Rethinking Secularism by Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, Jonathan VanAntwerpen

By Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, Jonathan VanAntwerpen

This choice of essays provides groundbreaking paintings from an interdisciplinary staff of best theorists and students representing the fields of historical past, philosophy, political technology, sociology, and anthropology. the quantity will introduce readers to a few of the main compelling new conceptual and theoretical understandings of secularism and the secular, whereas additionally studying socio-political traits concerning the connection among the spiritual and the secular from various destinations around the globe.

In fresh a long time, the general public has develop into more and more conscious of the real position spiritual commitments play within the cultural, social, and political dynamics of household and global affairs. This so known as ''resurgence'' of faith within the public sphere has elicited a wide range of responses, together with vehement competition to the very concept that spiritual purposes should still ever have a correct to expression in public political debate. the present worldwide panorama forces students to reassess not just as soon as primary understandings of secularization, but in addition the definition and implications of secular assumptions and secularist positions. The concept that there's no singular secularism, yet particularly quite a number a number of secularisms, is one of the rising efforts to reconceptualize the meanings of faith and the secular.

Rethinking Secularism surveys those efforts and is helping to reframe discussions of faith within the social sciences by means of drawing recognition to the primary factor of the way ''the secular'' is constituted and understood. It offers necessary perception into how new understandings of secularism and faith form analytic views within the social sciences, politics, and foreign affairs.

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The economy, the state, and social movements all involve world-making projects. The demarcation between religion and the secular is made, not simply found. But, finally, we should recognize the prominence of a secularist ideology that goes beyond affirming the virtues of the ostensibly neutral. The secular is claimed by many, not just as one way of organizing life, not just as useful in order to ensure peace and harmony among different religions, but as a kind of maturation. It is held to be a developmental achievement.

There are multiple ways of experiencing the secular—and, indeed, of being secular—and the challenge of social science is to investigate and understand these different forms of secularity. While “the religious” and “the secular” are mutually constitutive, however, and while a good deal of social-scientific effort has been dedicated to the study of religion, the development of a reflexive anthropology and sociology of the secular remains in its relative infancy. “Secularization,” on the other hand, has long been a staple of the social sciences, particularly sociology, where it has been associated with a general theory of institutional differentiation, religious privatization, and religious decline.

2. , Secularism and Its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 31–53. 3. Robert Keohane, “The Globalization of Informal Violence, Theories of World Politics, and ‘The Liberalism of Fear,’” in C. Calhoun, P. Price, and A. , Understanding September 11 (New York: New Press, 2002), 72. : Princeton University Press, 2007). 4. See Julie Reuben, The Making of the Modern University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 5. Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization,” American Historical Review 108, no.

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