Privatization Of Religion Research Articles

Religion as memory: How has the continuity of tradition produced collective meanings? – Part one

Danièle Hervieu-Léger gives an account of religion as a chain of memory, that is, a form of collective memory and imagination based on the sanctity of tradition. According to her theory, in the postmodern world the continuity of religious memory has been broken and all that remains are isolated fragments guarded by religious groups. This twofold study aims at showing, firstly, in what sense religion can be conceived of as memory which produces collective meanings (Part One) and, secondly, what may happen when individualised and absolutised memories alienate themselves from a continuity of tradition, thus beginning to function as a sort of private religion (Part Two). Being the first part of the study in question, this article is dedicated to a historical-theological analysis of religious memory as a source of collective meanings, as seen from a Christian perspective. Firstly, it situates Hervieu-Léger’s definition of religion against the background of the most topical religious contexts in which the notion of memory appears today. Secondly, the dialectics of individual and collective memory is discussed, notably through the lens of Ricoeur’s original proposal. This is followed by an overview of the traditional functions of memory in Christianity. Lastly, the interpretation of the way in which Christian tradition, in its premodern continuity, served as a source of collective cultural meanings, is recapitulated. What underlies this analysis is the conviction that to comprehend, and even more so to challenge mechanisms based on which the dominant purveyors of meaning (such as economic and information market) function in our day, one should have a clear understanding of what they attempt to substitute for. In brief, before exploring how memories become religion, one ought to be able to conceive of religion as memory.

Memories as religion: What can the broken continuity of tradition bring about? − Part two

In postmodern societies the symbolic vacuum, a result of the loss of a unified religious tradition, calls for substitutes in the form of fragmentary and isolated memories. By drawing from the reservoir of those memories in an arbitrary and subjective way, privatised (de- institutionalised) religion creates a kind of symbolic bricolage. Can such a bricolage become more than a mere ‘counterfeit’ of collective meaning that religion once used to provide? Can religious tradition, based on a broken continuity of memory, still bring about a matrix of the ways of expressing one’s faith? If so, how? This twofold study seeks to explore those and similar questions by means of showing, firstly, in what sense religion can be conceived of as memory which produces collective meanings (Part One) and, secondly, what may happen when individualised and absolutised memories alienate themselves from a continuity of tradition, thus beginning to function as a sort of private religion (Part Two). Being the second part of the study in question, this article aims at exploring the postmodern crisis of religious memory, which includes the pluralisation of the channels of the sacred and the differentiation of a total religious memory into a plurality of specialised circles of memory. Firstly, it examines the three main aspects of the current crisis of continuity at large, namely the affirmation of the autonomous individual, the advance of rationalisation, and the process of institutional differentiation. Secondly, the plurality of the channels of the sacred is discussed in light of religion’s apparently unique way of drawing legitimisation from its reference to tradition. This is followed by two illustrations of the reconstruction of religious memory. In the final section of the article, a theological reflection on possible directions that may be taken in the face of the postmodern crisis of religious memory is offered.

Japan, beyond institutional religion. Private religion in the traditions of Shugendō, Komusō and non-church christianity of Kanzō Uchimura

Japan, beyond institutional religion. Private religion in the traditions of Shugendō, Komusō and non-church christianity of Kanzō Uchimura

Two Nations under God: Religion and Public in Canada and the United States

This article explores relationships between religion and public life in Canada and the United States. Attention is given to historical and contemporary situations in Canada, especially regarding cultural and political developments leading to the growing privatization of religion in the nation. Through an examination of the vestiges of church establishment in Upper Canada, the varieties of federal and provincial funding of religious activities, the history of the social gospel, the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Quebec’s recently proposed Charter of Values, the article analyses the complicated nature represented by the mixing of religion and public life in Canada. The Canadian developments are compared, where appropriate, to the public expressions of religion found in North American civil religion. The article concludes with reflections about whether Canada’s commitment to multiculturalism is inconsistent with the privatization of religion and should lead to a cultural shift towards the deprivatization of religion.

Accommodating Religious Pluralism in Denmark

AbstractThis article discusses the room for accommodating religious diversity offered by the particular configuration of secularity existing in Denmark. Theoretically, the article adopts Jose Casanova and Mark Chaves’ proposals to separate analytically between the core elements of secularisation, and to leave open for empirical analyses the development and potential connections between these in different geographical and geo-political contexts.From this perspective, the article discusses the conditions for accommodating religious diversity offered by the peculiar combination prevailing in Denmark of a low level of structural differentiation combined with a high level of rationalisation, generalisation, and privatisation of religion. The article argues that the legal inequality existing in Denmark between religious communities stemming from the existence of a state supported church (i.e. a low level of differentiation) matters less for the accommodation of religious diversity than do widely held and strongly embedded popular sentiments and imaginations of the public sphere as strictly secular (i.e. a high level of rationalisation, generalisation and privatisation of religion).

Austrian MEPs: between privatisation and politicisation of religion

This contribution investigates the role of religion in the work and attitudes of Austrian members of the European Parliament (MEPs). It is based on the Austrian results of a large-scale survey of MEPs, RelEP, and on the analysis of parliamentary questions. The study argues that the attitudes of Austrian MEPs to religion are characterised by two seemingly contradictory phenomena: the privatisation and the politicisation of religion. The privatisation of religion expresses itself in the MEPs’ refusal to disclose information about their religiosity and in the absence from the political agenda of topics related to the role of churches and majority religions within European societies. By contrast, human rights abuses against Christian minorities abroad, the religious dimension of Turkey’s candidacy to the European Union and the difficulties of integrating Islam in Europe are all highly politicised topics. In short, the religion of the Other is politicised, while the religion of the majority is privatised. In this context, it is the attribution of religious belonging to the Other which serves the symbolic function of drawing identity boundaries, whereas the Self is envisaged as secular.

Postsecular Encounters in World Politics

In a late interview, published after his death, one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, looking to the future with an eye to the past, condensed in one sentence the historical and spiritual condition of his age: Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten [only a God can save us]. With this seemingly simple phrase, Heidegger cast a counter-image as intense as the one launched by Nietzsche’s philosophical cry a century earlier. For, the ‘death of God’ and his invoked ‘resurrection’ metaphorically drew the philosophical and cultural boundaries of an age suspended between construction and deconstruction, nihilism and search for a nomos, being (Heidegger) and nothingness (Nietzsche). It is exactly within this intellectual landscape that the analyses of those who have sought to rethink the thorny relationship between religion and politics in the ‘age of disenchantment’ have found refuge. Once the great myths of the ‘accomplished secularization’ and of the ‘privatization of religion’ had faded, the so-called ‘resurgence of the sacred’ – especially in International Relations – revitalised some of the fundamental issues of our time. In particular, the complex debate on the relationship between secularisation and modernity, religion and conflict, democracy and inclusion has been reopened and reconsidered in the light of a new ‘postsecular awareness’. This recent theoretical direction has been indicated by Jurgen Habermas who has taken a conceptual step back and spoken of the necessity of ‘postsecular encounters’ between religious and secular understandings of being-in-the-world, of ‘a change of attitude in favour of a dialogical relationship, open to learning, with all religious traditions’. It is around these themes and issues that the two works under review have been developed. They offer novel, alternative and illuminating insights on how to rethink the relationship between religion, world politics and global ethics within the new theoretical postsecular horizon. These books somehow represent the two faces of the same coin. Mavelli elaborates a genealogical deconstruction of the problematic relationship between Europe and Islam which, figuratively, opens the way to Barbato’s postsecular construction.

Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain, ed. Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie

This volume is one of a pair which arises out of the activities during 2008 of an ARHC-funded research network centred around questions of worship and devotion in the early modern period, organised by Jessica Martin, Alec Ryrie, Natalie Mears and Judith Maltby. While the companion volume (edited by Mears and Ryrie, also published by Ashgate, 2012) explores Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain, this collection of essays considers the more secret world of private and domestic religion. The issue of how individuals and households actually practised their religion outside the ritual and ceremony of public worship has, the editors note, ‘been left remarkably unexplored, both by literary scholars and especially by historians’ (p. 3). This is perhaps overstating things a little, but it is certainly true that we know much less about private religion than we do about public worship, in part for obvious reasons of evidence, but also because Reformation historians have indeed been slow to ask these sorts of questions.

Samotność w prywatnym świecie

The text is concentrated on relations between concepts of privacy and solitude nowadays. The author claimed that privacy replaced traditional metaphors and images of solitude like island, mountain or dessert. Protection of privacy and bringing it to the limelight, privatization of religion and the special place occupied in contemporary culture by a search for one’s own identity reveal not only a change in society’s ideas about privacy, but also its axiotic dimension connected with authenticity, creativity and freedom. The meaningful result of this process is connected with replacing religious Transcendence by private individual internal experience, which became unrecognizedand mysterious for the subject itself. It proved to new conceptualization of privacy and ofsolitude as well.

Understanding the Changing Landscape of Contemporary Spirituality.: A useful starting point for reviewing Catholic school religious education

Pope John Paul II, following in the steps of his predecessors, strongly advocated the critical appraisal of the influence of culture on people’s spirituality. This article responds to his directive by seeking to develop an interpretation of how and why contemporary spirituality has changed that will better inform the work of religious educators in Catholic schools. A number of constructs like secularisation, privatisation of religion etc. have been used to describe the significant change in spirituality of many of the young people in Australian Catholic schools over the last 50 years from a more traditional religious spirituality to something that is more secular, eclectic and individualistic. To some extent, this change has been acknowledged; but the religion curricula in Catholic schools still give the impression that all of the students are, or should be, regular church goers – as if Sunday mass attendance was to be the end point of their education in spirituality. An interpretation of change in spirituality in terms of change in cultural meanings has been developed for the purpose of understanding contemporary spiritualities in other than a deficit model. Such an interpretation may be more persuasive in getting Catholic education authorities and religious educators firstly to accept, rather than condemn or ignore, the significant change in contemporary spiritualty; and then secondly, to take steps to address this change positively and constructively in the Catholic school religion curriculum. This article is concerned with the first step – understanding contemporary spirituality; it is intended that the second question will be considered in a follow up article.

Private Religion, Public Mourning, and Mrs. Dalloway

Private Religion, Public Mourning, and <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i>

Islam and the postsecular

AbstractThe language of the ‘postsecular’ acknowledges the enduring presence of faith in politics, repudiating secularisation theses claiming diminution or privatisation of religion in social and political life. In cognitive and experiential worlds, those presumably unfettered by these conceptions (for example, the Islamic Cultural Zones or ICZs), the postsecular presents a different order of challenge and possibility. The term ICZs refers to Muslim majority areas informed by transnational subjectivities loosely connecting varied Islamic societies around symbolic commonality, memory, and historical experience. The term stresses the plurality of Islamic cultural experience, albeit distinguished by recognisable semiotic markers, without essentialising Islamic identity. This article questions the hegemonic view pervasive in both secular and postsecular theorising of the fiction of immutability of faith in the ICZs and recognises its rupture and displacement under conditions of late modernity. The ontological dislocation in the character of religion itself under conditions of late modernity opens up the possibility to account for the assumed resistance of Islam to secular modernity, but also to explain Islam's imbrications in politics read under the sign of Political Islam. Paradoxically, under the condition of late modernity, a more homogenised Islam appears to crystallise in the ICZs at odds with an ‘open’ Islam.

El «regreso de Dios» a la política: las religiones «públicas»

&lt;p&gt;Este artículo se acerca al fenómeno de la irrupción de las religiones en el ámbito público, que se produce a partir de finales de los años 1970 a lo largo del mundo. El objetivo de este trabajo es, por un lado, desarrollar los dos modelos típico-ideales de «religiones públicas» posibles, según sea la postura que la religión adopte respecto a la democracia y a la laicidad; y, por otro lado, replantear el paradigma de la secularización, que defendía la privatización de la religión, para que se haga cargo de aquella presencia pública de las religiones que sea legítima y aceptable para una sociedad democrática.&lt;/p&gt;

Canadian Values and Military Operations in the Twenty-First Century

Whereas traditionally religion has played a central role in shaping the shared values in a society, secularization, privatization of religion, and pluralism are changing the values that personnel bring to the Canadian Forces. This late modern reality means that many people who have rejected traditional forms of religion in order to interpret their personal spiritual beliefs for themselves are uncertain about their core values. Differences in values among military personnel are further complicated by the realities of modern military engagements that require a greater need for ethical thinking and moral decision making. This article examines the nature of religion and values in late modern Canadian society and identifies religious leadership as a source of moral and ethical direction as well as consolation in the face of moral anomie. Finally, it highlights the need for greater education about the role of religion and values for military personnel.

Return of the First-Person Singular: The Science of Subjectivity and the Sciences

Return of the First-Person Singular: The Science of Subjectivity and the Sciences

Secularization by law? The establishment clauses and religion in the public square in Australia and the United States

While there is an enormous body of case law and literature on the American establishment clause, there has been considerably less attention devoted to its Australian counterpart. As Australia is confronting the question of what role religion should play in public life, the Australian establishment clause is likely to become caught up in controversies similar to its American counterpart. The argument in this article is, first, that religion historically had a place in the public square in both the U.S. and Australia, and, second, that the U.S. and Australian constitutions never repudiated this tradition. Third, this article argues that the Australian establishment clause is interpreted and applied today in a way that is very similar to the way the U.S. establishment clause was understood in the early Republic, before the modern era of Supreme Court decisions on the subject began in the mid-twentieth century. The U.S. Supreme Court has departed further from the early positions on establishment than has its Australian counterpart. Finally, this article argues that the U.S. decisions tend to reflect a modern “culture of disbelief,” moving the culture toward privatization of religion. Australian courts have so far resisted the pressure to follow the American path of encouraging the privatization of religion through establishment clause jurisprudence (even though, ironically, religion holds a less prominent place in Australian culture than it does in the U.S.). While it is likely that there will be increased pressure on the Australian courts to do precisely this in the near future, this article argues that this would be a mistake.

THE MORAL FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICAL CHOICES: GEORGE WASHINGTON, FOREIGN POLICY, AND NATIONAL CHARACTER

The principles to which Washington adhered throughout his presidency consistently focused on a definition of American national interest and identity, which Washington articulated in his public addresses and pragmatic actions. Washington promoted a national morality based on private morality and religion, and he believed strongly that God's Providence had made the founding of the new republic possible. This essential vision was an important factor shaping his recommendations in the 1783 “Circular Address to the Governors of the Thirteen States,” which argued for a deeply moral character of the American republic, and undergirded Washington's “Proclamation of Neutrality” in 1793.

Teologi Kapitalistik : Catatan atas Cara Pandang Masyarakat Modern Terhadap Agama

As a cultural movement, globalization has presented the differences that tear do wn the totality and unity of values and beliefs .Global culture is characterized by the integration of local culture into the global order. Accordingly ,various foreign cultural values become the bases of the formation of sub-culture that stands alone with the freedom of expression. As a cultural movement, it brings the differences that under mine the totality and the unity of values and religious beliefs. This climate conduci ve to these different ways of life and then spawns a widespread individualization process, which turns man away from the general context. This massive shift can be seen in the so-called “privatization of religion”, the process of individualization in the appreciation and religious practices. Revitalization of religion is needed to restore the basic values of religion that have been secularized. Religion must come back as a legitimate sovereign social values and piety . This sovereignty of religion should be structured as a strategy for revitalizing religion in the lives of individuals and social piety . Thus,religion as a sovereign authority regulates individual piety personally and socially .However, the sovereignty of religion should give a wide freedom for individuals to perform the function of religion in accordance with the present context.

Islam as political religion: the future of an imperial faith

Introduction Part I: The Prophetic Consummation: Islam as Original and Final Religion 1. A Prophetic Religion 2. A Literary Religion 3. A Universal Religion Part II: The Twin Birth: Islam as Empowered Religion 4. A Political Religion: Muhammad as Statesman 5. A Secular Religion: Faith or Ideology? 6. A Legal Religion 7. An Imperial Religion Part III: The Crucible of Reason: Islam as Contemporary Religion 8. A Rational Religion 9. An Ethical Religion 10. A Private Religion Part IV: Epilogue 11. The Future Scope of an Imperial Faith

Politicised religion and the religionisation of politics

The dilemmas of dealing with difference are currently at the heart of our society. Among the anomalies of our age is the survival and even flourishing of complex systems of values based on religion. However, we see that mosques flourish, ethnic associations with religious undertones multiply and religion is present in the public sphere through conflicts about religion or persons believed to be religious. Islam is a much discussed topic. The line between private and public religion is as thin as ever, and I would argue so is the line between religion and politics. This can be observed at two levels. First, the invocation of religion in the political discourse, leading to the politicisation of religion and second, as the influence religion has on political life, the religionisation of politics.