Thursday, August 27, 2020 | 12:30 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. EDT
ONLINE ZOOM WEBINAR – See below for practical instructions
This event is co-sponsored by Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and Reset Dialogues on Civilizations.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to limit social interaction while simultaneously raising enormous societal and economic challenges, the Global Religions and Secular Dynamics discussion series brings together prominent scholars online to facilitate ongoing intellectual conversation. The series examines modern secularization and competing theories of global religious revival as interrelated dynamics. Contemporary issues such as the resurgence of exclusionary populisms and self-enclosed nationalisms, transnational religion, migration, and increasing ethno-religious and cultural diversity, are discussed in public conversations moderated by Berkley Center Senior Fellow José Casanova, one of the world’s top scholars in the sociology of religion.
Craig Calhoun is an American sociologist who has had a long and esteemed career. In his role as head of the Social Science Research Council, he co-edited and promoted important works on religion and secularism, including Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. His own work has included a focus on these topics as well, including how forces of secularism and religion have contributed to political and cultural transformations. As director of the London School of Economics he helped inaugurate their Religion and Global Society program.
This conversation will build on three others in the Global Religious and Secular Dynamic Discussion Series, including the inaugural talk with Charles Taylor. Calhoun will join Berkley Center Senior Fellow José Casanova to discuss debates on nationalism and cosmopolitanism, receding hopes for a global fourth wave of democracy and specifically for democratization in China, and the COVID-19 pandemic and the contemporary global condition, with a special attention to its effects on universities and social science research.