Second Annual Conference

“Empowering the Individual, Nurturing the Community” is the topic that authors discussed in their lectures delivered at the Second Annual Conference of the European Academy of Religion (2019), the texts of which are collected in this volume. Tackling the theme from the different perspectives of their fields of study, Craig Calhoun (Arizona State University) explores the meaning of secularisation for the individual and the community, and the challenges resulting from the reorganisation of human existence on a global scale and from new technologies; Maureen Junker-Kenny (Trinity College Dublin) analyses different approaches to the relationship between individuality and sociality, and the consequences of this for people’s views of religion; Sophie Nordmann (École Pratique des Hautes Études) discusses the contribution of Jewish philosophers to political theory in the twentieth century, and how they developed their conceptions of the way in which individuals belong to social, political, and cultural communities; finally, Tim Winter (University of Cambridge) surveys foundational Islamic assumptions about human diversity and measures their intelligibility to modern positivism.

Jocelyne Cesari holds the Chair of Religion and Politics at the University of Birmingham, is senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Aff airs, T.J. Dermot Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding at Harvard Divinity School, and was President of the European Academy of Religion (2018–2019).