Lecture Report: Religion Without God — St. Petersburg, May 2026
On 29 May, St. Petersburg hosted the public lecture “Religion Without God” — the last of the Medio Modo series for this season. A broad range of topics, from the foundations of the sociology of religion to contemporary quasi-religious practices. What We Covered Sociology of religion: core concepts. We opened with Durkheim’s definition of religion — the distinction between the sacred and the profane as a universal foundation for any religious system. Then Robert Bellah’s civil religion: how national symbols, rituals, and holidays perform religious functions in secular societies. Berger and Luckmann on the social construction of religious reality and the process of secularisation. ...