Religion and Modernity in a Secular City Open Registration

Registration is now open for the Religion and Modernity in a Secular City postgraduate conference, which will take place this coming 16-18 September at the Katholische Akademie in Berlin. The keynote speaker will be Professor Graham Ward, who will also engage in a public panel discussion with Dr. Ataullah Siddiqui of the Markfield Institute of Higher Education, and Professor Rolf Schieder of Humbolt University.

The language of the conference will be English, and the conference will take place in the centre of Berlin at the Katholische Akademie.

The registration form can be downloaded by clicking here, and the official programme for the conference can be downloaded by clicking here. The conference fee is €60 which includes lunch from Thursday to Saturday. Accommodation can also be booked at the conference venue through the registration form, however spaces are limited so do register soon.

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Religion and Modernity in a Secular City

Call for Papers: The Religion and Modernity in a Secular City postgraduate conference will take place this coming 16-18 September at the Katholische Akademie in Berlin. The conference is being organized by the K. Akademie in conjunction with the Centre for Religion and Political Culture at the University of Manchester, and the Program on Religion, Politics and Economics at Humboldt University. Further details can be found by clicking here. The following is an abstract from the conference website:

Writing from Vichy, France in early 1940, Walter Benjamin articulated what many theologians secretly feared in his Über den Begriff der Geschichte by portraying theology as the hunchback that must keep out of sight. However, Slavoj Žižek has recently suggested that it is time to reverse Benjamin’s first thesis on the philosophy of history: “The puppet called ‘theology’ is to win all the time.” This startling reversal reveals that the extent to which Enlightenment secularization imagined it could map the rational world onto a manipulable grid, manifested in the global spread of political, economic and social structures that have attempted to inscribe the sacred within a strictly private sphere, is increasingly being called into question by the continuing public presence of political theologies. However, the question of what this new visibility of religion might mean in the context of the supposedly secular city remains less than clear. We invite proposals for papers, to be delivered in no more than 30 minutes, that address this broad theme from theology, philosophy, political theory, economics, sociology, as well as cultural and biblical studies. The keynote speaker will be Professor Graham Ward.

The language of the conference will be English. Abstracts of no more than 300 words, together with a CV, should be sent simultaneously to both the conference organizers via email no later than 30 April 2010. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 14 May 2010. The conference will take place in the centre of Berlin at the Katholische Akademie. Generous grants are available for presenters to cover the costs of registration, accommodation and meals. 

For further information please contact the conference organizers at the following addresses: 

• Martin Knechtges: knechtges@katholische-akademie-berlin.de
• Kyle Gingerich Hiebert: kyle.gingerichhiebert@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

Poster (PDF)

After Atheism Symposium

This 24 April, from 10am-5pm, the Storey Institute at the University of Lancaster will be hosting a symposium with Terry Eagleton, entitled After Atheism: Religion, Literature and Science. Speakers include Terry Eagleton, Arthur Bradley, John Cartwright, Abir Hamdar, Gavin Hyman and Andrew Tate. All are welcome, however, to reserve a place, please contact a.h.bradley@lancaster.ac.uk or a.tate@lancaster.ac.uk. Here's a blurb on the conference theme itself:

In recent years, the "God Question" has re-emerged with a vengeance. On the one hand, there has been a rash of best-selling polemics against God, religion and belief by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. On the other, there has also been a concerted defence of religious belief from Terry Eagleton, John Gray and Charles Taylor. This one-day symposium gathers together a range of international experts on religion, literature and culture - including the world-renowned literary critic Terry Eagleton - to consider the cultural significance of this debate. Why has the God Question re-emerged now? How has it impacted upon literature, culture and even politics? And what, finally, might come "after atheism" - a new Enlightenment or the return of the religious?

Messianism - Jewish and Christian Perspectives

Applications are currently being accepted (deadline 15 February) for a summer course on "Messianism - Jewish and Christian Perspectives" which will take place at the Central European University in Budapest, July 5-16, 2010. A number of renowned experts will give lectures and teach intensive seminars, but also the course participants will be invited to present their own research. Detailed information about contents, teachers, application procedures, and funding opportunities can be found by clicking here. We especially invite applications from advanced graduate students and young faculty. If you have any questions, please contact Matthias Riedl at Visriedl@ceu.hu. 

The course is a co-operation between the Center for Jewish Studies at the CEU, and Duke University's The Gerst Program for Political, Economic, and Humanistic Studies and Center for International Studies. The course is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. 

Here's an excerpt from the course website:

This course will explore the ancient messianic idea, its spatial expansion, and its ideational development up to the present. The topic will be approached from a wide variety of disciplines (Political Science, History, Philosophy, Anthropology), sharing a common focus on the messiah as a central and enduring symbol of Jewish and Christian societies and their interconnected eschatological expectations.

Political Theology Conference

This coming 14-15 December, the Political Theology for the 21st Century: Trends and Tasks conference will be held at the Institute for Political Science at Corvinus University-Budapest. The conference has been organised by the International Research Network on Religion and Democracy. Paper's will be given by Professor Lieven Boeve on "The Interruption of Political Theology," and, "Political Theology and Its Discontents," by Dr. Michael Hoelzl. 

Sacred Modernities

This past week, 17-19 September, Professor Graham Ward gave a keynote address at the Sacred Modernities: Rethinking Modernity in a Post-Secular Age conference which was hosted at Oxford Brookes University in conjunction with The University of Northampton. Here's a brief abstract of the conference theme:

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.

Ward's paper was entitled "How Hegel Re-sacralised the Project of Modernity," and an Mp3 of his address can be downloaded by clicking here. For further information about Ward's research interests and publications please click here, or email him at graham.ward@manchester.ac.uk.