Relationships among national and international institutions and religious organizations and communities color politics, governance expectations, and daily life in much of the world. The upheavals of the COVID-19 crisis have cast new light on perennial issues of ethics and belief fundamental for institutions and processes of governance. As we move into an unsettling post-COVID-19 era, global religious and interfaith networks aspire to revitalized roles in advancing global agendas. Many questions will arise along the path, including how religious ideals are framed and how contested questions—theological, philosophical, and practical—are to be addressed.
Convening
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- The 2021 Carthage Seminars and Summer School will explore the theme of cultural pluralism in the Media, both traditional and digital, with particular attention paid to information technologies and how news spreads. What are the principal sources of information in the Arab and Muslim World? Who finances them, who owns them, who controls them culturally? Who is in the position to guarantee or impede freedom of speech and the plurality of public discourse? The courses and workshops will explore the status of pluralism in the Arab and Muslim world and the communities the world over.
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- An online workshop devoted to Islam and Pluralism that will gather prominent scholars of Islam from the perspective of theology, philosophy and law. The focus of the discussion will be: the status of salvation and truth in Islam, the legal status of the Other, and the current tensions/intersections between legal and theological status of the Other.
- In this round table, speakers will discuss how misinformation among citizens is becoming an increasingly serious problem for all societies, due to the spreading effects of social networks, which can amplify the circulation of falsehoods. In addition, cable news networks promoting misinformation and “alternative facts” have found a foothold in the United States and are starting to spread across the Atlantic.
- ResetDOC in collaboration with the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice is organizing an online Summer School and Conference addressing issues concerning free speech and how its dominance in Western legal structures has shifted over time, including a comparative outlook on the question through the lens of varying cultural and religious perspectives from all over the globe.
- In this final event in the Global Religious and Secular Dynamics Discussion Series, Casanova will be interviewed by Thomas Banchoff, vice president for global engagement at Georgetown University. Together they will review the series as a whole and what it revealed about our contemporary global condition. It will also be an opportunity for Casanova to share the personal history of his own work on modern secularization and competing theories of global religious revival and to discuss contemporary issues through that lens.
- Round Table: Is there any reason to think that Trump’s defeat signalled the beginning of the end of populism, or do the underlying causes continue to linger? Democracies worldwide are exercising vigilance while seeking the best paths to restore dialogue among citizens and re-prioritize common sense and rationality at the heart of national politics.
- UC Berkeley’s Center for Democracy, Toleration, and Religion presents a lecture by Professor Michael Walzer. The lecture will revisit the old question about tolerating the intolerant. “We have to do that, but this isn’t a simple toleration; we have a right to ask for concessions from them–some minimal conformity, especially with regard to gender and equality.” Exactly what that means, and how it might be justified, will be the subject of his lecture.
- Reset DOC presents a round table to discuss the currently shifting paradigms in the Middle East and North Africa. From tremors within the Jordanian monarchy to Libya’s fragile peace, Lebanon’s absentee ruling class and Algeria’s struggle to move on from Bouteflika. What is at stake for the region after a decade of faltering change. Will the new geopolitical shifts allow for more breathing room for democracy to flourish or do we return to the status quo by another name?