Whence the Post-secular? A Critical Look at the Field

This talk will question the concept of post-secularism by revisiting the fallacies of secularization, its theoretical and empirical bases, and current religious trends across the globe. It will argue that shifting trends in scholarship do not always match empirical evidence, or the latter is often read through a normative lens. If post-secularism is, like its predecessor, a contested normative concept: how can we develop an empirical study of religion in contemporary society?

Vlad Naumescu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU. He is broadly interested in questions of learning and cultural transmission approached from an interdisciplinary perspective. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Ukraine, Romania and South India, looking at practices, institutions and politics that shape Orthodox communities in different localities. His most recent research brings these cases together into a comparative study of pedagogies of prayer in Eastern Christianity.