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Author: Sjoerd Griffioen
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2022-01-10
Total Pages: 504
ISBN-13: 9004504524
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Sjoerd Griffioen investigates the polemics between Löwith, Blumenberg and Schmitt in the German secularization debate (1950’s-1980’s). ‘Secularization’ is revealed as a contested concept in ideological struggles over modernity and religion, both in this debate and contemporary postsecularism.
Author: Alpo Penttinen
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Published: 2024-01-17
Total Pages: 430
ISBN-13: 1527572331
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the wake of various secularization processes, a growing number of people in Western societies are now describing themselves as “non-religious.” But what does this sociological fact really mean, for the Church and for society at large? Has human religiosity a future after secularization? It does, this book argues, but in a radically altered form. Taking its cue from Pope Francis’s suggestion that globalizing humanity is presently living through a genuine “epochal shift,” this book presents an original analysis of the transformative effect of secularization on our spiritual predicament in the Western, now definitively post-Christian, world. Instead of succumbing to the all-too-common polarizations in contemporary religious discourse, this book aspires to overcome the “religious” vs. “secular” dichotomy through developing the logic of “Radical Secularization,” arguably the genuine novelty of the particularly Western process of secularization. The past homogeneously religious culture is certainly dusking, but this only paves the way for the dawn of the future and radically open horizon for our human search for meaning. This challenging book will offer intellectual impulses and spiritual incentives to everybody who ponders the future of human religious evolution after secularization.
Author: Peter Harrison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2024-04-18
Total Pages: 483
ISBN-13: 1009477269
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In his famous argument against miracles, David Hume gets to the heart of the modern problem of supernatural belief. 'We are apt', says Hume, 'to imagine ourselves transported into some new world; where the whole form of nature is disjointed, and every element performs its operation in a different manner, from what it does at present.' This encapsulates, observes Peter Harrison, the disjuncture between contemporary Western culture and medieval societies. In the Middle Ages, people saw the hand of God at work everywhere. Indeed, many suppose that 'belief in the supernatural' is likewise fundamental nowadays to religious commitment. But dichotomising between 'naturalism' and 'supernaturalism' is actually a relatively recent phenomenon, just as the notion of 'belief' emerged historically late. In this masterful contribution to intellectual history, the author overturns crucial misconceptions – 'myths' – about secular modernity, challenging common misunderstandings of the past even as he reinvigorates religious thinking in the present.
Author: Willem Styfhals
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2019-11-01
Total Pages: 262
ISBN-13: 1438476396
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Presents a historical and philosophical overview of the twentieth-century German debates on secularization, and their significance for contemporary discussions about the relationship between theology and modernity. While the concept of secularization is traditionally used to define the nature of modern culture, and sometimes to uncover the theological origins of secular modernity, its validity is being questioned ever more radically today. Genealogies of the Secular returns to the historical, intellectual, and philosophical roots of this concept in the twentieth-century German debates on religion and modernity, and presents a wide range of strategies that German thinkers have applied to apprehend the connection between religion and secularism. In fundamentally heterogeneous ways, these strategies all developed “genealogies of the secular” by tracing modern phenomena back to their religious or theological roots. This book aims to disclose the complex prehistory of the contemporary debates on political theology and postsecularism, and to show how prominent thinkers continue this German tradition today. It explores and assesses the classic theories of secularization that are epitomized in Carl Schmitt’s writings on political theology, but also addresses German philosophers whose work has been rarely associated with secularization, including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, and Hannah Arendt. Attention is also paid to two thinkers whose role in these discourses has not been fully explored yet: Jacob Taubes and Jan Assmann. By introducing their thinking on religion, politics, and secularization, the book also makes two of their own key texts available to an English-language readership. “What makes the book so valuable pedagogically is the clarity and scope of its synthetic gestures about the dense questions congealing around the topic of secularization. It offers a pronouncement of central significance, emerging from some of the most important contemporary voices in these fields. The scholarship is internationally informed and engaged, even as it feels vibrant, immediate, and agenda setting.” — Ward Blanton, University of Kent, Canterbury
Author: Todd H. Weir
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2023-11-30
Total Pages: 383
ISBN-13: 1009463705
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Red Secularism is the first substantive investigation into one of the key sources of radicalism in modern German, the subculture that arose at the intersection of secularism and socialism in the late nineteenth-century. It explores the organizations that promoted their humanistic-monistic worldview through popular science and asks how this worldview shaped the biographies of ambitious self-educated workers and early feminists. Todd H. Weir shows how generations of secularist intellectuals staked out leading positions in the Social Democratic Party, but often lost them due to their penchant for dissent. Moving between local and national developments, this book examines the crucial role of red secularism in the political struggles over religion that rocked Germany and fed into the National Socialist dictatorship of 1933. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Author: Jens Meierhenrich
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 873
ISBN-13: 0199916934
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt collects thirty original chapters on the diverse oeuvre of one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was a German theorist whose anti-liberalism continues to inspire scholars and practitioners on both the Left and the Right. Despite Schmitt's rabid anti-semitism and partisan legal practice in Nazi Germany, the appeal of his trenchant critiques of, among other things, aestheticism, representative democracy, and international law as well as of his theoretical justifications of dictatorship and rule by exception is undiminished. Uniquely located at the intersection of law, the social sciences, and the humanities, this volume brings together sophisticated yet accessible interpretations of Schmitt's sprawling thought and complicated biography. The contributors hail from diverse disciplines, including art, law, literature, philosophy, political science, and history. In addition to opening up exciting new avenues of research, The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt provides the intellectual foundations for an improved understanding of the political, legal, and cultural thought of this most infamous of German theorists. A substantial introduction places the trinity of Schmitt's thought in a broad context.
Author: Michael Allen Gillespie
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Published: 2010-10-21
Total Pages: 762
ISBN-13: 1459606124
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Taking as his starting point the collapse of the medieval world, Gillespie argues that from the very beginning moderns sought not to eliminate religion but to support a new view of religion and its place in human life- and that they did so not out of hostility but in order to sustain certain religious beliefs. He goes on to explore the ideas of such figures as William of Ockham, Petrarch, Erasmus, Luther, Descartes, and Hobbes, showing that modernity is best understood as the result of a series of attempts to formulate a new and coherent metaphysics or theology.
Author: Clemens Six
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2020-11-16
Total Pages: 80
ISBN-13: 9004447962
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →To what extent was the evolution of secularism in twentieth-century South and Southeast Asia a result of transnational exchange? Six argues that networks of non-state actors played a bigger role than previously understood.
Author: John H. Smith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2011-10-15
Total Pages: 325
ISBN-13: 0801463270
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The contemporary theologian Hans Küng has asked if the "death of God," proclaimed by Nietzsche as the event of modernity, was inevitable. Did the empowering of new forms of rationality in Western culture beginning around 1500 lead necessarily to the reduction or privatization of faith? In Dialogues between Faith and Reason, John H. Smith traces a major line in the history of theology and the philosophy of religion down the "slippery slope" of secularization—from Luther and Erasmus, through Idealism, to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and contemporary theory such as that of Derrida, Habermas, Vattimo, and Asad. At the same time, Smith points to the persistence of a tradition that grew out of the Reformation and continues in the mostly Protestant philosophical reflection on whether and how faith can be justified by reason. In this accessible and vigorously argued book, Smith posits that faith and reason have long been locked in mutual engagement in which they productively challenge each other as partners in an ongoing "dialogue." Smith is struck by the fact that although in the secularized West the death of God is said to be fundamental to the modern condition, our current post-modernity is often characterized as a "postsecular" time. For Smith, this means not only that we are experiencing a broad-based "return of religion" but also, and more important for his argument, that we are now able to recognize the role of religion within the history of modernity. Emphasizing that, thanks to the logos located "in the beginning," the death of God is part of the inner logic of the Christian tradition, he argues that this same strand of reasoning also ensures that God will always "return" (often in new forms). In Smith's view, rational reflection on God has both undermined and justified faith, while faith has rejected and relied on rational argument. Neither a defense of atheism nor a call to belief, his book explores the long history of their interaction in modern religious and philosophical thought.
Author: Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-05-16
Total Pages: 428
ISBN-13: 022640336X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
