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Dear friends and colleagues,

In next week’s colloquium, our Senior Research Fellow Marian Burchardt will give a presentation on his research project. In two weeks, we will be showing the next film in our Screening Religion series: "H2: The Occupation Lab" and already today we provide you with information about the screening.

Furthermore, we have a publication for you and a recommendation for an exhibition opening at Leipzig University. Today’s Wednesday Weekly ends with a Call for Papers and a note on a Workshop.

Enjoy and have a good week!

Anja & Lucy

Next week’s Colloquium: Marian Burchardt on “Secular Space”, 3 May

Next Wednesday, our Senior Research Fellow Marian Burchardt seeks to develop a sociological conceptualization of “secular space”. By secular space, he means the – inevitably tentative – outcomes of the processes (involving both material practices and conceptual orientations) whereby social actors of all sorts designate networks of sites as falling outside the purview of religion and demarcate these sites through material markers, moral maps, and symbolic boundaries. Understood this way, secular space is both, more or less enduring, shaped by tendencies towards institutionalization and routinization on the one hand, and fluid as it is subject to reinterpretations, which often occur amidst cultural contestations and processes of religious change. The project contributes to the KFG’s research lines materiality and heritagization.

The colloquium will take place in a hybrid format (on-site and online). In the Member Area you will find the relevant readings as well as information on the zoom connection data.  

3 May | 9.15–11.45 am (CET)

Strohsack, Room 4.55 and online via zoom

Screening Religion: “H2: The Occupation Lab”, 10 May at naTo

We are happy to announce the next film in our Screening Religion series: On 10 May, we will be showing the film “H2: The Occupation Lab”, directed by Idit Avrahami and Noam Sheizaf. It tells the story of a place that is both a microcosm of the entire conflict and a test site for the methods of control Israel is implementing throughout the West Bank. H2 is the name given to the eastern part of Hebron – the only Palestinian city with a Jewish settlement in it. Here lies the holy Cave of the Patriarchs, where Jews and Muslims believe their common father, Abraham, is buried. This is where the massacre of 1929, known as “year zero” of the conflict, took place, where the Jewish settlement movement was born, and where the policy of ethnic separation was first implemented by the military.

After the film, there will be a discussion with one of the directors Noam Sheizaf and our Associate Member Lydia Ginzburg from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The film will be shown at the Cinémathèque Leipzig at naTo in Hebrew with English subtitles.

10 May | 7.30 pm (CET)

Cinémathèque Leipzig at naTo, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 46, 04275 Leipzig

Free entry, donations welcome

Opening of the exhibition “Boga njet! – There is no God – Anticlerical and Antireligious Posters from the Soviet Union”, Neues Augusteum, Leipzig University, 28 April

On one of the most famous Soviet posters, Yuri Gagarin, greets the viewers and announces the figuratively obvious: “There is no God!” Thus, the cosmonaut sums up something that had been propagated to the Soviet population for decades: an atheistic worldview and the related criticism of religion. This criticism was an important theme of poster culture, which, on the one hand, was about the pictorial representation of religion. On the other hand, it also achieved the desired secular penetration of society.

From 24 April to 31 May, the Institute for the Study of Religions at Leipzig University, together with the Berlin Institute for Comparative Church-State Research, is showing the exhibition “Boga njet! - There is no God”. The vernissage will take place on 28 April.

Vernissage: 28 April | 7 pm (CET)

Exhibition: 24 April–31 May

Venue: Leipzig University | Neues Augusteum | Augustusplatz 10, 04109 Leipzig

Call for Papers: Conference on “Comparative Theology, Comparison and Religious Studies” at Université de Fribourg, 5–6 October

We would like to draw your attention to this Call for Papers for the Conference on “Comparative Theology, Comparison and Religious Studies”, which will take place at Université de Fribourg from 5–6 October. The conference aims at determining the role of comparison in comparative theology. This implies an engagement with the discussion of methods in religious studies and a clarification of the status of intentionally neutral methods within the framework of normative approaches in theology.

Paper proposals can be submitted via e-mail.

Submission of Abstracts: 13 May

Conference Dates: 5–6 October | Venue: Université de Fribourg

Workshop on “Negotiating Religious Neutrality in Society” at University of Bern, 5–6 May

We would like to point to the announcement of this workshop on religious neutrality at the Institute for the Science of Religion at the University of Bern, organized by the Research Committee “Religion and Society” with the support of the Swiss Sociological Association and with the collaboration of the Working Group on Religions and Politics of the DVRW. The contributions discuss the social negotiation of neutrality regarding religion in different social spheres.

Registration and more information can be found here.

5–6 May

University of Bern, Uni Tobler, Room S113

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.