Religion and Modernity

Religion and Modernity PDF Author: Detlef Pollack
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198801661
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
This is not a book that provides a new integrated theory of religious change in modern societies, but rather one that develops theoretical elements that contribute to the understanding of some contemporary religious developments. Most of the approaches in sociology of religion are prone to emphasize either processes of religious decline or of religious upswing. For example, secularization theory usually includes a couple of relevant factors--such as functional differentiation, economic affluence or social equality--in order to account for religious change. However, the result of such a theory's empirical analyses seems to be certain in advance, namely that the social relevance of religion is decreasing. In contrast, the religious market model devised by sociologists of religion in the US is inclined to detect everywhere processes of religious upsurge. Religion and Modernity: An International Comparison avoids a purely theoretically based perspective on religious changes. For this reason, Detlef Pollack and Gergely Rosta do not begin with theoretical propositions but with questions. The authors raise the question of how the social significance of religion in its various facets has changed in modern societies, and explain what factors and conditions have contributed to these changes.

Religion and Modernity

Religion and Modernity PDF Author: Detlef Pollack
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198801661
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 506

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is not a book that provides a new integrated theory of religious change in modern societies, but rather one that develops theoretical elements that contribute to the understanding of some contemporary religious developments. Most of the approaches in sociology of religion are prone to emphasize either processes of religious decline or of religious upswing. For example, secularization theory usually includes a couple of relevant factors--such as functional differentiation, economic affluence or social equality--in order to account for religious change. However, the result of such a theory's empirical analyses seems to be certain in advance, namely that the social relevance of religion is decreasing. In contrast, the religious market model devised by sociologists of religion in the US is inclined to detect everywhere processes of religious upsurge. Religion and Modernity: An International Comparison avoids a purely theoretically based perspective on religious changes. For this reason, Detlef Pollack and Gergely Rosta do not begin with theoretical propositions but with questions. The authors raise the question of how the social significance of religion in its various facets has changed in modern societies, and explain what factors and conditions have contributed to these changes.

Religions of Modernity

Religions of Modernity PDF Author: Stef Aupers
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004184511
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Religions of Modernity challenges the social-scientific orthodoxy that, once unleashed, the modern forces of individualism, science and technology inevitably erode the sacred and evoke the profane. The book's chapters, some by established scholars, others by junior researchers, document instead in rich empirical detail how modernity relocates the sacred to the deeper layers of the self and the domain of digital technology. Rather than destroying the sacred tout court, then, the cultural logic of modernization spawns its own religious meanings, unacknowledged spiritualities and magical enchantments. The editors argue in the introductory chapter that the classical theoretical accounts of modernity by Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and others already hinted at the future emergence of these religions of modernity

Religion in Late Modernity

Religion in Late Modernity PDF Author: Robert Cummings Neville
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 079148825X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Religion in Late Modernity runs against the grain of common suppositions of contemporary theology and philosophy of religion. Against the common supposition that basic religious terms have no real reference but are mere functions of human need, the book presents a pragmatic theory of religious symbolism in terms of which the cognitive engagement of the Ultimate is of a piece with the cognitive engagement of nature and persons. Throughout this discussion, Neville develops a late-modern conception of God that is defensible in a global theological public. Against the common supposition that religion is on the retreat in late modernity except in fundamentalist forms, the author argues that religion in our time is a stimulus to religiously oriented scholarship, a civilizing force among world societies, a foundation for obligation in politics, a source for healthy social experimentation, and the most important mover of soul. Against the common supposition that religious thinking or theology is confessional and inevitably biased in favor of the thinker's community, Neville argues for the public character of theology, the need for history and phenomenology of religion in philosophy of religion, and the possibility of objectivity through the contextualization of philosophy, contrary to the fashionable claims of neo-pragmatism. This vigorous analysis and program for religious thinking is straightforwardly pro-late-modern and anti-postmodern, a rousing gallop along the high road around modernism.

Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel

Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel PDF Author: Thomas A. Lewis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199595593
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This study analyzes Hegel's philosophy of religion in relation to ongoing debates about the relation between religion and politics as well as the history of their conceptualization in the modern West. Lewis argues that recent non-traditional, more Kantian interpretations of Hegel's project open up a new understanding of his treatment of religion.

Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity

Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity PDF Author: Paul Heelas
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631198482
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity is the first book to engage the study of religion with contemporary theorizing about culture. It addresses important issues such as whether there are postmodern forms of religion, whether theories of religion framed in terms of modernity can be recast to suit new or emerging circumstances, and how the study of religion can be better integrated with recent developments in the study of culture.

Religion and Modernity in the Himalaya

Religion and Modernity in the Himalaya PDF Author: Megan Adamson Sijapati
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317333861
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Religion has long been a powerful cultural, social, and political force in the Himalaya. Increased economic and cultural flows, growth in tourism, and new forms of governance and media, however, have brought significant changes to the religious traditions of the region in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book presents detailed case studies of lived religion in the Himalaya in this context of rapid change to offer intra-regional perspectives on the ways in which lived religions are being re-configured or re-imagined. Based on original fieldwork, this book documents understudied forms of religion in the region and presents unique perspectives on the phenomenon and experience of religion, discussing why, when, and where practices, discourses, and the category of religion itself, are engaged by varying communities in the region. It yields fruitful insights into both the religious traditions and lived human experiences of Himalayan peoples in the modern era. Presenting new research and perspectives on the Himalayan region, this book should be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, Religious Studies, and Modernity.

Religion, Modernity, Globalisation

Religion, Modernity, Globalisation PDF Author: François Gauthier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000725979
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This book argues that the last four decades have seen profound and important changes in the nature and social location of religion, and that those changes are best understood when cast against the associated rise of consumerism and neoliberalism. These transformations are often misunderstood and underestimated, namely because the study of religion remains dependent on the secularisation paradigm which can no longer provide a sufficiently fruitful framework for analysis. The book challenges diagnoses of transience and fragmentation by proposing an alternative narrative and set of concepts for understanding the global religious landscape. The present situation is framed as the result of a shift from a National-Statist to a Global-Market regime of religion. Adopting a holistic perspective that breaks with the current specialisation tendencies, it charts the emergence of the State and the Market as institutions and ideas related to social order, as well as their changing rapports from classical modernity to today. Breaking with a tradition of Western-centeredness, the book offers probing enquiries into Indonesia and a synthesis of global and Western trends. This long-awaited book offers a bold new vision for the social scientific study of religion and will be of great interest to all scholars of the Sociology and Anthropology of religion, as well as Religious Studies in general.

Meaning and Modernity

Meaning and Modernity PDF Author: Richard Madsen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520226579
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
"This interesting volume of essays on contemporary religion and its ambivalent relationship to modernity not only serves as a testimony to the intellectual influence of Robert Bellah, it establishes a new school of comparative religious and social thought. This Bellahian school--at the intersection of sociological, theological, and contemporary philosophical thinking--has roots in Durkheim and Weber, borrows insights from Marx, Foucault, and Bourdieu, and finds its clearest voice in the writings of Bellah himself. The essays by some of Bellah's colleagues and former students that have been gathered in this volume address some of the most sagacious of these Bellahian themes: the religious dimension of contemporary civil societies, the relationship between religious and capitalist values, the cultural critique of modernity, and the moral visions that hold a promise of civic renewal."—Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (California, 2000). "This highly readable collection of original, thought-provoking essays by leading scholars provides fresh insights into the issues that Robert Bellah has addressed so fruitfully in his long career. Readers will learn much about such issues as how Calvinism contributed to political revolution, why democracies require an enlarged sense of political community, how the religious foundations of Japan and the United States differ, and what it means to be a Christian and an American."—Benton Johnson, coauthor of Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Protestant Baby Boomers (1994) and author of Functionalism in Modern Sociology: Understanding Talcott Parsons (1975)

Powers of Distinction

Powers of Distinction PDF Author: Nancy Levene
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022650753X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
The principle of modernity -- A history of religion -- Artificial populations -- The collective -- Images of truth from Anselm to Badiou -- The radical enlightenment of Spinoza and Kant -- Modernity as ground zero -- Of gods, laws, rabbis, and ends

The Enlightenment and religion

The Enlightenment and religion PDF Author: S. J. Barnett
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847795935
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book offers a critical survey of religious change and its causes in eighteenth-century Europe, and constitutes a challenge to the accepted views in traditional Enlightenment studies. Focusing on Enlightenment Italy, France and England, it illustrates how the canonical view of eighteenth-century religious change has in reality been constructed upon scant evidence and assumption, in particular the idea that the thought of the enlightened led to modernity. For, despite a lack of evidence, one of the fundamental assumptions of Enlightenment studies has been the assertion that there was a vibrant Deist movement which formed the “intellectual solvent” of the eighteenth century. The central claim of this book is that the immense ideological appeal of the traditional birth-of-modernity myth has meant that the actual lack of Deists has been glossed over, and a quite misleading historical view has become entrenched.