Exploring how religious and secular forces interact in the modern world.
The identity politics at work here are dangerously illiberal and run counter to the hopes of postwar European institutions.
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ATALIA OMER
The conference “Making Democracy One’s Own: Muslim, Catholic and Secular Perspectives in Dialogue on Democracy, Development, and Peace” (Rome, May 30-June 1, 2016) sought to strengthen and intervene in theorizing the question of religion and democracy.
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We must root our analysis in the actual dilemmas encountered in practice…
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Violent extremism is one problem set where the role of religion is often highlighted – and causality presumed – by policymakers…
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Modern religious actors are anxious about their own inevitable secularity, which has always been a condition of their existence.
Read More →In multiple cases across Europe, a growing list of rulings by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) converges on an apparent consensus: the expanding presence of Islam throughout Europe presents a pronounced challenge to Western conceptions of secular law and human rights. Read the full article »
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Due to his sole preoccupation with a secularized Christian and Western story of human-humanism-humanitarianism, Asad’s genealogy misses ongoing, creative, and complex contemporary engagements with the ethics and practices, promises and ambivalences of all humanistic projects—engagements that can and do inform the ways in which humanitarianism is being envisioned, enacted, and critiqued.
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Contending Modernities welcomes our newest co-director Dr. Atalia Omer. As a scholar trained in the theories and methods of the study of religion she brings expertise in religion, conflict and peacebuilding as well as attention to conceptual questions of modernity and secularism. Read the full article »
Read More →Lynch’s proposal strikes me as potentially quite fruitful as a mode of ethical and political analysis. She not only retrieves the notion of casuistry, but develops it as a lens to understand the everyday ethics of humanitarian actors. To harvest these fruits, however, I want to encourage Lynch to further clarity about the conceptual work that casuistry does in her research. Read the full article »
Read More →Lynch’s research is to be celebrated for the ways it foregrounds and explicates the importance of interrogating the discursive formations that inform religious ethics and popular casuistry. Her neo-Weberian framing allows for an elastic lens through which to examine the intersections of neoliberal and (African) orientalist discourses in the diffusion and praxis of the technocratic donor-driven apparatus of humanitarianism and development work. Read the full article »
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