Ideological turn in theology?

The impact of globalisation on the talk of "God"

 

09.-11. June 2022

Goethe Universität - Frankfurt am Main

During the recent decades, the debate about the appropriate role of religious ideas within democratic societies has been shaped by the differentiation between religious and secular convictions. Yet it turned out that the line between religious and secular argumentation patterns does not suffice to capture the conflict area. Against the complex background of global interconnectedness, the contingency of particular worldviews becomes evident. At the same time, it becomes clear that over and beyond the respective content of reasoning, the respective attitude plays a crucial role in determining the relation between divergent approaches to reality.
This perspective shifts the focus of attention from the distinction between secular and religious reasons, to the distinction between apodictic and discourse-oriented ways of reasoning. Which empirical observations suggest approaching religious symbolic worlds by means of ideology-critical categories? How do the perspectives of rationality theory and theory of ideology relate to each other? Which aspects of theological deliberation invite us to investigate them in terms of criticism of ideology? The conference gathers scholars from sociology of religion and social anthropology, political philosophy and theology to discuss these questions in an exchange between empirical and conceptual perspectives.