[Reader-list] [Announcements] Seminar Announcement- CSDS

[Mitoo Das]

Tuesday, 21st April, 2009

Sonia Sikka will speak on


Secularism and the Hardening of Religious Identity


at 3:00 PM in the Seminar Room, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi – 110 054


The broad thesis of this paper is that practical operation of certain 
secular paradigms has an undesirable effect on the construction and 
negotiation of religious identities. This thesis is oriented towards 
political models that seek to exclude deliberation involving appeals to 
religion from the public sphere, whether these prescribe the wholesale 
privatisation of religion as a matter of individual conscience, or offer 
state recognition to multiple religious communities. While these two 
procedures are in many respects very different, they both encourage 
members of religious communities to cordon off a critically important 
subset of their beliefs and values, and to treat this subset as if it 
were fixed and unrevisable, intrinsically unsuited to substantive 
discussion and debate. Such a process contributes to a reification and 
hardening of religious identities; it contributes, in fact, to the 
positioning of religious viewpoints as a matter of “identity.” At the 
same time, the exclusion of religion from educational institutions, and 
from the public sphere in general, gives rise to a situation in which 
non-religious citizens are largely ignorant about religion, and unable 
to see in it anything but foolish superstition and a source of hatred 
and violence. This view of religion, it is suggested, is both false and 
unhelpful, serving to reinforce rather than to mitigate the dogmatism of 
the forms of belief it opposes.

Sonia Sikka is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of 
Ottawa, Canada. Her primary research interests are in modern European 
philosophy, philosophy of religion and philosophy of culture. She has 
written extensively on Heidegger, Nietzsche, Levinas and other authors 
in the continental tradition of philosophy. Over the past several years, 
she has also published a series of articles on issues related to 
cultural identity and pluralism within the thought of J.G. Herder. At 
present, Dr. Sikka is working on the topic of identity construction, 
with a particular focus on religious identities.



- Rajesh Ramakrishnan
Academic Secretary
CSDS

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