{"id":2452,"date":"2017-12-11T17:08:17","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T17:08:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/?p=2452"},"modified":"2017-12-11T17:11:57","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T17:11:57","slug":"dr-lois-lee-delivers-research-seminar-on-understanding-non-religion-and-ethics-in-the-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/2017\/12\/11\/dr-lois-lee-delivers-research-seminar-on-understanding-non-religion-and-ethics-in-the-uk\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr Lois Lee delivers research seminar on understanding non-religion and ethics in the UK"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For Week 9\u2019s instalment of the social anthropology seminar series on \u2018Understanding Ethics in Our Changing World\u2019, Dr <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/secl\/thrs\/staff\/lee.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lois Lee<\/a>, Research Fellow in the Religious Studies school at the University of Kent, introduced her research on \u2018non-religious\u2019 populations in contemporary society.<\/p>\n<p>Primarily drawing on her (2015) monograph\u00a0<em>Recognising the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular<\/em>, Lee analysed comprehensively qualitative interviews undertaken with people who identify as non-religious as opposed to religious in a UK context. According to surveys, around 35 million people identify as non-religious in the UK: there is significant demand for social science to provide nuanced, qualitative understandings of what being non-religious actually means for the enormous range of people included within this data-set.<\/p>\n<p>Non-religious identifications should not be reduced to \u2018atheism\u2019 as a rejection of propositional belief in God or \u2018agnosticism\u2019 as a lack of certainty about whether God exists. In practice, identifications as non-religious can be context specific: one person may use the label \u2018atheist\u2019 among friends but \u2018non-religious\u2019 among others. Moreover, non-religion subsumes a wide variety of relationships with \u2018organised religion\u2019 and religious sensibilities such as personal identities (\u2018I am ethnically Catholic but I do not believe in God\u2019), lifecycle events and ceremonies (baptisms and Christenings, weddings, funerals, burial and cremation), public holidays (Christmas, Easter), education (attending a religious school), and attitudes toward \u2018spirituality\u2019. These experiences can have significant implications for people\u2019s interaction with ethical concepts (e.g. notions of the \u2018sanctity of life\u2019) and moral systems, as well as their attitudes with respect to ethical issues, such as the place of religion in society.<\/p>\n<p>In summary, Lee\u2019s presentation demonstrated how \u2018non-religion\u2019 is a distinctive, varied and widespread social phenomena which can be analysed from a comparative perspective, making it highly relevant to debates in the anthropology of religion.<\/p>\n<p><em>(Report by Tom Bell.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For Week 9\u2019s instalment of the social anthropology seminar series on \u2018Understanding Ethics in Our Changing World\u2019, Dr Lois Lee, Research Fellow in the Religious &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/2017\/12\/11\/dr-lois-lee-delivers-research-seminar-on-understanding-non-religion-and-ethics-in-the-uk\/\">Read&nbsp;more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40284,"featured_media":2453,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[124,70,6600],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2452"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40284"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2452"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2456,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2452\/revisions\/2456"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}