Secular Conversions

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Secular Conversions

Author : Damon Mayrl
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316720705
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (167 download)

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Book Synopsis Secular Conversions by : Damon Mayrl

Download or read book Secular Conversions written by Damon Mayrl and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does secularization proceed differently in otherwise similar countries? Secular Conversions demonstrates that the institutional structure of the state is a key factor shaping the course of secularization. Drawing upon detailed historical analysis of religious education policy in the United States and Australia, Damon Mayrl details how administrative structures, legal procedures, and electoral systems have shaped political opportunities and even helped create constituencies for secular policies. In so doing, he also shows how a decentralized, readily accessible American state acts as an engine for religious conflict, encouraging religious differences to spill into law and politics at every turn. This book provides a vivid picture of how political conflicts interacted with the state over the long span of American and Australian history to shape religion's role in public life. Ultimately, it reveals that taken-for-granted political structures have powerfully shaped the fate of religion in modern societies.

Secular Conversions

Author : Damon Mayrl
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107103711
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Secular Conversions by : Damon Mayrl

Download or read book Secular Conversions written by Damon Mayrl and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals how taken-for-granted political structures have shaped the fate of religion in Australian and American public life.

Preaching to Convert

Author : John Fletcher
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 047211915X
Total Pages : 413 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (721 download)

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Book Synopsis Preaching to Convert by : John Fletcher

Download or read book Preaching to Convert written by John Fletcher and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-11-13 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preaching to Convert offers an intriguing new perspective on the outreach strategies of U.S. evangelicals. Author John Fletcher frames these activities, from door-to-door proselytizing to the spirited sermons of superstar televangelists, as examples of activist performance, broadly defined here as acts performed before an audience in the hopes of changing hearts and minds. Most writing about activist performance has focused on left-progressive causes, events, and actors, and if evangelicals have appeared at all, they often appear as one-dimensional forces of ignorance or bigotry against which brave (left-leaning) activists must fight. Preaching to Convert argues against such a constricted view of activism and for a more nuanced understanding of U.S. evangelicalism as a movement defined by its desire to win converts and spread the gospel. In other words, evangelicals are activist performers par excellence. The book positions evangelicals as a diverse, complicated group confronting the loss of conservative Christianity’s default status in twenty-first–century U.S. culture. In the face of an increasingly secular age, evangelicals have been reassessing models of outreach. In acts like handing out Bible tracts to strangers on the street or going door-to-door with a Bible in hand, in elaborately staged horror-themed morality plays or multi-million-dollar creationist discovery centers, in megachurch services beamed to dozens of satellite campuses, and in controversial “ex-gay” ministries striving to return gays and lesbians to the straight and narrow, evangelicals are redefining what it means to be deeply committed in a pluralist world. The book’s engaging style and careful argumentation make it accessible and appealing to scholars and students across a range of fields.

Strange Gods

Author : Susan Jacoby
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1400096391
Total Pages : 514 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Strange Gods by : Susan Jacoby

Download or read book Strange Gods written by Susan Jacoby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a groundbreaking historical work that focuses on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with an uncompromising secular perspective, Susan Jacoby illuminates the social and economic forces that have shaped individual faith and the voluntary conversion impulse that has changed the course of Western history—for better and for worse. Covering the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin’s dour theocracy, American plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters’ religion—along with individual converts including Augustine of Hippo, John Donne, Edith Stein, Muhammad Ali, George W. Bush and Mike Pence—Strange Gods makes a powerful case that nothing has been more important in struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one’s choice or to reject belief in God altogether.

The Secular Paradox

Author : Joseph Blankholm
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479809527
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis The Secular Paradox by : Joseph Blankholm

Download or read book The Secular Paradox written by Joseph Blankholm and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radically new way of understanding secularism which explains why being secular can seem so strangely religious For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals. In The Secular Paradox, Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, they feel they have lost too much. Trying to strike the right balance, secular people alternate between the two sides of their ambiguous condition: absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition. Blankholm relies heavily on the voices of women and people of color to understand what it means to live with the secular paradox. The struggles of secular misfits—the people who mis-fit normative secularism in the United States—show that becoming secular means rejecting parts of life that resemble Christianity and embracing a European tradition that emphasizes reason and avoids emotion. Women, people of color, and secular people who have left non-Christian religions work against the limits and contradictions of secularism to create new ways of being secular that are transforming the American religious landscape. They are pioneering the most interesting and important forms of secular “religiosity” in America today.

Religious Conversions in the Mediterranean World

Author : N. Marzouki
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137004894
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (37 download)

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Book Synopsis Religious Conversions in the Mediterranean World by : N. Marzouki

Download or read book Religious Conversions in the Mediterranean World written by N. Marzouki and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While globalization undermines ideas of the nation-state in the Mediterranean, conversions reveal how religion can unsettle existing political and social relations. Through studies of conversions across the region this book examines the challenges that conversions represent for national, legal and policy ways of dealing with religious minorities.

The Secular Paradox

Author : Joseph Blankholm
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479809497
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis The Secular Paradox by : Joseph Blankholm

Download or read book The Secular Paradox written by Joseph Blankholm and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Secular people are strangely ambiguous. They feel a tension between what they don't share and what they have in common-between avoiding religion and embracing something like it. An event as ordinary as a wedding can be uncomfortable if it feels too religious, and even for those who are indifferent to religion, a passing reference to God can be cringeworthy. And yet, religion is tough to avoid completely without living in its remainder. The Secular Paradox explains why. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, Blankholm shows how secular people are both absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like tradition, which includes beliefs and institutions, as well embodied practices. Recovering this tradition makes legible what secular people share with one another and explains why the secular movement in the United States remains predominately white and male. Humanistic Jews, Hispanic Freethinkers, Ex-Muslims, and black nonbelievers are secular misfits whose stories reveal the contours of the secular most clearly by proving to be more and less than what remains when Christianity is removed. The Secular Paradox offers a radically new way of understanding secularism and secular people by explaining the origins of their inherent contradiction and its awkward effects on their lives. This new understanding matters for anyone who has ever avoided something because it felt too religious, everyone who considers themselves secular, and all those who want to understand them better"--

Beyond Church and State

Author : Matthew Scherer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9781107579439
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (794 download)

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Book Synopsis Beyond Church and State by : Matthew Scherer

Download or read book Beyond Church and State written by Matthew Scherer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secularism is often imagined in Thomas Jefferson's words as "a wall of separation between Church and State." Beyond Church and State moves past that standard picture to argue that secularism is a process that reshapes both religion and politics. Borrowing a term from religious traditions, the book goes further to argue that this process should be understood as a process of conversion. Matthew Scherer studies Saint Augustine, John Locke, John Rawls, Henri Bergson, and Stanley Cavell to present a more accurate picture of what secularism is, what it does, and how it can be reimagined to be more conducive to genuine democracy.

Strange Gods

Author : Susan Jacoby
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1101870966
Total Pages : 512 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (18 download)

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Book Synopsis Strange Gods by : Susan Jacoby

Download or read book Strange Gods written by Susan Jacoby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a groundbreaking historical work that addresses religious conversion in the West from an uncompromisingly secular perspective, Susan Jacoby challenges the conventional narrative of conversion as a purely spiritual journey. From the transformation on the road to Damascus of the Jew Saul into the Christian evangelist Paul to a twenty-first-century “religious marketplace” in which half of Americans have changed faiths at least once, nothing has been more important in the struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one’s choice or to reject belief in God altogether. Focusing on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—each claiming possession of absolute truth—Jacoby examines conversions within a social and economic framework that includes theocratic coercion (unto torture and death) and the more friendly persuasion of political advantage, economic opportunism, and interreligious marriage. Moving through time, continents, and cultures—the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin’s dour theocracy, Southern plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters’ religion—the narrative is punctuated by portraits of individual converts embodying the sacred and profane. The cast includes Augustine of Hippo; John Donne; the German Jew Edith Stein, whose conversion to Catholicism did not save her from Auschwitz; boxing champion Muhammad Ali; and former President George W. Bush. The story also encompasses conversions to rigid secular ideologies, notably Stalinist Communism, with their own truth claims. Finally, Jacoby offers a powerful case for religious choice as a product of the secular Enlightenment. In a forthright and unsettling conclusion linking the present with the most violent parts of the West’s religious past, she reminds us that in the absence of Enlightenment values, radical Islamists are persecuting Christians, many other Muslims, and atheists in ways that recall the worst of the Middle Ages. (With 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations.)

Reimagining Zen in a Secular Age

Author : André van der Braak
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004435085
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (44 download)

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Book Synopsis Reimagining Zen in a Secular Age by : André van der Braak

Download or read book Reimagining Zen in a Secular Age written by André van der Braak and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-08-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reimagining Zen in a Secular Age André van der Braak uses Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age to describe the encounter between Japanese Zen Buddhism and Western modernity. He proposes how Dōgen’s thought offers resources for a reimagining of Zen.

René Girard and Secular Modernity

Author : Scott Cowdell
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268076979
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (68 download)

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Book Synopsis René Girard and Secular Modernity by : Scott Cowdell

Download or read book René Girard and Secular Modernity written by Scott Cowdell and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis, Scott Cowdell provides the first systematic interpretation of René Girard’s controversial approach to secular modernity. Cowdell identifies the scope, development, and implications of Girard’s thought, the centrality of Christ in Girard's thinking, and, in particular, Girard's distinctive take on the uniqueness and finality of Christ in terms of his impact on Western culture. In Girard’s singular vision, according to Cowdell, secular modernity has emerged thanks to the Bible’s exposure of the cathartic violence that is at the root of religious prohibitions, myths, and rituals. In the literature, the psychology, and most recently the military history of modernity, Girard discerns a consistent slide into an apocalypse that challenges modern ideas of romanticism, individualism, and progressivism. In the first three chapters, Cowdell examines the three elements of Girard’s basic intellectual vision (mimesis, sacrifice, biblical hermeneutics) and brings this vision to a constructive interpretation of “secularization” and “modernity,” as these terms are understood in the broadest sense today. Chapter 4 focuses on modern institutions, chiefly the nation state and the market, that function to restrain the outbreak of violence. And finally, Cowdell discusses the apocalyptic dimension of Girard's theory in relation to modern warfare and terrorism. Here, Cowdell engages with the most recent writings of Girard (particularly his Battling to the End) and applies them to further conversations in cultural theology, political science, and philosophy. Cowdell takes up and extends Girard’s own warning concerning an alternative to a future apocalypse: “What sort of conversion must humans undergo, before it is too late?”

Converting Fiction

Author : David H. Darst
Publisher : Unc Department of Romance Studies
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Converting Fiction by : David H. Darst

Download or read book Converting Fiction written by David H. Darst and published by Unc Department of Romance Studies. This book was released on 1998 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the many ways in which seventeenth-century Spanish authors manipulated the expected outcomes of secular literature to create religiously motivated endings prompted by some kind of conversion. In the late sixteenth century, the prevalent technique was to transform the secular material entirely, a lo divino. After 1598, however, writers developed the ingenious procedure of ostensibly following a secular account of events but subverting it by inserting an unanticipated religious ending. The specific kinds of conversion at closure examined here are the appropriation of earlier genres; conversion of non-Christian literary types; personal conversion of the native Spaniard through the Catholic ritual of confession, penitence, and absolution; conversion of the nation's historical material; and conversion of the very landscape upon which Christians walk in their pilgrimage through life.

The Sacred in a Secular Age

Author : Phillip E. Hammond
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520325427
Total Pages : 390 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sacred in a Secular Age by : Phillip E. Hammond

Download or read book The Sacred in a Secular Age written by Phillip E. Hammond and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

Secular Surge

Author : David E. Campbell
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108831133
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (88 download)

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Book Synopsis Secular Surge by : David E. Campbell

Download or read book Secular Surge written by David E. Campbell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Americans are turning away from religion. Will a Secular Left rise to counter the Religious Right?

Secular War

Author : Stacey Gutkowski
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0857729527
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (577 download)

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Book Synopsis Secular War by : Stacey Gutkowski

Download or read book Secular War written by Stacey Gutkowski and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-27 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have long-standing and unconscious secular assumptions about religion shaped the post-9/11 climate and its wars? Stacey Gutkowski explores this little-examined, yet crucial, element of British perceptions of and policy towards Jihadism over the last decade, to draw critical conclusions about the relationship between war and the secular. She points to a surprisingly coherent body of secular beliefs that have fuelled policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and counter-terrorism, and that have had mixed results - responsible for both positive strategies and tragic errors. The theory Gutkowski develops on the impact of this secular approach to warfare holds a broader global significance, and cannot be viewed as just a British phenomenon. This book addresses ongoing and critical debates, such as the 'overreach' of Western liberal interventionism in the Middle East, and speaks to policy-makers, security analysts and students of IR, Foreign Policy and Security Studies.

A Secular Age

Author : Charles Taylor
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674986911
Total Pages : 889 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

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Book Synopsis A Secular Age by : Charles Taylor

Download or read book A Secular Age written by Charles Taylor and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions

Author : Monique Scheer
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350065242
Total Pages : 411 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions by : Monique Scheer

Download or read book Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions written by Monique Scheer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com Taking its cue from the study of 'lived religion', Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions shows how the idea of a secular public is equally marked by a display and cultivation of affect and emotions. Whereas it is widely agreed that religion is often saturated by emotion, the secular is usually treated as a neutral background serving as the domain of public, rational deliberation. This book demonstrates that secularity and secularism are also upheld by bodily practices and emotional attachments. Drawing on empirical case studies, this is the first book to ask and explore whether a secular body exists. Building on the work of Talal Asad, the book argues that the secular is not an absence of religion, but a positive entity that comes about through its co-constitutive relationship with religion. And, once we attune ourselves to recognizing its operations as grammar which structures social practice, writing an anthropology of the secular could become a new possibility.