Religious and Secular Worldmaking. Narrative Cultures and the Perception of Differences.

Do reli­gious and sec­u­lar peo­ple expe­ri­ence the world dif­fer­ent­ly? This lec­ture dis­cuss­es ear­ly 19th-cen­­tu­ry emi­grant nar­ra­tive cul­tures as prac­tices of world­mak­ing. Migrat­ing to North Amer­i­ca not to dis­cov­er but to cre­ate a new world, social reform­ers such as rad­i­cal pietists, social­ists, and ear­ly com­mu­nists were unit­ed by the utopi­an spir­it of their time. Yet in their new envi­ron­ment, their com­mu­nal sto­ry­telling diver­si­fied rapid­ly: rou­tines were dis­turbed, every­day activ­i­ties gained renewed sig­nif­i­cance, new expe­ri­ences and chal­lenges became worth recount­ing.

The pre­sen­ta­tion explores the rela­tion­ship between intel­lec­tu­al argu­ment, ver­nac­u­lar reli­gious prac­tice and edu­ca­tion of the sens­es at the Fron­tier. It inves­ti­gates the his­tor­i­cal, aes­thet­ic, and per­cep­tu­al con­di­tions under which con­flict­ing world­views gained epis­temic affor­dance as con­trast­ing modes of observ­ing, inter­pret­ing, and enact­ing the world.

Anja Kirsch (NTNU Trond­heim). Uni­ver­sität Erfurt, “Mon­day Lec­tures”, C19 – Forschungs­bau “Welt­beziehun­gen”, Sem­i­nar­raum (EG) (Cam­pus). Weit­er Infor­ma­tio­nen (auch zur online Teil­nahme): https://www.uni-erfurt.de/universitaet/aktuelles/veranstaltungskalender/eventdetail/religious-and-secular-worldmaking-narrative-cultures-and-the-perception-of-difference