Monthly Archive for December, 2010

Announcing Dinner for 2011 Religion Conference

Published on December 31, 2010 in Headline and Newsletter. 1 Comment

We are pleased to let you know that the dinner for the 2011 Religion and Spirituality in Society Conference has been finalized.

The Berghoff Restaurant is a Chicago classic, serving German-American style cuisine and culture since 1898. One of the oldest family-run businesses in the nation, it is now run by fourth generation, Carlyn Berghoff. At today’s Berghoff, menus have evolved to add newer, lighter and more contemporary dishes, but it’s still the same old Berghoff, down to the famous root beer.

Located at 17 W. Adams in Chicago’s Loop for more than 112 years, Berghoff Catering & Restaurant Group includes a full-service catering business, the Berghoff Restaurant, the Berghoff Café and the Berghoff Café at O’Hare International Airport. The Berghoff is known for family traditions, its annual Oktoberfest celebration and being a part of the fabric of Chicago.

For more information or to book your ticket, please visit our conference website.

Study Reveals ‘Secret Ingredient’ in Religion That Makes People Happier

Published on December 26, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Physorg.com

“Our study offers compelling evidence that it is the social aspects of religion rather than theology or spirituality that leads to life satisfaction,” said Chaeyoon Lim, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study. “In particular, we find that friendships built in religious congregations are the secret ingredient in religion that makes people happier.”

In their study, “Religion, Social Networks, and Life Satisfaction,” Lim and co-author Robert D. Putnam, the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, use data from the Faith Matters Study, a panel survey of a representative sample of U.S. adults in 2006 and 2007. The panel survey was discussed in detail in the recently published book American Grace by Putnam and David E. Campbell.

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The Meaning of Secularism

Published on December 22, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Charles Taylor, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia

It is generally agreed that modern democracies have to be “secular.” There is perhaps a problem, a certain ethnocentricity, involved in this term. But even in the Western context the term is not limpid and may in fact be misleading. What in fact does it mean? There are at least two models of what constitutes a secular regime. Both involve some kind of separation of church and state. The state can’t be officially linked to some religious confession, except in a vestigial and largely symbolic sense, as in England or Scandinavia. But secularism requires more than this. The pluralism of society requires that there be some kind of neutrality, or “principled distance,” to use Rajeev Bhargava’s term.

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Thinking Otherwise

Published on December 19, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Mary-Jane Rubenstein, in The Immanent Frame

In Why I Am Not a Secularist, William Connolly offers a usefully reductive gloss of the standpoint he does not avow. Secularism, he ventures, is the effort to maintain a rigid distinction between church and state by “strain[ing] metaphysics out of politics.” For my limited purposes here, I would like to propose, similarly, that a Euro-American secularist is one who insists that religion be confined to the realm of private belief and that politics be conducted independently of any purported vision of transcendence. The dangers of transcendence are clear to the secularist; she worries that it inspires other-worldliness at best, and dictatorship at worst.

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