Date/Time
Date(s) - January 26, 2026
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Location
LSC 304, Lory Student Center

Categories No Categories

Join us for this January Sociology-in-Progress Community Gathering.

This talk explores the growing trend of everyday organizations and actors experimenting with – and often distancing themselves from – the category of “religion,” and thereby proposing alternative orientations to conscience work and opening new possibilities of civic engagement. Drawing on comparative ethnographic fieldwork with a “religion”-disavowing Christian brotherhood in Mexico City and a Masonic lodge in Switzerland, the talk charts the emotions motivating members of both organizations’ everyday experimentations with religion; and it considers the implications and consequences of these experimentations, for the ethical aims and practices of the selves doing the experimenting and for the politics of the societies in which they live. I will argue that these two, otherwise very different organizations, can be understood as two different responses to the same set of problems associated with the separation of private conscience from public citizenship: tendencies toward feelings of cloistered conscience and hollow citizenship that this kind of separation tends to cultivate, problems inherent to liberal separation but exacerbated in recent years by declining popular trust and participation in the institutions of both conventional religion and liberal democracy.

Graham Hill is a Researcher and Lecturer at the Sociology Institute of the University of Bern. His research and teaching interests include religion, gender, liberalism, political and cultural sociology, social theory, and ethnography. His forthcoming book, Not Religion (Temple University Press), investigates everyday practices and politics of identity in the context of converging crises of popular faith in the institutions of religion and liberal democracy; and he is currently working on a project that examines problems associated with liberal separation as they pertain to contemporary politics and practices of gender.