Past Programs

“There is nothing more difficult to convey than reality in all its ordinariness.” (Pierre Bourdieu, On Television, 1998)

Last year’s NAASR program brought discourses in other academic fields to bear on the study of religion, examining new directions for our field moving forward. The 2025 meeting will advance this interdisciplinary endeavor more specifically by hosting discussions aimed at exploring how, in our scholarly methodologies and vocabularies—whether in our field or in others—we draw distinctions between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Scholars in religious studies have staked out a particular corner of the broad humanistic charge to “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange,” sometimes separating out an aspect of the mundane and presenting it as exceptional, and sometimes taking what others consider exceptional and demonstrating how it is, in fact, exceedingly mundane. Such scholarly moves reflect the deepest currents of our methodological agendas, including the critiques our field has offered of the arbitrary lines separating the sacred from the profane, the “savage” from the “civilized,” and the normal from the pathological.

This year’s papers will depart from well-trod avenues of inquiry; rather than revisit, e.g., the sacred/profane or religious/secular dichotomies (on which there is already a massive literature), we hope to see interventions that draw attention to less-studied forms of exceptionalizing or reducing, including (but not limited to) narratives of crisis, normalization, exception, societal structuration, and the everyday. What forms of methodological exceptionalizing or reducing seem necessary for us to accomplish our work? How can the field move forward with a more nuanced understanding of the stakes of distinguishing the ordinary and the extraordinary? How do scholars treat social phenomena as exceptional or ordinary and how/why these distinctions emerge in our data, our methodologies, and our theoretical frameworks?

The program takes inspiration from the challenge implicit in Bourdieu’s claim that “There is nothing more difficult to convey than reality in all its ordinariness,” and in Lauren Berlant’s treatment of “crisis” not as an exceptional event but a process that produces and shifts the boundaries of what counts as ordinary. Such an emphasis necessarily alters the way we might think of a wide range of discourses, from a “crisis of faith” to the “crisis” in the humanities, and beyond.

Virtual Programming | Saturday, November 15

12:00-1:00pm EST

Conversation with the IAHR: Reports from Krakow

Host: Adrian Hermann, Universität Bonn
Amarjiva Lochan, University of Delhi
Milda Ališauskienė, Vytautas Magnus University
Denzil Chetty, University of South Africa

1:30-2:30pm EST

Craig Martin, St. Thomas Aquinas College, NAASR President

“Deconstruction and the Science of Religion”

In-Person Programming | Friday, November 21-Sunday, November 23

Friday, November 21

Resituating Religious Studies

9:30-11:30am