Challenging Modernity and Its Contradictions: Religion in the 21st Century

This roundtable panel is inspired by the late work of Rebert Bellah, especially through engaging with the new edited volume Challenging Modernity (Columbia UP, 2024), in which social theorists and scholars of religion debate the question of religion in modernity, which has been central to Bellah’s work. The theme of the panel is the seeming contradictions between the transcendent aspirations of religion and the social and political perils we now face in the global 21st century. How to deal with the tension between the transcendental, universalizing ambitions of democracy and the restricting exigences of time, place, and function? What does transcendence mean when it is nurtured by for-profit capitalism? What is the relationship between political, religious, economic, and intellectual classes in the global Muslim communities? The panel includes two original members of the “Habits of the Heart” group as well as three leading sociologists of religion.