Religion

Commencement reception for seniors and their families for the departments of Dance, Theatre, Classics & Classical Studies, Literary Studies, Philosophy, Religion, and Education Studies.

The Religion Department at Middlebury College will present the Scott Symposium titled “What Is Religious Studies?: Two Examples from India” on the afternoon of Thursday, April 4 in the Orchard Room (Hillcrest 103) at 4:30 p.m. Community members are welcome. Sponsored by the Department of Religion with generous support from the Charles P. Scott Memorial Fund.

Remarks and awards for seniors and their families in Mahaney Center for the Arts Room 126.

“The Kabbalah of Poetry, the Poetry of Kabbalah.” Reading and lecture by Peter Cole Peter Cole, poet, translator, scholar and MacArthur Fellow, will speak on and read from his new book, The Poetry of Kabbalah (Yale University Press, 2012), seeking the connection between poetic creation and mystical experience. Booklist has praised this latest work of Cole’s as “a dazzling treasury of verse spanning more than 1,500 years and accompanied by fascinating, illuminating commentary rich in history, biography, and literary expertise.” A book-signing will follow.

The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs presents Dr. Artyom Tonoyan and “Paradise Lost: Nagorno-Karabakh’s Quest for Independence from Aspiration to Exile.”

Erin Durban and Lucinda Ramberg, two feminist, queer, postcolonial scholars, will have a conversation about queer anthropology: What does it mean to queer anthropology? How can we do anthropology, as well as ethnographic methods more broadly, in a queer way and for queer purposes?

Erin Durban, a scholar of queer anthropology, will discuss their book The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti. Evangelical Christians and members of the global LGBTQI human rights movement have vied for influence in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. Each side accuses the other of serving foreign interests. Yet each proposes future foreign interventions on behalf of their respective causes despite the country’s traumatic past with European colonialism and American imperialism. As Durban shows, two discourses dominate discussions of intervention.

According to a letter from the apostle Paul, Christ-followers in the Roman colonial town of Corinth in the midst of assembly were speaking in tongues which no one could understand. This talk is an experiment, bringing together recent analyses of speaking in tongues or glossolalia in South Korea (Nicholas Harkness) with a critique of the violence of language by Afro-Caribbean poet M. NourbeSe Philip.

The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs program on Global Health and Medicine presents Professor Lucinda Ramberg, sociocultural and medical anthropologist at Cornell University

Fair trade, microfinance, impact investing, social entrepreneurship, decolonized philanthropy: as the crisis of neoliberal order has multiplied in recent decades, so too have projects to represent global capitalism as a vehicle for feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial solidarities. What is the history of these projects? Whose interests do they serve? And, for critics of racialized economic violence and labor expropriation, how should we relate to shiny promises that “humanitarian” capitalism might still be achieved?