Berkley Center

In this Spanish-language interview published in the journal REDHISEL Debates, José Casanova discusses two of his current projects, which attempt to reconstruct the globalization of Catholicism from the sixteenth century to the present. One is a project about Jesuits and globalization, which produced an edited volume in 2016. Casanova is now expanding his chapter into a monograph that rethinks globalization, arguing that globalization is actually prior to Western modernity. His second project delves into Catholicism in Asia, where several Catholic orders were simultaneously involved in education, health, and missionary work. He emphasizes that while the first globalization came before modern Western hegemony, the second is that of modernity, which globalizes the territorial framework of the Wesphalian system. In both efforts Casanova uses Catholicism as a prism through which to understand those different dynamics of globalization.