Sacred Modernities: Rethinking Modernity in a Post-Secular Age
Thursday-Saturday, 17-19 September, 2009 (Buckley Building, BG 10/11, Oxford Brookes University)
The age of globalization confronts the observer with more ironies than certainties. It was once assumed that the growth of modern institutions – democracy, capitalism, science – would be attended by a series of mutually reinforcing social processes, most notably secularisation, rationalisation and disenchantment. Not only has the global spread of these institutions proved patchy and uneven, religious movements and belief systems have doggedly refused to assume the private status once thought to be their natural destiny. In both the West and the wider world, religion continues to make competing claims on the public sphere and public morals. Developments like this have been accompanied by conceptual critique and innovation. Increasingly, traditional accounts of modernity are seen as Euro-centric and prescriptive, while there has been renewed interest in the question of political and civil religions and the more general relationship of the political and the theological.
Aims and agenda
The aim of this conference is to take stock of these transformations in the context of what is often referred to as a ‘post-secular’ age comprised of ‘multiple modernities’. Its agenda is emphatically interdisciplinary and welcomes scholars from the fields of history, sociology, cultural studies, theology, and others. In the same spirit, the conference adopts a broad, abundant understanding of the term ‘sacred’ to encompass not only formal religious worldviews, but also that which, in whatever fashion, disturbs, complicates, and perhaps abolishes, the distinction between the sacred and the secular. Accordingly, it is just as much interested in manifestations and logics of re-enchantment and resacralization, as it is of desecularisation understood as the persistence and revival of traditional religions. In sum, the aim of the conference is to rethink the equation of modernity, secularity and disenchantment, and to explore the various conceptual and historiographical perspectives through which we might better understand the present.
Organisers
Dr. Tom Crook (Oxford Brookes University), Dr. Matthew Feldman (University of Northampton).
Contact:
tcrook@brookes.ac.uk
———————————
Thursday 17th September, 2009
- Modernity and Post-Secularity: Mapping the Landscape Tom Crook, Oxford Brookes University
Opening plenary address (5pm-7pm):
‘(Post-)modern (wo-)man in search of a soul: Reflections on the contents and discontents of the first post-secular civilization’, Roger Griffin, Oxford Brookes University
———————————
Friday 18th September, 2009
Parallel sessions 1 and 2 (9.30am-11.30am):
1. Utopia, political modernism and sacred causes
- ‘The New Age and Political Modernism ‘ Paul Jackson, Oxford Brookes University
- ‘Selling Sacralised Socialism: The USSR in Construction and modern(ist) propagations of faith under Stalin’ Matthew Feldman University of Northampton
- ‘The Sacralization of Time in Italian Fascism’, Lorenzo Santoro, University of Warwick
2. ‘End times’, ‘new times’ and ‘secular times’
- ‘ Rethinking the Equation of Modernity and Secularity after Charles Taylor: The Performance of Secular Time in Victorian England’, Stefan Fisher-Hoyrem, Oxford Brookes University
- ‘The Watch Tower Society and the End of the Cold War: Reconciling the Sacred and the Secular in the Theology of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’, Zoe Knox, University of Leicester
- ‘The Feast of Disobedience: Orange Gifts and the Sacred Birth of a Modern Ukrainian Nation’ Anton Shekhovtsov, Sevastopol National Technical University, Ukraine
- Question session
Plenary address (12pm-1pm)
‘Fascist Italy and the Sacred City of Rome’, Aristotle Kallis, Lancaster University
Parallel sessions 3 and 4 (2pm-4pm):
3. Reconciling and Reworking the Secular and the Sacred
- ‘The Aesthetic-Ethical Self and the Catholic Self: Aporias in Charles Du Bos’s Catholicism, 1923-1933’, Katherine Davies, Manchester Metropolitan University
- ‘Sacred and Secular: Analytical psychological doubleness and the problem of modernity – the work of C. G. Jung, Roderick Main, University of Essex
- Question Session
4. Multiple Modernities and Capitalist Mythologies
- ‘The Historical Paradigm of the Post-Secular’, Susanna G. Rizzo & Gregory Melleuish, Campion College and University of Wollongong, Australia
- ‘From the Parish Hall to the Shopping Mall: Consumption and Re-enchantment in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland’, Carmen Kuhling, University of Limerick
- ‘(Vat City plc)”: The Sacred Violence of Market Forces in the Fiction of Iain Sinclair’, Daniel Cojocaru, St. Peter’s College, University of Oxford
- Question Session
Plenary Session: Post-secular Reappraisals (4:15pm – 6:15pm): Aesthetics and Representations
- ‘The Theological Turn in Modernity Studies’, Vincent Lloyd, Georgia State University
- ‘Beyond Sovereignty: Political Theology and Enchanted ‘representation’ in Eighteenth-Century France’, Stephanie Frank, University of Chicago
- ‘Theodicy and the Re-invention of Nature: From William Paley to Samuel Beckett’, Erik Tonning, Regent’s Park College, Oxford
- Question Session
Keynote Address (6:30pm – 7:30pm):
‘How Hegel Re-sacralised the Project of Modernity’, Graham Ward, Professor of Contextual Theology and Ethics, University of Manchester
———————————
Saturday 19th September, 2009
Plenary address (10.00am-11.00am)
‘The Disenchanted Enchantments of Modernity: From Sacred Spaces to Imaginary Worlds’, Michael Saler, University of California, Davis
Parallel Sessions 5 and 6 (11.30am-1.30pm):
5. Enchantment, Spectacle and Consumption
- ‘Sanctifying the Street: Resurrecting the Spiritual Lives of East London Inhabitants, 1880 – 1929‘ Lucinda Matthew-Jones, Kings College London
- ‘Aviation and Enchantment: Snowden Gamble and the Public Education Programmes of Imperial Airways in 1930s Britain’, Scott Anthony, University of Manchester AUDIO NOT AVAILABLE
- ‘The Cathedral That Was Never Built? Catholic Modernity and Consumerism in 1930s Liverpool’, Charlie Wildman, University of Manchester
- Question Session
6. Natural Healing and Spiritual Health
- ‘Multiple Modernities, c.1700: Richard Roach’s ‘Natural Musick’, Tom Dixon, University of Manchester
- ‘Music as a Religion of the Future: Theosophy, Sound and Esoteric Modernity’,James G. Mansell, University of Manchester
- ‘Spiritual Practice in Secular Contexts: Well-Being and Healing in a Re-Enchanted World’,Dominic Corrywright, Oxford Brookes University
- Question Session
Plenary address (2.30-3.30pm)
‘On (Not) Making Enchantment Safe for Modernity’, Patrick Curry, University of Kent.
Concluding roundtable discussion, chaired by Matthew Feldman (3:30pm–4:30pm)
The conference was supported by the Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, Oxford Brookes University, and the University of Northampton.
PHOTOS
