Religion and the Political Imagination

Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 10/7/2010
EAN 9780521766548, ISBN10: 0521766540

Hardcover, 394 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm
Language: English

The theory of secularisation became a virtually unchallenged truth of twentieth-century social science. First sketched out by Enlightenment philosophers, then transformed into an irreversible global process by nineteenth-century thinkers, the theory was given substance by the precipitate drop in religious practice across Western Europe in the 1960s. However, the re-emergence of acute conflicts at the interface between religion and politics has confounded such assumptions. It is clear that these ideas must be rethought. Yet, as this distinguished, international team of scholars reveal, not everything contained in the idea of secularisation was false. Analyses of developments since 1500 reveal a wide spectrum of historical processes: partial secularisation in some spheres has been accompanied by sacralisation in others. Utilising new approaches derived from history, philosophy, politics and anthropology, the essays collected in Religion and the Political Imagination offer new ways of thinking about the urgency of religious issues in the contemporary world.

Introduction - multiple secularities Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones
1. Secularisation
religion and the roots of innovation in the political sphere Ingrid Creppell
2. Regarding toleration and liberalism
considerations from the Anglo-Jewish experience Ira Katznelson
3. The Enlightenment, the late eighteenth-century revolutions and their aftermath
the 'secularising' implications of Protestantism? David M. Thompson
4. In the lands of the Ottomans
religion and politics Karen Barkey
5. The Russian Orthodox Church and secularisation Geoffrey Hosking
6. The American experience of secularisation Michael O'Brien
7. French Catholic political thought from the deconfessionalisation of the state to the recognition of religious freedom Emile Perreau-Saussine
8. Religion and the origins of socialism Gareth Stedman Jones
9. From 1848 to Christian democracy Christopher Clark
10. The disciplining of the religious conscience in nineteenth-century British politics Jonathan Parry
11. Colonial secularisation and Islamism in North India
a relationship of creativity Humeira Iqtidar
12. The 1960s Hugh McLeod
13. Gendering secularisation
locating women in the transformation of British Christianity in the 1960s Callum G. Brown
14. Does constitutionalisation lead to secularisation? Anat Scolnicov
15. Europe's uneasy marriage of secularisation and Christianity since the 1960s and the challenge of contemporary religious pluralism Jytte Klausen
16. On thick and thin religion
some critical reflections on secularisation theory Sudipta Kaviraj.