Conference | Sacred Modernities

Rethinking Modernity in a Post-Secular Age

Thursday-Saturday, 17-19 September, 2009

The entire event can be listened to again, as a series of podcasts, at the following address:

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2009/09/sacred-modernities-rethinking-modernity-in-a-post-secular-age/

Speakers include: Patrick Curry (University of Kent); Roger Griffin (Oxford Brookes University); Aristotle Kallis (Lancaster University); Vincent Lloyd (Georgia State University); Michael Saler (University of California, Davis); Graham Ward (University of Manchester).

The age of globalization confronts the observer with more ironies than certainties. It was once assumed that the growth of modern institutions - democracy, capitalism, science - would be attended by a series of mutually reinforcing social processes, most notably secularisation, rationalisation and disenchantment. Not only has the global spread of these institutions proved patchy and uneven, religious movements and belief systems have doggedly refused to assume the private status once thought to be their natural destiny. In both the West and the wider world, religion continues to make competing claims on the public sphere and public morals. Developments like this have been accompanied by conceptual critique and innovation. Increasingly, traditional accounts of modernity are seen as Euro-centric and prescriptive, while there has been renewed interest in the question of political and civil religions and the more general relationship of the political and the theological.

Aims and agenda

The aim of this conference is to take stock of these transformations in the context of what is often referred to as a ‘post-secular’ age comprised of ‘multiple modernities’. Its agenda is emphatically interdisciplinary and welcomes scholars from the fields of history, sociology, cultural studies, theology, and others. In the same spirit, the conference adopts a broad, abundant understanding of the term ‘sacred’ to encompass not only formal religious worldviews, but also that which, in whatever fashion, disturbs, complicates, and perhaps abolishes, the distinction between the sacred and the secular. Accordingly, it is just as much interested in manifestations and logics of re-enchantment and resacralization, as it is of desecularisation understood as the persistence and revival of traditional religions. In sum, the aim of the conference is to rethink the equation of modernity, secularity and disenchantment, and to explore the various conceptual and historiographical perspectives through which we might better understand the present.

Attending as a delegate

The deadline for the submission of proposed papers has now passed. If you would like to attend as a delegate please contact Dr. Tom Crook (Oxford Brookes University) by email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)). The deadline for delegate registration is July 2009.