Download or read book Beyond the Secular West written by Akeel Bilgrami and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the character of secularism in countries that were not pervaded by Christianity, such as China, India, and the nations of the Middle East? To what extent is the secular an imposition of colonial rule? How does secularism comport with local religious cultures in Africa, and how does it work with local forms of power and governance in Latin America? Has modern secularism evolved organically, or is it even necessary, and has it always meant progress? A vital extension of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, in which he exhaustively chronicled the emergence of secularism in Latin Christendom, this anthology applies Taylor's findings to secularism's global migration. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Rajeev Bhargava, Akeel Bilgrami, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Sudipta Kaviraj, Claudio Lomnitz, Alfred Stepan, Charles Taylor, and Peter van der Veer each explore the transformation of Western secularism beyond Europe, and the collection closes with Taylor's response to each essay. What began as a modern reaction to—as well as a stubborn extension of—Latin Christendom has become a complex export shaped by the world's religious and political systems. Brilliantly alternating between intellectual and methodological approaches, this volume fosters a greater engagement with the phenomenon across disciplines.
Download or read book Theology and Social Theory written by John Milbank and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a revised edition of John Milbank’s masterpiece, which sketches the outline of a specifically theological social theory. The Times Higher Education Supplement wrote of the first edition that it was “a tour de force of systematic theology. It would be churlish not to acknowledge its provocation and brilliance”. Featured in The Church Times “100 Best Christian Books" Brings this classic work up-to-date by reviewing the development of modern social thought. Features a substantial new introduction by Milbank, clarifying the theoretical basis for his work. Challenges the notion that sociological critiques of theology are ‘scientific’. Outlines a specifically theological social theory, and in doing so, engages with a wide range of thinkers from Plato to Deleuze. Written by one of the world’s most influential contemporary theologians and the author of numerous books.
Download or read book A Secular Age Beyond the West written by Mirjam Künkler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book compares secularity in societies not shaped by Western Christianity, particularly in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.
Download or read book Development Beyond the Secular written by Catherine Loy and published by SCM Press. This book was released on 2017-09-30 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intersection of religion and development has for some decades been considered contentious, with scholars of both disciplines inhibited by the constraints of either the religious or the secular paradigm they primarily inhabit. Development Beyond the Secular aims to provide a new resource for those interested in the study of religions and development (primarily postgraduate and academic), and for those development practitioners wishing to contextualize their discipline within a religious frame. Using the work of Christian Aid as its primary lens, this book examines and critiques the theological underpinnings of development work and questions how Christian values are manifest through day-to-day work in the world of poverty eradication.
Download or read book Beyond Secular Order written by John Milbank and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Secular Order is the first of a two-volume work that expands upon renowned theologian John Milbank’s innovative attempt to understand both theology and modern thought begun in his previously published classic text Theology and Social Theory. Continues Milbank’s innovative attempt to understand both theology and modern thought begun in Theology and Social Theory – considered a classic work in the development of systematic theology Authored by one of the world’s most influential and highly regarded contemporary theologians Draws on a sweep of ideas and thinkers to argue that modern secularism is a form of Christian heresy that developed from the Middle Ages and can only be overcome by a renewed account of Christendom Shows how this heresy can be transformed into a richer blend of religion, modernity and politics Reveals how there is a fundamental homology between modern ideas about ontology and knowledge and modern ideas about political action, expressed in both theory and practice
Download or read book Beyond the Sacred secular Divide written by Scott D. Allen and published by YWAM Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolutionizing the lives and renewing the minds of believers and local churches from North America to Africa, the Kingdom Lifestyle Bible Studies help people grow in their relationships with the King and his kingdom. Each tested, insightful study is designed for group or individual use and equips believers to engage in a vibrant life with Christ and offer healing to a broken world.
Download or read book Religion written by Hent de Vries and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 1024 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we talk about when we talk about "religion"? Is it an array of empirical facts about historical human civilizations? Or is religion what is in essence unpredictable--perhaps the very emergence of the new? In what ways are the legacies of religion--its powers, words, things, and gestures--reconfiguring themselves as the elementary forms of life in the twenty-first century? Given the Latin roots of the word religion and its historical Christian uses, what sense, if any, does it make to talk about "religion" in other traditions? Where might we look for common elements that would enable us to do so? Has religion as an overarching concept lost all its currency, or does it ineluctably return--sometimes in unexpected ways--the moment we attempt to do without it? This book explores the difficulties and double binds that arise when we ask "What is religion?" Offering a marvelously rich and diverse array of perspectives, it begins the task of rethinking "religion" and "religious studies" in a contemporary world. Opening essays on the question "What is religion?" are followed by clusters exploring the relationships among religion, theology, and philosophy and the links between religion, politics, and law. Pedagogy is the focus of the following section. Religion is then examined in particular contexts, from classical times to the present Pentacostal revival, leading into an especially rich set of essays on religion, materiality, and mediatization. The final section grapples with the ever-changing forms that "religion" is taking, such as spirituality movements and responses to the ecological crisis. Featuring the work of leading scholars from a wide array of disciplines, traditions, and cultures, Religion: Beyond a Concept will help set the agenda for religious studies for years to come. It is the first of five volumes in a collection entitled The Future of the Religious Past, the fruit of a major international research initiative funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.
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.
Download or read book How to Be Secular written by Jacques Berlinerblau and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that a return to a more secular America will promote religious diversity and freedom, and help eliminate the widening divide between religious conservatives and staunch atheists.
Download or read book How Not to Be Secular written by James K. A. Smith and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2014-04-23 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on.
Download or read book Freedom of Religion and the Secular State written by Russell Blackford and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the relationship between religion and the state Focusing on the intersection of religion, law, and politics in contemporary liberal democracies, Blackford considers the concept of the secular state, revising and updating enlightenment views for the present day. Freedom of Religion and the Secular State offers a comprehensive analysis, with a global focus, of the subject of religious freedom from a legal as well as historical and philosophical viewpoint. It makes an original contribution to current debates about freedom of religion, and addresses a whole range of hot-button issues that involve the relationship between religion and the state, including the teaching of evolution in schools, what to do about the burqa, and so on.
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
Download or read book Beyond the Secular Mind written by Paul Eidelberg and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1989-05-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Going beyond Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Paul Eidelberg shows how the cardinal principles of democracy--freedom and equality--can be saved from the degradation of moral relativism by applying Jewish law to these principles. The author attempts to overcome the dichotomy of religion and secularism as well as other contradictions of Western civilization by means of a philosophy of history that uses thoroughly rational concepts and is supported by empirical evidence. Eidelberg enumerates and elucidates the characteristics that make Jewish law particularly suited to reopening the secular mind and elevating democracy's formative principles. The author compares and contrasts Jewish law with political philosophy. His goal is to derive freedom and equality from a conception of man and society that goes beyond the usual political and social categories, avoiding both relativism and absolutism. In conclusion, Eidelberg attempts to overcome the perennial problem of democracy: how to reconcile wisdom and consent. This he does by sketching the basic institutions of a new community. This unique analysis should be read by political and religious theoreticians alike.
Download or read book Beyond Radical Secularism written by Pierre Manent and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the book that took France by storm upon its publication in the fall of 2015. It was praised by some for its rare combination of tough-mindedness and moderation and attacked by others for suggesting that radical secularism could not provide the political and spiritual resources to address the Islamic challenge. The book is even more relevant after the Parisian terror attacks of November 13, 2015. It is a book that combines permanence and relevance, that addresses a pressing political and civilizational problem in a manner that will endure. Responding to the brutal terror attacks in France in January 2015, Pierre Manent has written a learned, passionate essay that reflects broadly and deeply on the political and religious situation of France and Europe. He freely acknowledges that the West is at war with fanatics who despise liberal and Christian civilization. That war must be conducted with prudent tough-mindedness. At the same time, serious thought must be given to the Islamic question at home and abroad. Concentrating on the French situation, Manent suggests that French Muslims are not entering an "empty" nation, defined by radical secularism and human rights alone. France has a secular state, as do all the nations of the contemporary West. That is a heritage to be cherished. But the Islamic question will not be "solved" by transforming Muslims into modern secularists devoid of all religious sensibility. It must be remembered that France is also nation of a "Christian mark" with a strong Jewish presence, both of which enrich its spiritual and political life. Manent proposes a "social contract" with France''s Muslims that is at once firm and welcoming. Rejecting radical secularism, the effort by certain "laicists" to completely secularize European society, to create a society without religion, Manent calls for a defensive policy that will allow Muslims to keep their mores, save the integral veil and polygamy. In exchange, they must accept the fact that they live in a society of a Christian mark and they must stop hiding behind charges of Islamophobia. In liberal and Christian Europe, there must be total freedom of criticism, including criticism of the Islamic religion. Muslims must forgo funding from Arab Islamic states (not to mention extremist movements) and must recognize they are henceforth participants in the common life of the French nation. They must become citizens in a nation that does more than defend individual or communal rights, as crucial as those rights are. Beyond Radical Secularism also provides a luminous reflection on the necessary coexistence of the liberal state and a nation of a Jewish and Christian mark in a Western liberty worthy of the name. Europeans have succumbed to passivity in no small part because they reject the nation which is the indispensable framework of democratic self-government. They no longer have confidence in human action, in the elemental human capacity "to put reasons and actions in common." That faith in individual and collective action ultimately depends on belief in "the primacy of the Good," or in theological terms, in faith in a benevolent and Providential God. The West at its best combined the pride of the citizen and the humility of the believer. Europeans--and Americans, too--governed themselves in a "certain relation to the Christian proposition." The nation was the instrument par excellence for combining the cardinal virtues--courage, prudence, justice, moderation--and the confidence which is specific to the Christian religion. A capacious sense of Europe and the West, one that acknowledges its Christian and Jewish mark, is ultimately necessary to face the Islamic challenge. The Jewish idea of the Covenant provides a powerful reminder of the ultimate ground of democratic self-government and of deliberation and action that respect limits while acknowledging the full range of human possibilities in a world where the good is not ultimately without transcendent support. Only by recovering something of the European faith in a higher ground of freedom will the nations of Europe be able to muster the realism and the hope necessary meet the challenge of Islam.
Download or read book Judaism Beyond God written by Sherwin Wine and published by . This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judaism Beyond God presents an innovative secular and humanistic alternative for Jewish identity. It provides new answers to old questions about the essence of Jewish identity, the real meaning of Jewish history, the significance of the Jewish personality, and the nature of Jewish ethics. It also describes a radical and creative way to be Jewish - new ways to celebrate Jewish holidays and life cycle events, a welcoming approach to intermarriage and joining the Jewish people, and meaningful paths to strengthen Jewish identity in a secular age.
Download or read book Beyond Religion written by Dalai Lama XIV Bstan-ʼdzin-rgya-mtsho and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2011 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Beyond Religion" is a stirring call to move beyond religion for the guidance to improve human life on individual, community, and global levels--including a guided meditation practice for cultivating key human values.
Download or read book Beyond Political Liberalism written by Troy Lewis Dostert and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Beyond Political Liberalism: Toward a Post-Secular Ethics of Public Life, Troy Dostert offers a critical examination of political liberalism, the approach to liberal political theory advanced most forcefully in the later work of John Rawls. Political liberalism's defenders claim that an overlapping consensus of shared values holds out the strongest prospects for regulating democratic politics in light of our moral diversity. Dostert contends, however, that the attempt to establish such a consensus in fact works to restrict and control the presence of religious and other moral perspectives that can ennoble and invigorate public life. Dostert argues that there is a steep price to be paid for this conception of politics, for what results is a political vision characterized by a profound distrust and fear of citizens' comprehensive convictions - the animating source of many citizens' political activity. He suggests that a post-secular ethics is a more appropriate response to moral diversity than restricting and managing the presence of religion and other moral perspectives in public life. of public discourse, as political liberalism counsels, but by encouraging dialogic practices such as forbearance, discipline, creativity, and sincerity. Such practices allow us to negotiate our moral disagreements in a spirit of mutuality, while also remaining open to discovering new formulations of worthwhile political ideals. By drawing on the religious witness of the civil rights movement and the work of theologian John Howard Yoder, Dostert elucidates these core dialogic practices and illustrates their value through a consideration of the contemporary debates surrounding international debt relief and abortion. Challenging the secular presuppositions of contemporary liberal political theory, Beyond Political Liberalism will appeal to scholars in political philosophy and contemporary theology. It will also interest religious communities and parishes dedicated to political activity.
