows a whole
tradition in a coded situation from a sacred text that involves the viewer
in a complex negotiation of ordinary life and extraordinary
sacramentality.  A short story or a novel or a poem uses language to
express the experience of the divine “deep down in things,” drawing the
reader into a shared vision.

How can a phenomenological account of these everyday experiences assist us
when we reflect on them?  How can our first- and second-person accounts,
our intersubjective or intercorporeal presuppositions, help us create a
dynamic, rigorous descriptive phenomenology that transcends doctrine in
favor, as Husserl might say, of moving toward the eidetic structures of
religious experience itself?

The Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience (SoPheRE
<https://sophere.org/>) will be hosting a panel discussion on the topic
“Community, Art, and Religious Experience” at the Eastern Division meeting
of the American Philosophical Association January 4-7, 2021 in New York
City. We hereby invite papers related to that theme. Possible topics to be
covered include (but are not limited to):

What is meant phenomenologically by community in religious experience?  Are
there religious resources in the the Continental and phenomenological
tradition that might assist us in order to aritculate a phenomenology of
religious community—resources such as those in the works of Jean-Luc Nancy,
Jean-Luc Marion, Edith Stein, John Caputo, and others?

How does religious experience make possible (or make problematic) what it
means to be in community with others?  How would Heidegger’s discussion of
religious life and freedom in *The Phenomenology of Religious Life *help us
to see this causal relationship?

How does art or literature demonstrate or call for religious experience as
an interpretative process? How would Derrida’s ongoing discussion of a
“messianic without messianism” reopen a kind of hermeneutics or exchange
with this art that would redirect religious experience?

What is, could be or should be the relationship between religious
experience and art?  Can Husserl’s or Stein’s discussion of intentionality
and of beauty bear fruit within a renewed commitment to the sense of earth
or stone or painting that we see in work by John Sallis and others?

Papers should be for 30 minutes reading time (approx.. 3500 words) and
submitted for blind review by *JULY 25th, 2020*. Accepted papers will be
notified by September 30th, 2020. All presenters must register for the
Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. All
papers, and any questions, should be sent to the panel organizers at
dr.petercostello at gmail.com.

-- 

Olga Louchakova-Schwartz
Professor of Philosophy of Religion, Spirituality, and Human Development,
HIBS
Clinical Professor, UC Davis, School of Medicine
https://ucdavis.academia.edu/OlgaLouchakova

Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience
Founding President, www.sophere.org

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)
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