Oaths, Treaties, and Covenants in Multi-jurisdictional and Multi-religious Societies (November 5-7, 2020)

The final workshop in the Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies project, in collaboration with the York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law, held at University College, University of Toronto convenes a comparative conversation about oaths, treaties, and covenants as speech acts or performances grounded on transcendental referents, such as God, the Creator, or a future yet to come, and enacted through ritual and material exchange. At a time of environmental devastation when making promises for the future seems both urgent and futile, this workshop examines the politics of the promise in interdisciplinary perspectives.

This 2.5-day workshop brings together scholars from religious studies, Indigenous Studies, law, history, politics, and anthropology, and other relevant disciplines whose research focuses on “making promises” in a range of historical and regional contexts. Swearing oaths of citizenship and allegiance, negotiating treaties as “sacred promises” between nations, and legitimizing relations of kinship through state-sanctioned ceremonies of marriage and adoption are all examples of ritualized promises in which secular politics and religious commitments conjoin. These public promises are, in fact, far more than examples: oaths, treaties, and covenants are generative sites of relationship out of which the very concepts and practices of religion, the sacred, and the secular have emerged.

Public keynote lecture:  Prof. Jeffery G. Hewitt (Osgoode Hall Law School, York University), "Fragmented Promises, Pentimento & the Salvage Paradigm"

Thursday, November 5, 5:00 – 6:15 pm CET

Register to attend this lecture at: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/fragmented-promises-pentimento-the-salvage-paradigm-tickets-124750741827

Especially for students at the LUI: our former international visiting professor, Pamela Klassen, and our upcoming Humboldt Fellow, Yaniv Feller, are speaking in a panel on Saturday, November 7, at 4:00 – 4:45 pm CET

Session 5: Ceremony, Law, and Promises of Belonging

• Yaniv Feller, Silencing the Torah in Museums
• Pamela Klassen, Ceremonial Morality: What a History of Oath-Taking Reveals about Practices of Living in a Good Way

The entire program with abstracts of lectures can be viewed here: https://rpm.religion.utoronto.ca/index.php/workshop-schedule-2/
A pdf of the Schedule is available here

The Zoom-link to the workshop can be obtained by emailing Professor Scheer.