Seminar | A History of the Western Sacred: From Babylon to Beyoncé

Sala Conferenze, Palazzo Liviano - Piazza Capitaniato, 7, Padova

17.06.2026

June 17, 2026, h. 15.30

A History of the Western Sacred: From Babylon to Beyoncé

For over a century now, sociologists and philosophers have told us that Western culture is “disenchanted” (entzaubert), and uniquely so. But what if Weber and his followers were wrong? What if the sacred is alive and well in our supposed “secular” society? Gorski argues that the real peculiarity of the Western trajectory was the monopoly over legitimate forms of the sacred that was exercised by the Roman Church of the Middle Ages and that the culture of Late Modernity is more like that of Early Antiquity than anything in between.

A seminar with Phil Gorski (Yale University)
Philip Gorski is Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University. He writes on religion and politics in early modern and modern Western Europe and North America from a comparative historical perspective.

Discussants: Paolo Costa (FBK, Trento) & Giovanni Zampieri (Unipd)

Zoom link: https://unipd.zoom.us/j/9516144063