In the French Revolution, revolutionary legislators faced the problem of how to relate to the Catholic Church, to which the vast majority of citizens belonged. Inheriting theological, legal, and Enlightenment philosophical categories for thinking about religion and the Church, t…
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The rise of religious politics throughout the world has called into question the assumption that political secularization would inevitably occur with modernization, and has created the impression that this political challenge represents a dichotomous conflict between the religio…
Using survey data and a multi-level time-lagged linear regression, we show that cultural values are primal in the human development sequence. The spread of advantageous cultural values - like respect for individual rights - predicts future economic development and democracy. The…
The dissertation looks at the enduring nature of religious nationalism in certain European states in spite of the broader trend towards secular identity. Through a combination of in-depth case studies (Ireland, England, Poland, Greece) and cross-case analysis, I argue that relig…
In this research, I explore the relationship between religion and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. My goal is to find out in what ways belonging to a particular denomination and participation in church related activities influence societal support for democracy. Favorabl…
Westphalian secularism is neither universal nor 'rational' but Western, the product of a historical process, and it is unintended, cumulative, and incomplete. The recollection of its contingency, specificity and features is an essential prerequisite to overcoming the consistent …
It is very common to defend laiklik by invoking laïtcité. This dissertation puts the constitutions of laiklik and laïcité in their respective historical contexts, in order to locate the reasons behind the changes in the meanings of the concepts and behind the changes in the conc…
This study investigates the practices of religious management used by radical modernizing states, usually labeled 'secular.' The method applied is a comparative historical study of institutional and ideological practices, principally legal and educational reforms, as revealed in…
This study aims to examine Turkish religious women's attitudes toward gender with respect to family, education, the workplace, and politics. Turkey makes an interesting case for studying the links between religion and perceptions about women's social opportunities. As a modern s…
The role of religion has been enigmatic in the study of war and International Relations. In the age of secularization, the discipline has been largely dismissive of the significance of religion, but it has become increasingly accepted in the last several decades that it is indee…
This dissertation is a study of how modern America talks about death. I examine these discussions in roughly three spheres (popular, professional, and personal) by analyzing the release and reception of the best-selling book on death and dying in the past fifty years, over seven…
In this dissertation, I explore the interaction between religious and artistic expressions as manifest in the religious quests of the early Russian modernists in the first decade of the twentieth century. Artists and thinkers of the era grappled with this tension as they sought …
After the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church appeared to suffer a collapse of its moral authority over the lay people in the United States. This has been attributed to the actions of Church elites, who intentionally created structures of dissent to keep people inv…
In this dissertation I purpose to identify key indicators of contemporary secularization discovered through literary resources documenting the rise of secularism in Western culture from the Middle Ages to the present day. After identifying these key cultural markers of seculariz…
The pipe organ, a musical instrument historically, culturally, and conceptually associated with Christian worship, is being negatively affected in terms of condition and continued use in the United States by rising rates of secularity, declining mainline Protestant and Catholic …
How do Islamic institutions of learning prepare their students for life in modern democratic societies and support civil society? In light of the increasingly heated public debate about Islamic education this question may appear counterintuitive. Especially after the events of N…
Classical social theorists such as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim all predicted that modern society would inevitably secularize and that religion's role in the modern world would diminish. Following these classical theorists, development studies--starting with the early modernization…
This dissertation is an analysis of the modernization of Muslim societies in Russia during the 18th and 19th centuries in the context of events leading up to and influencing this process. It is also an explication of how history can be understood as an ongoing battle among epist…
For more than seventy years the Soviet Union devoted immense educational efforts and cruel repression in order to eliminate all aspects of religious belief and practice, not only in the many Soviet Republics, but, following World War II, in the satellite nations of eastern Europ…