Religion at New School - Why?

The high point of the university's official centennial celebration will be the "Festival of the New" held the first week of October. It's an odd and engaging set of events - fitting for what it commemorates. Several classes are holding open sessions, including of course our "New School Histories" ULEC. But "Theorizing Religion" is getting in on the game, too!

RELIGION - WHY?

HORACE KALLEN AND THE FAITHS OF THE NEW SCHOOL

An open session of the course "Theorizing Religion," this presentation and workshop traces the presence of religious studies at The New School from its earliest years to the present. The presentation will focus on the work of the Jewish pragmatist and theorist of cultural pluralism Horace Kallen, who taught at the New School from 1919 to 1973 and whose work as educator and public intellectual helped shape the school's distinctive ethos in enduring ways. The workshop will explore the often pathbreaking ways religion has been theorized in representative New School courses and in public programs from "Religion - Why?" in the 1930s to "Queer Christianities" in the 2010s, and then engage these legacies to divine what contributions The New School might make to religious studies in its second century.

Best of all, I'll be joined (by video) by Matthew Kaufman, author of the new Horace Kallen biography and of the recent Public Seminar piece on Kallen's influence on The New School!