Peter Losonczi (Director, IRNRD)
Are We
Postsecular? Religion & Politics in Comparative Contexts
10:00-12:00 KEYNOTE ADDRESSES
Chair: Tania Hadad (American University of
Beirut)
10:00 Keynote 3: Ranabir
Samaddar (Calcutta Research Group)
The Religious Nature of Our Political Rites
Many of our political rites draw
from religious roots. The notion of sacredness is involved in the way the
concept of legitimacy functions in politics. From this aspect the issue is not
whether we are becoming post-secular, but whether we want to acknowledge and
analyse the theology-secularism bind. Politics in its secularised form is still
caught in this bind. The word "post" in the title of the conference
therefore raises question: post to what and towards what?
10:40 Keynote
4: David Rasmussen (Boston College)
Rawls,
Religion and the Clash of Civilizations
In this essay I deal
with two conceptions of the political; one that entails a clash of civilizations
associated with an Schmittian critique of liberalism and a second that
envisions the political as an emerging domain in relationship to the idea of
overlapping consensus. The discovery of
the emerging domain of the political which can be associated with the later
work of John Rawls, separates the comprehensive from the political in a way
that breaks the link between modernization and secularization. In so
doing Rawls accommodates the rise of religion that has become a major issue in
the twenty-first century. I follow Rawls’ development from the last part of A
Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism arguing that finding a way
to accommodate a pluralism of comprehensive doctrines kept the liberal project
which began with Hobbes attempt to overcome the war of all against all alive.
At the same time his orientation toward comprehensive doctrines and therefore
religion was simultaneously liberating and constraining. In the end, although
the liberal project under Rawls presents an alternative to the war of all
against all a trace of the clash of civilizations remains.
11:20
Comments on lecture of R.
Samaddar by D. Rasmussen
11:30 Comments on lecture of D. Rasmussen by R.
Samaddar
11:40: Coffee
Break
12:00-1:30pm
Panel 3: Papers: Postsecularism and Its Discontents
Chair: Devrim Kabasakal (Izmir University)
12:00:
Walter Van Herck (University of
Antwerp)
Diagnosis (and therapy?) of the postsecular
disease.
In their book All
Things Shining. Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age
(New York: Free Press, 2011) Dreyfus and Kelly give a diagnosis and even a
therapy for the loss of meaning that afflicts the postsecular age. In this talk
I will review their assessment and confront it with “a second opinion”, namely
the analysis offered by Olivier Roy in his Holy Ignorance. When Religion and
Culture Part Ways (London: Hurst, 2010).
12:30:
Sudarshan Padmanabhan (IIT Chennai)
Imagining
India – The Interplay of the Cosmopolitan and the Vernacular
The
dialectical relationship between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular has
tremendously influenced the social, political, cultural and economic
scaffolding of the post-colonial Indian democratic experiment. This article
delineates the cosmopolitan and vernacular relationship along three
trajectories; first, the historical evolution of the cosmopolitan and
vernacular cultural traditions in India; second, the empowerment of vernacular
linguistic and cultural traditions and assertion of vernacular identities in
post-independence India; third, the implications of the cosmopolitan versus
vernacular debate for questions of social justice, especially, neeti – nyaya.
The article will also substantiate how the cosmopolitan versus vernacular
debate morphs into a battle for grand narratives during the very process of
vernacularization. This article also argues that contemporary cosmopolitanism
has been a-historicized and hence does not possess the normative-theoretical
framework to engage with the process of post-colonial institution building,
especially in the context of diverse cultures that have multi-lingual,
multi-religious, and multi-layered societies.
1:00: Comments on lecture of S. Padmanabhan by W. Van Herck
1:05: Comments on
lecture of W. Van Herck by S. Padmanabhan
1:10: Discussion
1:30pm: Lunch (all participants and
audience)
2:30-4:40pm: Panel 4: Postsecularism &/or Liberalism
Chair: Andrej Zwitter (University of Groningen)
2:30: Sebastiano Maffettone (Luiss University, Rome)
What matters
is Liberalism, not Secularism.
In
the paper I will argue that secularism is connected to a primitive form of
liberalism, based on the fear of religions. Mature liberalism, on the contrary,
is based on respect for others. This respect includes respect for religious
politics. Religious politics however must be within the boundaries of public
reason. Public reason in its turn can change force, shape and content according
to contexts and in particular considering the fact of religious politics.
Minimal liberalism is the core of public reason so interpreted.
3:00: C. Upendra (IIT Indore)
Post-secular or
secular human?
The
paper explains, while acknowledging the significance attached to
postsecularity, postsecularism is as rightly argued by Habermas a sociological
predicate. However, his ideas expressed in the “religion in the public sphere”
are not fully acceptable where the gap can be filled by the Rawlsian conception
of the distinct political – keeping in view all valued criticisms of Rawls. It
is also stated in the paper that the postcolonial societies like India need to
germinate political discourses of civility – where the resurgence of religion
via the postsecular attribution does not at all undermine the secular
humanistic concerns.
3:25: Tom Bailey (John Cabot University, Rome)
Postsecular
Liberalism?
However sensitive to the presence of religions in
modern societies, Habermas’s and Rawls’s influential theories of liberalism
appeal primarily to grounds independent of religion – communicative reason in
Habermas’s case and mutual respect in Rawls’s. However, neglected themes in
their theories suggest that they are intended to rest equally on religious
grounds, and are thus more distinctively ‘postsecular’. This paper will
consider two such themes in particular. The first is that of the political
transformation of religious into shareable notions, a peculiarly paradoxical
task that both Habermas (with his notion of ‘translation’) and Rawls (with his
notion of ‘conjecture’) attribute to citizens of modern liberal societies. The
second theme is that of the religious origins of citizens’ shared political
terms, origins that both Habermas (with his notion of solidarity as a ‘faith’)
and Rawls (with his notion of the ‘faith’ involved in consensus) emphasize. The
paper will attempt to determine the nature of these ‘postsecular’ themes and
their critical implications for the primary ‘secular’ elements of Habermas’s
and Rawls’s theories.
3:50: Vidhu Verma (JNU)
Habermas and
Gandhi
Instead
of relying on a descriptive account of a post-secular society Gandhi raised the
normative issue of how secularism is bound inextricably with how we define
religion and thus accepts the significance of the tradition it proposes to go
beyond. As he rejected the post-enlightenment distinctive realities of the
spiritual and temporal, he did not invoke the public and private as two
separate spheres. Based on this understanding he maintained that it is not
possible to retain religion as an ethical ideal while rejecting its presence in
the political domain. To a large extent Habermas’ position may be seen in some
degree compatible with Gandhi if we take the approach that both scholars minimize the dualistic framework of
enlightenment philosophers by focusing on the character of practical
rationality. They both favour a kind of reclamation of the public domain by
technocrats of social power and recognise the relevance that religious ideas
and moral values have in shaping the social fabric. Habermas’ notion of a post
secular society is an attempt
to look for political cultural resources instead of a rearticulated political
ideology to revitalize the democracy project. Gandhi attempts to translate the
likeness of human beings to the image of the divine into the equal dignity of
all human beings which then offers a way of reorienting society’s values
towards social transformation. In Hind Swaraj he argues that adoption of either modernity
or tradition has to enhance both the spiritual and material well being of the
individual and society. An
exploration of these approaches, I submit constitutes a useful contribution to
the understanding of the limits of post-secularism to reclaiming the political.
4:20: Discussion
4:40: Coffee Break
5:00-6:00pm: Panel 5: Postsecular
Pluralism
Chair: Mohammed Hashas (Rome)
5:00: Tapio Nykanen (Lapland
University)
The Political Theology of the Anti-immigration Movement in Finland
In the recent Finnish political scene,
the most striking development has been the rise of the new, extreme political
right. This ideology opposes multiculturalism, immigration and most often
Islam. For example in the local elections of 2012 candidates from the extreme
wing of the patriotic, anti-EU and anti-immigration party ‘True Finns’ had a
huge success in several cities and municipalities. My aim is to empirically
analyze the political theology behind this new extreme right: what does it
believe and how extreme is it actually?
5:25: Asghar Ali Engineer
(CSSS)
Politics
of Religious Pluralism: Is Religion the Culprit?
Secularism played an important role
in modernizing society and was one of modernity’s central pillars. This had
become necessary insofar as the Church, with its dogmas and doctrines, was
coming in the way of social and economic change. But in the course of time modernity
and secularism became as intolerant as the religion represented by the Church.
This also created a problem. On the one hand, there are atheists and
rationalists as intolerant as believers; on the other, there are people of deep
faith who are far from dogmatic. Often scholars maintain that the main ‘culprit’
is religion. Human beings cannot live without religion or some kind of ideology
which gives human life meaning and direction, and whatever the nature of the ideology
or thought or value system, it creates its own ‘other’. Some form of struggle inevitably
starts between followers of one or the other ideology.
5:50: Final Remarks from TN Madan
5:55: Closing Remarks
Aakash Singh Rathore (Director,
IRNRD)
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