CRS Lecture Hall: E-Learning Video Lecture Series

Rector’s Lecture Series

Comparative Approaches to Abrahamic Religions, May 2012 – May 2013

Rector’s Lecture Series Comparative Approaches to Abrahamic Religions May 2012 – May 2013 This five-lecture series provides a vibrant dialogue on the overarching theme of Comparative Approaches to Abrahamic Religions. It is a fascinating exchange of ideas that exhibits how a highly challenged and charged notion such as Abrahamic Religion can be approached critically and productively. These lectures offer approaches from Judaism, Christianity and Islam as well as show-casing different theoretical and conceptual approaches. Access the video series from this page. 

International Summer University Course

Religion and Realism in Political Thought- Historical Perspectives and Recent Developments,  July 2013.

Co-directed by Matthias Riedl & Hans-Jörg Sigwart. In cooperation with Department of Political Science, Duke University, USA and Department of Political Science, Duke University, USA, and the Institute of Political Science, Friedrich Alexander-University Erlangen Nuremberg, Germany. External funding from Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and the Linda Noe Laine Foundation. Access the video series from this page. 

The Christian Turks Workshop, 23 May 2014

Organized by Gerard Wiegers (University of Amsterdam), Martin Mulsow (Universität Erfurt), and Tijana Krstić (CEU), this workshop was part of the project ‘Encounters with the Orient in Early Modern European Scholarship’ supported by Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) and hosted by the CEU Center For Religious Studies (CRS). Access the video series here.

University-Wide CEU Courses 

RELI 6000 University-Wide Seminar on Religious Enthusiasm: Psychology, Politics, History, January-May 2016

University Professor Aziz Al-Azmeh (Department of History) and Vlad Naumescu (Department of Sociology and Anthropology) designed this course to consider the commonalities between extraordinary states of consciousness and extraordinary forms of collective behavior and connections between states of enthusiasm, absorption and rapture, individual as well as collective, and religious phenomena, in a manner that might also address the consequences of such states for contemporary political and social movements, some of the most visible and salient today being perhaps being states conducive to acts of spectacular violence such as suicide bombing and mass-religious fanaticism, as well as charismatic religious practices. Access the video series here.

RELI 6002 CEU University-Wide Doctoral Seminar: Reason, Unreason and Nature in Religion, January-March 2017

In this doctoral seminar, University Professor Aziz Al-Azmeh (Department of History) asks his students to consider how a specific set of analytical research problems and empirical phenomena pertaining to the themes of religion, reason and nature might be approached from a multiplicity of disciplinary angles. These angles are covered by seminar sessions pertaining to philosophy, social sciences, cognitive science and history. Access the video series here. 

UWC 6000 CEU University-Wide Doctoral Seminar: Post-Secularism and its Precedents: Religious Counterdiscourses to Modernity, September-December 2018

This course designed by Aziz Al-Azmeh (Department of History) Carsten Wilke (Department of History, Department of Medieval Studies)  considers  the current upsurge of "postsecular" approaches to the study of history, society, and politics is of vital interest for Religious Studies, which unexpectedly finds itself in the position of a key discipline for the understanding of our cultural world.The concept of the postsecular appears as (1) the description of a social reality, (2) a historical narrative, (3) an epistemological model, and (4) a political norm. This PhD seminar will discuss critically how the postsecular concept, launched in 2001 by Jürgen Habermas in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, expanded rapidly, how it is marking academic and politicocultural debates, and how it relates to antecedent conception arising both from sociological revisions of modernity and secularization, and older, romantic anti-modernist ideas arising at the time of the French Revolution. Access the video series here.