This past week, 17-19 September, Professor Graham Ward gave a keynote address at the Sacred Modernities: Rethinking Modernity in a Post-Secular Age conference which was hosted at Oxford Brookes University in conjunction with The University of Northampton. Here's a brief abstract of the conference theme:
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.
Ward's paper was entitled "How Hegel Re-sacralised the Project of Modernity," and an Mp3 of his address can be downloaded by clicking here. For further information about Ward's research interests and publications please click here, or email him at graham.ward@manchester.ac.uk.