Secularity

• Published in: Parse Journal no. 6
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Art and Religion; Art and Secularity; Art and the Sacred; Art and Theology; Artistic Research; Arts; History of Science and Ideas; Idé- och lärdomshistoria; Konst; Religionsvetenskap; Religious Studies; Secularization
• ISSN: 2002-0511

The focus on secularity comes at a critical time for European social and political attitudes within a global context, in which many principles are fundamentally being challenged. In particular, the very European truce between secular humanism and religious traditions has come under increasing scrutiny, challenged both from within and without. The issue asks: has the search for mutual disambiguation, an exorcism of the ghost of the (belief of the) other, given rise to a profound lack of comprehension between cultures of belief and non-belief? Contributors examine the historical entanglement of secular humanisms and religious traditions, the forbearance of European religious history, and the ways in which majority religion in Europe has never been rid of challenges from other modes of life, religious or otherwise. Contributors also write from the context of Iran, Turkey, Russia and Congo to examine forms of religious hybridity and disputed spaces and representations of belief and secularity which mark the great and violently affective ambivalence of our age. The subject is taken directly from Nav Haq’s curatorial research and thematic, WheredoIendandyoubegin – On Secularity, and was launched to coincide with the opening of the GIBCA biennial 2017 to act as part-catalogue, part-contextual resource and part-imaginative interpolation.