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With the growth and tolerance of Islam and the attitude of everyone should be able to believe whatever they want to believe, it has become increasingly difficult to take a stand for the absolute truth as presented in God's word. What are Christians to do? This workbook helps answer this important question.
The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.
The Congregation in a Secular Age (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #3) by Andrew Root Pdf
Churches often realize they need to change. But if they're not careful, the way they change can hurt more than help. In this culmination of his well-received Ministry in a Secular Age trilogy, leading practical theologian Andrew Root offers a new paradigm for understanding the congregation in contemporary ministry. He articulates why congregations feel pressured by the speed of change in modern life and encourages an approach that doesn't fall into the negative traps of our secular age. Living in late modernity means our lives are constantly accelerated, and calls for change in the church often support this call to speed up. Root asserts that the recent push toward innovation in churches has led to an acceleration of congregational life that strips the sacred out of time. Many congregations are simply unable to keep up, which leads to burnout and depression. When things move too fast, we feel alienated from life and the voice of a living God. The Congregation in a Secular Age calls congregations to reimagine what change is and how to live into this future, helping them move from relevance to resonance.
Religious Difference in a Secular Age by Saba Mahmood Pdf
How secular governance in the Middle East is making life worse—not better—for religious minorities 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 examining four cornerstones of secularism—political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais—religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country—Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe. A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality.
Church and Politics in a Secular Age by Kenneth Medhurst,George Moyser Pdf
This book arises from a general preoccupation with the relationship between religion and politics and from a particular interest in the changing political stance of England's established Church. With the aid of surveys, interviews, and documentary evidence the authors have assembled anuniquely detailed picture of how the Church governs itself, of its leaders' attitudes, and of the institution's consequent impact upon public debate. Equally, they scrutinize the structural and ideological factors which limit the Church's capacity for influencing public discussion. Recent and wellpublicized shifts in the Church's official positions are explained by reference to the complex interaction of long-term social, political, and theological developments. The result is a volume which not only adds to our understanding of a significant yet little-charted area of English politicallife, but which is also intended to enhance the Church's own self-understanding.
Public Christians in A Secular Age: Leadership for Season Change by Neil R. Johnson Pdf
This book explores new depths in the foundations for leadership and for aspiring leaders in business, ministry and media. It explores how leaders manage the necessary call to action in emerging from the shallow dimension of a Secular Age.
Religious Freedom in a Secular Age by Michael F. Bird Pdf
Discover how to responsibly defend religious freedom for all without compromising your personal beliefs. Religious freedom is a bitterly contested issue that spills over into political, public, and online spheres. It's an issue that's becoming ever more heated, and neither of the global political polarities is interested in protecting it. While the political left is openly hostile toward traditional religion, the political right seeks to weaponize it. How can we ensure that "religious freedom" is truly about freedom of one's religion rather than serving an ethno-nationalist agenda? In Religious Freedom in a Secular Age, Michael Bird (New Testament scholar and author of Evangelical Theology) has four main goals: To explain the true nature of secularism and help us to see it as one of the best ways of promoting liberty and mutual respect in a multifaith world. To dismantle the arguments for limiting religious freedom. To outline a biblical strategy for maintaining a Christian witness in a post-Christian society. To encourage Christians to participate in a new age of apologetics by being prepared to defend not only their own believes but also the freedom of all faiths. While Bird does address the recent political administrations in the US, his focus is global. Bird—who lives in Melbourne, Australia—freely admits to his anxiety of the militant secularism surrounding him, but he also strongly critiques the marriage of national and religious identities that has gained ground in countries like Hungary and Poland. The fact is that religion has a lot to contribute to the common good. Religious Freedom in a Secular Age will challenge readers of all backgrounds and beliefs not only to make room for peaceable difference, but also to find common ground on the values of justice, mercy, and equality.
Identity in a Secular Age by Fern Elsdon-Baker,Bernard Lightman Pdf
Although historians have suggested for some time that we move away from the assumption of a necessary clash between science and religion, the conflict narrative persists in contemporary discourse. But why? And how do we really know what people actually think about evolutionary science, let alone the many and varied ways in which it might relate to individual belief? In this multidisciplinary volume, experts in history and philosophy of science, oral history, sociology of religion, social psychology, and science communication and public engagement look beyond two warring systems of thought. They consider a far more complex, multifaceted, and distinctly more interesting picture of how differing groups along a spectrum of worldviews—including atheistic, agnostic, and faith groups—relate to and form the ongoing narrative of a necessary clash between evolution and faith. By ascribing agency to the public, from the nineteenth century to the present and across Canada and the United Kingdom, this volume offers a much more nuanced analysis of people’s perceptions about the relationship between evolutionary science, religion, and personal belief, one that better elucidates the complexities not only of that relationship but of actual lived experience.
Identifying as Christian in an Alien Public Arena by Maureen Miner,Mark Stephens Pdf
Although Christianity is the world’s largest religion, there is confusion over what it means to be Christian within contemporary society. For individuals it is difficult to find, form, or receive a Christian identity, let alone maintain one within a secular world. Within organizations such as the church and professions there is often a disconnection between public and private identities and the reality of being Christian in our culture. For society there is the problem of disparate portrayals of Christianity, the marginalized status of Christianity with an associated lack of influence of Christians on our society, and the ongoing shaping of Christian identity by the public arena itself. Associated questions are: should Christians try to engage in, and even shape, the public arena and if so, how? This volume examines the problem of confused and misunderstood Christian identity in a post-Christian age. It suggests ways of shaping Christian identity for the benefit of individuals and for the common good. The importance of well-formed Christian identities is illustrated by research and analysis of selected professions so that the public life of Christians can be more fulfilling and effective. This book will be valuable for all those who are interested in religious identity within a secular society. People of faith and religious organizations will benefit from a penetrating analysis of what it means to be Christian today. Similarly, those whose work involves the church, counseling, education and the performing arts will find specific applications that address concerns about faith in the workplace.
Andrew Root's well-received Ministry in a Secular Age series offers a developed practical theology that uniquely attends to divine action. Series volumes engage with Charles Taylor's articulation of our cultural context and the challenge he raises for Christian life in a Western world that has found divine action increasingly unbelievable. This project provides not only a needed and deep dialogue with the issues Taylor presents but also offers a constructive vision for confronting Taylor's challenge. Volumes include: · Faith Formation in a Secular Age: Responding to the Church's Obsession with Youthfulness · The Pastor in a Secular Age: Ministry to People Who No Longer Need a God · The Congregation in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life · Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age · The Church after Innovation: Questioning Our Obsession with Work, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship · The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticisms: Why Spiritualities without God Fail to Transform Us
We live in a profoundly spiritual age, but not in any good way. Huge swaths of American culture are driven by manic spiritual anxiety and relentless supernatural worry. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives, together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation desperate to stand of the side of morality--to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light. In An Anxious Age, Joseph Bottum offers an account of modern America, presented as a morality tale formed by a collision of spiritual disturbances. And the cause, he claims, is the most significant and least noticed historical fact of the last fifty years: the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches that were the source of social consensus and cultural unity. Our dangerous spiritual anxieties, broken loose from the churches that once contained them, now madden everything in American life. Updating The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, Max Weber's sociological classic, An Anxious Age undertakes two case studies of contemporary social classes adrift in a nation without the religious understandings that gave them meaning. Looking at the college-educated elite he calls "the Poster Children," Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to the Swallows of Capistrano, the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying mainline voice in public life. Sweeping across American intellectual and cultural history, An Anxious Age traces the course of national religion and warns about the strange angels and even stranger demons with which we now wrestle. Insightful and contrarian, wise and unexpected, An Anxious Age ranks among the great modern accounts of American culture.
Drawn from the eponymous blog essays on faith, culture, and lives of Christian discipleship by young Jesuit priests and seminarians for young adult seekers.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Elaine Graham Pdf
Public theology is an increasingly important area of theological discourse with strong global networks of institutions and academics involved in it. Elaine Graham is one of the UK's leading theologians and an established SCM author. In this book, Elaine Graham argues that Western society is entering an unprecedented political and cultural era, in which many of the assumptions of classic sociological theory and of mainstream public theology are being overturned. Whilst many of the features of the trajectory of religious decline, typical of Western modernity, are still apparent, there are compelling and vibrant signs of religious revival, not least in public life and politics - local, national and global. This requires a revision of the classic secularization thesis, as well as much Western liberal political theory, which set out separate or at least demarcated terms of engagement between religion and the public domain. Elaine Graham examines claims that Western societies are moving from 'secular' to 'post-secular' conditions and traces the contours of the 'post-secular': the revival of faith-based engagement in public sphere alongside the continuing - perhaps intensifying - questioning of the legi¬timacy of religion in public life. She argues that public theology must rethink its theological and strategic priorities in order to be convincing in this new 'post-secular' world and makes the case for the renewed prospects for public theology as a form of Christian apologetics, drawing from Biblical, classical and contemporary sources.
The role of Evangelical Christianity in American public life is controversial. The mythology of America as a “Christian nation” and the promissory note of secularism have proved inadequate to cope with the increasing pluralism, the resilience of spirituality, and the wariness toward formal religion that mark our post-secular age. Christianity and democracy have a complex history together, but is there a future where these two great traditions draw the best out of one another? What does that future look like in a heterogeneous society? Sanders argues that democracy is stronger when it allows all of its religious citizens to participate fully in the public sphere, and Christianity is richer when it demonstrates the wisdom of God from the ground up, rather than legislating it from the top down. In this reality, the Evangelical church must return to Christianity’s prophetic roots and see itself as a “community in exile,” where participation in the political is important, but not ultimate—where the substantive work of the church happens “after the election.”
No one doubts we have quickly moved to what Charles Taylor called “a secular age.” How do Christian pastors, professors, seminary students, and others respond to the myriad issues now facing the Body of Christ? Following on a biblical and reformed understanding of public theology, Milton along with trusted theologians John Frame, George Grant, Peter Lillback (and a special contribution from noted Orthodox economist and theologian John Panagiotou) not only provide biblical responses to the issues of our time but in doing so give the Church a method, a way, to conduct faithful Gospel ministry in an increasingly hostile post-Christian world. A must for classes on ethics, sociology of religion, pastoral theology, and serious-minded Christians seeking insight that they might “Understand of the times” (1 Chr 12:32).