Welcome Letter from Our President:
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Crises in the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and law summon the critical study of religion to take up renewed roles for servicing knowledge in the university, and for responsible culture creation in the contemporary world. This is true today perhaps like never before, as religious studies and theology departments in both secular and traditional religious institutions seek to showcase religions’ relevance amid ongoing pressures in academia and the wider culture.
While religion often finds uneasy places in higher education, reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Religion surrounds us, occupying every space. It lends its integrative features spread throughout the various fields of our range of free and open intellectual inquiry. Religion matters for all of life, including how it is and ought to be lived out, informing our ethics and values for life and society with radical depiction, powerful imagination, and practical relevancy.
These are the kinds of issues that keep us committed to studying religion in the American Academy of Religion’s Western Region (AARWR). As the largest and most diverse regional body of the larger AAR, we are concerned with religions’ extant materiality as well as its theological frameworks and internal norming commitments. We want to engage, cultivate, and disseminate the best ways of understanding religious and theological phenomena.
At this critical time for the study of religion, we invite a wide-range of participants to contribute to our annual spring meeting, including practitioners, clergy, laypeople, scholars, and graduate students. The AARWR is a scholarly organization that produces a peer-reviewed academic conference. To facilitate this, we encourage submissions of paper proposals and other organized panels in response to our various units’ emphases and interests, and in light of the 2020 conference theme, Religion and Rites of Passage. Information about this can be found in our upcoming conference’s Call for Papers.
Whatever role you may play in the upcoming spring gathering, please plan to join us for our next conference March 13-15, 2020, in the peaceful and beautiful setting of Claremont, California, where we will be hosted by Claremont Graduate University.
Yours Truly,
Jason S. Sexton, Ph.D.
AARWR President (2019-2020)
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Crises in the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and law summon the critical study of religion to take up renewed roles for servicing knowledge in the university, and for responsible culture creation in the contemporary world. This is true today perhaps like never before, as religious studies and theology departments in both secular and traditional religious institutions seek to showcase religions’ relevance amid ongoing pressures in academia and the wider culture.
While religion often finds uneasy places in higher education, reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Religion surrounds us, occupying every space. It lends its integrative features spread throughout the various fields of our range of free and open intellectual inquiry. Religion matters for all of life, including how it is and ought to be lived out, informing our ethics and values for life and society with radical depiction, powerful imagination, and practical relevancy.
These are the kinds of issues that keep us committed to studying religion in the American Academy of Religion’s Western Region (AARWR). As the largest and most diverse regional body of the larger AAR, we are concerned with religions’ extant materiality as well as its theological frameworks and internal norming commitments. We want to engage, cultivate, and disseminate the best ways of understanding religious and theological phenomena.
At this critical time for the study of religion, we invite a wide-range of participants to contribute to our annual spring meeting, including practitioners, clergy, laypeople, scholars, and graduate students. The AARWR is a scholarly organization that produces a peer-reviewed academic conference. To facilitate this, we encourage submissions of paper proposals and other organized panels in response to our various units’ emphases and interests, and in light of the 2020 conference theme, Religion and Rites of Passage. Information about this can be found in our upcoming conference’s Call for Papers.
Whatever role you may play in the upcoming spring gathering, please plan to join us for our next conference March 13-15, 2020, in the peaceful and beautiful setting of Claremont, California, where we will be hosted by Claremont Graduate University.
Yours Truly,
Jason S. Sexton, Ph.D.
AARWR President (2019-2020)
