Public Religion, Collective Memory in a Multilocal and Global Society

The new times we live are characterized by the public role of religion (Casanova): not only the religion as an institution, but the real dimension of religions entering and pervading the public sphere: affecting the relationships between religion, family, cultures, public politics, welfare state, health problems: this phenomenon is not a return to medieval time where church and political systems tried to dominate one upon the other, but the new modernity or post traditional society conveys  at same time the autonomy of religious sphere respect to the political one, but at same time the partial exit of religion from the boundaries of the religions institution still influencing many aspects of social life.

Public religion or civil religion (R. Bellah) is closely related to a collective memory which is a social construction and representation of reality, but it is also a sedimentation of symbolic capital within a cultural system, in a given historical time and space. It is also a stratified reality almost as an archeological circle where the present, the past and the projection toward the future constitute a collective memory. The analysis of collective memory leads up to the discovery of the magma of popular religiosity, the families lineage, the mythological points, the grounding meanings (M. Weber) the collective unconscious (Freud, Jung, Neuman) the place of transcendence in the social life (R. Bellah) The analysis of collective memory can be analyzed in a small community in the South of Italy as I have done in my research on Images of Death and Symbolic Construction of Reality or at global level by analyzing the cultural bases and the collective memory in a process of development and globalization, as I have done in my work on the Grammar of Development.