Globalization and Localization of Religion

The Sixth Conference of the Social Scientific Study of Religion in China was held on July 7-8, 2009 in the beautiful City of Wuxi in Jiangsu Province of China. The theme of the conference was “Globalization and Localization of Religion.”

In the social scientific study of religion, the relationship of globalization and localization has become a hot topic in recent years. In the process of modernization, religious change appears to share some common patterns on the one hand, and religious expressions appear to be combined with diverse local cultures on the other hand. The newly coined term “globalocalization” is an indication of the scholarly effort to theorize such phenomena, which seems affirming a common belief among many Chinese intellectuals: the more national/local, the more international/universal.