North Carolina German Studies

Seminar and Workshop Series

2010 WORKSHOP

POPULAR BELIEF, RELIGIOUS IDENTITES,

AND CONFLICT IN GERMANY

9-10 APRIL 2010

EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY

Greenville, North Carolina

Scholars concede that one of the great mistakes of modern social science was the assumption that religion and religious belief retreated in the face of modernization.  Now it is clear to scholars in all fields that piety and religious fervor do not necessarily give way to modernization.  On the contrary, industrialization, modernity, and commercialization with its dislocations and uncertainties seem to have generated not a decline but a remarkable global resurgence of religiosity.  This resurgence has provided identity during an age of uncertainty at the same time that it has contributed to conflict, oppression, terrorism, and war. 

In German scholarship, research in diverse fields has developed a body of work on religious resurgence, life, and diversity in the modern era from a number of perspectives, countering presumptions of stasis and homogeneity.  So much attention has shifted to topics of popular religion, piety, and belief that scholars talk of a “religious turn” as important as that research devoted to gender, culture, language, and sexuality.  This work has cast new light on a remarkable range of tolerance, assimilation, exclusion, coercion, and ultimately genocide in the past two hundred years of modern Germany.   Ultimately, research has suggested that religion, its use and abuse, has been inextricably enmeshed in the attempt to define what it means to be German.  As Germans have negotiated religious identities in the modern era, German identity has remained as elusive as it has been contested.

Scholarship on religious belief and identity, formal and informal, represents some of the most innovative and provocative work on modern Germany.  This workshop takes stock of this research and seeks to move beyond the state of current scholarship:  What have been the roles of forms of coercion and exclusion in beliefs?  How do we account for religious resurgence and waning in the modern period?  How have different religious populations influenced the belief of other religious populations?  In what ways have religious beliefs been embedded in social, cultural and gender mores and relationships?  How have issues of religion and belief (e.g., the Muslim population, state suppression of Scientology) shaped or reflected contemporary German social and cultural dynamics?

Please click, to view the program: NCGS 2010 Workshop

Registration is necessary. For more information contact

 Dr. Michael Gross at grossm@ecu.edu