Secular Conversions

Author : Damon Mayrl
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316720705
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Secular Conversions written by Damon Mayrl and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does secularization proceed differently in otherwise similar countries? Secular Conversions demonstrates that the institutional structure of the state is a key factor shaping the course of secularization. Drawing upon detailed historical analysis of religious education policy in the United States and Australia, Damon Mayrl details how administrative structures, legal procedures, and electoral systems have shaped political opportunities and even helped create constituencies for secular policies. In so doing, he also shows how a decentralized, readily accessible American state acts as an engine for religious conflict, encouraging religious differences to spill into law and politics at every turn. This book provides a vivid picture of how political conflicts interacted with the state over the long span of American and Australian history to shape religion's role in public life. Ultimately, it reveals that taken-for-granted political structures have powerfully shaped the fate of religion in modern societies.

Author : Susan Jacoby
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1400096391
Total Pages : 514 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Strange Gods written by Susan Jacoby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a groundbreaking historical work that focuses on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with an uncompromising secular perspective, Susan Jacoby illuminates the social and economic forces that have shaped individual faith and the voluntary conversion impulse that has changed the course of Western history—for better and for worse. Covering the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin’s dour theocracy, American plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters’ religion—along with individual converts including Augustine of Hippo, John Donne, Edith Stein, Muhammad Ali, George W. Bush and Mike Pence—Strange Gods makes a powerful case that nothing has been more important in struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one’s choice or to reject belief in God altogether.

Author : Damon Mayrl
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107103711
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Secular Conversions written by Damon Mayrl and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals how taken-for-granted political structures have shaped the fate of religion in Australian and American public life.

Author : John Fletcher
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472029878
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Preaching to Convert written by John Fletcher and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-11-13 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preaching to Convert offers an intriguing new perspective on the outreach strategies of U.S. evangelicals, framing them as examples of activist performance, broadly defined as acts performed before an audience in the hopes of changing hearts and minds. Most writing about activist performance has focused on left-progressive causes, events, and actors. Preaching to Convert argues against such a constricted view of activism and for a more nuanced understanding of U.S. evangelicalism as a movement defined by its desire to win converts and spread the gospel. The book positions evangelicals as a diverse, complicated group confronting the loss of conservative Christianity’s default status in 21st-century U.S. culture. In the face of an increasingly secular age, evangelicals have been reassessing models of outreach. In acts like handing out Bible tracts to strangers on the street or going door-to-door with a Bible in hand, in elaborately staged horror-themed morality plays or multimillion-dollar creationist discovery centers, in megachurch services beamed to dozens of satellite campuses, and in controversial “ex-gay” ministries striving to return gays and lesbians to the straight and narrow, evangelicals are redefining what it means to be deeply committed in a pluralist world. The book’s engaging style and careful argumentation make it accessible and appealing to scholars and students across a range of fields.

Author : N. Marzouki
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137004894
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Religious Conversions in the Mediterranean World written by N. Marzouki and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While globalization undermines ideas of the nation-state in the Mediterranean, conversions reveal how religion can unsettle existing political and social relations. Through studies of conversions across the region this book examines the challenges that conversions represent for national, legal and policy ways of dealing with religious minorities.

Author : Joseph Blankholm
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479809497
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Secular Paradox written by Joseph Blankholm and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Secular people are strangely ambiguous. They feel a tension between what they don't share and what they have in common-between avoiding religion and embracing something like it. An event as ordinary as a wedding can be uncomfortable if it feels too religious, and even for those who are indifferent to religion, a passing reference to God can be cringeworthy. And yet, religion is tough to avoid completely without living in its remainder. The Secular Paradox explains why. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, Blankholm shows how secular people are both absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like tradition, which includes beliefs and institutions, as well embodied practices. Recovering this tradition makes legible what secular people share with one another and explains why the secular movement in the United States remains predominately white and male. Humanistic Jews, Hispanic Freethinkers, Ex-Muslims, and black nonbelievers are secular misfits whose stories reveal the contours of the secular most clearly by proving to be more and less than what remains when Christianity is removed. The Secular Paradox offers a radically new way of understanding secularism and secular people by explaining the origins of their inherent contradiction and its awkward effects on their lives. This new understanding matters for anyone who has ever avoided something because it felt too religious, everyone who considers themselves secular, and all those who want to understand them better"--

Author : Matthew Scherer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9781107579439
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Beyond Church and State written by Matthew Scherer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secularism is often imagined in Thomas Jefferson's words as "a wall of separation between Church and State." Beyond Church and State moves past that standard picture to argue that secularism is a process that reshapes both religion and politics. Borrowing a term from religious traditions, the book goes further to argue that this process should be understood as a process of conversion. Matthew Scherer studies Saint Augustine, John Locke, John Rawls, Henri Bergson, and Stanley Cavell to present a more accurate picture of what secularism is, what it does, and how it can be reimagined to be more conducive to genuine democracy.

Author : Joseph Blankholm
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479809527
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Secular Paradox written by Joseph Blankholm and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radically new way of understanding secularism which explains why being secular can seem so strangely religious For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals. In The Secular Paradox, Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, they feel they have lost too much. Trying to strike the right balance, secular people alternate between the two sides of their ambiguous condition: absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition. Blankholm relies heavily on the voices of women and people of color to understand what it means to live with the secular paradox. The struggles of secular misfits—the people who mis-fit normative secularism in the United States—show that becoming secular means rejecting parts of life that resemble Christianity and embracing a European tradition that emphasizes reason and avoids emotion. Women, people of color, and secular people who have left non-Christian religions work against the limits and contradictions of secularism to create new ways of being secular that are transforming the American religious landscape. They are pioneering the most interesting and important forms of secular “religiosity” in America today.

Author : Susan Jacoby
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1101870966
Total Pages : 512 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Strange Gods written by Susan Jacoby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a groundbreaking historical work that addresses religious conversion in the West from an uncompromisingly secular perspective, Susan Jacoby challenges the conventional narrative of conversion as a purely spiritual journey. From the transformation on the road to Damascus of the Jew Saul into the Christian evangelist Paul to a twenty-first-century “religious marketplace” in which half of Americans have changed faiths at least once, nothing has been more important in the struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one’s choice or to reject belief in God altogether. Focusing on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—each claiming possession of absolute truth—Jacoby examines conversions within a social and economic framework that includes theocratic coercion (unto torture and death) and the more friendly persuasion of political advantage, economic opportunism, and interreligious marriage. Moving through time, continents, and cultures—the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin’s dour theocracy, Southern plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters’ religion—the narrative is punctuated by portraits of individual converts embodying the sacred and profane. The cast includes Augustine of Hippo; John Donne; the German Jew Edith Stein, whose conversion to Catholicism did not save her from Auschwitz; boxing champion Muhammad Ali; and former President George W. Bush. The story also encompasses conversions to rigid secular ideologies, notably Stalinist Communism, with their own truth claims. Finally, Jacoby offers a powerful case for religious choice as a product of the secular Enlightenment. In a forthright and unsettling conclusion linking the present with the most violent parts of the West’s religious past, she reminds us that in the absence of Enlightenment values, radical Islamists are persecuting Christians, many other Muslims, and atheists in ways that recall the worst of the Middle Ages. (With 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations.)

Author : André van der Braak
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004435085
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reimagining Zen in a Secular Age written by André van der Braak and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-08-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reimagining Zen in a Secular Age André van der Braak uses Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age to describe the encounter between Japanese Zen Buddhism and Western modernity. He proposes how Dōgen’s thought offers resources for a reimagining of Zen.