The Festival of New

An open session of the course "Theorizing Religion," this presentation and workshop traces the presence of religious studies at The New School from its earliest years to the present. The presentation focuses on the work of the Jewish pragmatist and theorist of cultural pluralism Horace Kallen, who taught at The New School from 1919 to 1973, and whose work as an educator and public intellectual helped shape the university's distinctive ethos in enduring ways. The workshop explores the often pathbreaking ways religion has been theorized in representative The New School courses and in public programs from "Religion - Why?" in the 1930s to "Queer Christianities" in the 2010s, and then engages these legacies to divine what contributions The New School might make to religious studies in its second century.