rethinking

Four of the world’s leading public intellectuals came together on Thursday, October 22, in the historic Great Hall at Cooper Union to discuss “Rethinking Secularism.” In an electrifying symposium convened by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, the Social Science Research Council and the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West gave powerful accounts of religion in the public sphere.

Below you will find the full audio of each talk. Click here to join an open thread conversation about this event.

Jürgen Habermas: “‘The Political’ – The Rational Sense of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology

[audio: http://tif.ssrc.org/wp-content/uploads/audio/Habermas.mp3]

Charles Taylor: “Why We Need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism”

[audio: http://tif.ssrc.org/wp-content/uploads/audio/Taylor.mp3]

Judith Butler: “Is Judaism Zionism? Religious Sources for the Critique of Violence”

[audio: http://tif.ssrc.org/wp-content/uploads/audio/Butler.mp3]

Cornel West: “Prophetic Religion and the Future of Capitalist Civilization”

[audio: http://tif.ssrc.org/wp-content/uploads/audio/West.mp3]