Power and Authority Within European Secularity: From the Enlightenment Critique of Religion to the Contemporary Presence of Islam (original) (raw)
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Revisiting Secularism: Secularism and Secularisation-A Bibliographical Essay
Economic and Political Weekly
Tracing the trajectory of "secularism" studies, this essay brings out a critique of the evolutionary perspective that pronounced a waning of the "religious" in a predominantly "secular" "modern" world. In the face of global and local realities that negate any strict boundaries between the "secular", "religious" and "political", many western and non-western debates on secularism have creatively re-envisaged the concept and highlighted its variegated meanings. Yet, these have been unable to locate secularism in lived phenomenological realities. This bibliographical essay discusses works that may not be categorised as "secularism" studies and yet offer insights into the interaction between religious, cultural, political and secular aspects of society, while attempting to unentangle the different, but related, processes of "secularism" and "secularisation". It is the secularisation process that needs academic attention to understand the complex interaction between the "secular" and the "religious".
Ruth Wodak & Bernhard Forchtner (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. London: Routledge, 587–599., 2017
This chapter explores how the modern distinction between religion and the secular has become a debated and contested discursive tool in the political organization of modern societies. This discourse is in operation in scholarly works as well as in public debates. Both are introduced and examined in this chapter. The main argument is that while important social and political issues are negotiated with the help of categories such as 'religion' and the 'secular', scholars should pay more attention to what is achieved by deploying such categories and distinctions in various locations and contexts.
The Debate on Secularization and Religion. What Is Left?
There is a common view in the field of sociology, particularly, and social sciences, in general, that the world, as we know it, is a secular world and the role of religion in the public space is therefore minimal. This view has been challenged by a few sociologists of religion that pretended to see in the appearance of new religiosities and spiritualities, in the late 1970s and 1980s, a reawakening of the reality of the sacred and belief, now bound for the personal sphere and aside from the institutional functioning of churches and main denominations. Some of them have even talked about the privatization of religion and the disenchantment of the world, exhibiting mixed feelings of revivalism and nostalgia. They consider the thesis of secularization elaborated by important figures of sociology, like Max Weber, Durkheim and Marx, historically rooted and discredited by recent events in America and Great Britain and by the evolution of former atheist societies such as Russia and Eastern Europe. Modern sociologists of religion that subscribe to the thesis of secularization of the world, like Bryan Wilson, Steve Bruce and Charles Taylor, reformulated their initial outline of the model. These changes have not convinced those who shield themselves in the essentiality of religion in human society. The debate has somehow become frozen, in the two camps, around previous arguments. This essay looks to portray the evolution of the secularization thesis, taking in consideration other contributions beyond those originated in the English-speaking world. The Secularization Paradigm It was common, during the 1970s, to state that the Western world was more and more secularized and that only a few people recognized themselves as religious and pious.