ACT: Australian Centre for Christianity, ‘New Religious Thought’

Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture will host Prof. Wayne Hudson’s presentation on New Religious Thought on 27 Jun 2023 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm t the Chambers Pavilion, Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Barton, ACT.

In this lecture, Prof Wayne Hudson will introduce some issues raised by the prospect of a new religious thought.

Modern Western religious thought was immersed in historical religion. Historical religion provided identity, group solidarity, markers of division, community as well as utopian horizons such as the promise of life after death. It also inspired art, music, sculpture, dance, theatre and architecture. On the other hand, historical religion frequently functioned as a form of social binding. It was anthropocentric, exclusivist and species chauvinist. It was also frequently associated with human sacrifice and war. For most of the historical record, it tended to sacralise unjust social and economic arrangements. Our evolutionary path may now require something else.

Today we need to move past governing concepts of modern religious thought. Specifically:

1. the concept that there is religion is an essentialist sense

2. the idea that religion is about true or false beliefs

3.the concept that there is a dualism between religion and the secular

4.the concept that divinity is about a metaperson called ‘God’

5. the idea that organisational forms are purely instrumental

Questioning these concepts might be thought to lead to a vague agnosticism or some version of ‘radical theology’. Prof Wayne Hudson argues, to the contrary, that breaking with these concepts opens the way for a new religious thought with more contemporary features.

Professor Wayne Hudson

Professor Wayne Hudson studied history and law at the University of Sydney, and German philosophy at Oxford University where he worked with the renowned Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski. Subsequently he was elected a Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford and taught Philosophical Anthropology in the Philosophy Department at the University of Utrecht whilst a National Research Scholar and member of the Utrecht Postmodernism Circle. Working across the fields of philosophy, history, politics and religion, he has published 24 books and 86 refereed articles and book chapters, and has won 25 research grants. He has lectured at Oxford University, the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, McGill University in Canada, Georgetown University and the University of California at both Berkeley and Irvine, and at Beijing Foreign Studies University and the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. He was recently elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Professor Hudson’s research addresses connections between utopianism, heterodoxy and social reform. His recent publications include: Wayne Hudson, Beyond Religion and the Secular: Creative Spiritual Movements and their Relevance to Political, Social and Cultural Reform (London: Bloomsbury, 2022); Wayne Hudson and Geoff Lindsay, eds., Australian Jurists and Christianity (Alexandria, NSW: Federation Press, 2022); Wayne Hudson, “Charles Strong in Australian Intellectual History,” in Charles Strong’s Australian Church: Christian Social Activism 1885–1917, ed. Marion Maddox (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2021);Azyumardi Azra and Wayne Hudson, eds., Islam Beyond Conflict: Indonesian Islam and Western Political Theory 2nd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Wayne Hudson, Australian Religious Thought (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2016).