Dr Lois Lee, Research Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies, featured on the New Humanist website earlier in the month, in an interview published 4 January 2017.
The interview, entitled ‘What Does It Mean To Be Non-Religious in the Modern Era?’, discussed Lois’s book Recognizing the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular (Oxford University Press, 2015).
The New Humanist is a quarterly magazine published by the Rationalist Association, with an expanded online section where the interview appears.
Lois’s research focuses on the social structures and cultures of non-religious people. ‘What I’m trying to argue throughout my book is that we need to be a lot more precise about what we mean by these kinds of terms, and that there are important differences between what it means to be “non-religious” and what it means to be “secular”’, explains Lois in the interview.
Lois also discusses her current research programme, Understanding Unbelief, which examines the variety of different beliefs held by so-called ‘unbelievers’. It is the largest programme of research dedicated to the area, having generously received £2.3m in funding from the John Templeton Foundation and other partners to enable global reach.
To read the full interview, please see the webpage here: https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5132/what-does-it-mean-to-be-nonreligious-in-the-modern-era