Research Areas in English: Religion, Secularism, Postsecular Studies: Early Sociological and Critical Work
A guide to the study of Religion, Secularism, Postsecular Studies at the University of Iowa English Department.
Early Sociological and Critical Work on Religion, Secularization, and Secularism
While terms such as "postsecular" and "the religious turn" began to form in the 1990's, other writings are foundational to the ideas that developed at that time. Below are the major works of Sociology and critical works on Religion, Secularization, and Secularism that influence the development of the idea of postsecular. Further down on the page is a listing of works by some of the major writers whose ideas developed the field, and the writers who were influenced by them.
Major Early Sociological and Critical Works
Voltaire's "Religion" in Dictionnaire Philosophique by
Selected and Translated by H.I. Woolf
New York: Knopf, 1924
Scanned by the Hanover College Department of History in 1995.
Proofread and pages added by Jonathan Perry, March 2001.Religion As Poetry by
Call Number: UI Libraries Annex (Main Materials) BL60 .G725 1995ISBN: 1560001836Publication Date: 1995-02-28Per Lori Branch - Of note are the Karl Marx, selections on "The Opiate of the People" and Emile Durkheim, "Religion as Society's Self-Worship."
Religion as Poetry continues in the grand tradition of the sociology of religion pioneered by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons, among other giants in intellectual history. Too many present-day sociologists either ignore or disparage religious currents. In this provocative book, Andrew M. Greeley argues that various religions have endured for thousands of years as poetic rituals and stories. Religion as Poetry proposes a theoretical framework for understanding religion that emphasizes insights derived from religious stories. By virtue of his own rare abilities as a novelist as well as sociologist, Greeley is uniquely qualified for this task. Greeley first considers classical theories of the sociology of religion, and then, drawing upon them, he explicates his own interpretation. He critically examines the viewpoint that society is becoming more secular, and that religion is declining. He observes that this theory stands in the way of persuading sociologists that religion is still worth studying. In contrast, Greeley is interested in why religions persist despite secular trends and alongside them. He argues that it is poetic elements that touch the human soul. Greeley then sets out to test this viewpoint. Greeley maintains that his theory is not the only, or necessarily even the best approach to study religion. Rather, it is his contention that it uniquely provides sociologists with perspectives on religion that other theories too often overlook or disregard. Religion as Poetry, an original and intriguing study by a distinguished social scientist and major novelist, will be enjoyed and evaluated by sociologists, ' theologians, and philosophers alike.The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by
Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BR115.E3 W413 2001ISBN: 1579583385Publication Date: 2001-06-01For the first time in 70 years, a new translation of Max Weber's classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism --one of the seminal works in sociology-- published in September 2001. Translator Stephen Kalberg is an internationally acclaimed Weberian scholar, and in this new translation he offers a precise and nuanced rendering that captures both Weber's style and the unusual subtlety of his descriptions and causal arguments. Weber's original italicization, highlighting major themes, has been restored, and Kalberg has standardized Weber's terminology to better facilitate understanding of the various twists and turns in his complex lines of reasoning. Weber's compelling work remains influential for these reasons: it explores the continuing debate regarding the origins and legacy of modem capitalism in the West; it helps the reader understand today's global economic development; and it plumbs the deep cultural forces that affect contemporary work life and the workplace in the United States and Europe. This new edition/translation also includes a glossary; Weber's 1906 essay, "The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism"; and Weber's masterful prefatory remarks to his Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion, in which he defines the uniqueness of Western societies and asks what "ideas and interests" combined to create modem Western rationalismReligion and Modernization by
Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BL2747.8 .R45 1992ISBN: 9780198273691Publication Date: 1992-12-31The claim that modern societies are less religious than their predecessors because modernity undermines the plausibility of religion has been almost an orthodoxy. But increasingly this `secularization thesis' is being challenged on a number of fronts.This collection brings together leading sociologists and historians who share a common interest in advancing our understanding of religious change by clarifying the key elements of the thesis and testing them against appropriate bodies of data.The book begins with an exposition of the thesis by two sociologists and goes on to present and interpret new data on church adherence in the nineteenth century in the USA and Europe, British church membership rates for the last two hundred years and the British 1851 census of church attendance,changes in English Roman Catholicism, and comparisons of American and European religiosity. The collection is completed with a response by Bryan Wilson, for many the chief advocate of the secularization account of religious change.Even where historians and sociologists cannot agree, Religion and Modernization has the great value of clarifying the arguments and pointing the way toward their resolution.Religion As a Chain of Memory by
Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BL60 .H4613 2000ISBN: 0813528275Publication Date: 2000-05-01For most of the last twenty years, sociologists have studied the "decline" of religion in the modern world--a decline they saw as a defining feature of modernity, which promotes materialism over spirituality. The revival and political strength of varying religious traditions around the world, however, has forced sociologists to reconsider. This paradox has led Hervieu-Léger to undertake a sociological redefinition and reexamination of religion. For religion to endure in the modern world, she finds, it must have deep roots in traditions and times in which it was not defined as irrelevant. This reasoning leads her to develop the concept of a "chain of memory"--a process by which individual believers become members of a community that links past, present, and future members. Thus, like cultural tradition, religion may be understood as a shared understanding with a collective memory that enables it to draw upon the deep well of its past for nourishment in the increasingly secular present. Hervieu-Legér also argues that the modern secular societies of the West have not, as is commonly assumed, outgrown or found secular substitutes for religious traditions; nor are they more "rational" than past societies. Rather, modern societies have become "amnesiacs," no longer able to maintain the chain of memory that binds them to their religious pasts. Ironically, however, even as the modern world is destroying and losing touch with its traditional religious bases, it is also creating the need for a spiritual life and is thus opening up a space that only religion can fill.The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida by
Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks B809.6 .C27 1997ISBN: 0253211123Publication Date: 1997-09-22"Caputo's book is riveting. . . . A singular achievement of stylistic brio and impeccable scholarship, it breaks new ground in making a powerful case for treating Derrida as homo religiosis. . . . There can be no mistaking the importance of Caputo's work." --Edith Wyschogrod "No one interested in Derrida, in Caputo, or in the larger question of postmodernism and religion can afford to ignore this pathbreaking study. Taking full advantage of the most recent and least discussed writings of Derrida, it offers a careful and comprehensive account of the religious dimension of Derrida's thought." --Merold WestphalOn Religion by
Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BL51 .C325 2001ISBN: 0415233321Publication Date: 2001-05-23John D. Caputo explores the very roots of religious thinking in this thought-provoking book. Compelling questions come up along the way: 'What do I love when I love my God?' and 'What can Star Wars tell us about the contemporary use of religion?' (are we always trying to find a way of saying 'God be with you'?) Why is religion for many a source of moral guidance in a postmodern, nihilistic age? Is it possible to have 'religion without religion'? Drawing on contemporary images of religion, such as Robert Duvall's film The Apostle, Caputo also provides some fascinating and imaginative insights into religious fundamentalism.A Secular Age by
Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BL2747.8 .T39 2007ISBN: 0674026764Publication Date: 2007-09-20What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others. Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in "Western Christendom" of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion--although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined--but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations. What this means for the world--including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence--is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.The Enchantments of Mammon by
Call Number: Ebook Central Academic CompleteISBN: 0674984617Publication Date: 2019-11-12Far from displacing religions, as has been supposed, capitalism became one, with money as its deity. Eugene McCarraher reveals how mammon ensnared us and how we can find a more humane, sacramental way of being in the world. If socialists and Wall Street bankers can agree on anything, it is the extreme rationalism of capital. At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the "disenchantment" of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and sacredness. Ignoring the motive force of the spirit, capitalism rejects the awe-inspiring divine for the economics of supply and demand. Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether or not it is acknowledged. Capitalist enchantment first flowered in the fields and factories of England and was brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit. Later, the corporation was mystically animated with human personhood, to preside over the Fordist endeavor to build a heavenly city of mechanized production and communion. By the twenty-first century, capitalism has become thoroughly enchanted by the neoliberal deification of "the market." Informed by cultural history and theology as well as economics, management theory, and marketing, The Enchantments of Mammon looks not to Marx and progressivism but to nineteenth-century Romantics for salvation. The Romantic imagination favors craft, the commons, and sensitivity to natural wonder. It promotes labor that, for the sake of the person, combines reason, creativity, and mutual aid. In this impassioned challenge, McCarraher makes the case that capitalism has hijacked and redirected our intrinsic longing for divinity-and urges us to break its hold on our souls.
Major Authors and Their Ideological Descendants
The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion by
Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BL60 .B42ISBN: 0696581450Publication Date: 1967An absorbing and original examination that brilliantly argues that religion is a product of the society from which it springs--featuring illustrations drawn from a variety of primitive, ancient, and contemporary religions.In this book, Berger that religion is the "sacred canopy" which every human society builds over its world to give it meaning, expanding on theories of knowledge that he first explored (with Thomas Luckmann) in The Social Construction of Reality.The Desecularization of the World by
Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BL65.P7 D47 1999ISBN: 9780802846914Publication Date: 1999-07-16Theorists of "secularization" have for two centuries been saying that religion must inevitably decline in the modern world. But today, much of the world is as religious as ever. This volume challenges the belief that the modern world is increasingly secular, showing instead that modernization more often strengthens religion. Seven leading cultural observers examine several regions and several religions and explain the resurgence of religion in world politics. Peter L. Berger opens with a global overview. The other six writers deal with particular aspects of the religious scene: George Weigel, with Roman Catholicism;David Martin, with the evangelical Protestant upsurge not only in the Western world but also in Latin America, Africa, the Pacific rim, China, and Eastern Europe; Jonathan Sacks, with Jews and politics in the modern world; Abdullahi A. An-Na'im, with political Islam in national politics and international relations; Grace Davie, with Europe as perhaps the exception to the desecularization thesis; and Tu Weiming, with religion in the People's Republic of China.
Talal Asad's Genealogy of Religion and its descendants: Saba Mahmood, as well as histories of the colonial provenance of "religion" by Chidester, Frykenberg, Masuzawa, et al
Genealogies of Religion by
Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BL50 .A85 1993ISBN: 0801846315Publication Date: 1993-08-18In Geneologies of Religion, Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept. The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation--from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign--is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invokved to explain and justify the liberal politics and world view of modernity. And it leads to the view that "politicized religions" threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and question all these assumptions. He argues that "religion" is a construction of European modernity, a construction that authorizes--for Westerners and non-Westerners alike--particular forms of "history making."Formations of the Secular by
Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BL2747.8 .A75 2003ISBN: 0804747679Publication Date: 2003-02-03Opening with the provocative query "what might an anthropology of the secular look like?" this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East. Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the "strangeness of the non-European world" and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion),the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined. The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity.Secular Translations by
Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BL2747.8 .A755 2018ISBN: 0231189869Publication Date: 2018-12-04In Secular Translations, the anthropologist Talal Asad reflects on his lifelong engagement with secularism and its contradictions. He draws out the ambiguities in our concepts of the religious and the secular through a rich consideration of translatability and untranslatability, exploring the circuitous movements of ideas between histories and cultures. In search of meeting points between the language of Islam and the language of secular reason, Asad gives particular importance to the translations of religious ideas into nonreligious ones. He discusses the claim that liberal conceptions of equality represent earlier Christian ideas translated into secularism; explores the ways that the language and practice of religious ritual play an important but radically transformed role as they are translated into modern life; and considers the history of the idea of the self and its centrality to the project of the secular state. Secularism is not only an abstract principle that modern liberal democratic states espouse, he argues, but also a range of sensibilities. The shifting vocabularies associated with each of these sensibilities are fundamentally intertwined with different ways of life. In exploring these entanglements, Asad shows how translation opens the door for-or requires-the utter transformation of the translated. Drawing on a diverse set of thinkers ranging from al-Ghazāl#299 to Walter Benjamin, Secular Translations points toward new possibilities for intercultural communication, seeking a language for our time beyond the language of the state.Politics of Piety by
Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks HQ1785 .M34 2005ISBN: 1282569333Publication Date: 2004-01-01Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension of the Islamic revival, it is also an unflinching critique of the secular-liberal principles by which some people hold such movements to account. The book addresses three central questions: How do movements of moral reform help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics? How does the adherence of women to the patriarchal norms at the core of such movements parochialize key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject? How does a consideration of debates about embodied religious rituals among Islamists and their secular critics help us understand the conceptual relationship between bodily form and political imaginaries? Politics of Piety is essential reading for anyone interested in issues at the nexus of ethics and politics, embodiment and gender, and liberalism and postcolonialism.Savage Systems by
Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BL2463 .C45 1996ISBN: 0813916674Publication Date: 1996-11-29Savage Systems examines the emergence of the concepts of "religion"and "religions" on colonial frontiers. The book offers a detailed analysis of the ways in which European travelers, missionaries, settlers, and government agents, as well as indigenous Africans, engaged in the comparison of alternative religious ways of life as one dimension of intercultural contact. Focusing primarily on ninteenth-century frontier relations, David Chidester demonstrates that the terms and conditions for comparison--including a discrouse about "otherness" that were established during this period still remains. A volume in the series Studies in Religion and CultureChristianity in India by
Call Number: EBook- Oxford Scholarship - Oxford University Press: ReligionISBN: 0199575835Publication Date: 2010-04-05Robert Frykenberg's insightful study explores and enhances historical understandings of Christian communities, cultures, and institutions within the Indian world from their beginnings down to the present. As one out of several manifestations of a newly emerging World Christianity, in whichChristians of a Post-Christian West are a minority, it has focused upon those trans-cultural interactions within Hindu and Muslim environments which have made Christians in this part of the world distinctive. It seeks to uncover various complexities in the proliferation of Christianity in its manyforms and to examine processes by which Christian elements intermingled with indigenous cultures and which resulted in multiple identities, and also left imprints upon various cultures of India.Thomas Christians believe that the Apostle Thomas came to India in 52 A.D./C.E., and that he left seven congregations to carry on the Mission of bringing the Gospel to India. In our day the impulse of this Mission is more alive than ever. Catholics, in three hierarchies, have become most numerous;and various Evangelicals/Protestant communities constitute the third great tradition. With the rise of Pentecostalism, a fourth great wave of Christian expansion in India has occurred. Starting with movements that began a century ago, there are now ten to fifteen times more missionaries than everbefore, virtually all of them Indian. Needless to say, Christianity in India is profoundly Indian and Frykenberg provides a fascinating guide to its unique history and practice.The Invention of World Religions by
Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BL80.3 .M27 2005ISBN: 0226509885Publication Date: 2005-05-15The idea of "world religions" expresses a vague commitment to multiculturalism. Not merely a descriptive concept, "world religions" is actually a particular ethos, a pluralist ideology, a logic of classification, and a form of knowledge that has shaped the study of religion and infiltrated ordinary language. In this ambitious study, Tomoko Masuzawa examines the emergence of "world religions" in modern European thought. Devoting particular attention to the relation between the comparative study of language and the nascent science of religion, she demonstrates how new classifications of language and race caused Buddhism and Islam to gain special significance, as these religions came to be seen in opposing terms-Aryan on one hand and Semitic on the other. Masuzawa also explores the complex relation of "world religions" to Protestant theology, from the hierarchical ordering of religions typical of the Christian supremacists of the nineteenth century to the aspirations of early twentieth-century theologian Ernst Troeltsch, who embraced the pluralist logic of "world religions" and by so doing sought to reclaim the universalist destiny of European modernity.