05 Apr Secularization without End: Modernity and Religion
Professor Vincent Pecora (English, University of Utah)
Thursday, April 5 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
Vincent P. Pecora is the author of Self and Form in Modern Narrative (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), Households of the Soul (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and he is the editor of Nations and Identities: Classic Readings (Blackwell Publishers, 2001). His current project is a book entitled Secularization without End: Modernity and the Vicissitudes of Religion. The argument of his talk for the IHC is that the “common sense” secular ideal represented by the complete translation of religious truths into secular ones is in all likelihood an impossible and, perhaps, an undesirable goal.
Professor Pecora teaches currently at the University of Utah, where he holds the Gordon B. Hinckley Chair in British Literature and Culture. He has taught at the University of Arkansas (1984-85), the University of California, Los Angeles (1985-2005), and has directed summer seminars for the School of Criticism and Theory (2002) and the Social Science Research Council (2010). He works primarily in the areas of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, critical theory and intellectual history, and most recently on the question of secularization in modernity. His work has been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese.
Sponsored by the Department of French and Italian, COMMA and the Department of Religious Studies, and The IHC.