Secularism Category

Some Disjointed Thoughts on Democracy, Plato, and the Christian Roots of Liberalism

Yesterday I was inspired by someone dear to me to write out these thoughts. In a rather uncomfortable disagreement, this person, after I had complained about the direction society was moving (a common aghast of the postgraduate), they simply retorted, “that’s democracy.” My first impulse was to aggressively and disdainfully disagree. But I knew this […]

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Preaching at the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Secularism of George Jacob Holyoake

Wrapping up a series of essays I have been reading from The British Journal for the History of Science, I now come to two interrelated and complimentary essays by Ciaran Toal, “Preaching at the British Association for the Advancement of Science: Sermons, Secularization and the Rhetoric of Conflict in the 1870s” (2012), and Michael Rectenwald, […]

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Unintended Consequences: Brad S. Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation

Peter Harrison argues in his The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (1998) that it was only after people began reading the Bible in a different way that they began reading “God’s other book,” that is, the “Book of Nature,” in a different way, and in consequence scientific knowledge began to increase as […]

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Myths about Science and Religion – That Modern Science has Secularized Western Culture (Final)

My last review of Galileo goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion comes from the pioneering historian of science, John Hedley Brooke, who wrote an entry on the myth that modern science has secularized western culture. Once upon a time, social scientists commonly asserted that scientific progress has been the principal cause […]

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The European Commission and the Commemorative Euro Coin

Andrew Higgins, in one of the cover stories of today’s New York Times, reports how the European Commission ordered the National Bank of Slovakia to remove halos and crosses from a commemorative euro coin to be minted this summer (“A More Secular Europe, Divided by the Cross“). The coins are a celebration of Christianity’s arrival […]

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Desecularizing the World

Continuing the trend from the last post, in this post we will be looking at a different book, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (1999), edited by Peter L. Berger. Few scholars have contributed so much to our understanding of religion and modernity as Berger. Beginning in the 1960s, he advanced […]

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Rethinking Secularism: José Casanova’s The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms

José Casanova’s exemplary essay in Rethinking Secularism is one of the best I have read on the subject. Casanova, a professor of Sociology at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, engages secularism from a critical analytical angle. Because there are multiple and various ways of experiencing […]

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Rethinking Secularism – Charles Taylor’s Western Secularity

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) has generated a huge amount of discussion. In the first chapter of Rethinking Secularism, entitled “Western Secularity,” Taylor revisits central themes from A Secular Age as he charts the historical trajectory that led from the “axial religion” through Latin Christendom to the contemporary conditions of modern secularity. While noting that […]

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Rethinking Secularism – Introduction

Challenging the Bifurcation In the Introduction to their Rethinking Secularism (2011), Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen begin by announcing that not only a host of political activism but a rising tide of scholarship has emerged challenging established understandings of how the terms “secularism” and “religion” function in public life. “Reigning theories of […]

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The Secularization of the European Mind

A popular mind, even when that mind is middle class…has a need to inflate if it is to understand. It seizes upon a salient point; the point which is easy to identify; the point which is graphic, can be pictured; the point which a newspaper can make readable. In seizing upon the salient point it […]

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