The Vienna Conferences

In June of 2005 the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture organized the following conferences in Vienna, Austria:

Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order

June 1, 2005

At this working conference contributors to a forthcoming volume, Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order, presented their draft chapters and received comments from one another. The overarching question the volume asks is: Are the solutions to religious conflict proposed by the Western Enlightenment feasible or appropriate outside the West?

Religion, Secularism, and the End of the West

June 3, 2005

This conference explored the empirical validity, explanations, meaning, and political ramifications of the “End of the West” thesis. Among the topics addressed were the history of the idea of the West; competing notions of the cultural content of the West; the role of religion in shaping the democratic cultures of the societies of the West; the role of the two world wars and the Cold War in solidifying the West, and of the Cold War’s end in fragmenting it; and the implications for democracy in Western countries and for world order in general.

Read transcripts of speakers’ remarks from Religion, Secularism, and the “End of the West.”

Several of the “End of the West” conference papers are published in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of The Hedgehog Review.