OVERVIEW

The course Education for Citizenship, within which the seminar module Religions in the Public Sphere is situated, is open to all students enrolled in bachelor’s, master’s, single-cycle master’s, and doctoral programs at the University, regardless of the department or degree program of enrollment. The aim of the course is to promote the development of active and responsible citizenship through the acquisition of personal and social competences.

AIMS AND CONTENT

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

Students who attend the seminar lessons and actively participate through comments, critical observations, and questions, will be expected to develop:

• A critical awareness of the densely plural character of the religious geography of contemporary societies.
• The ability to recognize the need for a new project of secularism that societies require in order to create a grammar of plurality and to promote the value of religious and cultural differences—an ongoing process, inherited from modern times.
• Theoretical competences enabling them to critically identify and assess ongoing transformations of religious phenomena in societies, as well as to address and resolve issues related to the governance of religious pluralism.

This critical awareness will prove useful and valuable in various professional contexts, including:

• Teaching in schools of all levels.
• Work in cultural mediation.
• Positions within public administration dealing with public-facing services or social issues.
• Employment in social services.
• Management of private companies employing or serving people of diverse religious beliefs.
• Leadership roles within religious communities.
• Professions dealing with social, cultural, and religious relations, such as journalism, law, and public relations.

TEACHING METHODS

Seminar lessons of 90 minutes.

Mixed format: classes will be held both in person (Room F, Via Balbi 4, 3–5 p.m.) and online via Microsoft Teams, channel code: u4nnx8f.

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

For several decades now, we have been living in a phase of modernity that profoundly transforms global structures and the very identities of individuals and communities. Globalization processes undermine the autonomy of cultures, reshape identity boundaries, and spread increasingly homogenizing social and economic models. Multiculturality fosters closer relations between ethnic groups, cultures, and faiths, imposing confrontation and dialogue—often leading to conflict.

Equally evident is that, at the heart of these massive processes and the global disorder they entail, unmistakable signs have indicated what has been called a “return of religion.” This takes on a plural phenomenology: the rise of new spiritual movements, the spread of charismatic currents within Churches, the growing presence in the West of Islam and other Eastern religions, the global reach of fundamentalist excesses, and, finally, the reappearance and reassertion of religions in the public sphere. This evidence has shaken the once-persistent assumption of religion’s decline in the modern world. It appears as though, even within secularization, disenchantment, and nihilism, religious restlessness never ceased to pulse. Secularization, therefore, does not mean the disappearance of faiths and religious institutions, but rather the recognition of a changed status in their relationship with socio-political reality.

Within this plural framework, the urgency is clear: not only for dialogue among religions—especially at a time marked by cultural, religious, and political crises of coexistence—but also for a new conception of secularism in response to the return of religions to the public sphere. In this sense, having abandoned anticlerical and antiecclesiastical stances, and rejecting secularism as an ideology of neutralizing or excluding religious identities from public spaces, the challenge today is to conceive secularism as an inclusive method of dialogue and mutual recognition among diverse identities and hermeneutical perspectives.

This requires, first of all, dispelling the misunderstanding that equates the private sphere with the intimate sphere, as they do not coincide. Religions being called to incorporate secularization and secularism does not mean confining them to intimacy. Why should it not be possible to imagine religions, starting from their “private” dimension rather than from normative control of the socio-political order, entering the public sphere as spaces of communication and exchange—as components and resources of society capable of embracing the challenge of pluralism and the spirit of distinction proper to secularism?

Against this theoretical backdrop, the module will address these issues from multiple perspectives.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Each Professor will provide essential bibliography for individual study related to their lectures.

TEACHERS AND EXAM BOARD

Exam Board

ELISABETTA COLAGROSSI (President)

ROBERTO CELADA BALLANTI (President Substitute)

SIMONA LANGELLA (President Substitute)

LESSONS

Class schedule

The timetable for this course is available here: Portale EasyAcademy