On 22 February we were happy to welcome Ahmet T. Kuru from San Diego State University to our colloquium. He gave a presentation on “Secularism and Islam: A Complex Relationship from History to the Present“ introducing his books on Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison and Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey.
The complete talk is now available online and you can watch the video below and on Ahmet T. Kuru's YouTube channel.
16.03.2023
On 14 October 2022 Lori Beaman gave her inaugural lecture on "The Transformational Possibilities of Immanence: The Rise of Nonreligion and its Implications for the Climate Crisis" at the GLOBE22 Science Festival of the Leipzig Research Centre Global Dynamics (ReCentGlobe). The complete lecture is now available online via the YouTube channel of ReCentGlobe.
more 19.02.2023
Last November, Dagmar Schwerk gave a guest lecture with the title “’Tighter Than a Silken Knot and Heavier Than a Golden Yoke’: Tibetan Metaphors of the Religious and Political Between Imagination and Social Reality” at the SFB 1475 “Metaphors of Religion” at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. CERES has recently published a follow-up interview online.
more 23.11.2022
After presenting it at our book launch in September here in Leipzig, our Senior Research Fellow Sushmita Nath was recently invited to present her first book “The Secular Imaginary: Gandhi, Nehru and the Idea(s) of India” in a talk with host Tiatemsu Longkumer for the New Books Network Podcast.
more 01.11.2022
Since the beginning of 2022, Israeli media has publicised a decision by Merav Michaeli, Minister of Transportation and leader of the left-wing Avoda party, approving public transportation on Saturdays, and thus putting an end to what she has described as a “siege over weekends”. In the eyes of anthropologist Lydia Ginzburg, the scrutiny of public transport on Shabbat underlines the relevancy of the Multiple Secularities perspective, in examining the entangled connections between religious and secular institutions, discourses and daily practices, in order to better understand different configurations of secularity on a global scale.
more 02.05.2022
Continuing our irregular series on the war between Russia and Ukraine, our Senior Research Fellow Ina Merdjanova has written a short piece on the limits of faith-based diplomacy - especially when church and state embrace each other in a symbiotic alliance to pursue their respective hegemonic ambitions.
more 28.03.2022
Together with Jonas Bens from the Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin, our Senior Researcher Nur Yasemin Ural produced a Podcast on "The colonial affects of secular Europe" for the Podcast series of the Affect and Colonialism Web Lab. The Podcast series aims to shed a critical light on colonialism’s affective lives and afterlives.
more 14.03.2022
Our Senior Research Fellow Dietrich Jung reflects on the current state of academic freedom in Denmark. Drawing on his personal experiences researching modern Islam, he observes a tendency towards increasing public and political pressure on independent research on controversial topics, which could ultimately endanger the academic integrity and freedom of Danish research.
more 07.03.2022
Taking into account the dynamics of the current developments, this is a continuation of Sebastian Rimestad's previous bulletin entry. Whereas his first article provided a basic understanding of the Orthodox view of the conflict in Ukraine, this one analyses a number of new developments, especially the latest utterances of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow.
more 04.03.2022
Against the backdrop of the ongoing Russian military assault, our former Senior Research Fellow and current Heisenberg Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Religions at Leipzig University Sebastian Rimestad sheds light on Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine and its role in the conflict. He points out the role of the religious aspect for the perception of the conflict and in the run-up to it, and also hints at how the religious landscape might ultimately be affected by it, but he seriously doubts that religion can play a decisive role in resolving the conflict.
more 02.12.2021The panel “The Formation of the Concepts of Secularity/Secularism in the Arab/Islamicate Worlds”, was held at University of Osnabrück from 16 to 18 September 2021, in hybrid format. It was organised and chaired by Housamedden Darwish, as part of the 27th International DAVO Congress, which was jointly organized by the Institute for Islamic Theology, and the German Middle East Studies Association for Contemporary Research and Documentation (DAVO).
more 11.10.2021
The KFG's associated member Katja Triplett is the curator of a current exhibition on „Translated Religion: In a Forest of True Words” at Leipzig University's Bibliotheca Albertina (8 October 2021-13 February 2022).
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