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Author: George Levine Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400838428 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
The case for a thoughtful secularism from some of today's most distinguished scientists, philosophers, and writers Can secularism offer us moral, aesthetic, and spiritual satisfaction? Or does the secular view simply affirm a dog-eat-dog universe? At a time when the issues of religion, evolution, atheism, fundamentalism, Darwin, and science fill headlines and invoke controversy, The Joy of Secularism provides a balanced and thoughtful approach for understanding an enlightened, sympathetic, and relevant secularism for our lives today. Bringing together distinguished historians, philosophers, scientists, and writers, this book shows that secularism is not a mere denial of religion. Rather, this positive and necessary condition presents a vision of a natural and difficult world—without miracles or supernatural interventions—that is far richer and more satisfying than the religious one beyond. From various perspectives—philosophy, evolutionary biology, primate study, Darwinian thinking, poetry, and even bird-watching—the essays in this collection examine the wealth of possibilities that secularism offers for achieving a condition of fullness. Factoring in historical contexts, and ethical and emotional challenges, the contributors make an honest and heartfelt yet rigorous case for the secular view by focusing attention on aspects of ordinary life normally associated with religion, such as the desire for meaning, justice, spirituality, and wonder. Demonstrating that a world of secular enchantment is a place worth living in, The Joy of Secularism takes a new and liberating look at a valuable and complex subject. The contributors are William Connolly, Paolo Costa, Frans de Waal, Philip Kitcher, George Levine, Adam Phillips, Robert Richards, Bruce Robbins, Rebecca Stott, Charles Taylor, and David Sloan Wilson.
Author: George Levine Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400838428 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
The case for a thoughtful secularism from some of today's most distinguished scientists, philosophers, and writers Can secularism offer us moral, aesthetic, and spiritual satisfaction? Or does the secular view simply affirm a dog-eat-dog universe? At a time when the issues of religion, evolution, atheism, fundamentalism, Darwin, and science fill headlines and invoke controversy, The Joy of Secularism provides a balanced and thoughtful approach for understanding an enlightened, sympathetic, and relevant secularism for our lives today. Bringing together distinguished historians, philosophers, scientists, and writers, this book shows that secularism is not a mere denial of religion. Rather, this positive and necessary condition presents a vision of a natural and difficult world—without miracles or supernatural interventions—that is far richer and more satisfying than the religious one beyond. From various perspectives—philosophy, evolutionary biology, primate study, Darwinian thinking, poetry, and even bird-watching—the essays in this collection examine the wealth of possibilities that secularism offers for achieving a condition of fullness. Factoring in historical contexts, and ethical and emotional challenges, the contributors make an honest and heartfelt yet rigorous case for the secular view by focusing attention on aspects of ordinary life normally associated with religion, such as the desire for meaning, justice, spirituality, and wonder. Demonstrating that a world of secular enchantment is a place worth living in, The Joy of Secularism takes a new and liberating look at a valuable and complex subject. The contributors are William Connolly, Paolo Costa, Frans de Waal, Philip Kitcher, George Levine, Adam Phillips, Robert Richards, Bruce Robbins, Rebecca Stott, Charles Taylor, and David Sloan Wilson.
Author: Charles Taylor Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674986911 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 889
Book Description
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.
Author: David Sehat Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 030026562X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 343
Book Description
An award-winning scholar’s sweeping history of American secularism, from Jefferson to Trump “An essential book for understanding today’s culture wars. Sehat’s clear-eyed and elegant narrative will change how you think about our supposedly secular age.”—Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill In This Earthly Frame, David Sehat narrates the making of American secularism through its most prominent proponents and most significant detractors. He shows how its foundations were laid in the U.S. Constitution and how it fully emerged only in the twentieth century. Religious and nonreligious Jews, liberal Protestants, apocalyptic sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and antireligious activists all used the courts and the constitutional language of the First Amendment to create the secular order. Then, over the past fifty years, many religious conservatives turned against that order, emphasizing their religious freedom. Avoiding both polemic and lament, Sehat offers a powerful reinterpretation of American secularism and a clear framework for understanding the religiously infused conflict of the present.
Author: Robert Coles Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400822815 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 198
Book Description
Does the business of daily living distance us from life's mysteries? Do most Americans value spiritual thinking more as a hobby than as an all-encompassing approach to life? Will the concept of the soul be defunct after the next few generations? Child psychiatrist and best-selling author Robert Coles offers a profound meditation on how secular culture has settled into the hearts and minds of Americans. This book is a sweeping essay on the shift from religious control over Western society to the scientific dominance of the mind. Interwoven into the story is Coles's personal quest for understanding how the sense of the sacred has stood firm in the lives of individuals--both the famous and everyday people whom he has known--even as they have struggled with doubt. As a student, Coles questioned Paul Tillich on the meaning of the "secular mind," and his fascination with the perceived opposition between secular and sacred intensified over the years. This book recounts conversations Coles has had with such figures as Anna Freud, Karen Horney, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day. Their words dramatize the frustration and the joy of living in both the secular and sacred realms. Coles masterfully draws on a variety of literary sources that trace the relationship of the sacred and the secular: the stories of Abraham and Moses, the writings of St. Paul, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Darwin, and Freud, and the fiction of George Eliot, Hardy, Meredith, Flannery O'Connor, and Huxley. Ever since biblical times, Coles shows us, the relationship between these two realms has thrived on conflict and accommodation. Coles also notes that psychoanalysis was first viewed as a rival to religion in terms of getting a handle on inner truths. He provocatively demonstrates how psychoanalysis has either been incorporated into the thinking of many religious denominations or become a type of religion in itself. How will people in the next millennium deal with advances in chemistry and neurology? Will these sciences surpass psychoanalysis in controlling how we think and feel? This book is for anyone who has wondered about the fate of the soul and our ability to seek out the sacred in our constantly changing world.
Author: J. P. Moreland Publisher: Crossway ISBN: 1433556936 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 221
Book Description
Rigid adherence to scientism—as opposed to a healthy respect for science—is all too prevalent in our world today. Rather than leading to a deeper understanding of our universe, this worldview actually undermines real science and marginalizes morality and religion. In this book, celebrated philosopher J. P. Moreland exposes the selfdefeating nature of scientism and equips us to recognize scientism’s harmful presence in different aspects of culture, emboldening our witness to biblical Christianity and arming us with strategies for the integration of faith and science—the only feasible path to genuine knowledge.
Author: Thomas Howard Publisher: Ignatius Press ISBN: 1642290343 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 162
Book Description
In this new edition of a modern classic, Thomas Howard contrasts the Christian and secular worldviews, refreshing our minds with the illuminated vision of reality that inspired the world in times past and showing us that we cannot live meaningful lives without it. Howard explains in clear and beautiful prose the way materialism robs us of beauty, depth, and truth. With laser precision and lyrical ponderings he takes us through the dismal reductionist view of the world to the shimmering significance of the world as sign and sacrament. More timely now than when it was first written, this book is a prophetic examination of modern society's conscience.
Author: Jonathon S. Kahn Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231541279 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
This anthology draws bold comparisons between secularist strategies to contain, privatize, and discipline religion and the treatment of racialized subjects by the American state. Specializing in history, literature, anthropology, theology, religious studies, and political theory, contributors expose secularism's prohibitive practices in all facets of American society and suggest opportunities for change.
Author: John F. Alexander Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1597521043 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 307
Book Description
The real problem with secularism? It's boring. Christians have for decades lamented the secularism of the modern world. Often secularization is seen as a fierce, malevolent force out to devour everything in its path. But John Alexander suggests the real danger of secularism is that it is empty and shallow: it has squeezed the world flat. Modern secular culture has produced people who see themselves as little more than highly evolved machines. They live ina world with no heroes, only celebrities, and with no causes more grand than acquiring a nice house. The only adequate response to secularism's emptiness, Alexander argues, is a remnant church that actually lives by the truth of Jesus' story, a gospel that offers people something truly worth living and dying for. 'The Secular Squeeze' couples trenchant cultural analysis with stirring, constructive insight into how Christians can disavow the false myths of secularism and take up a cross with nails.
Author: Martin Hägglund Publisher: Anchor ISBN: 1101873736 Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 466
Book Description
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.
Author: Anne Bokma Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre ISBN: 1771622342 Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 203
Book Description
In 2017, Anne Bokma embarked on a quest to become a more spiritual person. After leaving the fundamentalist religion of her youth, she became one of the eighty million North Americans who consider themselves spiritual-but-not-religious, the fastest growing “faith” category. In mid-life she found herself addicted to busyness, drinking too much, hooked on social media, dreading the empty nest and still struggling with alienation from her ultra-religious family. In response, she set out on a year-long whirlwind adventure to immerse herself in a variety of sacred practices—each of which proved to be illuminating in unexpected ways—to try to develop her own definition of what it means to be spiritual. In My Year of Living Spiritually, Bokma documents a diverse range of soulful first-person experiences—from taking a dip in Thoreau’s Walden Pond, to trying magic mushrooms for the first time, booking herself into a remote treehouse as an experiment in solitude, singing in a deathbed choir and enrolling in a week-long witch camp—in an entertaining and enlightening way that will compel readers (non-believers and believers alike) to try a few spiritual practices of their own. Along the way, she reconsiders key relationships in her life and begins to experience the greater depth of meaning, connection, gratitude, simplicity and inner peace that we all long for. Readers will find it an inspiring roadmap for their own spiritual journeys.
Author: George Levine
Author: George Levine
Author: Charles Taylor
Author: David Sehat
Author: Robert Coles
Author: J. P. Moreland
Author: Thomas Howard
Author: Jonathon S. Kahn
Author: John F. Alexander
Author: Martin Hägglund
Author: Anne Bokma