Lecture

Public lecture at Medio Modo, St. Petersburg. What if religion does not begin with belief in God? Secular meditation has conquered Silicon Valley and turned into a corporate productivity tool. Atheist churches across the world gather hundreds of people for Sunday meetings with songs, lectures, and something very much like a sermon. Harvard’s chief chaplain is an atheist. The lecture examines what happens when religion loses God but keeps everything else — where the sacred goes in a secular age, and whether it returns through the back door. ...

Transcript of a public lecture delivered in Moscow, 21 March 2026. Good evening. Thank you for spending your Saturday evening on religious studies. Today’s lecture is about the phenomenon of parody religiosity. I should say upfront: I found almost no academic or popular coverage of this topic — neither on YouTube nor anywhere online, in Russian or in English. A few videos on adjacent themes exist, so tonight we are, in some sense, filling a gap. ...