Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves?
Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves?

Author: Anna Fedele

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-17

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0429853181

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Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? is the first volume to address the gendered intersections of religion, spirituality and the secular through an ethnographic approach. The book examines how ‘spirituality’ has emerged as a relatively ‘silent’ category with which people often signal that they are looking for a way to navigate between the categories of the religious and the secular, and considers how this is related to gendered ways of being and relating. Using a lived religion approach the contributors analyse the intersections between spirituality, religion and secularism in different geographical areas, ranging from the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy to Canada, the United States and Mexico. The chapters explore the spiritual experiences of women and their struggle for a more gender equal way of approaching the divine, as well as the experience of men and of those who challenge binary sexual identities advocating for a queer spirituality. This volume will be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists as well as scholars in other disciplines who seek to understand the role of spirituality in creating the complex gendered dynamics of modern societies.

A Secular Age
A Secular Age

Author: Charles Taylor

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-09-17

Total Pages: 889

ISBN-13: 0674986911

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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.

Living the Secular Life
Living the Secular Life

Author: Phil Zuckerman

Publisher: Penguin Books

Published: 2015-10-27

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0143127934

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A sociology professor examines the demographic shift that has led more Americans than ever before to embrace a nonreligious life and highlights the inspirational stories and beliefs that empower modern-day secular culture.

How (Not) to Be Secular
How (Not) to Be Secular

Author: James K. A. Smith

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2014-04-23

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 0802867618

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How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on.

Seculosity
Seculosity

Author: David Zahl

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published: 2019-04-02

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1506449441

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At the heart of our current moment lies a universal yearning, writes David Zahl, not to be happy or respected so much as enough--what religions call "righteous." To fill the void left by religion, we look to all sorts of everyday activities--from eating and parenting to dating and voting--for the identity, purpose, and meaning once provided on Sunday morning. In our striving, we are chasing a sense of enoughness. But it remains ever out of reach, and the effort and anxiety are burning us out. Seculosity takes a thoughtful yet entertaining tour of American "performancism" and its cousins, highlighting both their ingenuity and mercilessness, all while challenging the conventional narrative of religious decline. Zahl unmasks the competing pieties around which so much of our lives revolve, and he does so in a way that's at points playful, personal, and incisive. Ultimately he brings us to a fresh appreciation for the grace of God in all its countercultural wonder.

Preaching
Preaching

Author: Timothy Keller

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-06-09

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0698195094

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Pastor, preacher, and New York Times bestselling author of The Prodigal Prophet Timothy Keller shares his wisdom on communicating the Christian faith from the pulpit as well as from the coffee shop. Most Christians—including pastors—struggle to talk about their faith in a way that applies the power of the Christian gospel to change people’s lives. Timothy Keller is known for his insightful, down-to-earth sermons and talks that help people understand themselves, encounter Jesus, and apply the Bible to their lives. In this accessible guide for pastors and laypeople alike, Keller helps readers learn to present the Christian message of grace in a more engaging, passionate, and compassionate way.

Sacred Music in Secular Society
Sacred Music in Secular Society

Author: Dr Jonathan Arnold

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2014-03-28

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1472406737

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Sacred Music in Secular Society is a new and challenging work asking why Christian sacred music is now appealing afresh to a wide and varied audience, both religious and secular. Blending scholarship, theological reflection and interviews with some of the greatest musicians and spiritual leaders of our day, Arnold suggests that the intrinsically theological and spiritual nature of sacred music remains an immense attraction particularly in secular society. This book will appeal to readers interested in contemporary spirituality, Christianity, music, worship, faith and society, whether believers or not, including theologians, musicians and sociologists.

This Life
This Life

Author: Martin Hägglund

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2020-02-04

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 1101873736

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Winner of the René Wellek Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Millions, and The Sydney Morning Herald This Life offers a profoundly inspiring basis for transforming our lives, demonstrating that our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism. Philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that we need to cultivate not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions: what matters is how we treat one another in this life and what we do with our time. Engaging with great philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, literary writers from Dante to Proust and Knausgaard, political economists from Mill to Keynes and Hayek, and religious thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard and Martin Luther King, Jr., Hägglund points the way to an emancipated life.

Secularism in Antebellum America
Secularism in Antebellum America

Author: John Lardas Modern

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-11-11

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0226533255

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Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.

Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality
Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality

Author: Anna Fedele

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0415659477

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Contemporary distinctions between religion and spirituality can often be traced to rebellion against hierarchical institutions with biases towards women and minorities that constrain individual freedom. This opposition is carefully addressed in this volume, with greater attention paid to gender and power in the context of contemporary spirituality and how these relate to the distinction between religion and spirituality.