In this post, NSRN Deputy Editors Joanna Malone and Jacqui Frost report on findings from the 2019 Cultures of Unbelief conference in Rome. They share insights from the Understanding Unbelief program’s core research projects that were presented, as well as other innovative research being done around the globe to better understand nonreligious beliefs, practices, and identities.
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Local Secularisms in Italy
In this post, Alberta Giorgi describes the different “local secularisms” that have taken shape in Italy that are often built directly in relation to Italy’s Catholic culture and state politics.
Asking grown-ups about religious unbelief
In this post, Paul Merchant reflects on the how there are differences in the way children and adults are asked about religion and (un)belief in oral history interviews.
Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan
In this post, Jolyon Thomas reflects on the anxious nature of secularity and the contested meanings of religious freedom in American-occupied Japan.
Stumbling Upon the Nones
While studying the impact of social media on social relations in a medium-sized Norwegian city, and the formation of local social media clusters, our team of researchers stumbled upon a group of ex- and non-religious persons, which made us re-examine issues of majority-minority relations.
Negotiating Religion in Secularised Domains: Religiously Inspired Social Care in Japan
In this post, Aura Di Febo details how religious actors in Japan employ strategies of ‘reflexive secularisation’ in order to spread religious values in secularised public spaces.
NSRN annual lecture 2018 by Samuli Schielke: Secular powers and heretic undercurrents
In this keynote held at the 2018 NSRN conference Worldviews in World View: Particularizing Secularism, Secularity and Nonreligion, Samuli Schielke discusses secularism as a form of discursive power in the Middle East.
Émile Durkheim, the Sacred, and the Nonreligious
In this post, Galen Watts argues for a Durkheimian approach to nonreligion that focuses less on the labels “religion” and “nonreligion” and more on how the sacred manifests itself in contemporary life.
Sacred Traditions in Secular Britain – What plans for the next coronation reveal about the relationship between religion and tradition
In this blog post, Charlotte Hobson explores British sentiments around the sacred using the Monarchy as a case study, asking: who wants a Christian coronation?
The Critical Study of Nonreligion: An Invitation
In this post, NSRN Co-Director Chris Cotter places contemporary non-religion studies into conversation with the critical study of religion, assessing two dominant approaches in the field before extolling the virtues of a discursive approach as one way in which rigorous empirical work can be conducted ostensibly under the religion/non-religion binary and contribute to the critical project.
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