15th Transatlantic Summer Academy, Events Open to the Public
“The Secular and the Sacred: Politics and Religion in Transatlantic Perspective”
June 23 - July 19, 2008
For more than ten years, the University of Bonn has been host to students, graduates and PhD candidates from North America and Europe participating in the annual Transatlantic Summer Academy (TASA). Founded in 1994, TASA has always been dedicated to fostering an understanding of the nature and the importance of transatlantic relations and the European integration process. Each year, the academy invites future leaders and decision makers to focus on a different central issue.
TASA’s 2008 program will focus on “The Secular and the Sacred: Politics and Religion in Transatlantic Perspective”.
Enlightenment taught the modern transatlantic world to think of religion and politics as two important but separate spheres of human existence. However, were they ever strictly separate? Most often politics and religion are intertwined, clash, and cause chaos, destruction, and suffering. Only ten years after the end of the Cold War the 9/11 attacks and the phenomenon of religiously motivated suicide bombing reminded an increasingly secular, rationalized, and business-concentrated Western civilization that religion still can be one of the strongest motives for human behavior. The religiously motivated terrorism of the beginning 21st century has caused intense debate about the relationship between religion and politics, about inter-confessional differences, religious violence, and even about the different world religions’ approach to humor.
Religion and politics touch the very core of human existence. Whereas the sphere of politics gives substance to everyday life by regulating the relationship between individuals in a public community, religion can give meaning and structure to every aspect of private and public life. Over the course of history, these two spheres often collided, until after World War I, the world saw the rise of a new form of political entity the so called “totalitarian political religions” of National Socialism and Communism. Both ideologies tried to sacralize the political sphere by permeating every aspect of private and public life promising redemption to their “true believers” in the here and now. Both ideologies therefore tried to destroy religious communities within their spheres of influence. Both operated with seduction and unprecedented terror to create a “new man”.
In contrast to National Socialism and Communism, the Islamic fundamentalism of today tries to permeate the political sphere culminating in the establishment of a strict theocracy. TASA 2008 will focus on the intersection of politics and religions. We will explore religious conflicts and violence from the ancient world to the middle age, study modern civil religions, analyze the operating modes of totalitarian political religions of the twentieth century, and try to understand the aims of today’s religious terrorism in a multidisciplinary perspective.
The following events will be open to the Public:
Tuesday, June 24, 2008, 3:00 PM-5:00 PM, Opening Ceremony, Festsaal, University of Bonn
“Totalitarianism and Political Religions in the 20th Century. A History of Ideas.”
Keynote Lecture, Dr. Hans Otto Seitschek, Faculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Religious Studies, Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich
Friday, June 27, 2008, 6:00 PM
“(New) Religious Conflicts of the 21st Century?”
Panel Discussion, in co-operation with “Deutsche Atlantische Gesellschaft e.V.”
with: Professor Dr. jur. Werner Gephart, Department of Sociology, University of Bonn; Professor (em.) Dr. Christian Hacke, Department of Political Science, University of Bonn; Professor Dr. Eva Orthmann, Institute for Oriental and Asian Studies, University of Bonn; Peter Philipp, Deutsche Welle’s chief correspondent and an expert on the Middle East
Thursday, July 17, 2008, 6:00 PM
“In God We Trust? Europe between Statecraft and Religious Renaissance?”
Panel Discussion in co-operation with “Deutsche Atlantische Gesellschaft e.V.”
with: Professor Dr. Hartmut Lehmann, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen; Professor (em.) Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Gerhard Sauter, Faculty of Protestant Theology, University of Bonn; Professor Dr. Joachim Scholtyseck, History Department, University of Bonn; Wolfgang Stützer, Bureau for Transatlantic Counseling and Communication (BTACC); Participant of the 15th Transatlantic Summer Academy (TASA)
For more information, please refer to the University of Bonn’s TASA website.
