José Casanova is one of the world’s top scholars in the sociology of religion and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center, where his work focuses on globalization, religions, and secularization. His best-known work, Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), has become a modern classic in the field and has been translated into several languages, including Japanese, Arabic, and Turkish. In 2020 and 2021, as the COVID-19 pandemic limited social interaction while simultaneously raising enormous societal and economic challenges, Casanova brought together a series of prominent scholars to facilitate ongoing intellectual conversation.

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.