University-Wide Seminar on Religious Enthusiasm: Psychology, Politics, History Video Lecture Series (Winter and Spring 2016)

RELI 6000 University-Wide Seminar on Religious Enthusiasm: Psychology, Politics, History 

Instructors:
Aziz Al-Azmeh (Department of History and Center for Religious Studies) 
Vlad Naumescu (Department of Sociology and Anthropology)

This doctoral seminar is designed to consider the commonalities between extraordinary states of consciousness and extraordinary forms of collective behavior and connections between states of enthusiasm, absorption and rapture, individual as well as collective, and religious phenomena, in a manner that might also address the consequences of such states for contemporary political and social movements, some of the most visible and salient today being perhaps being states conducive to acts of spectacular violence such as suicide bombing and mass-religious fanaticism, as well as charismatic religious practices. 

RELI 6000 Religious Enthusiasm: Lecture 1
21 January 2016
Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths University of London)
Fraternity and Fear in the 'Global Civil War'

28 January
RELI 6000 Religious Enthusiasm: Lecture 2
Dan Sperber (CEU)
What makes partly opaque beliefs and practices attractive?

11 February
RELI 6000 Religious Enthusiasm: Lecture 3
Gábor Klaniczay
Individual and Collective Enthusiasm: Passion devotion and stigmatics in the Middle Ages

25 February 2016
RELI 6000 Religious Enthusiasm: Lecture 4
Kinga Göncz (CEU)
Psychoanalysis and Politics:  The relation between reality and psychic reality

10 March 2016
RELI 6000 Religious Enthusiasm: Lecture 5
Klaus Theweleit (Free University Berlin)
The Laughter of the Perpetrators: Breivik and Others, Psychogram of the Drive to Kill

17 March 2016
RELI 6000 Religious Enthusiasm: Lecture 6 
Atay Citron (Haifa)
Vlad Naumescu (CEU)
Natalie Sebanz (CEU)
Playing at Ritual: A practical experiment into joint action and group dynamics 

12 May 2016
RELI 6000 Religious Enthusiasm: Lecture 7
Pascal Boyer (Washington University, St. Louis)
Human Evolution and the Variety of Religions