Solidarity in a Secular Age

Solidarity in a Secular Age PDF Author: Charles H. T. Lesch
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780197583807
Category : Democracy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Solidarity refers to our normative commitment toward some person or set of people as well our psychological motivation to act on that commitment. Liberal democracies need solidarity for at least four reasons: stabilizing society, realizing justice, diminishing dependence, and cultivating moral personality. But they must also navigate a conceptual tension: liberalism valorizes personal freedom, individual dignity, pluralism, and critical reflection; solidarity stresses social unity, visceral attachment, and the subordinating of one's own interest to the good of the whole. Even more dauntingly, they must confront what I call Schmitt's challenge. According to Carl Schmitt, the solidarity liberal democracies need comes from sources they cannot themselves produce, like religion. Thus in an age of declining religiosity and rising nationalism, how can we form strong social bonds without racism, demagoguery, and xenophobia? Can we have not only solidarity, but liberal solidarity, in a secular age?"--

Solidarity in a Secular Age

Solidarity in a Secular Age PDF Author: Charles H. T. Lesch
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780197583807
Category : Democracy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Solidarity refers to our normative commitment toward some person or set of people as well our psychological motivation to act on that commitment. Liberal democracies need solidarity for at least four reasons: stabilizing society, realizing justice, diminishing dependence, and cultivating moral personality. But they must also navigate a conceptual tension: liberalism valorizes personal freedom, individual dignity, pluralism, and critical reflection; solidarity stresses social unity, visceral attachment, and the subordinating of one's own interest to the good of the whole. Even more dauntingly, they must confront what I call Schmitt's challenge. According to Carl Schmitt, the solidarity liberal democracies need comes from sources they cannot themselves produce, like religion. Thus in an age of declining religiosity and rising nationalism, how can we form strong social bonds without racism, demagoguery, and xenophobia? Can we have not only solidarity, but liberal solidarity, in a secular age?"--

An Awareness of What is Missing

An Awareness of What is Missing PDF Author: Jürgen Habermas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745694705
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 83

Get Book Here

Book Description
In his recent writings on religion and secularization, Habermas has challenged reason to clarify its relation to religious experience and to engage religions in a constructive dialogue. Given the global challenges facing humanity, nothing is more dangerous than the refusal to communicate that we encounter today in different forms of religious and ideological fundamentalism. Habermas argues that in order to engage in this dialogue, two conditions must be met: religion must accept the authority of secular reason as the fallible results of the sciences and the universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality; and conversely, secular reason must not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith. This argument was developed in part as a reaction to the conception of the relation between faith and reason formulated by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 Regensburg address. In 2007 Habermas conducted a debate, under the title ‘An Awareness of What Is Missing', with philosophers from the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich. This volume includes Habermas's essay, the contributions of his interlocutors and Habermas's reply to them. It will be indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand one of the most urgent and intractable issues of our time.

A Secular Age

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

Get Book Here

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.

Solidarity with the World

Solidarity with the World PDF Author: Carolyn A. Chau
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498235875
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
Is Christian mission even possible today? In "a secular age," is it possible to talk about the goodness of God in a compelling way? How should the church proceed? Carolyn Chau explores the question of Catholic mission in a secular age through a constructive interpretation of the work of two celebrated Catholic thinkers, philosopher Charles Taylor and theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, arguing that Taylor and Balthasar together offer a promising path for mission today. Chau attends to Taylor's account of the conditions of belief today, and the genesis of the sociohistorical limits on contemporary "God-talk," as well as his affirmation of certain aspects of Western modernity's "culture." From Balthasar, Chau sifts out the distinctiveness of his view of the human person as defined by mission, and his encouragement of a kenotic self-understanding of the church. In the end, Chau claims that if modern persons in secular Western societies are seeking fulfillment and integrity, Christian spirituality remains a rich resource on offer.

A Secular Age Beyond the West

A Secular Age Beyond the West PDF Author: Mirjam Künkler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110841771X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 441

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book compares secularity in societies not shaped by Western Christianity, particularly in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Belonging

Belonging PDF Author: Montserrat Guibernau
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745671683
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description
It is commonly assumed that we live in an age of unbridled individualism, but in this important new book Montserrat Guibernau argues that the need to belong to a group or community - from peer groups and local communities to ethnic groups and nations - is a pervasive and enduring feature of modern social life. The power of belonging stems from the potential to generate an emotional attachment capable of fostering a shared identity, loyalty and solidarity among members of a given community. It is this strong emotional dimension that enables belonging to act as a trigger for political mobilization and, in extreme cases, to underpin collective violence. Among the topics examined in this book are identity as a political instrument; emotions and political mobilization; the return of authoritarianism and the rise of the new radical right; symbols and the rituals of belonging; loyalty, the nation and nationalism. It includes case studies from Britain, Spain, Catalonia, Germany, the Middle East and the United States. This wide-ranging and cutting-edge book will be of great interest to students and scholars in politics, sociology and the social sciences generally.

A Catholic Modernity?

A Catholic Modernity? PDF Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195131614
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 141

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dimensions of his intellectual commitment - dimensions left implicit in his philosophical writing.

The World Come of Age

The World Come of Age PDF Author: Lilian Calles Barger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190695404
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Get Book Here

Book Description
On November 16, 2017, Pope Francis tweeted, "Poverty is not an accident. It has causes that must be recognized and removed for the good of so many of our brothers and sisters." With this statement and others like it, the first Latin American pope was associated, in the minds of many, with a stream of theology that swept the Western hemisphere in the 1960s and 70s, the movement known as liberation theology. Born of chaotic cultural crises in Latin America and the United States, liberation theology was a trans-American intellectual movement that sought to speak for those parts of society marginalized by modern politics and religion by virtue of race, class, or sex. Led by such revolutionaries as the Peruvian Catholic priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, the African American theologian James Cone, or the feminists Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether, the liberation theology movement sought to bridge the gulf between the religious values of justice and equality and political pragmatism. It combined theology with strands of radical politics, social theory, and the history and experience of subordinated groups to challenge the ideas that underwrite the hierarchical structures of an unjust society. Praised by some as a radical return to early Christian ethics and decried by others as a Marxist takeover, liberation theology has a wide-raging, cross-sectional history that has previously gone undocumented. In The World Come of Age, Lilian Calles Barger offers for the first time a systematic retelling of the history of liberation theology, demonstrating how a group of theologians set the stage for a torrent of new religious activism that challenged the religious and political status quo.

The Unintended Reformation

The Unintended Reformation PDF Author: Brad S. Gregory
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067426407X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

How (Not) to Be Secular

How (Not) to Be Secular PDF Author: James K. A. Smith
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802867618
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on.