Mittwoch, 16. Juni 2011, 18 Uhr

Campus Westend, Hörsaalzentrum HZ5

Prof. Dr. José Casanova (Georgetown University Washington (D.C.))

Can religions be ranked hierarchically? Stadial consciousness and religious diversity in our global post-secular age

Abstract

The lecture will explore the tension between our stadial theories of religious evolution which link processes of religious rationalization to genealogical explanations of our modern secular age and therefore need to establish hierarchic asymmetries between lower and higher forms of religion and our phenomenological post-secular  consciousness which can experience all human religious forms, from the most “primitive” to the most “postmodern”, as formally equal and symmetrical within the immanent frame of our post-secular global age.

CV

José Casanova is Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, where he heads the Program on Religion, Globalization, and the Secular. Previously he served as Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1987 to 2007 and has held visiting appointments at New York University, at Columbia University, at Vienna's Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, at the Central European University in Budapest, at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, at the Freie Universität Berlin, at the University of Uppsala, and at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen. He has published widely in the areas of sociological theory, religion and politics, transnational migration, and globalization. His best-known work, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994) has become a modern classic in the field and has been translated into six languages, including Japanese and Arabic, and is forthcoming in Indonesian, Farsi, and Chinese. He is also the author of Europa's Angst vor der Religion (Berlin U.P., 2009).