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"Good Without God": Happiness and Well-being Among the Humanists

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Thursday, October 30, 2014
4:30 pm - 5:30 pm
Professor Matthew Engelke

In this paper Prof. Engelke explores conceptions of happiness and well-being among secular humanists in Britain. Based on a year of fieldwork on the British Humanist Association, and its associated local groups, he argues that happiness for the humanists is both the promise and demand of enlightenment, of an appeal to reason over and against what they see as the irrationality of religion. To be happy is to be secular. What such ¿ethnography of enlightenment¿ suggests is the need to pay attention to the particularities of reason, as both a value and a virtue. Yet contrary to the ways in which a certain stereotype of the Enlightenment as the ¿Age of Reason¿ crowds out emotion and sentiment, Engelke investigates how humanist practice suggests otherwise.Matthew Engelke is a Professor and Governor of the London School of Economics. He is the author of A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church, which won the 2008 Geertz Prize for Anthropology of Religion and the 2009 Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, and God¿s Agents: Biblical Publicity in Contemporary England. He is co-editor, most recently, of ¿Global Christianity, Global Critique¿ (with Joel Robbins), a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly. He has run Prickly Paradigm Press with Marshall Sahlins since 2002, and was editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 2010-2013.

Type: LECTURE/TALK