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10:30 am - 1:15 pm
Session I - Origins of the Secular
Noah Feldman, Professor of Law, Harvard University
The idea of the secular was born of the contrast to the religious – but that contrast emerged in a medieval intellectual environment suffused by religion, so that the very idea was shaped by a religious framework. In early modern Europe, the development of the idea of a secular realm of government was itself underpinned – in the work of Locke and others – by thoughts and structures of religious thought. The more full-blooded secularism of the nineteenth century (when the “ism” was framed) itself drew upon a range of religious sources, including the Protestant critique of Catholicism. The paper will draw upon these religious roots of the secular to explore religious structures in contemporary secularisms.
George Kateb, Professor Emeritus, Politics, Princeton University
The role of skepticism, as implicit in Locke's Letter on Toleration, engendered toleration, which in turn helped to loosen the hold of religious establishments on society. Religious "enthusiasm" made skepticism ever more attractive, but enthusiasm also strained the government's wish to tolerate, while putting pressure on government not to tolerate those who weren't enthusiasts. I also think that secular conscience, culminating in Thoreau, but coached by the Quakers, also played a role in the growth of sentiments favorable to secularism in general. Secular conscience is directed, in part, at the misuse of religion to justify injustice. Thus religious skepticism and moral conscience are two of the sources of political secularism and help to account for the energy of liberal secular humanism.
Richard J. Bernstein, Vera List Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research
I want to explore to philosophic origins of the modern conception of secularism. I plan to focus on the work of Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel. They were not secularists in the contemporary sense of the word --where the secular is sharply contrasted with the religious, but each of them interpreted religion in a manner that was compatible with an independent understanding of the secular. By exploring their thought, I want to expose the philosophic grounding for contemporary understandings of the secular and the religious.
José Casanova, Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow; Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, Georgetown University
Two versions of secularism can be identified as uncritical self-legitimating ideologies: a) a historico-philosophical version which interprets the particular historical process of modern Western secularization as the progressive teleological unfolding of universal human development from religious myth to rational scientific knowledge, from theistic heteronomy to human autonomy, from alienating transcendence to empowering immanence; and b) a political version which defines and constitutes the republican democratic public sphere as an strictly secular sphere from which religious discourse, religious identities, and religious mobilization are or ought to be legally excluded.
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1:15 pm - 2:15 pm BREAK
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2:15 pm - 5:00 pm
Session II - Religious Selves, Secular Selves
The Concept of the Religious Self
David Martin, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science; Honorary Professor of Sociology of Religion, Lancaster University
There are various religious sources of the secular: one lies in the concept of idolatry, in that objects in the world are not to be confused with God; another related source lies in the way the idea of transcendence treats "the world" as good but not divine; others lie in the "secularization" of political power, in the idea of a kingdom to come in this world, and in the Protestant pursuit of inwardness with a co-relative denial of sacramental and priestly mediation. Christianity and "the sacred" are in collusion and competition, and all the processes just indicated illustrate a complex dialectic: nothing is simple and unidirectional.
Peter van der Veer, University Professor, Utrecht University
In the nineteenth century, spirituality has been made into a central concept referring to a great variety of religious and cultural movements that transcend the boundaries of established religion. As such, it is in the West important in enabling at the level of aesthetics the creation of modern, abstract art (Kandinsky), at the social level in furthering anti-colonialism and socialism. In the East it enables an anti-materialist opposition against colonial power (Gandhi), a Panasianist movement (Tagore), and a rejection of Communism (Neo-Confucianism). The paper tries to show the connection between Western discourses of spirituality (mainly USA and Britain) and Eastern discourses of spirituality (India and China).
William E. Connolly, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Theory and International Relations, The Johns Hopkins University
What would a post-secular pluralism look like? During an era when global capital and other forces are helping to produce a veritable minoritization of the world, this question becomes an urgent one. My essay will review why shallow secular pluralism is not up to the challenge and what kind of ethos of engagement is required to sustain deep, multidimensional pluralism in a territorial regime.
Daniel C. Dennett, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University
Human minds may not be as unlike animal minds as Descartes and many other thinkers have maintained, but they are unique in several regards and not just in their access to language--though language plays a major role. We human beings acquire souls, in the course of growing up, not immortal, immaterial souls but remarkable control systems that can bear the weight of moral responsibility, something no other species can enjoy--or suffer. Through normal upbringing, human children acquire systems of thinking habits that give their brains reflective competences unprecedented in the biosphere. This is the source of moral personhood; noblesse oblige.
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5:00 pm - 6:00 pm BREAK
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6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Session III - The Polysemy of the Secular
Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, McGill University
Treating "secular" by its history is trailing several different meanings, and these for a variety of reasons can't be simply ironed out and reduced to one, hence the inevitability of confusions and cross-purposes. |
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10:00 am - 12:45 pm
Session IV - Religion, Politics, and the Democratic State
John T. Noonan, Jr., United States Senior Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
This presentation will consider the history of constitutional and legal debates.
Winnifred Sullivan, Associate Professor of Law and Director, Law and Religion Program, University at Buffalo Law School, SUNY
Recent decisions in the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as in the lower federal courts, suggest interesting, even dramatic, shifts in the courts' understanding of religion, shifts that reflect wider social changes but that also have historical roots in the religious culture created in the early nineteenth century in the wake of U.S. religious dis-establishment. The religious phenomenology that supported much of the religion clause jurisprudence of the second half of the twentieth century is giving way to a new and revived "naturalization" of religion. No longer defined by a now anachronistic protestant/Catholic split, the new phenomenology also reflects a maturing and convergence of several other trends in U.S. religion, including a shift in religious authority to the individual from institutions, an acceptance across the political spectrum of the value of faith-based approaches to social problems, the popularization of critiques of modernity, including the over scientization of the human anthropology underlying medical care, and a style of religious engagement that is pragmatic and adaptive. While not without energetic resistance, the courts' increasing disengagement from the regulation and management of U.S. religious life will increasingly shift those issues to legislatures and administrative bodies for resolution. This paper will reflect on these changes in the context of challenges to hospital and military chaplaincies.
James A. Morone, Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies, Brown University
Most scholars tag United States “the most liberal nation in the world.” And yet American politics regularly violates the great division between private realm and public sphere that lies at the heart of liberalism. Secular issues turn moralistic in a flash. A tumultuous religious sphere –marked by a constant process of creative destruction—feeds America’s moralizing politics. This paper reflects on how “a nation with the soul of a church” negotiates the highly charged territory between secular and religious, liberal and moral.
*Stephen L. Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Yale Law School
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12:45 pm - 1:45 pm BREAK
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1:45 pm - 4:30 pm
Session V - Moral Crusades Then and Now: Religious and Secular
The Prophetic Tradition and Civil Rights: a Transracial Challenge to Democracy
David L. Chappell, Professor of History, University of Oklahoma
To reconcile minority rights with majority rule has been a vexing challenge since ancient times, one that intensified astoundingly in America’s First and Second Reconstructions. Religious prophets, by my definition, stand apart from society yet refuse the corrupting privileges of an elite. They also refuse the comforts of mass adulation, and thus cannot be counted demagogues, or even democratic leaders in the usual sense. At rare and fleeting junctures, however, Prophets have swayed mass opinion. Their great gift to America remains a haphazard record of reconciliations of democracy and minority rights. We have incorporated these reconciliations into our constitutional order—-which may in some subtle sense have been rigged to accommodate such reconciliations. But the Prophets would caution us not to feel any complacency--not to assume the predictability or stability of such reconciliations. They could not bear to attribute their unique historic achievements to any human collective—-“liberals” “the black church,” etc.--over time. Unless we believe them when they say God did it all, I think the Prophets teach us that nobody earned moral credit for these reconciliations but the people who were there.
Susan F. Harding, Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz
Many Americans disliked the moral and political positions articulated by the Moral Majority in the 1980s, but much of the rhetoric directed against white fundamentalist activists also charged them with violating taboos on "mixing religion and politics." They had crossed secular/religious boundaries in some way that civil rights and peace activists of the 1960s and 1970s, many of whom were equally religiously mobilized, had not. Was it the way in which white fundamentalists "mixed" religion and politics? What it the particular positions they advocated? Did they bear a special onus for maintaining the boundary between religion and public life? Did earlier white Protestant moral crusaders such as Temperance activists provoke similar charges? What is the secular/religious boundary at stake here, how is it produced, and when was it created?
Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Professor of the History of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University
From the first moment Muslims appeared as immigrants to American shores they have been perceived in one way or another as unfit for citizenship. At first this assessment was based on prevailing American conceptions of race. By the middle of the 20th century Muslims felt alienated from the dominant discourse in relation to government policies regarding the Middle East. In the aftermath of 2001 many Muslims find it necessary to reinvent their American Muslim identity due to the perceived potential of being tagged as agents of terror.
Young Muslims, often represented by the voices of young women, are determining how to refashion their identity in contemporary America, how much of the religion of their parents is essential and how much is culture-bound and thus negotiable. They struggle to find a place of moderation between the sometimes self-imposed isolation of their parents and the socially-imposed “otherness” to which American society has so often relegated them. Issues of dress, decorum, gender relations, education, leadership and general participation in American life are run through a filter of self-selected Islamic identity.
This paper will discuss burgeoning efforts by a variety of American-born Muslims – in particular women and young people – to formulate an American Muslim identity in which they are both responsible citizens of a country to which they owe genuine allegiance and representatives of a faith that they see as playing an important role in American religious pluralism. It will assess how American Muslims, working against great odds, within a history of cycles of victimization, are seeking empowerment and full participation in American society on their own terms.
James Davison Hunter, LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory; University of Virginia
On the face of it, religious & secular social movements in recent history have been animated by very different ideals and thus have pulled in very different directions. For all of the obvious antagonisms, there are also a number of implicit points of convergence among these competing moral crusades. This talk will explore these complex patterns and tangled relationships and reflect on their meaning for the unfolding of America public culture.
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1:45 pm - 3:45 pm
Session VI - Contemporary Debates: The Future of Religion and the Future of Secularism, A Panel Discussion
Sheila Davaney, Program Officer, Religion, Society and Culture, Ford Foundation
Mark Lilla, Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University
Michael W. McConnell, Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; Presidential Professor of Law, S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah
Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Philosophy, McGill University; Professor of Law and Philosophy, Northwestern University
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Please email us at socres@newschool.edu or call 212-229-5776 x3121 with any questions or for more information. |
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For more information on our conference series and past conferences click here.
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