Grace Davie was the keynote speaker for the 2016 Implicit Religion conference held at Sarum College on the weekend of Friday 20 May 2016.
Davie’s lecture, The Future of Implicit Religion, was the inaugural Edward Bailey Lecture, in honour of his pioneering and challenging work which questioned a widely held assumption that religion was the sole prerogative of institutions devoted to religion.
Bailey, who died in 2015 sought to discover the sacred within what might otherwise be dismissed as profane, and to identify experiences of the holy within an apparently irreligious realm. His intellectual legacy is now in the hands of the many people who have been influenced by his work.
Part of that legacy is in the form of the annual Implicit Religion Conference.
The conference explored a historical overview of the development of the concept and its meaning, indicating how implicit religion overlaps with and differs from spirituality. It also examined questions concerning group solidarities, organisational institutions, and ritual behaviour, among others.
Leave a Reply