Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, eds., Secularisms (original) (raw)
Related papers
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".
Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age
Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2012
Debates about secularism refuse to go away just because some have declared that we live in a post-secular world. Indeed, it is only now when a high-decibel monologue about the importance of saving secularism has quietened down that certain conversations about secularism are possible. Efforts to come to a more fine-grained understanding of the different facets of secularism are underway in academia and this book is a valuable addition to that project. The original impetus for this collection was Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. This poses the challenge of placing the collection: is it to be read with and/or after Taylor's book or separately from it, as a book in its own right? In their introduction to this collection, the editors provide a helpful overview of Taylor's book and place it within his larger body of work. It would, of course, be helpful to have read the 896 pages of A Secular Age to engage fully with the ideas which the contributors to this collection present, but, equally, the collection can serve as a guide to reading Taylor's work with a more critical eye. To my mind, however, the collection can stand alone-largely because of the strength of some of the chapters which make a wider contribution to debates about secularism. At the very least, the collection of responses to Taylor's work moves beyond his arguments, with most authors bringing their distinctive disciplinary and critical perspectives into the discussion. Jon Butler's contribution, for instance, is a much-needed corrective to the lack of historical specificity, not just in Taylor's book but in most theory-driven investigations of secularism and secularisation. (Another recent contribution in this regard is the volume edited by Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones on Religion and the Political Imagination.) Butler rightly points out that there is significant historical material which goes against the assumption that belief was axiomatic prior to the Reformation. Acknowledging the presence of indifference if not outright lack of belief in the pre-Reformation period dislodges the singularity of contemporary developments and ''secularization theory's impulse towards inevitability'' (211). Butler contends that Taylor ignores this literature not for lack of learning but due to epistemological bias. Jonathan Sheehan's contribution may initially seem to be orthogonal to Butler's when he asks if questions of historical specificity, including those raised by Butler, ''irritate or otherwise deflect the 'secular age' concept in any way'' (224) and answers in the negative. Yet, Sheehan, too, suggests a fundamental alternative to Taylor's reading of history by arguing for a deeper exploration of the non-religious outside the concept of 'secular'. Similarly, Wendy Brown's contribution is an excellent example of an interlocutor who engages generously but critically with Taylor's arguments and in the process opens doors for thinking about secularism more deeply. Brown tackles Taylor's dismissal of historical materialism and attempts to show why and how a nuanced historical materialism may yield results in furthering our understanding of secularism within a neo-liberal context. In a Book Reviews 147
Questioning Secularization , History , and Ethics : A Review Essay of Radical Secularization ?
2016
Gathering together papers from a 2012 conference in Antwerp, the edited collection Radical Secularization?: An Inquiry into the Religious Roots of Secular Culture advances a philosophical inquiry into the meaning of secularization. In an increasingly postsecular world, debate and reflection on secularization now acknowledges the obsolescence of the linear secularization theories that dominated sociological thought in the 1970s and 1980s. The idea that religion would decline as modern industrial society progressed has now been repudiated by its own advocates, and now more nuanced assessments of the role of religion in the public sphere have been set forth. In particular, the idea that social and cultural “progress” is a value-neutral term has been called into question. Through the discourse on political theology the realization that many modern concepts are religious in nature has called into question the idea that the secular offers a value-neutral basis for culture and politics, an...
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.