Screening Religion: Some Kind of Liberating Effect

Three decades after the era of Scientific Atheism this documentary explores the interplay of science and religion in post-communist nations, now shaken by the war in Ukraine. The film provides a first-of-its-kind look at Religious Studies and intellectual freedom in Northern and Eastern Central Europe.

The film will be followed by a discussion with director Valerio Severino.

09 April 2025

7:30 p.m. 

Cinémathèque Leipzig: Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 109 

Free entry, donations welcome

We suggest to make ticket reservations online (click on the small green box for tickets here) since the capacity of the venue is limited. A small amount of tickets can also be reserved via 
multiple-secularities@uni-leipzig.de.

Working Paper #29

Russian Orthodox Approaches to Secularity in the Petrine Reforms of the Early Eighteenth Century

Sebastian Rimestad

Since the tenth century, the main religious force in Russia has been Orthodox Christianity. This branch of the Christian Church developed differently from its Western counterpart, Latin Christianity, after the geopolitical paths of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires diverged following the Migration Period in Late Antiquity. The different developments in the Christian East and West also led to distinct path dependencies, which informed the conceptualisation of the boundaries between the religious and the secular spheres. This working paper probes these differences, via an analysis of two important texts from early modern Russia: Feofan Prokopovich’s 1718 Palm Sunday sermon about “The Dignity and Power of the Sovereign,” and his 1721 “Spiritual Regulation.” By focusing on these two documents the paper provides a first glimpse into the official discourse of religion and its discontents in early eighteenth-century Russia.

Read the complete paper here.

Recent Publications

Multiple Secularities in Africa

Special Issue of the Journal of Religion in Africa

Marian Burchardt, Magnus Echtler and Katharina Wilkens, eds. 

This special issue tackles epistemological distortions and blind spots through empirical and historical studies of African secularities, of the ways in which Africans have socially enacted and discursively framed the religious – secular distinction and thus filled it with cultural meaning. We trace genealogies of the religious and the secular in Africa and the diaspora, search for possible conceptual and institutional precursors in precolonial societies, and discuss the heuristic values of divergent conceptualisations. The contributors analyze the colonial formations of secularities and their transformations through anticolonial struggles and in African revolutions, taking heed of the variations in Anglo-, Franco- and Lusophone Africa.

Porous Secularity: Religious Modernity and the Vertical Religious Diversity in Cold War South Korea

Kyuhoon Cho

The article focuses on the postcolonial reformulation of secularity and the corresponding transformation of religious diversity in Cold War South Korea. The Japanese colonial secularism rigidly banning the public and political engagement of religion was replaced by the flexible secular-religious divide after liberation of 1945. The porous mode of secularity extensively admitted religious entities to affect processes of postcolonial nation-building. Such a form of secularity became a critical condition that caused South Korea’s religious landscape to be reorganized in a vertical and unequal way. On the one hand, Buddhist and Christian populations grew remarkably in the liberated field of religion, while freedom of religion was recognized as a key ideological principle of the anticommunist country. On the other hand, folk beliefs and minority religious groups were often considered “superstitions”, “pseudo religions”, “heretics”, or even “evil religions”. With the pliable secularity at work, religious diversity was reconfigured hierarchically.

What Emotions Teach Us About Religion: Sociological Approaches and the "Affective Turn"

Nur Yasemin Ural and Marian Burchardt 

In this chapter, we explore the ways in which religious communities, along with non-religious ones, produce particular emotional regimes through which they shape their members’ affective lives, produce knowledge on how to live with, endure and regulate certain emotions, and on how to make certain emotions as well as physical and mental state sufferable. We pay particular attention to how religion and emotion have been theorized within the French and German sociological traditions, while also scrutinizing the contemporary assessments of these classical approaches. After this historical account and their relevance for secularization theory, we turn to recent studies that interpret religion and the secular within the framework of the affective turn that prioritizes embodiment, movement, practices, and spaces over individual feelings and beliefs in order to theorize the relationships between religion, emotion and institutions in relational and material ways.

The future of religious pasts: religion and cultural heritage-making in a secular age

Special Issue of Cultural Studies

Marian Burchardt and Nur Yasemin Ural, eds.

Questions of how to symbolize collective identities in an age marked by both nationalist fervour and diversity politics have come to dominate public debates and have highlighted the political role of religion. But what happens to religious objects, sites and practices when they are framed as cultural heritage? What are the forces behind the ways in which religion is drawn into the dynamics around cultural heritage? How is religion transformed when its constituent parts become subject to aesthetic and artistic evaluation, and enlisted in the politics of communal, national, and civilizational belonging? The contributors to this special issue address these questions based on case studies from East Asia, Africa, Europe and North America.

Postsäkularität oder multiple Säkularitäten? Was steckt hinter den neuen Deutungen der religiösen Lage?

Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Marian Burchardt

Wir befassen uns in diesem Artikel mit zwei Typen neuerer religionsbezogener Analysen, die beide ihren Zugang den Debatten um die Moderne entlehnen: mit den am Begriff der Postmoderne orientierten Analysen des Postsäkularen einerseits und mit dem an den »Multiple Modernities« orientierten Ansatz der »Multiple Secularities« andererseits. Der erste Ansatz ist, wie wir im Folgenden zeigen wollen, in seiner Problematisierung des Säkularen und seiner Begrifflichkeit deutlich zeitdiagnostisch ausgerichtet, während der zweite Ansatz versucht, das zugrundeliegende Phänomen in seiner gegenwärtigen Vielfalt und historischen Genese zu erfassen, darüber aber gleichzeitig eine generalisierbare Perspektive auf Säkularität zu bewahren. Die Reflexion dieser sozial- und geisteswissenschaftlichen Debatten erscheint uns auch in einem theologischen Kontext nicht zuletzt deshalb von Relevanz, weil insbesondere die Deutung des »Postsäkularen« dort eine gewisse Popularität erlangt hat.