RSRC Public Lecture

Dear All,
The Religion and Society Research Centre
<http://www.uws.edu.au/religion_and_society>
at the University of Western Sydney invites you to attend a Public Lecture:

‘Global Religion and the end of Secularization’

Speaker: Emeritus Professor Roland Robertson, University of Pittsburgh, USA and University of Aberdeen, UK

Date: Friday 7 June, 2013
Time: 1:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Venue: Bankstown Campus<http://www.uws.edu.au/campuses_structure/cas/campuses/bankstown>, Building 3 Room 55, Sydney, Australia

Please RSVP to e.garcia@uws.edu.au by 4 June.
Abstract In spite of or perhaps in part because of a wave of Western atheism – what some have called religious atheism – there appears to be a great wave of religiosity across much of the contemporary world. This is to be seen in various parts of Asian, Eurasia , the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. US American religiosity seems to be as strong as ever, in spite of the leading new atheists being themselves American or Anglo-American. These are, of course, very broad generalizations. Nonetheless, it is these that will form the context and the background for my presentation. Both the inter-societal and the intra-societal aspects of the global religious revival will be given attention. There will also be some consideration of extra-terrestrial factors.

Roland Robertson is Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh, USA and Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Global Society, University of Aberdeen, UK. He is also Distinguished Guest Professor of Cultural Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China and he has held visiting positions in many countries. He is the author of many publications, his most influential ones being The Sociological Interpretation of Religion, Meaning and Change, and Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (revised edition forthcoming). His major areas of specialization are cultural sociology, the sociology of religion, sociological theory, and global sociology. His present work deals with, inter alia, cosmology, antisemitism, dimensions and processes of civilization, the controversy over Southern theory, the cosmopolitanism debate, and the contemporary significance of glocality. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.