Dr. Levi McLaughlin

Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University

Public lecture: Wed, Mar 20, 2024

12:20-1:10pm MT, on Zoom

Register in advance:

Registration: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMtfuCqqTIrG9cNae-ndyBHEXnxAWman4kR

McLaughlin will introduce Japan’s diverse religious landscape by showing how people’s everyday interactions with Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, and other religious sites, as well as within politics and other spheres, instantiate religion in Japanese contexts. He will discuss historical processes that inform dispositions that guide Japanese people’s religious interactions, examine distinctive ambiguities that surround “religion” as a Japanese category, and highlight new challenges that have emerged in the wake of the July 2022 murder of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, in connection to controversies surrounding the Unification Church in Japan. Finally, he will introduce more recent developments in the ways religion and politics are changing as efforts to dissolve the Unification Church proceed through the courts, taking into account perspectives from church adherents and their various opponents.