Religious and Secular Reform in America PDF Download

Author: David K. Adams
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814706862
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
From its earliest days, the United States has provided fertile ground for reform movements to flourish. In this volume, twelve eminent historians assess religious and secular reform in America from the eighteenth century to the present day. The essays offer a mix of general overviews and specific case studies, addressing such topics as radical religion in New England, leisure in antebellum America, Sabbatarianism, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and Evangelicalism, social reform, and the U.S. welfare state. Suitable for students, the essays, each based on original research, will also be of interest to researchers and academics working in this area, as well as to all those with an interest in the history of religious and secular reform in America.

Author: John Lardas Modern
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226533255
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
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.

Author: Bruce J. Berman
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774825154
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Contemporary nation-states have seen the rise of religious pluralism within their borders, brought about by global migration and the challenge of radical religious movements. Secular States and Religious Diversity explores the meaning of secularism and religious freedom in these new contexts. The contributors chart the impact of globalization, the varying forms of secularism in Western states, and the different kinds of relations between states and religious institutions in the historical traditions and contemporary politics of Islamic, Indic, and Chinese societies. They also examine the limitations and dilemmas of governmental responses to religious diversity, and grapple with the question of how secular states deal (and should deal) with such pluralism. This volume brings in perspectives from the non-Western world and engages with viewpoints that might increase states’ capacities to accommodate religious diversity positively.

Author: Jonathon S. Kahn
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541279
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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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: Brad S. Gregory
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067426407X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

Author: Timothy Verhoeven
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030028771
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This book shows how, through a series of fierce battles over Sabbath laws, legislative chaplains, Bible-reading in public schools and other flashpoints, nineteenth-century secularists mounted a powerful case for a separation of religion and government. Among their diverse ranks were religious skeptics, liberal Protestants, members of minority faiths, labor reformers and defenders of slavery. Drawing on popular petitions to Congress, a neglected historical source, the book explores how this secularist mobilization gathered energy at the grassroots level. The nineteenth century is usually seen as the golden age of an informal Protestant establishment. Timothy Verhoeven demonstrates that, far from being crushed by an evangelical juggernaut, secularists harnessed a range of cultural forces—the legacy of the Revolutionary founders, hostility to Catholicism, a belief in national exceptionalism and more—to argue that the United States was not a Christian nation, branding their opponents as fanatics who threatened both democratic liberties as well as true religion.

Author: Craig S. Engelhardt
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1623963249
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Education Reform proposes and defends an alternate paradigm of public education. It challenges “secular education” as a failed educational model and proposes an alternate model with far-reaching potential. It reveals how secular schools have insufficient resources to support the public’s educational interests while religious schools, within a plural public education system, have the superior capacity to nurture citizens with the moral, intellectual, and civic qualities of good citizenship. The fulcrum upon which Engelhardt’s argument rests is the recognition that beliefs and values of a religious nature not only provide motivating frameworks for individual life, but also, they naturally provide core sources of meaning, understanding, and motivation for education efforts. Whereas secular schools avoid these ideological resources, they potentially suffuse the curriculum, climate, and community of “religious” schools to increase their educational success. Thus, this book argues that the move to a plural public education system, in which families are free to choose either secular or publicly supportive “religious” schools, will advance the educational interests of America. This argument is developed in three parts. The first entails a multi-chapter analysis of education history to discern the relationship between religion and the public’s education goals. By tracing ways in which “religion” is a key resource for curricular meaning, parent buy-in, rational thought, individual morality, public unity, and academic inspiration, it correlates school secularization with many of our current education problems. Part two engages criticisms that may arise from this reform proposal - such as concerns regarding autonomy, deliberative skills, equity, and public cohesion. Part three illumines superior ways in which religious schools can address the public’s educational concerns. The book concludes by proposing ideas and principles to guide the development of an American plural public education system that allow the public to draw from the strengths of religious schools without secularizing them in the process or breaching church/state boundaries.

Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674986911
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 889

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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: Ernest J. Zarra
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 147585854X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
When the Secular Becomes Sacred: Religious Secular Humanism and its Effects Upon America’s Public Learning Institutionsis an analysis of American K-16 public learning institutions from a unique perspective. Secular teachings, such as social-emotional learning, and sexual and identity philosophies, are behind movements to capture the minds and hearts of America’s students. Contemporary learning institutions resemble places of worship in several ways. This book will explain how this is the case. From educational philosophy to classroom practices, this book exposes tactical intersections between secular humanism and religion. In today’s secular culture there is strong evidence to support the notion that worship of the self, the individual, has usurped the historically sacred place reserved for a transcendent deity. The fact is that this worship of the individual is certainly more fashionable and attractive than traditional orthodoxy or evangelical theology, in a today’s society. Bolstering this self-worship are mandated programs, such as those found in states’ controversial History-Social Science Frameworks, English-Language Arts Frameworks, and new sex education programs. The intention of this book is to provide the reader a realistic look into the effects of religious humanism upon America’s schools and students. Readers will be challenged with the notion that separation of church and state is being ignored for the political advantage of some. Furthermore, the reader will be presented with the argument that self-worship has become more attractive than traditional Judeo-Christian religious teachings, leading to the individual becoming both the worshipper and the object of such self-worship.

Author: Michael Walzer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300213913
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
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.