Religion and Order

There will be no required reading for this event. Instead, three speakers will facilitate the discussion from different perspectives.

Modern society is uncomfortable with asking religious questions. Secularism means religion is a private affair. Nevertheless, most of the world continues to profess some sort of religious faith. As people, especially in the West, experience increasing intellectual disorder due to social fragmentation and the speed of technological advancement, it is advisable to revisit religion, which has been the ultimate source of political and intellectual order for most of human history.

Vienna Symposium has invited three speakers to address this topic not religiously, but rather philosophically. Are reason and faith compatible or inherently contradictory? Are we witnessing the limits to secularism in modern liberal democracies? How do we orient ourselves on the basis of our religious beliefs?

Wolfgang Wein will discuss Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), where Kant distinguishes the limits of knowledge from the legitimate claims of rational faith, thereby leaving room for hope and creating a way where reason and religion could complement each other.

Josef Köstlbauer will examine the role played by eschatology and apocalyptic expectations for early modern Christians’ views of society, social order, and everyday life.

Mike Waltner will discuss the dominance of technical reason and how it along with secularism have hollowed out spiritualism and the role played by the humanities, and in so doing, contributed to disorder – both within the individual soul and within society – in our time.