Visit of Steven M. Tipton
November 19, 2007

Wayne Morse Center
Distinguished Speaker

Professor Steven Tipton gave a lecture at the University of Oregon on November 19, 2007. He lead a seminar for faculty and graduate students, and presented an evening public address.

In addition, Tipton was interviewed by Steven Shankman for Oregon Today. The broadcast will be available in February 2008. These events were cosponsored by the Oregon Humanities Center, the departments of Religious Studies, Sociology, Philosophy, and the Robert D. Clark Honors College.

Short Biography

Steven M. Tipton teaches sociology, religion, and ethics at Emory University and its Candler School of Theology where he is Professor of Sociology of Religion.

A graduate of Harvard University with a joint Ph.D. in Sociology and the Study of Religion in l979, he is the author of Public Pulpits: Methodists and Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument of Public Life, a study of national religious advocacy by the mainline churches in Washington (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press late 2007 or early 2008). Tipton is also the author of Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change and also co-authored with Robert Bellah et al The Good Society and Habits of the Heart which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

A native of San Francisco, he has worked in Harlem as a murder investigator for the New York State Superior Court, and played semi-professional baseball in California.

Schedule

Faculty and Graduate Student Seminar:

“What's Right and Wrong about Religion in Public Life?”
Monday, November 19 at 3:00 to 4:30 p.m., 2007
Location is Gerlinger Lounge

This seminar was by pre-registration only. To register prior to the event participants were asked to read a paper by Professor Tipton titled “Globalizing Civil Religion and Public Theology.” According to Tipton, “this paper interrelates ideas of public theology, civil religion and political ideology in American political culture, links them to the shifting social arrangement of American public institutions, then weighs this interplay of ideals and institutions in global context.”

To register for the seminar, email Elizabeth Weber, eweber@uoregon.edu. Space is limited.

 

 

Public Address

“Public Pulpits: Religion in the Moral Argument of Public Life.”
Monday, November 19, 2007
7:00 p.m
Room 175, Knight Law Center
1515 Agate St.

How do religious and political institutions think through us? How do they shape the ways we think about ourselves, our society, and the good of government? This talk unfolds the moral drama of growing intimacy and tension between an expanded state, and more diversified religious institutions pursuing politicized moral advocacy. Hundreds of non-denominational 'parachurch' groups have crowded the American public square over the past generation, along with thousands of non-religious advocacy groups and lobbies, to charge a nationally integrated yet more contested and multi-vocal argument about how we ought to live together and govern ourselves. In a liberal democracy that is also a civic republic, according to contrasting moral traditions Americans share, we can discern how deeper continuities of cultural conflict and coherence inform our disagreement over religion's role in public and underlie our divisions over the democratic prospect in practice.

President Dave Frohnmayer introduced Professor Tipton. There was a reception and book signing in the Morse Commons of the law school following the lecture.

Additional Information:

Summary of Public Pulpits by Steven Tipton (80K PDF)

Summary and commentary of Public Pulpits by Martin Marty,
noted scholar of religion (24K PDF)

Steven Tiptons Cirriculum Vitae (128K PDF)