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Contrary to expert expectations, at least since 1979, it has been indisputable that religion would have a public role to play in our modern, secularizing, globalizing world.
In this conversation with Jeffrey Goldfarb and the Democracy Seminar, Georgetown University professor Jose Casanova argues that global religion ought not to be taken primarily as a threat to the modern Westphalian system of nation-states, but rather as its most powerful and essential ally.
Casanova, whose work has been at the forefront of this conversation for the last three decades, here suggests that it may, in fact, be religion which, by cultivating a “globalization of solidarity”, can best aid in responding to the migration, health, and environmental crises that threaten the stability of our modern order.
His partner in this conversation is Fr. Patrick Gilger, SJ, of Loyola University Chicago, who, while concurring with the macro-vision painted by Casanova, argues that it needs to be supplemented by a grounded, micro-analysis of how it is the particular religious communities that are involved in such a project create the capacity for this kind of action within their membership.
It is only by offering such fine-grained analyses of how particular formations of religious practice cultivate the capacity for pursuing such global solidarity within actual persons that this grand vision is enacted and incarnated.
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Presented by the Democracy Seminar and the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at The New School for Social Research.
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by Lala Pop, May 2021- Satu-Mare, Romania. Photo of Gaia, by Luke Jerram.
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José Casanova, is a Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University. From 1987 to 2007 he served as Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research, NY. His book, Public Religions in the Modern World, (Chicago, 1994) has become a modern classic and has been translated into many languages, including Japanese, Arabic, and Turkish. He is also the author of Europa’s Angst vor der Religion (Berlin U.P., 2009), Genealogías de la Secularización (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2012) and Global Religious and Secular Dynamics (Brill, 2019). He has also co-edited with Thomas Banchoff, The Jesuits and Globalization (Georgetown UP, 2016) and with Jocelyne Cesari, Islam, Gender and Democracy in Comparative Perspective (0xford, 2017).
Casanova holds a B.A. in philosophy from the Seminario Metropolitano in Zaragoza, an M.A. in theology from Universität Innsbruck, and M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the New School for Social Research. Among other awards, Casanova is the recipient of an honorary Dr. in theology from Universität Innsbruck in 2010 and the recipient of the 2012 Theologische Preis der Salzburger Hochschulwochen in recognition of his life-long achievement in the field of theology.
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology Emeritus at The New School for Social Research.
He is the author of dozens of articles and eight books, including Reinventing Political Culture: The Power of Culture versus the Culture of Power, The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times and Civility and Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society. He is the founder of the online magazine Public Seminar and the convener of The Democracy Seminar, first developed in the 1980s as an exchange between oppositionist groups in Central Europe and the United States, and in 2018 reconvened as a “World Wide Committee of Democratic Correspondence.”
Goldfarb lived in Poland in 1973-4 doing the research for his dissertation on Polish Student Theater. He collaborated with the democratic opposition before Solidarnosc and worked with Solidarnosc both above and below ground in the 1980s. Since 1989, he has annually returned to Poland to teach in an institute on Democracy and Diversity. For his work in Poland, he received the Solidarity Medal, presented by former President Lech Walesa, on behalf of the Polish government, in recognition of support for Solidarity, commemorating its 25th anniversary, September 28, 2005, and the Medal of Gratitude, from the European Solidarity Centre, Gdansk, Poland, 2012.
Fr. Patrick Gilger, SJ is assistant professor of sociology at Loyola University Chicago and contributing editor for culture at America Media. An NSSR graduate, Fr. Gilger’s research focuses on the role of religious actors in a secular age, particularly whether and how such actors can contribute to the restabilization of our fragile public sphere. He approaches this topic through fine grained study of the (religious) practices through which (religious) subjectivities take up particular “powers of publicity” — powers that, perhaps surprisingly, do not seek to dominate the public but broaden its boundaries and buttress its foundations. He tweets at @paddygilgersj.
