Modernity and the Category of Religion
24 April 2012
10:30 - 18:00
Venue: Court Room, University Offices
A workshop co-hosted by the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law and the Critical Religion network of the University of Stirling.
Click for the final version of the workshop programme
and the introductory text which explains the topic in detail.
We propose for discussion that religious-secular distinctions are written into the entire fabric of modern life, such that to figure out the category of religion is to figure out much of what passes for modernity. Following on the experience of our earlier workshops and conferences, we have asked our speakers to avoid debating whether there is or is not such a thing as "religion" or even using the terms "religion" or "religious" as descriptors. So we do not describe Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism as "religions" or institutions like the Catholic Church as "religious". We have asked our speakers to go beyond the simple (although important) observations that religious-secular distinctions vary from one context to another, or that that the boundary between "religious" and "secular" is often blurred in practice because that begs the question of why people do sometimes insist on drawing the boundary. The focus of the workshop will be, instead, on the consequences of how people distinguish religious from non-religious or secular. Our questions, then, are the following:
How and why do people - politicians, academics, peasants, managers, teachers, journalists, clergy, workers, lawyers - distinguish between "religious" and "non-religious" or "secular"? And what happens when they make such a distinction? In sum, we are interested in what happens when the "religious" and "non-religious" get distinguished, or when people resist or blur the distinction, at different conjunctures of modernity, past and present.
Contact
Louise Harkins (l.harkins@abdn.ac.uk)