Date: June 8, 2024
Place: Centre for Protestant Studies Gáspár Károli, Subotica, Serbia
Topic: The Protestant Worldview – Reforms and Challenges
The inceptive
The turn of the 15th century marks a bright period in human history. It was an age when mankind reclaimed its boldness and started seeking answers to manifold questions outside frozen dogmatic boxes. Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Erasmus, Holbein, Dürer, Machiavelli, Thomas More, as well as Luther, similarly to their contemporary Columbus famous for accidentally discovering an entire New World, dared to step out from naïve, almost mythical perceptions of the world they lived in. Their curiosity resulted in a genuine pursuit of the truth about the universe, the mankind, thus a new approach to the divine. Protestant reformation is commonly comprehended as a prominent example of this daring quest. The scope of influence new religious movements had on our subsequent social advancement is probably best described by Weber’s suggestion that even the development of capitalism has largely been influenced by Protestant ethics.
The Protestant worldview has undoubtedly enhanced various social values like toleration, multiculturalism, the secular state, or even the general equality of all men deriving from the Protestant rejection of the feudal status of clergy. However, throughout its half-millennial history, apart from these progressive, even avantgarde potentials, like the modern ordination of women, when facing otherness, a world dissenting its internal orthodoxy, Protestantism has likewise signalled certain totalitarian, elitist, even xenophobic trends, both internally and externally. A vivid example of the latter is the scandalous support to the South African apartheid.
The concept
The annual Károli Forum wishes to bring together participants from various fields within humanistic and respective disciplines, gathered by a shared attempt to offer a multidisciplinary analysis of the rapport between Protestantism and mankind in the context of wider social, cultural and civil settings. The presented material aims to provide a new insight in both historical and contemporary aspects of this relationship, along with an attempt to identify its various tendencies generated by the challenges of the modern world.
Public call
The Centre for Protestant Studies Gáspár Károli invites all interested to participate in the work of Károli Forum MMXXIV by submitting their papers on a topic of their own choice, in accordance with Instructions for Authors. For more information, please contact the organizers.
Conference proceedings
Each paper presented on the Forum will be published within a separate edition of Conference proceedings.
Agenda
The Agenda of the 2024 June Károli Forum can be downloaded here.
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