The Regimes of Modernity. Religion, Beyond Secularisation and Oscillations

About the event

This talk addresses the relative methodological, analytical, epistemological, and theoretical unease in which the social scientific study of religion is mired today. Building on a critique of the secularization paradigm within which the discipline remains bound, it interrogates the merits and limits of the supposed passage from “modernity” to “post-modernity” and other “posts” and “neos”. While the feeling that something did change over the last half century is widely shared, we seemingly fail to grasp what, exactly, this might be. This talk proposes an alternative on many levels, showing how thinking about religion and modernity requires a global perspective in which religion is not severed from other “social spheres”. Highlighting examples from Eastern Europe, the Muslim world, and China, this talk shows that two constellations, or social regimes, can be distinguished since the end of the nineteenth century. We will therefore embark on a World Tour, and see if thinking from outside the West helps us make better sense of religion today… and tomorrow.