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18.10.2016

Lecture: Contested Secularity

On 25 October 2016, 7 p.m., the KFG's director Monika Wohlrab-Sahr will give a public lecture on "Contested Secularity - Struggle for the Boundaries of Religion" (Umkämpfte Säkularität - Kampf um die Grenzen der Religion) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Munich. The lecture is part of the series "Religion and Society. Systems of Sensemaking in Conflict" (Religion und Gesellschaft. Sinnstiftungssysteme im Konflikt). The lecture will be given in German. 


Short abstract of the series:

Religion is back on the agenda of modern societies. Especially outside Europe religious protagonists deploy mobilizing power but may also create new conflicts through their ways of interpretation and sensemaking of the world. Religion can integrate as well as disintegrate societies and communities - the latter by intensifying tendencies of polarisation or excluding the "other". This development does not only take place in the modern, political Islam - new outbursts of violence also occur among other religious communities including Christianities. One of the normative conflicts created by religious belief in a modern world is the tension between religion and secular systems of knowledge - for example between the certainty of belief and scientific reason. The liberal constitutional state institutionalises the freedom of religion as a basic right - also giving space to religious groups or individuals who question the legitimacy of the law and the state's monopoly on the use of force for religious reasons. These tensions between law and religion have been intensified in many societies since the 1980s.The Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities traces the variety of current religious dynamics of conflict in a comprehensive series of lectures from summer 2015 to fall 2017. 


Full abstract (German)