Religious Difference in a Secular Age

Author: Saba Mahmood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691153280
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
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.

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.

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.

Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age

Author: Michael Warner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674072413
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Book Description
ÒWhat does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?Ó This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex A Secular Age, where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a defining feature of the modern world, not the mere absence of religion, and casts light on the experience of transcendence that scientistic explanations of the world tend to neglect. In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a prominent and varied group of scholars chart the conversations in which A Secular Age intervenes and address wider questions of secularism and secularity. The distinguished contributors include Robert Bellah, Jos Casanova, Nilfer Gle, William E. Connolly, Wendy Brown, Simon During, Colin Jager, Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan, Akeel Bilgrami, John Milbank, and Saba Mahmood. Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age succeeds in conveying to readers the complexity of secularism while serving as an invaluable guide to a landmark book.

A Secular Age

Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674026764
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year A Tablet Best Book of the Year Winner of a Christianity Today Book Award “One finds big nuggets of insight, useful to almost anybody with an interest in the progress of human society.” —The Economist “Taylor takes on the broad phenomenon of secularization in its full complexity...[A] voluminous, impressively researched and often fascinating social and intellectual history.” —Jack Miles, Los Angeles Times “A Secular Age is a work of stupendous breadth and erudition.” —John Patrick Diggins, New York Times Book Review “A culminating dispatch from the philosophical frontlines. It is at once encyclopedic and incisive, a sweeping overview that is no less analytically rigorous for its breadth.” —Steven Hayward, Cleveland Plain Dealer “[A] thumping great volume.” —Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian “Very occasionally there appears a book destined to endure. A Secular Age is such a book.” —Edward Skidelsky, Daily Telegraph “It is refreshing to read an inquiry into the condition of religion that is exploratory in its approach.” —John Gray, Harper’s “A Secular Age represents a singular achievement.” —Christopher J. Insole, Times Literary Supplement “A determinedly brilliant new book.” —London Review of Books

Hope in a Secular Age

Author: David Newheiser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108498663
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Book Description
Uses premodern theology and postmodern theory to show the endurance of religious and political commitments through the practice of hope.

Becoming Religious in a Secular Age

Author: Mark Elmore
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520964640
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
Religion is often viewed as a universally ancient element of the human inheritance, but in the Western Himalayas the community of Himachal Pradesh discovered its religion only after India became an independent secular state. Based on extensive ethnographic and archival work, Becoming Religious in a Secular Age tells the story of this discovery and how it transformed a community’s relations to its past and to its members, as well as to those outside the community. And, as Mark Elmore demonstrates, Himachali religion offers a unique opportunity to reimagine relations between religion and secularity. Elmore shows that modern secularity is not so much the eradication of religion as the very condition for its development. Showing us that to become a modern, ethical subject is to become religious, this book creatively augments our understanding of both religion and modernity.

Identity in a Secular Age

Author: Fern Elsdon-Baker
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822987694
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Book Description
Although historians have suggested for some time that we move away from the assumption of a necessary clash between science and religion, the conflict narrative persists in contemporary discourse. But why? And how do we really know what people actually think about evolutionary science, let alone the many and varied ways in which it might relate to individual belief? In this multidisciplinary volume, experts in history and philosophy of science, oral history, sociology of religion, social psychology, and science communication and public engagement look beyond two warring systems of thought. They consider a far more complex, multifaceted, and distinctly more interesting picture of how differing groups along a spectrum of worldviews—including atheistic, agnostic, and faith groups—relate to and form the ongoing narrative of a necessary clash between evolution and faith. By ascribing agency to the public, from the nineteenth century to the present and across Canada and the United Kingdom, this volume offers a much more nuanced analysis of people’s perceptions about the relationship between evolutionary science, religion, and personal belief, one that better elucidates the complexities not only of that relationship but of actual lived experience.

Religious Difference in a Secular Age

Author: Saba Mahmood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400873533
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Faith Formation in a Secular Age

Author: Andrew Root
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 9780801098468
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A Top Ten Book for Parish Ministry in 2017, Academy of Parish Clergy The loss or disaffiliation of young adults is a much-discussed topic in churches today. Many faith-formation programs focus on keeping the young, believing the youthful spirit will save the church. But do these programs have more to do with an obsession with youthfulness than with helping young people encounter the living God? Questioning the search for new or improved faith-formation programs, leading practical theologian Andrew Root offers an alternative take on the issue of youth drifting away from the church and articulates how faith can be formed in our secular age. He offers a theology of faith constructed from a rich cultural conversation, providing a deeper understanding of the phenomena of the "nones" and "moralistic therapeutic deism." Root helps readers understand why forming faith is so hard in our context and shows that what we have lost is not the ability to keep people connected to our churches but an imagination for how and where God could be present in their lives. He considers what faith is and what steps we can take to move into it, exploring a Pauline concept of faith as encounter with divine action. This is the first book in Root's Ministry in a Secular Age series.