Responsable : Audra Bullard

Description :

This talk examines how the digital age has produced a profound crisis of religious authority across global Christian, Muslim, and other faith communities. Traditional institutions—church hierarchies, seminaries, and clerical leadership—are increasingly challenged by online influencers, decentralized networks, and algorithm-driven forms of spiritual engagement. Digital platforms allow individual believers to bypass established authorities, creating new forms of interpretation, identity, and community that operate outside institutional control. At the same time, states exploit the digital sphere to monitor, manipulate, or suppress religious expression, further destabilizing traditional authority structures. The talk explores how this shift reshapes theology, political activism, and the social role of religious institutions. Ultimately, it argues that the digital age has not secularized religion but has fragmented it, producing a new landscape in which authority is diffused, contested, and constantly renegotiated.

Eren Tasar is Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor in the History Department at UNC Chapel Hill, where he has taught since 2013. His interests are the religious and social history of Soviet Central Asia. Tasar’s first book, “Soviet and Muslim: the Institutionalism of Islam in Central Asia,” examined Soviet policies toward Islamic institutions. His 24 lecture video series about the history of Central Asia since ancient times for The Great Courses was released in January 2025. Tasar has two forthcoming books, “Muslim Atheism in Central Asia,” which is under review with the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, and “Central Asia from Antiquity to the Present,” which is under contract with Oxford University Press.

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