Magic and Modernity at the Religious Studies Project

Just published over at the Religious Studies Project is a conversation between the Open University’s Richard Irvine, Theodoros Kyriakides and David G. Robertson concerning magical thinking in the modern world. We may think that such ideas are confined to the fringes in the secular, post-Enlightenment society, but this is not necessarily the case. We talk about Weber’s rationalisation and James Frazer’s evolutionary model of modernity, and how they relate to ideas of belief, and magic. We then look at examples from Orkney and Cyprus to show these ideas in play. This is an interview that will be of interest to all students of secularity, modernity and belief.

This interview was recorded at our Contemporary Religion in Historical Perspective conference in Feb 2018, and is based on the “Magical thinking in contexts and situations of unbelief” project, part of the Understanding Unbelief programme.