What Comes After the Secularization Thesis? Religious and Secular Sources of Moral Universalism
For many decades, the so-called secularization thesis has dominated studies about religion in the humanities and social sciences. This thesis never was a mere statement of facts about religious decline, but claimed to offer an explanation for such processes in the sense of a strong causal connection between the modernization of societies and the weakening of religion. In the last twenty years, however, this thesis has lost much of its plausibility. This talk will ask what the reasons for this change of mind are, what a superior explanation could be, how these changes affect our views about the “prehistory” of modern European secularization and what a more fruitful perspective on long-term religious change could be.
Biography:
Hans Joas Is the Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, and a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin in 1979 (G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought, mit Press, 1985, 1997). He received the Niklas Luhmann Prize in 2010; in 2012, an honorary doctorate in Theology from Universität Tübingen; in 2013, an honorary doctorate in Sociology from Uppsala University and the Hans Kilian Award; in 2015, the Max Planck Research Award; in 2017 the Prix Paul Ricoeur; in 2018 the Theological Prize, Salzburg; in 2022 an honorary doctorate from Peter-Pazmanyi-University, Budapest and the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from the German Sociological Association.
Among Joas’ other books in English are Pragmatism and Social Theory 1993; The Creativity of Action 1996; The Genesis of Values 2000; War and Modernity 2003; Do We Need Religion? On Experiences of Self-Transcendence 2008; The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights 2013; Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity 2014; and The Power of the Sacred. An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment 2021). Together with Wolfgang Knoebl he published Social Theory 2009 and War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present 2013. Together with Robert Bellah he edited The Axial Age and Its Consequences 2011.
Website: https://www.theologie.hu-berlin.de/de/professuren/s-professuren/etp/prof.-dr.-dr.-h.c.-hans-joas and https://socialthought.uchicago.edu/directory/hans-joas