The Secular Paradox

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The Secular Paradox

Joseph Blankholm
The Secular Paradox Book PDF

Author : Joseph Blankholm
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2022
Category : RELIGION
ISBN : 1479809519

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The Secular Paradox by Joseph Blankholm Pdf

"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"--

The Secular Paradox

Joseph Blankholm
The Secular Paradox Book PDF

Author : Joseph Blankholm
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2022-06-07
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781479809523

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The Secular Paradox by Joseph Blankholm Pdf

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.

The Paradox of Liberation

Michael Walzer
The Paradox of Liberation Book PDF

Author : Michael Walzer
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 189 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2015-03-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780300213911

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The Paradox of Liberation by Michael Walzer Pdf

Many of the successful campaigns for national liberation in the years following World War II were initially based on democratic and secular ideals. Once established, however, the newly independent nations had to deal with entirely unexpected religious fierceness. Michael Walzer, one of America’s foremost political thinkers, examines this perplexing trend by studying India, Israel, and Algeria, three nations whose founding principles and institutions have been sharply attacked by three completely different groups of religious revivalists: Hindu militants, ultra-Orthodox Jews and messianic Zionists, and Islamic radicals. In his provocative, well-reasoned discussion, Walzer asks why these secular democratic movements have failed to sustain their hegemony: Why have they been unable to reproduce their political culture beyond one or two generations? In a postscript, he compares the difficulties of contemporary secularism to the successful establishment of secular politics in the early American republic—thereby making an argument for American exceptionalism but gravely noting that we may be less exceptional today.

Church, State, and the Crisis in American Secularism

Bruce Ledewitz
Church State and the Crisis in American Secularism Book PDF

Author : Bruce Ledewitz
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2011-06-01
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780253001368

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Church, State, and the Crisis in American Secularism by Bruce Ledewitz Pdf

Since 1947, the Supreme Court has promised government neutrality toward religion, but in a nation whose motto is "In God We Trust" and which pledges allegiance to "One Nation under God," the public square is anything but neutral -- a paradox not lost on a rapidly secularizing America and a point of contention among those who identify all expressions of religion by government as threats to a free society. Yeshiva student turned secularist, Bruce Ledewitz seeks common ground for believers and nonbelievers regarding the law of church and state. He argues that allowing government to promote higher law values through the use of religious imagery would resolve the current impasse in the interpretation of the Establishment Clause. It would offer secularism an escape from its current tendency toward relativism in its dismissal of all that religion represents and encourage a deepening of the expression of meaning in the public square without compromising secular conceptions of government.

Questioning Secularism

Hussein Ali Agrama
Questioning Secularism Book PDF

Author : Hussein Ali Agrama
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2012-11-02
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780226010687

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Questioning Secularism by Hussein Ali Agrama Pdf

What, exactly, is secularism? What has the West's long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In this work, Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart.

True Paradox

David Skeel
True Paradox Book PDF

Author : David Skeel
Publisher : InterVarsity Press
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2014-08-28
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780830896691

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True Paradox by David Skeel Pdf

Foreword Review's Annual INDIEFAB Book of the Year Finalist How do we explain human consciousness? Where do we get our sense of beauty? Why do we recoil at suffering? Why do we have moral codes that none of us can meet? Why do we yearn for justice, yet seem incapable of establishing it? Any philosophy or worldview must make sense of the world as we actually experience it. We need to explain how we can discern qualities such as beauty and evil and account for our practices of morality and law. The complexity of the contemporary world is sometimes seen as an embarrassment for Christianity. But law professor David Skeel makes a fresh case for the plausibility and explanatory power of Christianity. The Christian faith offers plausible explanations for the central puzzles of our existence, such as our capacity for idea-making, our experience of beauty and suffering, and our inability to create a just social order. When compared with materialism or other sets of beliefs, Christianity provides a more comprehensive framework for understanding human life as we actually live it. We need not deny the complexities of life as we experience it. But the paradoxes of our existence can lead us to the possibility that the existence of God could make sense of it all.

Landscapes of the Secular

Nicolas Howe
Landscapes of the Secular Book PDF

Author : Nicolas Howe
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2016-09-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780226376806

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Landscapes of the Secular by Nicolas Howe Pdf

“What does it mean to see the American landscape in a secular way?” asks Nicolas Howe at the outset of this innovative, ambitious, and wide-ranging book. It’s a surprising question because of what it implies: we usually aren’t seeing American landscapes through a non-religious lens, but rather as inflected by complicated, little-examined concepts of the sacred. Fusing geography, legal scholarship, and religion in a potent analysis, Howe shows how seemingly routine questions about how to look at a sunrise or a plateau or how to assess what a mountain is both physically and ideologically, lead to complex arguments about the nature of religious experience and its implications for our lives as citizens. In American society—nominally secular but committed to permitting a diversity of religious beliefs and expressions—such questions become all the more fraught and can lead to difficult, often unsatisfying compromises regarding how to interpret and inhabit our public lands and spaces. A serious commitment to secularism, Howe shows, forces us to confront the profound challenges of true religious diversity in ways that often will have their ultimate expression in our built environment. This provocative exploration of some of the fundamental aspects of American life will help us see the land, law, and society anew.

The Secular Sacred

Markus Balkenhol,Ernst van den Hemel,Irene Stengs
The Secular Sacred Book PDF

Author : Markus Balkenhol,Ernst van den Hemel,Irene Stengs
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2020-09-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9783030380502

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The Secular Sacred by Markus Balkenhol,Ernst van den Hemel,Irene Stengs Pdf

How do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled across the world? In exploring this theme, The Secular Sacred focuses on diverse topics such as the dynamic roles of Carnival in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria, and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands. The contributions focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce, and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. The Secular Sacred will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, political scientists, and social psychologists, as well as students and scholars of cultural studies and semiotics. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The Paradox of Human Nature and Religious Faith

Christopher G. Smith
The Paradox of Human Nature and Religious Faith Book PDF

Author : Christopher G. Smith
Publisher : Troubador Publishing Ltd
Page : 112 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2020-11-28
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781800461154

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The Paradox of Human Nature and Religious Faith by Christopher G. Smith Pdf

This is a book for our time. The advent of Covid-19 is turning our world upside down and highlighting the paradoxical nature of human behaviour. A minority of thoughtless people are indulging in selfish activities that threaten our safety, whilst NHS workers heroically risk their own lives to save others. In South Africa members of rival drug gangs, who would normally kill each other without a second thought, have called a truce and are now working together in order to ensure that food is distributed to needy families. Human nature is paradoxical because it is capable of perceiving both the finite (secular) and infinite (spiritual) which are juxtaposed within the context of reality. What makes this book different is that spirituality is not considered to be other-worldly. What we refer to as the secular and the spiritual are viewed as ‘two sides of a coin’ that co-exist as part of one reality, within the context of temporality. Both contribute to what we perceive to be a sense of ‘self’. They are different perceptions of consciousness that influence human behaviour through conscious and subconscious processes. The aim of this book is to consider the factors that contribute to the paradoxical nature of being human and to explore the issues that cloud our perceptions and cause confusion. It proffers a vision of how a religious faith can be made intelligible at a time when the majority of people, living in our postmodern age, consider it to be irrelevant.

Freedom Paradox

Clive Hamilton
Freedom Paradox Book PDF

Author : Clive Hamilton
Publisher : Allen & Unwin
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781742375786

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Freedom Paradox by Clive Hamilton Pdf

A radical reconsideration of the meaning of freedom and morality in the modern world.

Religious Difference in a Secular Age

Saba Mahmood
Religious Difference in a Secular Age Book PDF

Author : Saba Mahmood
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2015-11-03
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780691153285

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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.

The Paradox of Liberation

Michael Walzer
The Paradox of Liberation Book PDF

Author : Michael Walzer
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 189 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2015-01-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780300187809

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The Paradox of Liberation by Michael Walzer Pdf

A thought-provoking reflection on why secular national liberation movements are so often challenged by militant religious revivals Many of the successful campaigns for national liberation in the years following World War II were initially based on democratic and secular ideals. Once established, however, the newly independent nations had to deal with entirely unexpected religious fierceness. Michael Walzer, one of America's foremost political thinkers, examines this perplexing trend by studying India, Israel, and Algeria, three nations whose founding principles and institutions have been sharply attacked by three completely different groups of religious revivalists: Hindu militants, ultra-Orthodox Jews and messianic Zionists, and Islamic radicals. In his provocative, well-reasoned discussion, Walzer asks, Why have these secular democratic movements been unable to reproduce their political culture beyond one or two generations? In a postscript, he compares the difficulties of contemporary secularism to the successful establishment of secular politics in the early American republic--thereby making an argument for American exceptionalism but gravely noting that we may be less exceptional today.

Secularism

Andrew Copson
Secularism Book PDF

Author : Andrew Copson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 164 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : RELIGION
ISBN : 9780198809135

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Secularism by Andrew Copson Pdf

What is secularism? -- Secularism in Western societies -- Secularism diversifies -- The case for Secularism -- The case against Secularism -- Conceptions of Secularism -- Hard questions and new conflicts -- Afterword: the future of Secularism

The Far Right Today

Cas Mudde
The Far Right Today Book PDF

Author : Cas Mudde
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 129 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2019-10-25
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781509536856

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The Far Right Today by Cas Mudde Pdf

The far right is back with a vengeance. After several decades at the political margins, far-right politics has again taken center stage. Three of the world’s largest democracies – Brazil, India, and the United States – now have a radical right leader, while far-right parties continue to increase their profile and support within Europe. In this timely book, leading global expert on political extremism Cas Mudde provides a concise overview of the fourth wave of postwar far-right politics, exploring its history, ideology, organization, causes, and consequences, as well as the responses available to civil society, party, and state actors to challenge its ideas and influence. What defines this current far-right renaissance, Mudde argues, is its mainstreaming and normalization within the contemporary political landscape. Challenging orthodox thinking on the relationship between conventional and far-right politics, Mudde offers a complex and insightful picture of one of the key political challenges of our time.

Understanding Death as Life’s Paradox

Brayton Polka
Understanding Death as Life s Paradox Book PDF

Author : Brayton Polka
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2019-04-30
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781527533929

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Understanding Death as Life’s Paradox by Brayton Polka Pdf

This book focuses on death as life’s paradox in order to test, to put on trial, what it means for us human beings to exist. No one of us chooses to be born. Yet, having been born, we must choose to have been born, to live, to exist. To exist is to choose to exist. To choose to exist is to live with our choices. This text argues that death is the limit of life, that we can live freely and lovingly, at once justly and compassionately, solely within the limit of death. It shows that we can develop a comprehensive conception of life, and also of death, solely insofar as we learn to overcome the dualistic opposition between philosophy and theology that continues today to falsify our understanding of not only the secular, but also the sacred.