This book traces religion and secularity in eleven countries not shaped by Western Christianity (Japan, China, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Morocco), and how they parallel or diverge from Charles Taylor's grand narrative of the North Atlantic world, A Secular Age (2007). In all eleven cases, the state - enhanced by post-colonial and post-imperial legacies - highly determines religious experience, by variably regulating religious belief, practice, property, education and/or law. Taylor's core condition of secularity - namely, legal permissibility and social acceptance of open religious unbelief (Secularity III) - is largely absent in these societies. The areas affected by state regulation, however, differ greatly. In India, Israel and most Muslim countries, questions of religious law are central to state regulation. But it is religious education and organization in China, and church property and public practice in Russia that bear the brunt. This
The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region.Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by ex
The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region.Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by ex
Sacred Violence examines the place that ideology or political religion plays in legitimizing violence to achieve a condition of worldly perfection. In particular, the book focuses upon Islamism as a p
Thomas Scirghi, SJ, has trained priests, deacons, and lay ecclesial ministers in the art and theology of preaching for decades. In Longing to See Your Face, he makes his insights and experience access
In Believing Again Roger Lundin brilliantly explores the cultural consequences of the rather sudden nineteenth-century emergence of unbelief as a widespread social and intellectual option in the Engli
Some twenty-five centuries after the Buddha started teaching, his message continues to inspire people across the globe, including those living in predominantly secular societies. But what does it mean
A renowned Buddhist teacher’s magnum opus, based on his fresh reading of the tradition’s earliest texts Some twenty-five centuries after the Buddha started teaching, his message continues to inspire p
