On Tuesday 4 March, Professor Richard King from the Department of Religious Studies, will be giving the 2014 Arnov Lecture at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama in the United States.
The Arnov Lecture is an annual event, running since 2002, which introduces the Alabama academic community to recognised scholars of religion, to reflect on issues of wide relevance to the humanities and social sciences.
The title of Professor King’s talk will be ‘From Mysticism to Spirituality: Colonial Legacies and the Reformulation of “the Mystic East”’. The field of comparative study of mysticism occupied a crucial role in debates about religion as a cross-cultural phenomenon and as an object of academic study in the middle decades of the twentieth-century. The lecture will explore some of those debates, particularly as they relate to the study of Asian traditions, but also to the study of pre-modern ‘mysticism’ in the West. The lecture will then explore social and cultural reasons why the category of ‘mysticism’ and its academic study have declined in popularity and academic respectability at the beginning of the 21st century, as popular and scholarly interest increasingly turns to ‘spirituality’ as an alternative to traditional forms of religious affiliation.
A Facebook page has been set up for the event here:
www.facebook.com/events/1441276739419019