The Art of Secularism

The Art of Secularism PDF Author: Karin Zitzewitz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781849042956
Category : Art and society
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Written in the wake of the widely publicised attacks by Hindu nationalist activists on the late M. F. Husain, India's most famous artist and a prominent Muslim, The Art of Secularism addresses the entanglement of visual art with political secularism. The crisis in secularism in India, commonlyassociated with the rise of Hindu nationalism in the 1980s, transformed the meaning of art. It challenged the relation- ships between modernism, national culture, secularism and modernity that had been built since Indias independence in 1947.The Art of Secularism describes how four renowned artists, "M. F. Husain, K. G. Subramanyan, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Bhupen Khakhar" developed their practice in an era when secular nationalism grappled with the recent re-enchantment of signs. Com- bining close readings of these artists' work withethnography of the art worlds of Mumbai and Vadodara, Karin Zitzewitz describes both the everyday forms of cosmopolitanism in the Indian art world and the increasing vulnerability of art world spaces to cultural regulation. She also presents the shifting conditions of the production and exhibitionof art within the particularly urgent, varied, and sophisticated public debates about secularism in India, in which artists have been increasingly prominent interlocutors.

The Art of Secularism

The Art of Secularism PDF Author: Karin Zitzewitz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781849042956
Category : Art and society
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Written in the wake of the widely publicised attacks by Hindu nationalist activists on the late M. F. Husain, India's most famous artist and a prominent Muslim, The Art of Secularism addresses the entanglement of visual art with political secularism. The crisis in secularism in India, commonlyassociated with the rise of Hindu nationalism in the 1980s, transformed the meaning of art. It challenged the relation- ships between modernism, national culture, secularism and modernity that had been built since Indias independence in 1947.The Art of Secularism describes how four renowned artists, "M. F. Husain, K. G. Subramanyan, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Bhupen Khakhar" developed their practice in an era when secular nationalism grappled with the recent re-enchantment of signs. Com- bining close readings of these artists' work withethnography of the art worlds of Mumbai and Vadodara, Karin Zitzewitz describes both the everyday forms of cosmopolitanism in the Indian art world and the increasing vulnerability of art world spaces to cultural regulation. She also presents the shifting conditions of the production and exhibitionof art within the particularly urgent, varied, and sophisticated public debates about secularism in India, in which artists have been increasingly prominent interlocutors.

The Spirit of Secular Art

The Spirit of Secular Art PDF Author: Robert Nelson
Publisher: Monash University ePress
ISBN: 0980361613
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
THE SPIRIT OF SECULAR ART explains the spiritual prestige of art. Various theorists have discussed how art has an aura or indefinable magic. This book explains how, when and why it gained its spiritual properties. The idea that all art is somehow spiritual (even though not religious) is often assumed; this book, while narrating the historical trajectory of art in the most accessible language, reveals how the mysteries of religious practice are abstracted and saved through all stages of secularisation in European culture. THE SPIRIT OF SECULAR ART presents a coherent theory defining the sacred basis of Western aesthetics. It evocatively describes the afterlife of the holy from Ancient Greece to the present, and outlines how the mysterious institution of art can be explained in material terms. Unlike other books in the genre, THE SPIRIT OF SECULAR ART radically deconstructs traditional art history in terms of 'prestige' and the value of the non-material. The book functions as: an alternative critical history of art, integrated with the histories of literature and belief; a philosophical essay on the fundamental values of art and religion; and a critique of the spiritual conceits of contemporary aesthetics and art appreciation.

The Secular Spirit

The Secular Spirit PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 0870990969
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description


Faithful to Secularism

Faithful to Secularism PDF Author: David T. Buckley
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231542445
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Religion and democracy can make tense bedfellows. Secular elites may view religious movements as conflict-prone and incapable of compromise, while religious actors may fear that anticlericalism will drive religion from public life. Yet such tensions are not inevitable: from Asia to Latin America, religious actors coexist with, and even help to preserve, democracy. In Faithful to Secularism, David T. Buckley argues that political institutions that encourage an active role for public religion are a key part in explaining this variation. He develops the concept of "benevolent secularism" to describe institutions that combine a basic division of religion and state with extensive room for participation of religious actors in public life. He traces the impact of benevolent secularism on religious and secular elites, both at critical junctures in state formation and as politics evolves over time. Buckley shows how religious and secular actors build credibility and shared norms over time, and explains how such coalitions can endure challenges from both religious revivals and periods of anticlericalism. Faithful to Secularism tests this institutional theory in Ireland, Senegal, and the Philippines, using a blend of archival, interview, and public opinion data. These case studies illustrate how even countries with an active religious majority can become and remain faithful to secularism.

The Privilege of Being Banal

The Privilege of Being Banal PDF Author: Elayne Oliphant
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780226731261
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
France, officially, is a secular nation. Yet Catholicism is undeniably a monumental presence, defining the temporal and spatial rhythms of Paris. At the same time, it often fades into the background as nothing more than "heritage." In a creative inversion, Elayne Oliphant asks in The Privilege of Being Banal what, exactly, is hiding in plain sight? Could the banality of Catholicism actually be a kind of hidden power? Exploring the violent histories and alternate trajectories effaced through this banal backgrounding of a crucial aspect of French history and culture, this richly textured ethnography lays bare the profound nostalgia that undergirds Catholicism's circulation in non-religious sites such as museums, corporate spaces, and political debates. Oliphant's aim is to unravel the contradictions of religion and secularism and, in the process, show how aesthetics and politics come together in contemporary France to foster the kind of banality that Hannah Arendt warned against: the incapacity to take on another person's experience of the world. A creative meditation on the power of the taken-for-granted, The Privilege of Being Banal is a landmark study of religion, aesthetics, and public space.

A Secular Age

A Secular Age PDF Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674986911
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 889

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Book Description
The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

Secularism in Antebellum America

Secularism in Antebellum America PDF Author: John Lardas Modern
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226533255
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.

Questioning Secularism

Questioning Secularism PDF Author: Hussein Ali Agrama
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226010686
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
What, exactly, is secularism? What has the West's long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In this work, Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart.

Religion, Secularism, and Constitutional Democracy

Religion, Secularism, and Constitutional Democracy PDF Author: Jean L. Cohen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540736
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
Polarization between political religionists and militant secularists on both sides of the Atlantic is on the rise. Critically engaging with traditional secularism and religious accommodationism, this collection introduces a constitutional secularism that robustly meets contemporary challenges. It identifies which connections between religion and the state are compatible with the liberal, republican, and democratic principles of constitutional democracy and assesses the success of their implementation in the birthplace of political secularism: the United States and Western Europe. Approaching this issue from philosophical, legal, historical, political, and sociological perspectives, the contributors wage a thorough defense of their project's theoretical and institutional legitimacy. Their work brings fresh insight to debates over the balance of human rights and religious freedom, the proper definition of a nonestablishment norm, and the relationship between sovereignty and legal pluralism. They discuss the genealogy of and tensions involving international legal rights to religious freedom, religious symbols in public spaces, religious arguments in public debates, the jurisdiction of religious authorities in personal law, and the dilemmas of religious accommodation in national constitutions and public policy when it violates international human rights agreements or liberal-democratic principles. If we profoundly rethink the concepts of religion and secularism, these thinkers argue, a principled adjudication of competing claims becomes possible.

The Politics of Secularism

The Politics of Secularism PDF Author: Murat Akan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231181815
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Murat Akan reframes the question of secularism, exploring its presence both outside and inside Europe and offering a rich empirical account of how it moves across borders and through time. Akan uses France and Turkey to analyze comparative discussions of secularism, struggles for power, and historical contextual constraints.