By Stephen Cooney

Starting Thursday, Oct. 4, the University will explore the conflicting ideas of religiosity and secularism in a conference titled “The Politics of Religion Making.” Three days of events will open with an address by a visiting scholar. Three remaining addresses, five panel discussions and a final round table discussion will carry the conference to its close.

Talal Asad, an essayist from the City University of New York who explores how systems of knowledge and discipline interact to shape the world, will give the opening address. His major focus is on how the secular and the sacred interact to make a specific identity of the modern nation-state.

“Religion and Secularism,” a panel how secularism has affected aspects of religion and how religion has confronted secularism through concepts of terrorism and ideas of power and government, will follow the opening.

“The Makings of Religion,” the second panel, will start the second day of the conference. It will explore the ideas of religion and its place in the global world.

Next, José Casanova, the chairman of the sociology department at the New School for Social Research, will deliver an address. Casanova concentrates are in religion, democratization, transnational migration and globalization. He is currently conducting research on rethinking secularization from a global comparative perspective on transnational religion, transnational migration and diversity.

Other conference panels include “Religion and Law,” which will explore the ideas of religion as part of law and how secular institutions interact with religion, and “Religion, Ideology and Genealogy.”

Tomoko Masuzawa, from the University of Michigan, will close the second day of the conference with an address. Masuzawa’s fields of study include discourses on religion, history of the human sciences from the 19th to 20th century, history of the study of religion, critical theory, Hermeneutics and psychoanalysis.

Hent de Vries from Johns Hopkins University will give the keynote address on Saturday. De Vries teaches modern European thought and works within three public service organizations. He is chairman of The Future of the Religious Past, advisor to the Netherlands Scientific Council of Government Policy in The Hague, and is a member of both its project group on Religion and the Public Domain and the working group “Values, Beliefs and Ideologies as Forces behind the Changing Europe.” His address precedes the last panel discussion, “Contesting Religion,” which will look at the ideas of religion and its place in the secular world.

“The Politics of Religion Making” will open Thursday, Oct. 4, with an address by Talal Asad. The conference will continue through Saturday, Oct. 6.