A Short History of Secularism

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0857731378
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (577 download)

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Book Synopsis A Short History of Secularism by : Graeme Smith

Download or read book A Short History of Secularism written by Graeme Smith and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2007-11-28 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to call Western society 'secular'? What is 'secularism'? And how should we understand the concept of 'secularism' in international relations, particularly the clash between radical Islam and the West? The Latin term from which the word 'secular' is derived - 'saeculum' - means 'generation' or 'age', and came to mean that which belongs to this life, to the here and now, in this world. It is widely used as a shorthand for the ideology which shapes contemporary society without reference to the divine.However, according to Graeme Smith, 'secularism' represents a great deal more. He offers a radical reappraisal of the notion of secularism and its history, beginning with the Greeks and proceeding to modernity and the contemporary period. The assumption that the West is becoming increasingly secular is often unquestioned. By contrast, Dr Smith discerns a different kind of society: one informed by a historical legacy which makes sense only when it is appreciated that it is religious. Secularism was born of Christianity. Daringly - and very originally - Smith argues that it is impossible to understand the idea of the secular without appreciating that, at root, it is Christian. "A Short History of Secularism" will fundamentally reshape discussions of western culture, religion and politics. It will have strong appeal to students of religion, political philosophy, and the history of ideas.

Secularisation

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Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443861200
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Secularisation by : Christopher Hartney

Download or read book Secularisation written by Christopher Hartney and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secularisation: New Historical Perspectives unveils an exciting range of case studies exploring emerging research in secularisation with an international outlook. Inspired by scholarship conducted by the Religious History Association, this collected volume questions the paradigm of secularisation by exploring its historical manifestations and making projections as to the future divide between religious life and the secular world. A must-read for anyone interested in events and personalities that shaped the religious landscape of the present, this volume contains meticulous historical research. It also presents a strong focus on the Southern Hemisphere, which is often largely absent in discussions of secularity. Topics covered here include schisms between secularism and Christianity in Australia and on a global scale; Jesuit frontier missions in Ibero-America; the publically religious displays of the Salvation Army; competition between church life and emerging recreational pursuits at the turn of the century; Joseph Fletcher’s contributions ethical secularity; the privileged place of Christianity within the Queensland educational system; notions of religiously justified violence amongst the ANZAC forces; and the ongoing debate between constitutional secularity and Christian nationhood in the United States of America from its foundation up until the present day. The latter part of the volume explores the secularisation paradigm as a cultural creation in its own right – an important consideration for any scholar in this field. To this end, the authors explore the mythic status of secularisation as a social and historical concept; question the validity of historical approaches to this discourse; explore whether or not definitions of ‘religion’ are too conservative to be workable; and pose the question of whether or not secular institutions like state museums are really what they claim to be. The role of religion in public life is a fascinating question to explore, and one that must be tackled via a truly international exploration of secularisation. So too must the inquisitive scholar consider the very nature of the terms employed in research. Secularisation: New Historical Perspectives is the perfect toolkit for such investigations.

A Secular Age

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Author :
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.

The Secularization of Early Modern England

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0195360753
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (953 download)

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Book Synopsis The Secularization of Early Modern England by : C. John Sommerville

Download or read book The Secularization of Early Modern England written by C. John Sommerville and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1992-04-09 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study overcomes the ambiguity and daunting scale of the subject of secularization by using the insights of anthropology and sociology, and by examining an earlier period than usually considered. Concentrating not only on a decline of religious belief, which is the last aspect of secularization, this study shows that a transformation of England's cultural grammar had to precede that loosening of belief, and that this was largely accomplished between 1500 and 1700. Only when definitions of space and time changed and language and technology were transformed (as well as art and play) could a secular world-view be sustained. As aspects of daily life became divorced from religious values and controls, religious culture was supplanted by religious faith, a reasoned, rather than an unquestioned, belief in the supernatural. Sommerville shows that this process was more political and theological than economic or social.

The Age of Secularization

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Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 077355226X
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (735 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Secularization by : Augusto Del Noce

Download or read book The Age of Secularization written by Augusto Del Noce and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2017-11-08 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Augusto Del Noce is widely considered one of Italy’s foremost philosophers and political thinkers in the second half of the twentieth century. He is also remembered as an original and profound cultural critic, and in particular as a great scholar of the process of secularization that took place in the West during the 1960s. A collection of eleven essays and lectures by Del Noce that originally appeared between 1964 and 1969, and which the author published as a book in 1971, The Age of Secularization quickly became recognized as one of the most original and penetrating attempts to interpret the cultural and political turmoil of the period. In its pages Del Noce discusses, among other topics, the student protests of 1968, the counterculture of the 1960s, the significance of the sexual revolution, the nature of the technological society, and the relationship between Christianity and modern culture. The Age of Secularization documents the encounter between a key period of contemporary history and the full intellectual maturity of one of its most perceptive observers. It makes available to English-language readers a lasting reflection on the philosophical roots of contemporary culture, and it is just as illuminating and topical today as it was nearly fifty years ago.

The Unintended Reformation

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 067426407X
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis The Unintended Reformation by : Brad S. Gregory

Download or read book The Unintended Reformation written by Brad S. Gregory and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-16 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

Secularization

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317625382
Total Pages : 211 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (176 download)

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Book Synopsis Secularization by : Charles Turner

Download or read book Secularization written by Charles Turner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-02 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Secularization’ sounds simple, a decline in the power of religion. Yet, the history of the term is controversial and multi-faceted; it has been useful to both religious believers and non-believers and has been deployed by scholars to make sense of a variety of aspects of cultural and social change. This book will introduce the reader to this variety and show how secularization bears on the contemporary politics of religion. Secularization addresses the sociological classics’ ambivalent accounts of the future of religion, later and more robust sociological claims about religious decline, and the most influential philosophical secularization thesis, which says that the dominant ideas of modern thought are in fact religious ones in a secularized form. The book outlines some shortcomings of these accounts in the light of historical inquiry and comparative sociology; examines claims that some religions are ‘resistant to secularization’; and analyzes controversies in the politics of religion, in particular over the relationship between Christianity and Islam and over the implicitly religious character of some modern political movements. By giving equal attention to both sociological and philosophical accounts of secularization, and equal weight to ideas, institutions, and practices, this book introduces complicated ideas in a digestible format. It will appeal to students and scholars interested in making unusual connections within sociology, anthropology, philosophy, theology, and political theory.

Genealogies of the Secular

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Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 1438476396
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Book Synopsis Genealogies of the Secular by : Willem Styfhals

Download or read book Genealogies of the Secular written by Willem Styfhals and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a historical and philosophical overview of the twentieth-century German debates on secularization, and their significance for contemporary discussions about the relationship between theology and modernity. While the concept of secularization is traditionally used to define the nature of modern culture, and sometimes to uncover the theological origins of secular modernity, its validity is being questioned ever more radically today. Genealogies of the Secular returns to the historical, intellectual, and philosophical roots of this concept in the twentieth-century German debates on religion and modernity, and presents a wide range of strategies that German thinkers have applied to apprehend the connection between religion and secularism. In fundamentally heterogeneous ways, these strategies all developed “genealogies of the secular” by tracing modern phenomena back to their religious or theological roots. This book aims to disclose the complex prehistory of the contemporary debates on political theology and postsecularism, and to show how prominent thinkers continue this German tradition today. It explores and assesses the classic theories of secularization that are epitomized in Carl Schmitt’s writings on political theology, but also addresses German philosophers whose work has been rarely associated with secularization, including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, and Hannah Arendt. Attention is also paid to two thinkers whose role in these discourses has not been fully explored yet: Jacob Taubes and Jan Assmann. By introducing their thinking on religion, politics, and secularization, the book also makes two of their own key texts available to an English-language readership. “What makes the book so valuable pedagogically is the clarity and scope of its synthetic gestures about the dense questions congealing around the topic of secularization. It offers a pronouncement of central significance, emerging from some of the most important contemporary voices in these fields. The scholarship is internationally informed and engaged, even as it feels vibrant, immediate, and agenda setting.” — Ward Blanton, University of Kent, Canterbury

The Secularization Debate

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Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 9780742507616
Total Pages : 140 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (76 download)

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Book Synopsis The Secularization Debate by : William H. Swatos

Download or read book The Secularization Debate written by William H. Swatos and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2000 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduced to social scientific audiences by Max Weber, the concept of secularization has had a major influence on the way in which religion has been understood in the West. But at least since the late 1980s both the predictive and the descriptive adequacy of this concept have been seriously challenged. In the face of this challenge, The Secularization Debate offers a timely summary of the critical issues that have arisen over the past decade. With its wide range of essays by prominent international scholars, The Secularization Debate is sure to become a pivotal volume for anyone interested in the hotly contested concept of secularization and its continued relevance to the study of religion.

The Secular Revolution

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Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520235614
Total Pages : 497 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

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Book Synopsis The Secular Revolution by : Christian Smith

Download or read book The Secular Revolution written by Christian Smith and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-06-04 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection presents a radical rethinking of the secularization of American public life.

The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521398299
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (982 download)

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Book Synopsis The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century by : Owen Chadwick

Download or read book The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century written by Owen Chadwick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-09-13 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Owen Chadwick's acclaimed lectures on the secularisation of the European mind trace the declining hold of the Church and its doctrines on European society in the nineteenth century.

Secularization and the World Religions

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Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 1846311888
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (463 download)

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Book Synopsis Secularization and the World Religions by : Klaus Wiegandt

Download or read book Secularization and the World Religions written by Klaus Wiegandt and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume concerns itself with the connections between religions and the social world and with the extent, limits, and future of secularization. Dealing with the major religious traditions and their explicit or implicit ideas about the individual, social, and political order, as well as offering an overview of the religious situation in important geographical areas, Secularization and the World Religions analyzes the legal organization of the relationship between state and religion—as well as the role of the natural sciences—in a global perspective. Contributors include such internationally renowned scholars as Winfried Brugger, José Casanova, Hans Joas, and Hans Kippenberg.

The Secularization of Early Modern England

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Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0195074270
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (95 download)

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Book Synopsis The Secularization of Early Modern England by : Charles John Sommerville

Download or read book The Secularization of Early Modern England written by Charles John Sommerville and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study overcomes the ambiguity and daunting scale of the subject of secularization by using the insights of anthropology and sociology, and by examining an earlier period than usually considered. Concentrating not only on a decline of religious belief, which is the last aspect of secularization, this study shows that a transformation of England's cultural grammar had to precede that loosening of belief, and that this was largely accomplished between 1500 and 1700. Only when definitions of space and time changed and language and technology were transformed (as well as art and play) could a secular world-view be sustained. As aspects of daily life became divorced from religious values and controls, religious culture was supplanted by religious faith, a reasoned, rather than an unquestioned, belief in the supernatural. Sommerville shows that this process was more political and theological than economic or social.

Formations of Belief

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Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691190755
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

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Book Synopsis Formations of Belief by : Philip Nord

Download or read book Formations of Belief written by Philip Nord and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, scholars and public intellectuals have been predicting the demise of religion in the face of secularization. Yet religion is undergoing an unprecedented resurgence in modern life—and secularization no longer appears so inevitable. Formations of Belief brings together many of today's leading historians to shed critical light on secularism's origins, its present crisis, and whether it is as antithetical to religion as it is so often made out to be. Formations of Belief offers a more nuanced understanding of the origins of secularist thought, demonstrating how Reformed Christianity and the Enlightenment were not the sole vessels of a worldview based on rationalism and individual autonomy. Taking readers from late antiquity to the contemporary era, the contributors show how secularism itself can be a form of belief and yet how its crisis today has been brought on by its apparent incapacity to satisfy people's spiritual needs. They explore the rise of the humanistic study of religion in Europe, Jewish messianism, atheism and last rites in the Soviet Union, the cult of the saints in colonial Mexico, religious minorities and Islamic identity in Pakistan, the neuroscience of religion, and more. Based on the Shelby Cullom Davis Center Seminars at Princeton University, this incisive book features illuminating essays by Peter Brown, Yaacob Dweck, Peter E. Gordon, Anthony Grafton, Brad S. Gregory, Stefania Pastore, Caterina Pizzigoni, Victoria Smolkin, Max Weiss, and Muhammad Qasim Zaman.

Formations of the Secular

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Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804783098
Total Pages : 401 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (47 download)

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Book Synopsis Formations of the Secular by : Talal Asad

Download or read book Formations of the Secular written by Talal Asad and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-03 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A dark but brilliantly original work . . . one of the most important books on religion and the modern in recent years.” —H-Net Reviews Opening with the provocative query “what might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East. Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the “strangeness of the non-European world” and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion),the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined. The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity. “A difficult if stunningly eloquent book, a response both elusive and forthright to the many shelves of ‘books on terrorism’ which this country’s trade publishers are rushing into print.” —Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature “This wonderfully illuminating book should be read alongside the author’s Genealogies of Religion.” —Religion “One of the most interesting scholars of religious writing today.” —Christian Scholar’s Review “Asad’s brilliant study remains a defining piece of intellectual and scholarly contribution for all of those interested in exploring the religious and the secular in the modern era.” —The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences

Secularism

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198809131
Total Pages : 164 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis Secularism by : Andrew Copson

Download or read book Secularism written by Andrew Copson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is secularism? -- Secularism in Western societies -- Secularism diversifies -- The case for Secularism -- The case against Secularism -- Conceptions of Secularism -- Hard questions and new conflicts -- Afterword: the future of Secularism

The Secular Enlightenment

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Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691216762
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis The Secular Enlightenment by : Margaret Jacob

Download or read book The Secular Enlightenment written by Margaret Jacob and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. Jacob reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Jacob demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come. --Adapted from publisher description.