This book is a smart, intelligent guide to navigating today's culture. 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 mi…
"Owen is generous, rational and balanced ... [H]e is astute enough to understand the vast real-world differences that block the resolution of conflict."--Publishers Weekly.
by Calhoun, Craig J., Juergensmeyer, Mark, VanAntwerpen, Jonathan
"This collection of essays presents groundbreaking work from an interdisciplinary group of leading theorists and scholars representing the fields of history, philosophy, political science, sociology, and anthropology. The volume will introduce readers to some of the most compell…
The enigmatic relation between religion and science still presents a challenge to European societies and to ideas about what it means to be 'modern.' This book argues that secularism, rather than pushing back religious truth claims, in fact has been religiously productive itself…
Hilal Elver offers an in-depth study of the escalating controversy over the right of Muslim women to wear headscarves. Examining legal and political debates in Turkey, several European countries including France and Germany, and the United States, Elver shows the troubling exclu…
Hilal Elver offers an in-depth study of the escalating controversy over the right of Muslim women to wear headscarves. Examining legal and political debates in Turkey, several European countries including France and Germany, and the United States, Elver shows the troubling exclu…
"The Modern Spirit of Asia challenges the notion that modernity in China and India are derivative imitations of the West, arguing that these societies have transformed their ancient traditions in unique and distinctive ways. Peter van der Veer begins with nineteenth-century impe…
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 fundemental questions about the relati…
This book provides an account and explanation of a fundamental dilemma facing secular states: the "legitimacy gap" left by the withdrawal of religion as a source of legitimacy. Legitimacy represents a particular problem for the secular state. The "secular" in all its manifestati…
Early modern Europe was the birthplace of the modern secular outlook. During the seventeenth century nature and human society came to be regarded in purely naturalistic, empirical ways, and religion was made an object of critical historical study. John Locke was a central figure…
From the publisher. Can secularism offer us moral, aesthetic, and spiritual satisfaction? Or does the secular view simply affirm a dog-eat-dog universe? At a time when the issues of religion, evolution, atheism, fundamentalism, Darwin, and science fill headlines and invoke contr…
Prominent observers complain that public discourse in America is shallow and unedifying -- This debased conditions often attributed to, among other things, the resurgence of religion in public life. Steven D. Smith argues that this diagnosis has the matter backwards: it is not p…
Prominent observers complain that public discourse in America is shallow and unedifying -- This debased conditions often attributed to, among other things, the resurgence of religion in public life. Steven D. Smith argues that this diagnosis has the matter backwards: it is not p…
"Ananda Abeysekara contends that democracy, along with its cherished secular norms, is founded on the idea of a promise deferred to the future. Rooted in democracy's messianic promise is the belief that religious - political identity-such as Buddhist, Hindu, Sinhalese, Christian…
by Yelle, Robert A., Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers, Taussig-Rubbo, Mateo
Recent scholarship has called into question the simplistic narrative of a separation between law and religion and blurred the boundaries between these two categories, enabling new accounts of their relation that do not necessarily either collapse them together or return law to a…
Recent scholarship has called into question the simplistic narrative of a separation between law and religion and blurred the boundaries between these two categories, enabling new accounts of their relation that do not necessarily either collapse them together or return law to a…
