This two-day conference will bring scholars from a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences into a conversation about Foucault and religion to engage the questions: How has Foucault’s thought contributed to the formation of “religion” as an object of inquiry in different fields? What are the points of contact between practices of the self (spiritual exercises) and the anthropology of ethics? How do empirical studies of religious and spiritual practices provoke us to rethink Foucault’s corpus? In what ways do genealogies of the secular trade on Foucault’s analysis of power-knowledge and his use of the concept of critique? What productive tensions are generated by interdisciplinary appropriations of Foucauldian concepts and critical-genealogical methodologies? The “and” in the conference’s title intends to evoke a number of possible conjunctures between the two stated themes: the significance of religion within Foucault’s conceptual architecture, as well as the ways in which Foucault’s work has recast anthropological, sociological, and historical discourses on religion as an object of knowledge.

For more information, contact conference organizers Daniel Schultz or Maureen Kelly.

Sponsored by the Martin Marty Center at the Divinity School, the Lichtstern Foundation, the France Chicago Center, the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, the Philosophy of Religions Workshop, and the Divinity Students Association.