Duration
05 May 2025 - 10 May 2025
Our course on The Future of Religion has been offered at the IUC for forty-three years. Literally hundreds of scholars, with the widest range of specializations, have submitted their work to this forum, daring to suggest what the future might, or should, or does hold for religion. Now, after a brief Covid-19 hiatus, our discourse will renew itself, this time around one of the most current and salient subtopics, namely “identity politics.” We can loosely define this as “politics based on a particular identity, such as race, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social background, caste, and social class,”. But this is only a starting definition. This year we welcome scholarly presentations on any one of these, or indeed on the phenomenon as a whole (its definition, its origin, its essence, its morality, and so on). And these can take the form of academic conference papers, lectures, multi-media events, even films and works of art (as they occasionally have in the past). Historically speaking, our group embodies diversity: philosophers, historians, sociologists, theologians, psychologists, political scientists, etc. Moreover, our group takes pride its open-minded tolerance. What we share in common is a willingness to apply critical rationality to the question of religion’s future.
