Online book launch of Defending the Faith

Prof. Dr. Todd Weir, Professor of History of Christianity and Modern Culture in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, published a new book with co-editor Hugh McLeod and Oxford University Press: Defending the Faith. Global Histories of Apologetics and Politics in the Twentieth Century. Join the editors and contributors to this volume on 20 January from 17.00-18.00 Central European Time for an online discussion of their comparative explorations of how conflicts between secular worldviews and religion shaped the global twentieth century. To join this online book launch, please go to Google Meets here at the start of the event and await entry.

Book description

Defending the Faith. Global Histories of Apologetics and Politics in the Twentieth Century explores the many ways in which conflicts between secular worldviews and religions shaped the history of the twentieth century. It introduces the notion of 'apologetics' to highlight a common feature of these conflicts: both secular and religious groups employed a mixture of learned argument and popular propaganda to defend their faith, but also to come up with new forms of outreach and mission. By bringing the dynamics of religious and secular apologetics into a comparative perspective, and drawing on examples from Western Europe, the USSR, the USA, North Africa and Asia from the 1920s to the present, the volume offers important historical perspectives on current debates over the place of religion in contemporary politics.

‘A new way of writing the history of religion and politics’

Editor Todd Weir, Professor of History of Christianity and Modern Culture at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies and director of the Faculty’s Centre for Religion and Heritage (CRH), explains the ambitions: ‘The volume represents a new way of writing the history of religion and politics, not by subjecting one to the other, but by examining religious-secular interactions in the theater of apologetic conflict. Ranging widely across the globe, the contributions provide novel understandings of how modern religious and political cultures have shaped one another.’

The volume marks the culmination of an international collaboration of leading historians, anthropologists and sociologists, who gathered at the British Academy in 2017, for a conference convened by the editors and Benjamin Ziemann. This volume appears in the series Proceedings of the British Academy.

Programme

The programme of the online book launch on 20 January (17.00-18.00 CET) is as follows:

• Summary of the volume's scope and ambition by editors Todd Weir (University of Groningen) and Hugh McLeod (University of Birmingham)

• Short overview of sample chapters on Europe, North America, Soviet Union and Asia by Benjamin Ziemann (Sheffield), Uta Balbier (King's College London), Victoria Smolkin (Wesleyan) and Clemens Six (Groningen)

• Discussion with other contributors to the volume: Peter Bowler (Queen's University Belfast), Miri Freud-Kandel (Oxford), Udi Greenberg (Dartmouth), Alma Rachel Heckman (UC Santa Cruz), Peter Itzen (Freiburg), Jennifer M. Miller (Dartmouth), Vlad Naumescu (CEU), John Francis Pollard (Cambridge) and Umar Ryad (Leuven).

Register

To join the launch of the book online on 20 January from 17.00-18.00 Central European Time, please enter the videocall.