Download or read book Augustine and the Limits of Politics written by Jean Bethke Elshtain and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now with a new foreword by Patrick J. Deneen. Jean Bethke Elshtain brings Augustine's thought into the contemporary political arena and presents an Augustine who created a complex moral map that offers space for loyalty, love, and care, as well as a chastened form of civic virtue. The result is a controversial book about one of the world's greatest and most complex thinkers whose thought continues to haunt all of Western political philosophy. What is our business "within this common mortal life?" Augustine asks and bids us to ask ourselves. What can Augustine possibly have to say about the conditions that characterize our contemporary society and appear to put democracy in crisis? Who is Augustine for us now and what do his words have to do with political theory? These are the underlying questions that animate Jean Bethke Elshtain's fascinating engagement with the thought and work of Augustine, the ancient thinker who gave no political theory per se and refused to offer up a positive utopia. In exploring the questions, Why Augustine, why now? Elshtain argues that Augustine's great works display a canny and scrupulous attunement to the here and now and the very real limits therein. She discusses other aspects of Augustine's thought as well, including his insistence that no human city can be modeled on the heavenly city, and further elaborates on Hannah Arendt's deep indebtedness to Augustine's understanding of evil. Elshtain also presents Augustine's arguments against the pridefulness of philosophy, thereby linking him to later currents in modern thought, including Wittgenstein and Freud.
Download or read book The Secular Paradox written by Joseph Blankholm and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radically new way of understanding secularism which explains why being secular can seem so strangely religious For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals. In The Secular Paradox, Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, they feel they have lost too much. Trying to strike the right balance, secular people alternate between the two sides of their ambiguous condition: absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition. Blankholm relies heavily on the voices of women and people of color to understand what it means to live with the secular paradox. The struggles of secular misfits—the people who mis-fit normative secularism in the United States—show that becoming secular means rejecting parts of life that resemble Christianity and embracing a European tradition that emphasizes reason and avoids emotion. Women, people of color, and secular people who have left non-Christian religions work against the limits and contradictions of secularism to create new ways of being secular that are transforming the American religious landscape. They are pioneering the most interesting and important forms of secular “religiosity” in America today.
Download or read book Limits of the Secular written by Kaustuv Roy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-09 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book facilitates a missing dialogue between the secular and the transsecular dimensions of human existence. It explores two kinds of limits of the secular: the inadequacies of its assumptions with respect to the total being of the human, and how it curbs the ontological sensibilities of the human. Kaustuv Roy argues that since secular reason of modernity can only represent the empirical dimension of existence, humans are forced to privatize the non-empirical dimension of being. It is therefore absent from the social, imaginary, as well as public discourse. This one-sidedness is the root cause of many of the ills facing modernity. Roy contends that a bridge-consciousness that praxeologically relates the secular and the non-secular domains of experience is the need of the hour.
Download or read book At the Limits of the Secular written by William A. Barbieri and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-12 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents an integrated collection of constructive essays by eminent Catholic scholars addressing the new challenges and opportunities facing religious believers under shifting conditions of secularity and "post-secularity." Using an innovative "keywords" approach, At the Limits of the Secular is an interdisciplinary effort to think through the implications of secular consciousness for the role of religion in public affairs. The book responds in some ways to Charles Taylor's magnum opus, A Secular Age, although it also stands on its own. It features an original essay by David Tracy -- the most prominent American Catholic theologian writing today -- and groundbreaking contributions by influential younger theologians such as Peter Casarella, William Cavanaugh, and Vincent Miller. CONTRIBUTORS William A. Barbieri Jr. Peter Casarella William T. Cavanaugh Michele Dillon Mary Doak Anthony J. Godzieba Slavica Jakelic J. Paul Martin Vincent J. Miller Philip J. Rossi Robert J. Schreiter David Tracy
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 Europe s Encounter with Islam written by Luca Mavelli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last few years, the Muslim presence in Europe has been increasingly perceived as ‘problematic’. Events such as the French ban on headscarves in public schools, the publication of the so-called ‘Danish cartoons’, and the speech of Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg have hit the front pages of newspapers the world over, and prompted a number of scholarly debates on Muslims’ capacity to comply with the seemingly neutral and pluralistic rules of European secularity. Luca Mavelli argues that this perspective has prevented an in-depth reflection on the limits of Europe’s secular tradition and its role in Europe’s conflictual encounter with Islam. Through an original reading of Michel Foucault’s spiritual notion of knowledge and an engagement with key thinkers, from Thomas Aquinas to Jurgën Habermas, Mavelli articulates a contending genealogy of European secularity. While not denying the latter’s achievements in terms of pluralism and autonomy, he suggests that Europe’s secular tradition has also contributed to forms of isolation, which translate into Europe’s incapacity to perceive its encounter with Islam as an opportunity rather than a threat. Drawing on this theoretical perspective, Mavelli offers a contending account of some of the most important recent controversies surrounding Islam in Europe and investigates the ‘postsecular’ as a normative model to engage with the tensions at the heart of European secularity. Finally, he advances the possibility of a Europe willing to reconsider its established secular narratives which may identify in the encounter with Islam an opportunity to flourish and cultivate its democratic qualities and postnational commitments. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of religion and international relations, social and political theory, and Islam in Europe.
Download or read book Europe India and the Limits of Secularism written by Jakob de Roover and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even though the crisis of secularism was declared decades ago, it remains unresolved. This book argues that its roots are internal to the liberal model of secularism, which emerged from the religious dynamics of the Protestant Reformation. In Europe and India, this model has gone hand in hand with an intolerant anticlerical theology that rejects certain traditions as evil political religion. Consequently, liberal secularism often harms local forms of coexistence rather than nourishing them.
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 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 Middle Way Philosophy written by Robert M. Ellis and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2015-07-06 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A departure at right angles to thinking in the modern Western world. An important, original work, that should get the widest possible hearing" (Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and his Emissary) Middle Way Philosophy is not about compromise, but about the avoidance of dogma and the integration of conflicting assumptions. To rely on experience as our guide, we need to avoid the interpretation of experience through unnecessary dogmas. Drawing on a range of influences in Buddhist practice, Western philosophy and psychology, Middle Way Philosophy questions alike the assumptions of scientific naturalism, religious revelation and political absolutism, trying to separate what addresses experience in these doctrines from what is merely assumed. This Omnibus edition of Middle Way Philosophy includes all four of the volumes previously published separately: 1. The Path of Objectivity, 2. The Integration of Desire, 3. The Integration of Meaning, and 4. The Integration of Belief.
Download or read book God and the Secular Legal System written by Rafael Domingo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-29 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a timely contribution to the debate on the rights and liberties of religion, beliefs, and conscience in an age of secularization.
Download or read book The Limits of Tolerance written by C.S. Adcock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a critical history of the distinctive tradition of Indian secularism known as Tolerance. Examining debates surrounding the activities of the Arya Samaj - a Hindu reform organization regarded as the exemplar of intolerance - it finds that Tolerance functioned to disengage Indian secularism from the politics of caste.
Download or read book Europe India and the Limits of Secularism written by Jakob de Roover and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even though the crisis of secularism was declared decades ago, it remains unresolved. This book argues that its roots are internal to the liberal model of secularism, which emerged from the religious dynamics of the Protestant Reformation. In Europe and India, this model has gone hand in hand with an intolerant anticlerical theology that rejects certain traditions as evil political religion. Consequently, liberal secularism often harms local forms of coexistence rather than nourishing them.
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 Politics of Secularism written by Murat Akan and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discussions of modernity—or alternative and multiple modernities—often hinge on the question of secularism, especially how it travels outside its original European context. Too often, attempts to answer this question either imagine a universal model derived from the history of Western Europe, which neglects the experience of much of the world, or emphasize a local, non-European context that limits the potential for comparison. In The Politics of Secularism, Murat Akan reframes the question of secularism, exploring its presence both outside and inside Europe and offering a rich empirical account of how it moves across borders and through time. Akan uses France and Turkey to analyze political actors' comparative discussions of secularism, struggles for power, and historical contextual constraints at potential moments of institutional change. France and Turkey are critical sites of secularism: France exemplifies European political modernity, and Turkey has long been the model of secularism in a Muslim-majority country. Akan analyzes prominent debates in both countries on topics such as the visibility of the headscarf and other religious symbols, religion courses in the public school curriculum, and state salaries for clerics and imams. Akan lays out the institutional struggles between three distinct political currents—anti-clericalism, liberalism, and what he terms state-civil religionism—detailing the nuances of how political movements articulate the boundary between the secular and the religious. Disputing the prevalent idea that diversity is a new challenge to secularism and focusing on comparison itself as part of the politics of secularism, this book makes a major contribution to understanding secular politics and its limits.
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 Limits written by Kevin Flegler and published by . This book was released on 2014-06-24 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does the Bible really reveal the role government should have in society? In Limits: A Biblical and Secular Argument for Limited Government, author Kevin Flegler takes the reader on an examination of God's purpose for government and how that purpose fits into God's design for an ordered, ethical, moral, and prosperous society. Using both the Bible and empirical evidence from secular history, Kevin demonstrates that limited government continues the liberation and freedom of mankind and unleashes the tremendous potential of the individual. Limits is a powerful and thought-provoking journey into an understanding of the root of the problems facing society, and a clear picture of the solution.
