Download or read book Contesting Secularism written by Dr Anders Berg-Sørensen and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As we enter the twenty-first century, the role of religion within civic society has become an issue of central concern across the world. The complex trends of secularism, multiculturalism and the rise of religiously motivated violence raise fundamental questions about the relationship between political institutions, civic culture and religious groups. Contesting Secularism represents a major intervention into this debate. Drawing together contributions from leading scholars from across the world it analyses how secularism functions as a political doctrine in different national contexts put under pressure by globalisation. In doing so it presents different models for the relationship between political institutions and religious groups, challenging the reader to be more aware of assumptions within their own cultural context, and raises alternative possibilities for the structure of democratic, multi-faith societies. Through its inter-disciplinary and comparative approach, Contesting Secularism sets a new agenda for thinking about the place of religion in the public sphere of twenty-first century societies. It is essential reading for policymakers, as well as for scholars and students in political science, law, sociology and religious studies.
Download or read book Contesting Secularism written by Anders Berg-Sorensen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As we enter the twenty-first century, the role of religion within civic society has become an issue of central concern across the world. The complex trends of secularism, multiculturalism and the rise of religiously motivated violence raise fundamental questions about the relationship between political institutions, civic culture and religious groups. Contesting Secularism represents a major intervention into this debate. Drawing together contributions from leading scholars from across the world it analyses how secularism functions as a political doctrine in different national contexts put under pressure by globalisation. In doing so it presents different models for the relationship between political institutions and religious groups, challenging the reader to be more aware of assumptions within their own cultural context, and raises alternative possibilities for the structure of democratic, multi-faith societies. Through its inter-disciplinary and comparative approach, Contesting Secularism sets a new agenda for thinking about the place of religion in the public sphere of twenty-first century societies. It is essential reading for policymakers, as well as for scholars and students in political science, law, sociology and religious studies.
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 Contesting Modernity in the German Secularization Debate written by Sjoerd Griffioen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-01-10 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sjoerd Griffioen investigates the polemics between Löwith, Blumenberg and Schmitt in the German secularization debate (1950’s-1980’s). ‘Secularization’ is revealed as a contested concept in ideological struggles over modernity and religion, both in this debate and contemporary postsecularism.
Download or read book Science under Siege written by Dick Houtman and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-12 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identifying scientism as religion’s secular counterpart, this collection studies contemporary contestations of the authority of science. These controversies suggest that what we are witnessing today is not an increase in the authority of science at the cost of religion, but a dual decline in the authorities of religion and science alike. This entails an erosion of the legitimacy of universally binding truth claims, be they religiously or scientifically informed. Approaching the issue from a cultural-sociological perspective and building on theories from the sociology of religion, the volume unearths the cultural mechanisms that account for the headwind faced by contemporary science. The empirical contributions highlight how the field of academic science has lost much of its former authority vis-à-vis competing social realms; how political and religious worldviews define particular research findings as favorites while dismissing others; and how much of today’s distrust of science is directed against scientific institutions and academic scientists rather than against science per se.
Download or read book Muslim Societies and the Challenge of Secularization An Interdisciplinary Approach written by Gabriele Marranci and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-09-08 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars from various disciplines worked together to present the first interdisciplinary book to address the issue of Islam, secularism and globalization. The book has a clear structure which represents its interdisciplinary approach: the first section addresses the philosophical and historical discussion about Islam and secularism; the second section discusses the topic from an ethnographical and social anthropological viewpoint; and the final section addresses Islam, secularism and globalization from a political viewpoint. This unique collection not only offers innovative research and new material, it also provides empirical examples and theoretical debates, and could therefore also be used as a textbook for courses on Islam, globalization, anthropology, politics, sociology and law.
Download or read book Women and Religion in the West written by Dr Giselle Vincett and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship between women and secularization? In the West, women are abandoning traditional religion. Yet they continue to make up the majority of religious adherents. Accounting for this seeming paradox is the focus of this volume. If women undergird the foundations of religion but are leaving in large numbers, why are they leaving? Where are they going? What are they doing? And what's happening to those who remain? Women and Religion in the West addresses a neglected yet crucial issue within the debate on religious belonging and departure: the role of women in and out of religion and spirituality. Beginning with an analysis of the relationship between gender and secularization, the book moves its focus to in-depth examination of women's experiences based on data from key recent qualitative work on women and religion. This volume addresses not only women's place in and out of Christianity (the normal focus of secularization theories) but also alternative spiritualities and Islam, asking how questions of secularization differ between faith systems. This book offers students and scholars of religion, sociology, and women's studies, as well as interested general readers, an accessible work on the religiosity of western women and contributes fresh analyses of the rapidly shifting terrain of contemporary religion and spirituality.
Download or read book Muslim Women s Rights written by Tabassum Fahim Ruby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-13 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the post-9/11 environment, the figure of the Muslim woman is at the forefront of global politics. Her representation is often articulated within a rights discourse owing much to liberal-secular sensibilities—notions of freedom, equality, rational thinking, individualism, and modernization. Muslim Women’s Rights explores how these liberal-secular sensibilities inform, shape, and foreclose public discussion on questions of Islam and gender. The book draws on postcolonial, antiracist, and transnational feminist studies in order to analyze public and legal debates surrounding proposed shari‘ah tribunals in Canada. It examines the cultural and epistemological suppositions underlying common assumptions about Islamic laws; explores how these assumptions are informed by the Western progress narrative and women’s rights debates; and asks what forms of politics these enable and foreclose. The book assesses the influence of secularism on the ontology, epistemology, and ethics afforded to Islam in the West, and begins to trace possibilities by which Islamic family law might be productively addressed on its own terms. Muslim Women’s Rights is a significant contribution to the fields of both Islam and gender and the critical study of secularism.
Download or read book Contesting Sacrifice written by Ivan Strenski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-07 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the counter-reformation through the twentieth century, the notion of sacrifice has played a key role in French culture and nationalist politics. Ivan Strenski traces the history of sacrificial thought in France, starting from its origins in Roman Catholic theology. Throughout, he highlights not just the dominant discourse on sacrifice but also the many competing conceptions that contested it. Strenski suggests that the annihilating spirituality rooted in the Catholic model of Eucharistic sacrifice persuaded the judges in the Dreyfus Case to overlook or play down his possible innocence because a scapegoat was needed to expiate the sins of France and save its army from disgrace. Strenski also suggests that the French army's strategy in World War I, French fascism, and debates over public education and civic morals during the Third Republic all owe much to Catholic theology of sacrifice and Protestant reinterpretations of it. Pointing out that every major theorist of sacrifice is French, including Bataille, Durkheim, Girard, Hubert, and Mauss, Strenski argues that we cannot fully understand their work without first taking into account the deep roots of sacrificial thought in French history.
Download or read book The Politics of Secularism in International Relations written by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conflicts involving religion have returned to the forefront of international relations. And yet political scientists and policymakers have continued to assume that religion has long been privatized in the West. This secularist assumption ignores the contestation surrounding the category of the "secular" in international politics. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations shows why this thinking is flawed, and provides a powerful alternative. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd argues that secularist divisions between religion and politics are not fixed, as commonly assumed, but socially and historically constructed. Examining the philosophical and historical legacy of the secularist traditions that shape European and American approaches to global politics, she shows why this matters for contemporary international relations, and in particular for two critical relationships: the United States and Iran, and the European Union and Turkey. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations develops a new approach to religion and international relations that challenges realist, liberal, and constructivist assumptions that religion has been excluded from politics in the West. The first book to consider secularism as a form of political authority in its own right, it describes two forms of secularism and their far-reaching global consequences.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Secularism written by Phil Zuckerman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As recent headlines reveal, conflicts and debates around the world increasingly involve secularism. National borders and traditional religions cannot keep people in tidy boxes as political struggles, doctrinal divergences, and demographic trends are sweeping across regions and entire continents. And secularity is increasing in society, with a growing number of people in many regions having no religious affiliation or lacking interest in religion. Simultaneously, there is a resurgence of religious participation in the politics of many countries. How might these diverse phenomena be better understood? Long-reigning theories about the pace of secularization and ideal church-state relations are under invigorated scrutiny by scholars studying secularism with new questions, better data, and fresh perspectives. The Oxford Handbook of Secularism offers a wide-ranging and in-depth examination of this global conversation, bringing together the views of an international collection of prominent experts in their respective fields. This is the essential volume for comprehending the core issues and methodological approaches to the demographics and sociology of secularity; the history and variety of political secularisms; the comparison of constitutional secularisms across many countries from America to Asia; the key problems now convulsing church-state relations; the intersections of liberalism, multiculturalism, and religion; the latest psychological research into secular lives and lifestyles; and the naturalistic and humanistic worldviews available to nonreligious people.
Download or read book Imagining Judeo Christian America written by K. Healan Gaston and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-13 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Judeo-Christian” is a remarkably easy term to look right through. Judaism and Christianity obviously share tenets, texts, and beliefs that have strongly influenced American democracy. In this ambitious book, however, K. Healan Gaston challenges the myth of a monolithic Judeo-Christian America. She demonstrates that the idea is not only a recent and deliberate construct, but also a potentially dangerous one. From the time of its widespread adoption in the 1930s, the ostensible inclusiveness of Judeo-Christian terminology concealed efforts to promote particular conceptions of religion, secularism, and politics. Gaston also shows that this new language, originally rooted in arguments over the nature of democracy that intensified in the early Cold War years, later became a marker in the culture wars that continue today. She argues that the debate on what constituted Judeo-Christian—and American—identity has shaped the country’s religious and political culture much more extensively than previously recognized.
Download or read book Questioning Secularism written by Hussein Ali Agrama and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-11-02 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What, exactly, is secularism? What has the West's long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In this work, Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart.
Download or read book The Refugee Crisis and Religion written by Luca Mavelli and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The current refugee crisis sweeping Europe, and much of the world, closely intersects with largely neglected questions of religion. Moving beyond discussions of religious differences, what can we learn about the interaction between religion and migration? Do faith-based organisations play a role within the refugee regime? How do religious traditions and perspectives challenge and inform current practices and policies towards refugees? This volume gathers together expertise from academics and practitioners, as well as migrant voices, in order to investigate these interconnections. It shows that reconsidering our understanding and approaches to both could generate creative alternative responses to the growing global migration crisis. Beginning with a discussion of the secular/religious divide - and how it shapes dominant policy practices and counter approaches to displacement and migration - the book then goes on to explore and deconstruct the dominant discourse of the Muslim refugee as a threat to the secular/Christian West. The discussion continues with an exploration of Christian and Islamic traditions of hospitality, showing how they challenge current practices of securitization of migration, and concludes with an investigation of the largely unexplored relation between gender, religion and migration. Bringing together leading and emerging voices from across academia and practice, in the fields of International Relations, migration studies, philosophy, religious studies and gender studies, this volume offers a unique take on one of the most pressing global problems of our time.
Download or read book Pluralistic Struggles in Gender Sexuality and Coloniality written by Erika Alm and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book seeks to understand how politics is being made in a pluralistic sense, and explores how these political struggles are challenging and transforming gender, sexuality, and colonial norms. As researchers located in Sweden, a nation often cited as one of the most gender-equal and LGBTQ-tolerant nations, the contributions investigate political processes, decolonial struggles, and events beyond, nearby, and in between organizations, states, and national territories. The collection represents a variety of disciplines, and different theoretical conceptualizations of politics, feminist theory, and postcolonial and queer studies. Students and researchers with an interest of queer studies, gender studies, critical whiteness studies, and civil society studies will find this book an invaluable resource.
Download or read book Contesting Nationalisms Hinduism Secularism and Untouchability in Colonial Punjab 1880 1930 written by Vikas Pathak and published by Ratna Sagar. This book was released on 2018-02-26 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indian nationalism has been a contested space over the last century. Claims and counter-claims have been advanced regarding its nature for long now. This book argues that there are multiple visions of Indian nationalism, each seeking hegemony over national discourse, and that divergences regarding the cultural-ideological contours of the idea of India are central to the contest over what Indian nationalism means. Contesting Nationalisms identifies four strands: composite culture nationalism; religious nationalism; a secular, citizen-centric nationalism, and a vision of 'Dalit nationalism' seeking to reorder the public sphere in its own fashion. It traces these visions, which emerged in colonial India, through an exploration of the ideas of key ideologues in colonial Punjab. The analysis also has implications for our understanding of communalism, which has been seen as intertwined with nationalism in India for more than a century now.
Download or read book Religious Freedom written by Tisa Wenger and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse--Wenger calls it "religious freedom talk--that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire. More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life. In so doing they posed sharp challenges to the racial and religious exclusions of American life. People of almost every religious stripe have argued, debated, negotiated, and brought into being an ideal called American religious freedom, subtly transforming their own identities and traditions in the process. In a post-9/11 world, Wenger reflects, public attention to religious freedom and its implications is as consequential as it has ever been.
