SSRC: Investigating Religious Counterpublics

I got back from New York at 2AM this morning, after a really enjoyable and thought-provoking workshop on "Investigating Religious Counterpublics" organized by the Social Science Research Council and the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge.  I joined about 10 scholars, including convenors Craig Calhoun and Michael Warner, for a long day of discussions about the impact of new media ecologies on religious movements, and about the usefulness of the concept of "religious counterpublics".  What made the workshop particularly interesting for me was the sheer breadth of the expertise in the room - instead of the (to me) overly familiar discussions of Islamist movements or the al-Jazeera effect, we had experts on a wide range of religions, regions, historical periods, and theoretical approaches to challenge each other's conventional wisdom and assumptions.  Unusually for a workshop convened to explore the usefulness of a concept (and presumably publication to follow), the group for the most part seemed skeptical about the "religious counterpublic" as a productive theoretical approach - but I think came up with some better formulations which may well down the road lead to some really useful cross-regional, cross-religious, and cross-historical comparative theory. 

Apologies for not going into any more detail on the discussions, but you know how it is.   But for those curious about how the SSRC crowd is thinking about religion these days, I strongly recommend the new SSRC blog The Immanent Frame. Organized and administered by Jonathan VanAntwerpen (who also took part in the workshop), the new blog began by focusing on Charles Taylor's remarkable new book The Secular Age but aspires to develop into a much wider forum for the public discussions of issues of religion by top scholars.   It's pretty darned impressive that VanAntwerpen has already coaxed into the blogosphere scholars of the caliber of Taylor, Talal Asad, Robert Bellah, John Bowen, Wendy Brown, Jose Casanova (and many more, including me if I can ever get my head above water).