Ideas of Secularization in Trans-Atlantic Perspectives
This workshop will address different ideas of secularization, the ways they have been historically narrated, and now function discursively, and how these insights may help us address the subject’s present day politicization. Workshop sessions will especially focus on the different approaches to secularization in the US and Europe.
In cultural, sociological, and geopolitical realms, religion and religiosity have become central issues in the contemporary world. This centrality raises questions about associating modernity with the secular, and also about what we mean by ‘secularism’ or ‘secularization.’ These concepts have been used variously to designate the progressive disappearance of religion and also its transformation into modern institutions, and connoting both emancipation and a nostalgia for lost origins. Today, this ambiguity is less an obstacle than a promise for future theory, since it encourages a promising debate about the modern and its relation towards religion.
Concepts of secularization appear to follow distinct perspectives: While an American debate focuses on the political issue of secularism and on sociological approaches, in Europe the concept is rather related to philosophy and cultural history. Both perspectives should be understood as interrelated and each responds to different historical and contemporary roles of religion in Europe and America, and raises important political questions. The 'neutrality' of the state toward religion, for example, as seen from a juridical or a historical perspective, has different meanings in the U.S. and Europe. No less important are the relations of Europe and the U.S. towards Islam in particular.
The present workshop aims to develop understandings of secularization that will be productive for cultural, political, and legal applications. Beyond a unified theory, secularization may be understood as a discursive construct, and as a series of figurative ideas: including metaphors such as the ‘death of God’ or modern ‘disenchantment,’ topoi such as Mysticism, Nihilism or the Vera Icon, and narratives such as the Weber-Thesis or the afterlife of antiquity. This workshop is intended to facilitate analysis of historical and contemporary issues including: Can ideas of secularization contribute to a fruitful analysis of the relation between religion and modernity? In what ways are secularism and faith integral to modern and postmodern thought? How can we put into productive debate American and the European approaches towards secularization? Does the idea of secularization necessarily cast theological communities as anti-modern?
WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
June 3
9:30am: Breakfast
10:00am: Welcome and Workshop Introduction, Daniel Weidner
I. (Secularization in Question) 10:15am – 11:45am
- Adrian Pabst, "The Paradox of Faith – Religion beyond secularization and de-secularization"
- Jean Claude Monod, "Has the concept of 'Secularization' lost any relevance?"
Lunch break 12:00pm-1:00pm
II (Rhetorics and Politics of Secularization) 1:00pm-2:30pm
- Daniel Weidner, " ‘Secularization’ as Metaphor, Myth, and Allegory"
- Christopher Soper, "Clothing the Naked Public Square: Religion, Secularism, and the Future of Politics"
Break: 2:30pm-3:00pm
III (Case studies) 3:00pm-4:30pm
- David Myers, "Reflections on the 'Deprivatization' of Religion: Lessons Learned from Kiryas Joel, New York"
- Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, "Disestablishment, American Style"
Day 1 summary remarks 4:30pm-5:00pm
Dinner
June 4
8:30am Breakfast, with day 2 opening remarks by Daniel Weidner
IV (Secularization in between) 9:00am-10:30am
- John McCole, "Between disenchantment and the post-secular: Georg Simmel on religion"
- Brian Britt, "Secular Reading, Religious Writing: Benjamin and Freud on Schreber"
Break
10:30-10:45am
V (Secularization and Literature) 10:45am-12:15pm
- Christian Sieg , "Between the Religious and the Secular. Heinrich Böll’s Early Oeuvre in the Context of the Secularization Debate"
- Russell Berman, "Konrad Weiss and the 'Christian Epimetheus' -- Secularization and the Weimar Crisis"
Lunch break 12:15pm-1:30pm
VI (Temporalities sacred and secular) 1:30pm-3:00pm
- Andrea Schatz, "Irresistible Secularism? Time, Language and the Jewish Enlightenment"
- Nitzan Lebovic, "Hannah Arendt and Extraordinary Secularism"
Workshop concluding remarks (Weidner) with concluding discussion 3:00pm-4:00pm.
Board Room
Stanford Humanities Center
Russell A. Berman
Department of Comparative Literature
Stanford University
Building 260, Room 201
Stanford, CA 94305-2030
Russell Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where he co-directs the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. He holds a courtesy appointment at the Freeman Spogli Institute. He formerly served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and has been awarded a Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for research in Berlin; he has also been honored with the Bundesverdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany.
His books include The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (1988) and Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (1998), both of which won the Outstanding Book Award of the German Studies Association. Some of his other books include Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem (2004), Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007) and Freedom or Terror: Europe Faces Jihad (2010). In his books and many articles Berman has written widely on the cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critical theory, and cultural dimensions of trans-Atlantic relations, as well as on topics between Europe and the Middle East. His commentary on current events has appeared in The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times Internationale Politik, Telos, Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Review Books, die Welt, die Neue Zuercher Zeitung, die Weltwoche, and American Greatness and elsewhere.
