How (Not) to Be Secular

Author: James K. A. Smith
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802867618
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
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.

A Secular Age

Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674986911
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 889

Book Description
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.

How to Be Secular

Author: Jacques Berlinerblau
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547473346
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Book Description
Argues that a return to a more secular America will promote religious diversity and freedom, and help eliminate the widening divide between religious conservatives and staunch atheists.

Secularism & Secularity

Author: Barry Alexander Kosmin
Publisher: ISSSC
ISBN: 0979481600
Category : Secularism
Languages : en
Pages : 165

Book Description

Living the Secular Life

Author: Phil Zuckerman
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0143127934
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
A sociology professor examines the demographic shift that has led more Americans than ever before to embrace a nonreligious life and highlights the inspirational stories and beliefs that empower modern-day secular culture.

Seculosity

Author: David Zahl
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1506449441
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
At the heart of our current moment lies a universal yearning, writes David Zahl, not to be happy or respected so much as enough--what religions call "righteous." To fill the void left by religion, we look to all sorts of everyday activities--from eating and parenting to dating and voting--for the identity, purpose, and meaning once provided on Sunday morning. In our striving, we are chasing a sense of enoughness. But it remains ever out of reach, and the effort and anxiety are burning us out. Seculosity takes a thoughtful yet entertaining tour of American "performancism" and its cousins, highlighting both their ingenuity and mercilessness, all while challenging the conventional narrative of religious decline. Zahl unmasks the competing pieties around which so much of our lives revolve, and he does so in a way that's at points playful, personal, and incisive. Ultimately he brings us to a fresh appreciation for the grace of God in all its countercultural wonder.

On Not Dying

Author: Abou Farman
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452961905
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 443

Book Description
An ethnographic exploration of technoscientific immortality Immortality has long been considered the domain of religion. But immortality projects have gained increasing legitimacy and power in the world of science and technology. With recent rapid advances in biology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, secular immortalists hope for and work toward a future without death. On Not Dying is an anthropological, historical, and philosophical exploration of immortality as a secular and scientific category. Based on an ethnography of immortalist communities—those who believe humans can extend their personal existence indefinitely through technological means—and an examination of other institutions involved at the end of life, Abou Farman argues that secular immortalism is an important site to explore the tensions inherent in secularism: how to accept death but extend life; knowing the future is open but your future is finite; that life has meaning but the universe is meaningless. As secularism denies a soul, an afterlife, and a cosmic purpose, conflicts arise around the relationship of mind and body, individual finitude and the infinity of time and the cosmos, and the purpose of life. Immortalism today, Farman argues, is shaped by these historical and culturally situated tensions. Immortalist projects go beyond extending life, confronting dualism and cosmic alienation by imagining (and producing) informatic selves separate from the biological body but connected to a cosmic unfolding. On Not Dying interrogates the social implications of technoscientific immortalism and raises important political questions. Whose life will be extended? Will these technologies be available to all, or will they reproduce racial and geopolitical hierarchies? As human life on earth is threatened in the Anthropocene, why should life be extended, and what will that prolonged existence look like?

A Secular Age Beyond the West

Author: Mirjam Künkler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110841771X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 441

Book Description
This book compares secularity in societies not shaped by Western Christianity, particularly in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.

How (Not) to Be Secular

Author: James K. A. Smith
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467440612
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 160

How to Be Secular

Author: Jacques Berlinerblau
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547518285
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Book Description
Why secularism isn’t the same thing as atheism—and why it’s crucial for preserving liberty and democracy for all Americans, regardless of their beliefs. Founding father Thomas Jefferson believed that “religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God,” but these days many people seem to have forgotten this ideal. Conservatives claim America is a “Christian nation” and urge that laws be structured around religious convictions. Hardcore atheists, meanwhile, seek to undermine and attack religion at all levels. Surely there must be a middle ground. In How to Be Secular, Jacques Berlinerblau issues a call to the moderates—those who are tired of the belligerence on the fringes—that we return to America’s long tradition of secularism, which seeks to protect both freedom from and for religion. He looks at the roots of secularism and examines how it should be bolstered and strengthened so that Americans of all stripes can live together peacefully. “Jacques Berlinerblau mounts a careful, judicious, and compelling argument that America needs more secularists. . . . The author’s argument merits a wide hearing and will change the way we think and talk about religious freedom.” —Randall Balmer, author of Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts FaithandThreatens America