April 20 Conference, “Pray, Kill, Eat: Relating to Animals across Religious Traditions.” New York, USA

Pray, Kill, Eat: Relating to Animals across Religious Traditions
Friday, April 20th, 2012, 9 a.m. – 6:30 p.m.
TBA, Columbia University, New York, USA
A graduate student conference on how religious traditions have been instrumental in both reflecting and constructing humans’ notions of animals and have integrated such notions into comprehensive mythical, symbolic, and ritual frameworks of meaning and action. In recent decades, however, many earlier forms of such relationships have been radically transformed in the face of rapid development.  This conference engages both the shifting complexity of the modern world and a growing body of scholarship in religious studies.
Keynote speakers include Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the University of Chicago Divinity School; and Kimberley C. Patton, Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion at Harvard Divinity School.
Sponsored by the Religion Graduate Students’ Association of Columbia University.