Thursday, November 6, 2025
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. (GMT+01:00) Madrid
Location: Online Livestream
The idea of transcendence has historically been linked to religious and spiritual commitments. Since the Enlightenment, however, a better material future has served as an alternative to transcendence for many people. Amid our emergent climate emergency, can solidarity with the natural world serve as a transcendent ideal—and what lessons can we learn from indigenous peoples and their struggles?
Participants
Kohei Saito
Kohei Saito is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo and a leading contemporary Marxist thinker. His most recent book, Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), has sold more than half a million copies in Japan and was published in English as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto in January 2024. Saito’s previous book, Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017), which creatively explored the ecological dimension of Marx’s thought and its contemporary relevance, won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.
José Casanova
José Casanova is one of the world's leading scholars in the sociology of religion and a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, where he focuses on globalization, religions, and secularization. He is also professor emeritus at Georgetown University. His best-known work, Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), has been translated into Japanese, Arabic, and Turkish, among others. In 2012, Casanova was awarded the Theology Prize from the Salzburger Hochschulwochen in recognition of his life-long achievement in the field of theology.
Camil Ungureanu
Camil Ungureanu is the Serra Húnter Associate Professor of Political Theory and coordinator of the Master in Political Philosophy at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. His area of research is contemporary political philosophy and political theory, religion, and law. He completed a Ph.D. at the European University Institute. He has published numerous articles and outstanding among his recent books are Cinema and Sacrifice (2016, co-edited with C. Bradatan) and Contemporary Democratic Theory and Religion (2017, co-authored with P. Monti).
Accessibility
Please email globaldialogues@georgetown.edu by October 27 with any accessibility requests. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill all requests made after this date.