Religion, Modernity, and Coloniality (original) (raw)
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Fashioning a Post-Colonial Sociology of Religion
This article describes two alternatives to standard approaches to the sociology of religion, both based on non-Western ideas. The first stems from Confucian approaches to the sacred, which emphasize the maintenance of holy relationships instead of beliefs or church organizations. The second is based on the writings of Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century Arab scholar who used the same concepts to understand ethic and religious solidarities. Standard sociologies of religion, in contrast, grow directly out of the core concerns of Western Christianity. In a post-colonial era, every intellectual discipline needs to expand its concepts beyond the West. This article begins a practical conversation about how to do so.
This essay explores Bernard Williams’s portrayal of his, Alasdair MacIntyre’s, and Charles Taylor’s views of how to move in relationship to religion in our modern world: backward in it (MacIntyre), forward in it (Taylor), and out of it (Williams). I contend that this portrayal is not entirely accurate in each case, though there is some truth in it, and that looking at each authors’ views on the relationship of religion to modernity is instructive for those of us who wish to keep religious faith alive in our modern, secular age. I begin with Williams, and then discuss MacIntyre and Taylor in turn. I seek to show how MacIntyre and Taylor can help us overcome the challenge to religious faith that Williams presents and how both offer important guidance for the life of faith in our modern, secular age.
SMSR 82-2/2016. Theme section: Religion as a Colonial Concept in Modern History (America, Asia)
Marianna Ferrara, Alessandro Saggioro, Manuel Ceccarelli, David Charles Wright Carr, Andrea Annese, Jana Valtrová, Daniel Barbu, Andrea Nicolotti, Madlen Krueger, anita agostini, Silvia Alfayé, Francesco Berno, Jens Ulff-Moller, Mitsutoshi Horii, Michel Kobelinski, Jens Ulff
Religions in the Modern World: Traditions and Transformations (Paperback) - Taylor & Francis
2001
The third edition of this comprehensive edited volume contains important chapters on the role of religions in the modern world. Framed on either end by detailed analyses of the phenomena known as modernity on the one hand, and secularism on the other, the book's structure in fact cleverly symbolises the common assumption that many Westerners have regarded the role of religion as 'compartmentalised' within the framework of modern secular states. This book demonstrates, quite impressively, that things are not so black and white. The introduction by two of the editors, Linda Woodhead and Christopher Patridge, defines key topics that are essential to understanding the engagement of religions with the modern world, including the topic of modernity, under which are addressed the subcategories of 'the nation state, ' 'colonialism, ' 'capitalism and rationalization, ' 'subjectivization and consumerism, ' 'secularism and secularization, ' to name a few (to these are added definitions pertaining to late modernity, such as 'globalization' and 'post-secularism' etc.). This volume can be described as interdisciplinary, since the more ancient religions addressed herein are, firstly, analysed on their own terms (their respective histories and theologies), and, secondly, addressed in regards to their relationship with modernity. In relation to contemporary religions, such as the New Age and New Religious Movements, the disparity between their pasts and modernity is not so evident since many of them are recent in origin. Thematic chapters include: 'Religion, globalization, and migration, ' 'Religion and politics, ' 'Religion and violence, ' 'Religion and gender, ' and 'Religion and popular culture, ' all of which are topics that are immediately relevant cross-culturally today. The second chapter on 'How to Study Religion, ' by Kim Knott, is particularly important since it sets-though in a very general way-the methodological 'tone' of the volume. It outlines the manner in which religion is studied as an academic discipline, including more traditional approaches such as the theological, textual, historical, and phenomenological ones that dominated in the past. New approaches, focusing "on the way in which class, gender, and power operate to reify certain traditions" (p. 24), as well as feminist and postcolonialist Book Reviews