Newsletter multiple secularities

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Wednesday Weekly 2 November 2022

Dear friends and colleagues,

We have an eventful week ahead of us at our KFG, with one event following the next. On Tuesday evening we invite you to a special Eranos dinner and book presentation with Tani and Rajeev Bhargava. On Wednesday, Rajeev will be presenting in the colloquium. Thursday morning we are looking forward to our guest Brian Catlos and on Friday we welcome Nilüfer Göle for a workshop in Leipzig. Tomorrow, the KFG workshop “Religion and Secularism as Problem Space in Postcolonial Occidentalist Discourses within the MENA Region” starts and you can still register for participation on-site or online.

Besides that, this Wednesday Weekly has two more recommendations, one for a seminar and another one for a public event.

We hope to see you at the events!

Enjoy and have a good week!

Anja & Lucy

Reminder: KFG-Workshop “Religion and Secularism as Problem Space in Postcolonial Occidentalist Discourses within the MENA Region”, 3–4 November

Tomorrow, the two-day KFG-workshop on “Religion and Secularism as Problem Space in Postcolonial Occidentalist Discourses within the MENA Region” will start and you can still register for participation. If you wish to attend, please send a short inquiry to Housamedden Darwish.

Please note that the programme has been modified. Here you will find the latest schedule of the workshop.

3 November | 9 am–6 pm (CET)

4 November | 10 am–12.30 pm (CET)

Leipzig University, Strohsack, Room 4.55 AND online via zoom

Special Eranos Dinner with Tani and Rajeev Bhargava, 8 November

We would like to remind you of our Eranos dinner on 8 November that will feature a double book presentation by Tani and Rajeev Bhargava. Rajeev will present his latest book “Between Hope and Despair: 100 Ethical Reflections on Contemporary India” and Tani will give us the chance to be among the first to get an impression of her forthcoming first novel “Lost Worlds”, which spans practically the entire 20th century as it traces the fortune and fate of three generations of a North Indian family.

If you would like to join the dinner and book presentation, please register by Thursday noon via e-mail, as participation is limited due to the capacity of the venue.

8 November | 5 pm (CET)

PAN at Lindenauer Markt 21, 04177 Leipzig

Next week’s Colloquium: Rajeev Bhargava on “Pre-modern and Modern Forms of Religious Coexistence in India”, 9 November

Next Wednesday, our Senior Research Fellow Rajeev Bhargava will give a presentation on his research project “Pre-modern and Modern Forms of Religious Coexistence in India”.

The colloquium will take place in a hybrid format (on-site and online). If you would like to join in person, please register for the colloquium via e-mail. In the Member Area you will find the relevant reading as well as information on the zoom connection data.

9 November | 9.15–11.45 am (CET)

Strohsack, Room 4.55 and online via zoom

Presentation with Brian Catlos on “Dynamics of Convenience in the Age of Convergence: Muslim-Christian-Jewish Relations in the Pre-Modern West”, 10 November

We are very happy to welcome Brian Catlos, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and Research Associate in Humanities at the University of California Santa Cruz, to our KFG on 10 November.

Brian will speak about “Dynamics of Convenience in the Age of Convergence: Muslim-Christian-Jewish Relations in the Pre-Modern West” and in doing so, he steps back from scholarly assumptions to take a phenomenological approach to intercommunal identity and relations, in a pre-Modern West that stretched from the Indus to the Atlantic and from the Sahel to the Baltic during the “Age of Convergence” (ca 650–1650CE). He shows how both the formal and informal manifestation of ethno-religious identity and intercommunal relations emerged out of social, economic and political structures that emerged in the broader Mediterranean world at this time – relations that rooted first and foremost in “convenience” rather than ideology or doctrine.

The presentation will take place in a hybrid format (on-site and online). If you would like to join in person, please register via e-mail. In the Member Area you will find the relevant readings as well as information on the zoom connection data.

10 November | 9.15–11.45 am (CET)

Strohsack, Room 4.55 and online via zoom

Workshop with Nilüfer Göle, 11 November

Also next week, on 11 November, Nilüfer Göle, Professor of Sociology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris will visit the KFG for an in-house workshop. It is planned to discuss Nilüfer's work in a morning session and turn to the programmatic works of the Multiple Secularities group in the afternoon.

The workshop will take place in a hybrid format. For participation on-site, please register via e-mail as soon as possible as seats are limited due to the capacities of the room. In the Member Area you will find the relevant readings as well as information on the zoom connection data for the workshop.

11 November | 10 am–4 pm (CET)

Strohsack, Room 4.55 AND online via zoom

Online Seminar on “Performing the Sanctity. The Sacred and the Profane in Croatian National Football Culture” with Dario Brentin, 3 November

At this week’s colloquium, our Senior Research Fellow Hugh McLeod spoke on the question of whether sport is something fundamentally religious, secular, both or neither.

This online event, organised by the University of Rijeka/Croatia, takes up the topic again with a presentation on “Performing the Sanctity: The Sacred and the Profane in Croatian National Football Culture” by Dario Brentin from the University of Applied Sciences in Vienna.

3 November | 12 am (CET)

Online via zoom

More Information

Event: „Gut Schabbes? Chag Sameach! – Religious freedom and respect for rest from work on Shabbat and Jewish holidays”, 6 November

Time and again conflicts arise in the everyday lives of Jews in Germany between religious life and secular demands and state regulations. Jewish students, for example, report that they have to choose between completing their studies quickly and their faith, as examination dates are set for Friday afternoons, i.e. Shabbat, or for high Jewish holidays – without any alternative dates. But refusing alternative examination dates and time off from work or school for religious practice violates religious freedom and is an impermissible discrimination. The event “Gut Schabbes? Chag Sameach! Religious freedom and respect for rest on Shabbat and Jewish holidays” is dedicated to this topic. It is organized jointly by the Expert Initiative Religious Policy (EIR), the Jewish Student Union Germany and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Tikvah Institute.

6 November, 2–7 pm (CET)

Akademie der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Tiergartenstr. 35, 10785 Berlin

More Information and Registration

If you have any content that you think suits the purpose of the weekly, please feel free to send it to us at multiple-secularities@uni-leipzig.de.

Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe "Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities"
Nikolaistraße 8-10, 04109 Leipzig
Mail: multiple-secularities@uni-leipzig.de

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