Download or read book Religion and Secular Categories in Sociology written by Mitsutoshi Horii and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Informed by ‘critical religion’ perspective in Religious Studies and postcolonial self-reflection in Sociology, this book interrogates the ideas of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ in social theory and Sociology. It argues that as long as social theory and sociological discourse embed the religion-secular distinction and locate themselves on the ‘secular’ side of the binary, Sociology will continue to serve the very ideologies it tries to subvert – namely Western modernity/coloniality.
Download or read book Secular Theories on Religion written by Tim Jensen and published by Museum Tusculanum Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of religious studies from Europe and North America explore what a secular, or scientific, study of religion should be like, what methods it should apply, what aims, and what kind of scientific thinking should be pursued. They also consider scholars as public intellectuals operating within and influenced by general societal developments. The 18 essays provide a survey of current thinking in the field. Distributed in the US by ISBS. c. Book News Inc.
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 Life After Faith written by Philip Kitcher and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although there is no shortage of recent books arguing against religion, few offer a positive alternative—how anyone might live a fulfilling life without the support of religious beliefs. This enlightening book fills the gap. Philip Kitcher constructs an original and persuasive secular perspective, one that answers human needs, recognizes the objectivity of values, and provides for the universal desire for meaningfulness. Kitcher thoughtfully and sensitively considers how secularism can respond to the worries and challenges that all people confront, including the issue of mortality. He investigates how secular lives compare with those of people who adopt religious doctrines as literal truth, as well as those who embrace less literalistic versions of religion. Whereas religious belief has been important in past times, Kitcher concludes that evolution away from religion is now essential. He envisions the successors to religious life, when the senses of identity and community traditionally fostered by religion will instead draw on a broader range of cultural items—those provided by poets, filmmakers, musicians, artists, scientists, and others. With clarity and deep insight, Kitcher reveals the power of secular humanism to encourage fulfilling human lives built on ethical truth.
Download or read book Political Secularism Religion and the State written by Jonathan Fox and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-27 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how the competition between religious and secular forces influenced state religion policy between 1990 and 2008. While both sides were active, the religious side had considerably more success. The book examines how states supported religion as well as how they restricted it.
Download or read book Making Sense of God written by Timothy Keller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.
Download or read book Secular Faith written by Mark A. Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Pope Francis recently answered “Who am I to judge?” when asked about homosexuality, he ushered in a new era for the Catholic church. A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for a pope to express tolerance for homosexuality. Yet shifts of this kind are actually common in the history of Christian groups. Within the United States, Christian leaders have regularly revised their teachings to match the beliefs and opinions gaining support among their members and larger society. Mark A. Smith provocatively argues that religion is not nearly the unchanging conservative influence in American politics that we have come to think it is. In fact, in the long run, religion is best understood as responding to changing political and cultural values rather than shaping them. Smith makes his case by charting five contentious issues in America’s history: slavery, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and women’s rights. For each, he shows how the political views of even the most conservative Christians evolved in the same direction as the rest of society—perhaps not as swiftly, but always on the same arc. During periods of cultural transition, Christian leaders do resist prevailing values and behaviors, but those same leaders inevitably acquiesce—often by reinterpreting the Bible—if their positions become no longer tenable. Secular ideas and influences thereby shape the ways Christians read and interpret their scriptures. So powerful are the cultural and societal norms surrounding us that Christians in America today hold more in common morally and politically with their atheist neighbors than with the Christians of earlier centuries. In fact, the strongest predictors of people’s moral beliefs are not their religious commitments or lack thereof but rather when and where they were born. A thoroughly researched and ultimately hopeful book on the prospects for political harmony, Secular Faith demonstrates how, over the long run, boundaries of secular and religious cultures converge.
Download or read book Religion and International Relations Theory written by Jack Snyder and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious concerns stand at the center of international politics, yet key paradigms in international relations, namely realism, liberalism, and constructivism, barely consider religion in their analysis of political subjects. The essays in this collection rectify this. Authored by leading scholars, they introduce models that integrate religion into the study of international politics and connect religion to a rising form of populist politics in the developing world. Contributors identify religion as pervasive and distinctive, forcing a reframing of international relations theory that reinterprets traditional paradigms. One essay draws on both realism and constructivism in the examination of religious discourse and transnational networks. Another positions secularism not as the opposite of religion but as a comparable type of worldview drawing on and competing with religious ideas. With the secular state's perceived failure to address popular needs, religion has become a banner for movements that demand a more responsive government. The contributors to this volume recognize this trend and propose structural and theoretical innovations for future advances in the discipline.
Download or read book Religion and Nationalism in Global Perspective written by J. Christopher Soper and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a new framework for understanding how religion and nationalism interact across diverse countries and religious traditions.
Download or read book Modes of Faith written by Theodore Ziolkowski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades surrounding World War I, religious belief receded in the face of radical new ideas such as Marxism, modern science, Nietzschean philosophy, and critical theology. Modes of Faith addresses both this decline of religious belief and the new modes of secular faith that took religion’s place in the minds of many writers and poets. Theodore Ziolkowski here examines the motives for this embrace of the secular, locating new modes of faith in art, escapist travel, socialism, politicized myth, and utopian visions. James Joyce, he reveals, turned to art as an escape while Hermann Hesse made a pilgrimage to India in search of enlightenment. Other writers, such as Roger Martin du Gard and Thomas Mann, sought temporary solace in communism or myth. And H. G. Wells, Ziolkowski argues, took refuge in utopian dreams projected in another dimension altogether. Rooted in innovative and careful comparative reading of the work of writers from France, England, Germany, Italy, and Russia, Modes of Faith is a critical masterpiece by a distinguished literary scholar that offers an abundance of insight to anyone interested in the human compulsion to believe in forces that transcend the individual.
Download or read book Sacred and Secular written by Pippa Norris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-17 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a theory of existential security. It demonstrates that the publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward more secular orientations during the past half century, but also that the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before. This second edition expands the theory and provides new and updated evidence from a broad perspective and in a wide range of countries. This confirms that religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially in poorer nations and in failed states. Conversely, a systematic erosion of religious practices, values and beliefs has occurred among the more prosperous strata in rich nations.
Download or read book Religion Christian Faith and Secular World written by LIT Verlag and published by LIT Verlag. This book was released on 2019-01-07 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What has been the role and understanding of religion in the last hundred years, and what can be the meaning of religion today? There is a well-known ongoing process of secularization in the Western world. Is there also a return of religion? And what does the fate of religion mean for an understanding of the Christian faith? These are topics of this book. The articles originate from the actual fields of research of an interdisciplinary group of scholars, who took part in a symposium held in Bergen Nov. 2019. The contributions relate to specific contexts in the modern history of religion from the perspective of religious studies, theology, philosophy and sociology. The editors are Hans Bringeland, Assoc. Prof., and Arve Brunvoll, Prof. emer., both teachers of theology and philosophy at NLA University College, Bergen, Norway.
Download or read book Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion written by Ahmet T. Kuru and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-27 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparing policy in America, France, and Turkey, this book analyzes the impact of ideological struggles on public policies toward religion.
Download or read book On the Theories of Secularism and Modernization written by A. K. Saran and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Moral Development Theories Secular and Religious written by R. Murray Thomas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1997-03-25 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral Development Theories—Secular and Religious introduces readers to 13 secular models and 13d religious theories in a wide-ranging comparative study of the roots of moral development. The secular models include attribution theory, cognitive-structural views, social-learning and social-cognition approaches, Freud's psychoanalysis (plus Erikson and Fromm), Marxist beliefs, a composite theory, Hoffman's conception of empathy, Anderson's information-integration view, Gilligan's gender distinction, Sutherland and Cressey's explanation of delinquency, and Lovinger on ego development. Religious theories represent the Judaic-Christian-Islamic line, Hinduism and derivatives (Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism), Confucianism, Shinto, and four minor theories drawn from the belief systems of the Navajo, Zulus, Vodou adherents, and Okinawans. The description of each theory is designed to answer a common set of questions introduced in Chapter 1. The closing section of each chapter evaluates that chapter's theories in terms of a series of assessment standards described in Chapter 2. The book's final chapter inspects all of the theories from the viewpoint of five desires that people often hold in relation to their conceptions of moral development. The desires are: (a) for immanent justice; (b) to understand the causes of the consequences that result from people's behavior in moral situations; (c) to become immortal; (d) to enjoy a happy life, and (e) to understand the moral-development process in order to help others who need moral guidance.
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 Deep History Secular Theory written by Luther Martin and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-05-21 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of his career, Luther H. Martin has primarily produced articles rather than monographs. This approach to publication has given him the opportunity to experiment with different methodological approaches to an academic study of religion, with updates to and different interpretations of his field of historical specialization, namely Hellenistic religions, the subject of his only monograph (1987). The contents of this collected volume represent Martin's shift from comparative studies, to socio-political studies, to scientific studies of religion, and especially to the cognitive science of religion. He currently considers the latter to be the most viable approach for a scientific study of religion within the academic context of a modern research university. The twenty-five contributions collected in this volume are selected from over one hundred essays, articles, and book chapters published over a long and industrious career and are representative of Martin's work over the past two decades.
