Adam Seligman is a professor of religion at Boston University and founding director of CEDAR – Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion. Winner of the Leopold Lucas Prize in 2020, his many books include The Idea of Civil Society (1992), Innerworldly Individualism (1994), The Problem of Trust (1997), Modernity’s Wager: Authority, the Self and Transcendence (2000), and a trilogy with co-author Robert Weller: Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (2008); Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience and Ambiguity (2012); and How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor (2018).

In this tenth conversation in the Global Religious and Secular Dynamics Discussion Series, Seligman will join Berkley Center Senior Fellow José Casanova to discuss such themes as civil society, trust, authority, collective belonging and the challenges posed by individualism and modern human rights discourse to any shared idea of a substantive public good. Weaving together theory and practice, the two scholars will also discuss Seligman’s role as director of CEDAR, which leads workshops every year on how to live with difference in a divided world.