After Secularism

Download or read book After Secularism written by E. Wilson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-11-22 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having destabilized dominant assumptions about the nature of religion, there is now a need to develop new ways of thinking about this ever-present phenomenon in global politics. This book outlines a new approach to understanding religion and its relationship with politics in the West and globally for International Relations.

Download or read book After Secular Law written by Winnifred Sullivan and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-29 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together scholars with a variety of perspectives and orientations, this work examines the interconnections between law and religion and the unexpected histories and anthropologies of legal secularism in a globalizing modernity.

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 Encountering Religion written by Tyler T. Roberts and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tyler Roberts encourages scholars to abandon rigid conceptual oppositions between "secular" and "religious" to better understand how human beings actively and thoughtfully engage with their worlds and make meaning. The artificial distinction between a self-conscious and critical "academic study of religion" and an ideological and authoritarian "religion," he argues, only obscures the phenomenon. Instead, Roberts calls on intellectuals to approach the field as a site of "encounter" and "response," illuminating the agency, creativity, and critical awareness of religious actors. To respond to religion is to ask what religious behaviors and representations mean to us in our individual worlds, and scholars must confront questions of possibility and becoming that arise from testing their beliefs, imperatives, and practices. Roberts refers to the work of Hent de Vries, Eric Santner, and Stanley Cavell, each of whom exemplifies encounter and response in their writings as they traverse philosophy and religion to expose secular thinking to religious thought and practice. This approach highlights the resources religious discourse can offer to a fundamental reorientation of critical thought. In humanistic criticism after secularism, the lines separating the creative, the pious, and the critical themselves become the subject of question and experimentation.

Download or read book After the Postsecular and the Postmodern written by Anthony Paul Smith and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Continental philosophy of religion has been dominated for two decades by 'postsecular' and 'postmodern' thought. This title questions what comes after the postsecular and the postmodern. It argues that philosophy of religion must either liberate itself from theological norms or mutate into a different practice of thinking.

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 Secularism in Antebellum America written by John Lardas Modern and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-11-11 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.