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 Becoming Religious in a Secular Age written by Mark Elmore and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-07-05 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion is often viewed as a universally ancient element of the human inheritance, but in the Western Himalayas the community of Himachal Pradesh discovered its religion only after India became an independent secular state. Based on extensive ethnographic and archival work, Becoming Religious in a Secular Age tells the story of this discovery and how it transformed a community’s relations to its past and to its members, as well as to those outside the community. And, as Mark Elmore demonstrates, Himachali religion offers a unique opportunity to reimagine relations between religion and secularity. Elmore shows that modern secularity is not so much the eradication of religion as the very condition for its development. Showing us that to become a modern, ethical subject is to become religious, this book creatively augments our understanding of both religion and modernity.
Download or read book Religious Difference in a Secular Age written by Saba Mahmood and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How secular governance in the Middle East is making life worse—not better—for religious minorities The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region. Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism—political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais—religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country—Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe. A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality.
Download or read book Religion for a Secular Age written by Thomas J. Green and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion for a Secular Age provides a transnational history of modern Vedānta through a comparative study of two of its most important exponents, Friedrich Max Muller (1823–1900) and Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902). This book explains why Vedānta's appeal spanned the ostensibly very different contexts of colonial India and Victorian Britain and America, and how this ancient form of thought was translated by Muller and Vivekananda into a modern form of philosophy or religion. These religiously-committed men attempted to reconcile religion with modernity by appealing to Advaita (literally, 'non-dualistic') Vedānta's monistic interpretation of reality. The 'scientific' study of religion allegedly demonstrated the evolutionary superiority of Vedānta and the possibility of religion's survival in 'the light of modern science'. They believed Vedānta could also provide the religious basis for moral engagement in this world, even as the hold of orthodox Christianity and traditional Hinduism appeared to be weakening. Vedānta thus served as a way of articulating a form of religion suitable for a secular age – religion which has embraced modern forms of thought while breaking away from creeds, scriptures and institutions to thrive in the spheres of public debate of London, Calcutta and New York.
Download or read book Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age written by Michael Warner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-04 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ÒWhat does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?Ó This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex A Secular Age, where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a defining feature of the modern world, not the mere absence of religion, and casts light on the experience of transcendence that scientistic explanations of the world tend to neglect. In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a prominent and varied group of scholars chart the conversations in which A Secular Age intervenes and address wider questions of secularism and secularity. The distinguished contributors include Robert Bellah, Jos Casanova, Nilfer Gle, William E. Connolly, Wendy Brown, Simon During, Colin Jager, Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan, Akeel Bilgrami, John Milbank, and Saba Mahmood. Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age succeeds in conveying to readers the complexity of secularism while serving as an invaluable guide to a landmark book.
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 Hope in a Secular Age written by David Newheiser and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-19 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses premodern theology and postmodern theory to show the endurance of religious and political commitments through the practice of hope.
Download or read book Faith Formation in a Secular Age written by Andrew Root and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Top Ten Book for Parish Ministry in 2017, Academy of Parish Clergy The loss or disaffiliation of young adults is a much-discussed topic in churches today. Many faith-formation programs focus on keeping the young, believing the youthful spirit will save the church. But do these programs have more to do with an obsession with youthfulness than with helping young people encounter the living God? Questioning the search for new or improved faith-formation programs, leading practical theologian Andrew Root offers an alternative take on the issue of youth drifting away from the church and articulates how faith can be formed in our secular age. He offers a theology of faith constructed from a rich cultural conversation, providing a deeper understanding of the phenomena of the "nones" and "moralistic therapeutic deism." Root helps readers understand why forming faith is so hard in our context and shows that what we have lost is not the ability to keep people connected to our churches but an imagination for how and where God could be present in their lives. He considers what faith is and what steps we can take to move into it, exploring a Pauline concept of faith as encounter with divine action. This is the first book in Root's Ministry in a Secular Age series.
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 Identity in a Secular Age written by Fern Elsdon-Baker and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although historians have suggested for some time that we move away from the assumption of a necessary clash between science and religion, the conflict narrative persists in contemporary discourse. But why? And how do we really know what people actually think about evolutionary science, let alone the many and varied ways in which it might relate to individual belief? In this multidisciplinary volume, experts in history and philosophy of science, oral history, sociology of religion, social psychology, and science communication and public engagement look beyond two warring systems of thought. They consider a far more complex, multifaceted, and distinctly more interesting picture of how differing groups along a spectrum of worldviews—including atheistic, agnostic, and faith groups—relate to and form the ongoing narrative of a necessary clash between evolution and faith. By ascribing agency to the public, from the nineteenth century to the present and across Canada and the United Kingdom, this volume offers a much more nuanced analysis of people’s perceptions about the relationship between evolutionary science, religion, and personal belief, one that better elucidates the complexities not only of that relationship but of actual lived experience.
Download or read book War and Religion in the Secular Age written by DAVIS. BROWN and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is religion a factor in initiating interstate armed conflict, and do different religions have different effects? Breaking new ground in political science, this book explores these questions both qualitatively and quantitively, concluding that the answer is yes. Previous studies have focused on conflict within states or interstate aggression with overtly religious motivations; in contrast, Brown shows how religion affects states' propensities to militarize even disputes that are not religious in nature. Different religions are shown to have different influences on those propensities, and those influences are linked to the war ethics inculcated in those religions. The book analyses and classifies war ethics contained in religious scripture and other religious classics, teachings of religions' contemporary epistemic communities, and religions' historical narratives. Using data from the new Religious Characteristics of States dataset project, qualitative studies are combined with empirical measurements of governments' institutional preferences and populations' cultures. This book will provide interesting insights to scholars and researchers in international security studies, political science, international law, sociology, and religious studies.
Download or read book Returning to Religion written by Jonathan Benthall and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2008-10-15 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can one explain the resurgence of religion, even in a western context of rationality and scientific endeavour? Jonathan Benthall explains precisely why societies are not bound to embrace western liberal rationality as an evolutionary inevitability.
Download or read book Religious Freedom in a Secular Age written by Michael F. Bird and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover how to responsibly defend religious freedom for all without compromising your personal beliefs. Religious freedom is a bitterly contested issue that spills over into political, public, and online spheres. It's an issue that's becoming ever more heated, and neither of the global political polarities is interested in protecting it. While the political left is openly hostile toward traditional religion, the political right seeks to weaponize it. How can we ensure that "religious freedom" is truly about freedom of one's religion rather than serving an ethno-nationalist agenda? In Religious Freedom in a Secular Age, Michael Bird (New Testament scholar and author of Evangelical Theology) has four main goals: To explain the true nature of secularism and help us to see it as one of the best ways of promoting liberty and mutual respect in a multifaith world. To dismantle the arguments for limiting religious freedom. To outline a biblical strategy for maintaining a Christian witness in a post-Christian society. To encourage Christians to participate in a new age of apologetics by being prepared to defend not only their own believes but also the freedom of all faiths. While Bird does address the recent political administrations in the US, his focus is global. Bird—who lives in Melbourne, Australia—freely admits to his anxiety of the militant secularism surrounding him, but he also strongly critiques the marriage of national and religious identities that has gained ground in countries like Hungary and Poland. The fact is that religion has a lot to contribute to the common good. Religious Freedom in a Secular Age will challenge readers of all backgrounds and beliefs not only to make room for peaceable difference, but also to find common ground on the values of justice, mercy, and equality.
Download or read book The Pastor in a Secular Age written by Andrew Root and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Academy of Parish Clergy 2020 Top Ten Book for Parish Ministry In Faith Formation in a Secular Age, the first book in his Ministry in a Secular Age trilogy, Andrew Root offered an alternative take on the issue of youth drifting away from the church and articulated how faith can be formed in our secular age. In The Pastor in a Secular Age, Root explores how this secular age has impacted the identity and practice of the pastor, obscuring his or her core vocation: to call and assist others into the experience of ministry. Using examples of pastors throughout history--from Augustine and Jonathan Edwards to Martin Luther King Jr. and Nadia Bolz-Weber--Root shows how pastors have both perpetuated and responded to our secular age. Root turns to Old Testament texts and to the theology of Robert Jenson to explain how pastors can regain the important role of attending to people's experiences of divine action, offering a new vision for pastoral ministry today. This is the second book in Root's Ministry in a Secular Age series.
Download or read book An Awareness of What is Missing written by Jürgen Habermas and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his recent writings on religion and secularization, Habermas has challenged reason to clarify its relation to religious experience and to engage religions in a constructive dialogue. Given the global challenges facing humanity, nothing is more dangerous than the refusal to communicate that we encounter today in different forms of religious and ideological fundamentalism. Habermas argues that in order to engage in this dialogue, two conditions must be met: religion must accept the authority of secular reason as the fallible results of the sciences and the universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality; and conversely, secular reason must not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith. This argument was developed in part as a reaction to the conception of the relation between faith and reason formulated by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 Regensburg address. In 2007 Habermas conducted a debate, under the title ‘An Awareness of What Is Missing', with philosophers from the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich. This volume includes Habermas's essay, the contributions of his interlocutors and Habermas's reply to them. It will be indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand one of the most urgent and intractable issues of our time.
Download or read book Church Faith Future written by Louis John Cameli and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this challenging but hopeful new book, Church, Faith, Future: What We Face, What We Can Do, Father Louis J. Cameli renders a carefully composed portrait of the church in North America today. Drawing on philosophy, history, cultural analysis, and sociology, he offers a sobering picture of where church and faith stand in our society and where they seem to be headed. Identifying several possible ways forward, Fr. Cameli points out the way he sees as the most promising and most faithful to Catholic tradition. In a fascinating afterword to the book, Cardinal Blase Cupich enters into dialogue with Fr. Cameli's thinking, describing how the Archdiocese of Chicago has begun to address the issues and the directions indicated.
Download or read book Modern Social Imaginaries written by Charles Taylor and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVAn accounting of the varying forms of social imaginary that have underpinned the rise of Western modernity./div
