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Religion at the University of Otago
Religion seminar series
Seminars in the Religion seminar series are held regularly throughout the year. Speakers include staff and postgraduates of Religion and other departments and programmes at the University of Otago, as well as visiting scholars from other universities and institutions.
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If you are interested in presenting a seminar as part of the Religion Seminar Series 2025, or for further information, please contact:
Deane Galbraith
Email deane.galbraith@otago.ac.nz
Seminar series 2025
| Time and date | Presenter | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Fri 4 April 3:00pm - 4:15pm |
Gregory Smith MA student, University of Otago | A Hindu Twist to the Panentheist Turn: Comparing Rāmānuja and Krause The concept of panentheism has recently seen a revival amongst Western philosophers and theologians. Panentheism is one of many competing ways in which humans have attempted to understand divinity. This recent revival, though, has led to retrospective questions concerning the origins of panentheism. In the Western sphere, the philosophy of panentheism gained prominence with the ideas of post-Kantian thinker Karl Christian Friedrich Krause. However, in locating the origins of panentheism another thinker can be suggested: Rāmānuja. Rāmānuja, the medieval Hindu theologian, argued for a concept of God that, on the face of it, expresses a panentheistic understanding of divinity. Through analysing the respective ideas of Krause and Rāmānuja, and undertaking a comparative exercise, I consider whether it is fair to assign the label of “panentheism” to Rāmānuja. After arguing that it is fair, I consider the ramifications of how our Western understanding of panentheism is modified by Rāmānuja’s input. Ultimately, Rāmānuja does present a panentheistic understanding of divinity akin to Krause’s philosophy. Through close comparison, Rāmānuja and Krause express strikingly similar notions of God. Yet, their contexts and their aims differ. Because of these different contexts and aims certain caveats are necessary in the act of assigning Rāmānuja the label “panentheism”. These caveats, however, provide us with an opportunity to enhance and modify our existing Western understanding of panentheism with Rāmānuja’s input. Rāmānuja’s Hindu theology provides rich and fascinating contributions to Western panentheistic philosophy: something that Western thinkers are now beginning to realise. |
| Fri 11 April 3:00pm - 4:15pm | Dr Sara Rahmani Senior Lecturer, Victoria University of Wellington | Māori Atheism as a Decolonising Project Atheism is on the rise among the Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand, but we know little about Māori nonreligion and the processes contributing to Māori deconversion from Christianity. In this seminar, Dr Rahmani will describe the contours of Māori atheism and its intersections with colonisation, cultural revitalisation, and protest movements. She will discuss her upcoming co-authored book, which draws on in-depth interviews and explores how activist resistance to colonialism plays a decisive role in Māori atheists’ accounts of their identity and non-belief. Moot Court Lecture Theatre, Level 10, Richardson Building North |
| Fri 9 May 3:00pm - 4:15pm | Associate Professor Miranda Johnson History Programme, University of Otago | Redeeming an Unjust State: The Christian Politics of Indigenous Petitioners in Colonial New Zealand (with the History Programme, Otago Centre for Law and Society, and the Faculty of Law) Over nearly two hundred years since annexation to the British empire, Māori political and religious leaders, intellectuals, academics, and even ordinary community members have written petitions to criticize actions of the Crown, to remind settler state officials of promises made but broken or unfulfilled, and to imagine a better and more just arrangement of power. Petitioning responds to the unjust actions of a state that is, nonetheless, imagined to be redeemable. This paper presents a chapter from a book in progress that examines how we might retrieve the horizons of interpretation of so-called ‘subaltern’ actors in imperial and colonial contexts. Drawing on the extensive archive of Indigenous petitions, this chapter examines how Māori leaders in the nineteenth century manipulated the plasticity of the petition as a form of claims-making to the state, in order to demonstrate the wrongs of settler government. It focuses particularly on longer petitions sent to the colonial government in the period of the 1860s-1880s, as the state entrenched its power and authority following the New Zealand wars and widespread dispossession. Those petitions demonstrated to colonial governments that the state’s account of recent and historical events was faulty and needed correcting. Petitioners examined at length the land laws and purchasing practices that were undermining their communities’ livelihoods and prospects. They countered historical claims made by state officials, presenting alternative versions of events. In these petitions, which significantly were published and translated in official publications, the colonial state appears as an unjust but redeemable entity. I conclude by considering how the idea of a redeemable state reverberates in later periods of Aotearoa’s political history, for instance in the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal in the late twentieth century. Richardson 7N10 Seminar Room, Level 7, Richardson Building North |
| Fri 23 May 3:00pm - 4:15pm | Dr Tom White Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Otago | Christian or secular states in the Pacific Islands? Over the last decade or so, Pacific Islands lawmakers have begun to abandon the passive secularism/soft establishment of their independence constitutions. Responding to markedly different social and political contexts, legal reformers have either entrenched secularism (Fiji, 2013) or Christian statehood (Samoa, 2017; Papua New Guinea, 2024), while in the Cooks, a parliamentary select committee is currently debating ‘Christian state’ reforms too. This paper discusses this rise of the religion/secular dual as a popular diagnostic for a sweeping set of moral, social and political governance questions in Pacific constitutional law. It examines the prefiguring colonial and pre-colonial social and epistemological conditions and historical events that contour the dual's multiple, overlapping and distinct use in different Island states. Lastly, it highlights how this 'religion turn' in Pacific Islands law offers important case study material for advancing scholarship on the politics of secularism beyond the West. Moot Court Lecture Theatre, Level 10, Richardson Building North |
| Fri 30 May 3:00pm - 4:15pm | Dr Usman Afzali Lecturer, University of Otago | Muslim Diversity Study The Muslim Diversity Study (MDS) was launched to address the under-representation of Muslims in the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study and to strengthen engagement with Muslim communities across Aotearoa New Zealand. This talk traces the inception of MDS, highlighting how community consultation and culturally responsive methods shaped the study. I will share qualitative findings on the experiences of research assistants, outlining key enablers and challenges in data collection. These insights offer practical guidance for conducting inclusive research with marginalised groups, and will be of particular interest to those in cross-cultural research and religious studies seeking to build more representative and ethical research frameworks. Moot Court Lecture Theatre, Level 10, Richardson Building North |
| Fri 13 June 3:00pm - 4:15pm | Professor Gregory Dawes University of Otago | Thomas Aquinas's View of Religious Faith Contemporary debates in the philosophy of religion focus on three views of religious faith. The first is the intellectualist view, which holds that (in the words of W. K. Clifford) “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.” The second is the fideist view, which holds that evidence (in the sense of data from which religious truths may be inferred) is not required for a defensible act of faith. (Modern-day fideists often appeal to the example of so-called basic beliefs, such as those arising from sense perception, which enjoy prima facie justification.) The third is the passional inclination view, made famous by William James, which that for a small class of beliefs, it is acceptable to choose such beliefs on non-evidential grounds. Aquinas's view differs from all three. It overlaps James's view in holding that non-evidential considerations are needed to motivate belief in that which cannot be evidentially proven. But it ultimately rests on an "externalist" account, which holds that it is God who gives the believer the rightly-disposed heart that motivates her decision to believe. Burns 5C13, Level 5, Arts Building Zoom Link |
| Fri 8 August 3:00pm - 4:15pm | Professor Halim Rane Griffith University | Covenants in Islam: New Directions for Islamic Studies, International Relations, and Decolonial Thought Islam is the world’s fastest-growing religion and is projected to become the most widely followed by the latter half of this century. For some, this demographic shift provokes anxiety, shaped by decades of media, political, and even academic narratives that associate Islam and Muslims with violence and conflict. While such narratives have been contested, what has long been missing is a compelling, evidence-based framework that offers a fundamentally different understanding of Islam’s ethical and political foundations. This lecture introduces groundbreaking scholarship on covenants in the Qurʾān and the Prophet Muhammad’s covenants with Christian and other communities—research that is reshaping contemporary understandings of interreligious relations, human security, and peaceful coexistence in Islam. Professor Halim Rane, a world-leading authority on the study of covenants in Islam, will present key findings on the Qurʾānic covenantal concepts of ʿahd and mīthāq, the Prophet’s covenantal diplomacy, and the historical legacy of Islamic covenantal governance. He will also explore the far-reaching implications of this paradigm for the field of Islamic Studies, responses to current crises of global justice and authority of international institutions, and prospects for decolonial thought. Moot Court Lecture Theatre, Level 10, Richardson Building North |
| Fri 26 September 3:00pm - 4:15pm | Professor Jesse Bering University of Otago | The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson This presentation is an early look at my new book, The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson: One Scientist's Epic Quest for Evidence of Reincarnation, Apparitions, Poltergeists, and Other Matters of the Soul (University of Chicago Press, 2026). It is the story of the late Dr. Ian Stevenson, Head of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, who in the 1960s shocked his fellow “orthodox scientists” when he became a fulltime parapsychologist. Whereas my own research in the cognitive science of religion centers on the question “how do we think about the minds of the dead?” Stevenson was preoccupied with the question “do the dead think?” In this talk, I will attempt to reconcile our scientific journeys. Law Seminar Room 5, Level 10, Richardson Building North |
| Fri 3 October 3:00pm - 4:15pm | Dr Elizabeth Guthrie Religion Programme, University of Otago | Someday my prints will come... For the past 15 years, I’ve been trying to track down a series of prints that were produced and printed under the direction of Suzanne Karpelès (189-1968) the Secretary-General of the Buddhist Institute in French Indochina and distributed widely through French Indochina. In this talk I will give an update on my search for Karpelès’ “missing prints”, and present a series of images from the Life of the Buddha. The analysis of these images demonstrates that these images reflect not only the beliefs of the Cambodian Buddhists who commissioned and created these images. They are also evidence of the histoire croisée - the entangled Buddhist history — that connected South Asia and French Indochina during the late colonial period. Moot Court Lecture Theatre, Level 10, Richardson Building North |
| Fri 17 October 3:00 - 4:15pm | Associate Professor Jolyon Thomas, Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania | Didactic Constitutionalism: Education Reform, Religion, and the Japanese Constitution (Co-hosted by the Religion Programme and the Otago Centre for Law & Society) This talk uses two education reforms conducted under the first (2006–2007) and second (2012–2020) Abe Shinzō Administrations to consider the relationship between religion and law in contemporary Japan. The first was the 2006 revision of the Fundamental Law on Education; the second was the designation of “morality time” classes as a “special subject” in the public school curriculum. Both reforms received significant support from rightwing religious lobbies. But even though the reforms were not as far-reaching as these parties hoped, they represented a broader political strategy I call “didactic constitutionalism.” By literally changing the content and pedagogy of specific school subjects, this long-term strategy aims to make citizen-subjects who will finally vote to revise the US-drafted Constitution of 1947. Law Seminar Room 5 Common |
| Fri 24 October 3:00pm - 4:15pm |
Navdeep Kaur PhD candidate, Psychology Department, University of Otago | Exploring the Role of Materials in Shaping Religious Architecture and Practices Throughout history, religious structures have traditionally been seen as reflections of beliefs and practices, yet their design may also shape religious behavior and thought. While researchers often emphasize that these buildings reflect community beliefs, less attention has been paid to how materials and architectural design influence religious practices. Drawing on psychology, anthropology, and archaeology, this research proposes that material constraints, such as resource availability and technological limitations, have historically influenced not only religious art but also religious beliefs and practices. Analysis of pre-industrial religious sites reveals that the use of local materials is linked to architectural features, which in turn are associated with different forms of worship. For example, the use of wood was associated with larger structures, which often facilitated communal gatherings. These findings suggest a potential role of material constraints in shaping religious architecture and practices, as well as the embeddedness of religious beliefs in its material and spatial context. Burns 5C13 Boardroom - 5th Floor |
| Fri 31 October 3:00pm - 4:15pm | Yincheng Qian MA student, Religion Programme, University of Otago | Visualising Vaiśravaṇa in 14th-century Tibet: Buton Rinchendrub’s (1290–1364) theories of iconography and design This paper offers an analysis and translation of a short text from Buton Rinchendrub’s (1290–1364) collection, titled Vaiśravaṇa’s bri yig (design manual), which provides detailed descriptions of the iconographic features of Vaiśravaṇa and his attendant deities. While other texts also discuss Tibetan Buddhist deity imagery, this is the only work in Buton’s collection specifically focused on design principles, like a concise design guide. Considering the popularity of Vaiśravaṇa images after the 14th century, this paper, in conjunction with representative paintings, particularly those from the Sakya School, examines Buton’s text as a pivotal reference in establishing the norms for representing Vaiśravaṇa, underscoring its role in the evolution and standardization of iconographic practices. Burns 5C13 Boardroom - 5th Floor |
Past seminars
Recordings of select past seminars and lectures are available on YouTube:
Religion Programme, University of Otago YouTube channel