Varieties Of Secularism Research Articles

Secularism: The Basics. By Jacques Berlinerblau

Students at the college where I teach—a nondenominational, liberal arts school in the northeast—have certain assumptions about the secularity of the United States. First, they broadly assume that the Constitution installs a wall of separation between church and state. Second, they assume that this wall ensures that governmental entanglement with religion—whether by its citizens giving voice to politics in explicitly religious terms, or by the government itself in its own engagements with religion—is strictly forbidden. Jacques Berlinerblau’s Secularism: The Basics is a book I would consider handing to my students to help dispel them of these myths, and then introduce them to the protean nature of secularism. Indeed, Berlinerblau could have called this pithy and eminently engagingly written text, “a handbook on the varieties of secularism,” because his main point is this: There is no single definition or political manifestation of secularism. Secularisms are plural across time and space, made of unstable and malleable ore.

Comment: Varieties of Secularism

New BlackfriarsVolume 100, Issue 1089 p. 491-492 Comment Comment: Varieties of Secularism Fergus Kerr OP, Fergus Kerr OPSearch for more papers by this author Fergus Kerr OP, Fergus Kerr OPSearch for more papers by this author First published: 29 August 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/nbfr.12490Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume100, Issue1089September 2019Pages 491-492 RelatedInformation

Varieties of Secularism, Class, and Who Does (and Doesn’t) Politicize Islam - Z. Fareen Parvez, Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India (New York, Oxford University Press, 2017)

Varieties of Secularism, Class, and Who Does (and Doesn’t) Politicize Islam - Z. Fareen Parvez, Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India (New York, Oxford University Press, 2017)

Secular studies come of age

In this essay I review three important volumes for the field of secular studies: Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, Rethinking Secularism, and The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. All three volumes explore the nature of the secular and the status, role, and possible futures of religion in our late modern, globalized world. The volumes present 34 essays by 30 authors representing seven disciplines, and at least six end games. For some, questions of religion-secular entanglement are a historical matter and the task is to map intellectual and ideological trajectories. A second purpose is to empirically document the complexities of particular religion-secular entanglements in particular socio-cultural locations. For others, the remit is theoretical, to discern a conceptual agenda for the ongoing study of religion-secular entanglements. Others are more philosophical, chasing the existential consequences of secularity. A fifth end game is applied in nature: reflections on how political actors might best engage the religious and the secular in acts of governance and international relations. Finally, there are normative voices, those seeking to name what a good, productive religion-secular entanglement ought to look like. Taken together, the volumes mark a thriving, mature field of scholarly inquiry: secular studies has come of age.

Post‐Secularism and the European Court of Human Rights: Or How God Never Really Went Away

This article analyses the critical yet elusive notions of state neutrality, secularism and religious coercion under the European Convention in light of the European Court of Human Rights recent decision in Lautsi v Italy. We contend that the real concern in the Italian crucifix case was not the infringement of the school pupils’ religious freedom nor the proselytising or coercive effect of the ‘passive’ religious symbols. Rather, opponents of the longstanding symbols were animated by desire for strict religious equality, a notion that is, correctly in our view, not guaranteed under the Convention. Lautsi has significantly cleared the conceptual undergrowth surrounding state neutrality and the varieties of secularism, reined in the elastic notion of religious coercion and eschewed attempts to squeeze the constitutional diversity of European religion‐state frameworks into a strict American‐style separationist mould. The Convention jurisprudence on freedom of religion has finally come of age.

Artigo bibliográfico após a (antropologia/sociologia da) religião, o secularismo?

O presente ensaio apresenta ao público brasileiro, a partir de duas coletâneas - Varieties of secularism in a secular age (2010) e Rethinking secularism (2011) - o recente debate sobre o secularismo. Os diversos autores pretendem seguir a crítica de Charles Taylor em A secular age (2007), em que questiona a tese da retração da religião das diversas esferas sociais sem que as mesmas sofram profundas alterações, isto é, ignorando seu caráter relacional. O principal argumento mobilizado é, nesse sentido, a necessidade de reavaliar a dicotomia secular/religioso, compreendendo a mútua constituição dos polos, bem como o efeito desta dicotomia em países fora do "mundo do Atlântico Norte", de tradição judaico-cristã. Diferencia-se, assim, "secularização", "secularismo" e "secular" como três fenômenos relacionados, mas não homogêneos. A proposta subjacente, de pesquisas sobre a "formação do secular", reivindica, portanto, uma análise da positividade do secular ao invés da simples ausência do religioso.

Book Review: Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age

Book Review: Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age

Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age

Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age

Out of Time: The Limits of Secular Critique

A review of Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech and Michael Warner, Jonathan Vanantwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (eds), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age.

Varieties of secularism in a secular age

Varieties of secularism in a secular age

The International Politics of Secularism: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Islamic Republic of Iran

The Iranian people did not rebel against their own failed rulers but against ours. --Robert J. Allison In his study of nationalism and modern politics, Mark Juergensmeyer describes secular nationalism and religion as two opposing ideologies of order. (1) These ideologies, he explains, have a great deal in common. They conceive of the world in coherent, manageable ways; they both suggest that are levels of meaning beneath the day-to-day world that give coherence to things unseen; and they both provide the authority that gives the social and political order its reason for being. After a lengthy analysis in which he portrays religion and nationalism as opposing ideologies, Juergensmeyer concludes that there can ultimately be no convergence between and secular political ideologies. (2) Juergensmeyer takes us some distance toward an understanding of the relationship between secular nationalism and religion. However, I want to take his insight into this relationship in a direction that he does not explore. For while he convincingly shows how secular and worldviews differ from each other, Juergensmeyer does not explore the extent to which secular order itself is created and maintained through its opposition to religion. Secularism has developed over centuries of experimentation and innovation. A curious relationship exists between this tradition and its counterparts. This article explores this relationship in the context of twentieth-century relations between the United States and Iran. To understand U.S. foreign policy toward Iran. I believe that we need to shift our attention away from threats to secular modernity and toward secular attempts to identify the religious. There are two varieties of secularism in the West. The first is laicism, or the attempt to expel religion from public life. In this form of secularism, the and the religious are expelled from public discourse and practice. (3) The second is what I call Judeo-Christian secularism, in which sacred aspects of Judeo-Christianity quietly inform public discourse and practice. Secularism has a rather cozy relationship with Judeo-Christian tradition. Judeo-Christian secularists believe that their tradition has culminated in the unique Western achievement of the separation of church and state. Secularization, then, is understood as the realization of a Western tradition. Both of these varieties of secularism are extremely unsympathetic toward the Islamic religion. Both chastise Islamic activists for attempting to import their religion into a would-be secular (either laicist or Judeo-Christian) democratic public sphere. (4) Both, in other words, are sustained through the identification and marginalization of Islam. When I refer to secularism, I am referring to both of these varieties. The argument is divided into three parts: The first sets out the conceptual framework that underlies my argument, the paradox of identity and difference; the second part applies this framework to relations between the United States and Iran. In particular I explain why the Islamic Revolution was perceived as such a profound threat to the United States. In challenging the automatic linkage between secularism, democracy, and freedom, the revolution threatened U.S. nationalism, in which these ideals are tightly interwoven. To counter this threat, Americans projected all of the negative traits that had been associated with secular modernity under the shah--violence, tyranny, and lack of democracy--onto an Islamic other. This projection served two functions: it exculpated the United States from its association with the shah's regime and it cemented the association of the United States with secular democracy in opposition to its nemesis, tyranny. My argument, then, in the third part, is that the very identity of the United States as secular and democratic was at stake in the Iranian Revolution. …

Parnassus Restored, Saints Confounded: The Secular Challenge to the Age of the Godly, 1560–1660

The conception of English culture in the century that was brought to a climax in Cromwellian triumph and tragedy has suffered from a flatness of historical perception, one major cause of which has been insufficient recognition of the thought and esthetic creativity of nominal Christian and emphatically non-Puritan intellectuals and artists. We have concentrated too much on defining the novelties, indeed often inappreciable differences, that characterized pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Christian factionalism in England: Anglicanism, Puritanism, Sectarianism, Laudianism, and now Arminianism. I want instead to make a case for the neglected power, pervasiveness, and perdurability of varieties of secularism in the age of the Godly.Although a growing number of scholars are aware of the importance of literature to the dynamics of this astonishing epoch, the redoubtable spirit of William Haller prevails still in historical efforts to reconstitute the cultural context of that literature. The pagan bedrock laid down by a century of humanist imports is obscured by the flood of ephemeral sermons and miscellaneous religious discourse. Recent literary scholarship, on the other hand, having shaken the incubus of F. R. Leavis and not yet succumbed to post-structuralism, has given us models with which to illuminate prerevolutionary English culture: the monographs of Stephen Greenblatt, Jonathan Dollimore, and Stephen Orgel investigate the penetration of secular humanism into literature, historical writing,and popular and court theatre. They could lead us out of the fog created by the supersaturated climate of Protestant culture.