CFP: [20th] Postsecular Britain? Religion, Secularity, and Cultural Agency

Post-Secular Britain? Religion, Secularity, and Cultural Agency:
Annual Conference of the German Association for the Study of British
Cultures, November 20 - 22, 2008, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg.
Deadline for abstracts is May 1, 2008.

Please submit abstracts electronically to:
Prof. Dr. Anton Kirchhofer (e-mail: anton.kirchhofer_at_uni-oldenburg.de ) or
Dr. Richard Stinshoff (e-mail: richard.stinshoff_at_uni-oldenburg.de )

Conference information: <http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/anglistik/konferenz2008/>

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Since the end of the Cold War, and even more so since ‘9/11’, geopolitical
constellations appear to offer renewed incentives for casting social and
political conflicts and affiliations in religious terms, and there are
those who see in this the symptoms of a new, post-secular phase in European
societies.
In British culture, the religious encoding of cultural conflict has a long
tradition, from the Reformation and the Civil War to the Glorious
Revolution and Protestant Succession, from the Penal Laws and the worlds of
dissent to Catholic emancipation and the long debates about
Disestablishment, and from the many variants of regional sectarian conflict
right down to the London bombings of July 7, 2005.
What do we make of this religious encoding of the cultural? How do we have
to read it? Can we simply translate religious terms and lines of conflict
into secular ones and vice versa? What difference does (or did) it make,
whether one’s position and actions are cast in religious or in secular
terms? What constraints does it put on one’s scope of action, what options
does it open up? Beyond the personal choices of individuals, one way of
accounting for the attractions of such religious encoding is to assume that
it may open up spheres of agency which a secular encoding cannot offer.
This conference aims to shed light on such questions, and it invites
contributions that would test this hypothesis and engage with the cultural
impact of the specific relations and tensions between the religious and the
secular, across a broad range of contemporary and historical examples.
Potential areas of inquiry include
    * Cultural codes and concepts of religion
    * Religion, regions, and the production of cultural difference
    * Religion, tolerance and the state
    * Religious coding of  political debates
    * History of secularity and of religious pluralism in Britain  
    * Religion, gender and the public sphere
If you wish to present a paper, please send a brief abstract (not longer
than 350 words, ready to be published), which includes the title of your
suggested presentation, your name and your institutional affiliation, to
the conference organizers.
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