On September 15 and 16, 2017 the Center for the Public Understanding of Religion hosted a conference on Religion in the Public Sphere. We brought together scholars from around the country who had at one time been associated with CSU Chico in order to address pressing questions about the role of religion today in issues that are facing America and the world such as violence, community cohesion, economic problems, racial tensions, and the search for justice. The guest speakers were Dr. Eric Mazur (Virginia Wesleyan University), Loren Lybarger (Ohio University), Andrew Flescher (State University of New York at Stony Brook), David Bertaina (University of Illinois at Springfield), Vernon Andrews (CSU San Jose), and Derek Jeffreys (University of Wisconsin, Green Bay). The event emphasized the central role that religion plays in many current events of concern to the general public.
The first session on Friday afternoon consisted of a round table featuring several of our guests and current faculty. Kate McCarthy, our former chair and currently Dean of Students emphasized that global and national realities have brought an immediate relevance to comparative religion that is new to most of us who research and teach in the field. This outward turn can be traced to the new situation wrought by the 9/11 attacks, where scholars were called upon to raise knowledge about Islam in order to counter the ignorance that was permeating much public discourse on the matter. There have also been in recent years a number of Supreme Court decisions about religious freedom that have drawn attention from the American public. Andrew Flescher discussed his interest in dealing with tensions between the rights of the individual and the needs of society, which raises complicated ethical questions. For example, should there be forced vaccinations, when the family does not wish for the child to be vaccinated due to religion or other beliefs? He emphasized that when it comes to living in society in our world, we have to understand that we are all in it together. He also talked about the history of the just war tradition and suggested we might start thinking about a just peace. Vernon Andrews drew our attention to African American culture and pointed out that it gains much of its expressive traditions from the Black churches. He emphasized that in order to really understand this important part of American life, we need to appreciate what African American athletes, musicians, artists, Black Lives Matter activists and others draw from this rich religious environment and bring to the public sphere. Jason Clower then spoke about his interest in how Communism reflects many of the features a religion and functions as one to a surprisingly large degree. It has dogma, intolerance of other beliefs, a notion of paradise, sacred scriptures (being the various writings of Marx, Mao and others), priestly bodies who lay down the orthodoxy and who punish unbelievers. Sarah Pike talked about her quest to present common ground between marginalized and mainstream religious groups. She talked about one project that set up workshops for prison chaplains with the aim of teaching them about non-Christian, non-mainstream religions so they could learn about the beliefs and minister to those believers more effectively. David Bertaina gave a talk entitled "What Constitutes Scripture? Historical and Contemporary Reflections on Interreligious Dialogue" in which he examined the difficulties of interreligious dialogue when the understandings of the nature, meaning and uses of scripture (in this case, the Bible and the Qur'an) are different and addressed the difficulty of dialog between believers when their definition of what constitutes scriptures excludes the existence of other scriptures.
Loren Lybarger spoke aboutCatholicism and the Commemoration of the Disappeared in Argentina 40 Years after the Dictatorship. Here he examined the response of one community - the Church of Santa Cruz (Buenos Aires) - to the Argentine dictatorship, 1976-1983, in the context of debate over the role of the national Church and its relationship to the regime and its actions during this period. Derek Jeffreys presented on the topic "Are Jails Unjust? Dignity and the American Jail," arguing that a religious framework can be used to limit the assault on human dignity in American jails. He spoke about the importance of seeing dignity in each human being just by virtue of their being human, and passionately warned about the dangers of losing our humanity. Eric Mazur discussed popular religion in his talk entitled "The Gospel According to Luke, or How I Came to Understand Scripture from 'a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away." This lecture was a "how-to" for those investigating sacred texts, myths, and parables in popular culture, using materials drawn from "hyper-real" / "non-history based" religions such as Jediism, Matrixism, Dudeism and Pastafarianism, in comparison with more traditional texts. He asked how these are similar to other religions that we all acknowledge. What does it mean to be a “real” religion? And why does it matter?