'Religion’ and ‘Secular’ Categories in Sociology PDF Download

Author: Mitsutoshi Horii
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030875164
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Informed by ‘critical religion’ perspective in Religious Studies and postcolonial self-reflection in Sociology, this book interrogates the ideas of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ in social theory and Sociology. It argues that as long as social theory and sociological discourse embed the religion-secular distinction and locate themselves on the ‘secular’ side of the binary, Sociology will continue to serve the very ideologies it tries to subvert – namely Western modernity/coloniality.

Author: Mitsutoshi Horii
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783030875176
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Mitsutoshi Horii is Professor at Shumei University in Japan, and Principal of Chaucer College, UK. Informed by the 'critical religion' perspective in religious studies and postcolonial self-reflection in sociology, this book interrogates the ideas of 'religion' and 'the secular' in social theory and sociology. It argues that as long as social theory and sociological discourse embeds the religion-secular distinction and locates itself on the 'secular' side of the binary, sociology will continue to serve the very ideologies it tries to subvert - namely Western modernity/coloniality. Horii raises fundamental epistemological questions and deep ontological issues in the field of the sociology of religion. Innovative and provoking, the book will inspire the reader to discuss and question established concepts from new perspectives." -Per Pettersson, Professor of Sociology of Religion, Karlstad University, Sweden "This is a superb book that ... calls into question sociology's own understanding of itself as secular and 'rational,' distinguished from the 'non-rational' understandings of those it presents as other." -John Holmwood, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Nottingham, UK. "This book is a valuable contribution to the critical demystification of general categories that sustain the illusions on which the humanities and social sciences are based." -Timothy Fitzgerald, Honorary Research Associate Professor, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, Australia, and Research Associate, the Center for Critical Research on Religion, USA. "A must-read for any scholar who wants to learn how to think beyond the confinements of modern social theory." -Jayne Svenungsson, Professor of Systematic Theology, Lund University, Sweden. "By decolonizing the secular-religion binary, Horii provides an important challenge to sociology's self-understanding as a secular discipline and he calls into question a number of its conventional scholarly abstractions. This is a fascinating book that furthers crucial debates and thus will definitely be of interest to scholars in a range of disciplines." -Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, Professor of Religion and the Chair of Science & Technology Studies, Williams College, USA.

Author: Bryan R. Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198788371
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This is a new edition of 'Religion in Secular Society' by Bryan Wilson (1926-2004), a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford for thirty years and one of the leading sociologists of religion of the twentieth century.

Author: Anthony Blasi
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004271031
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Sociology of Religion in America tells the story of the controversies involved in the development of a scientific specialty that often makes news in America. The evidence it presents runs contrary to the many myths about the field.

Author: Courtney Bender
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199938644
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The thirteen essays in this volume offer a challenge to conventional scholarly approaches to the sociology of religion. They urge readers to look beyond congregational settings, beyond the United States, and to religions other than Christianity, and encourage critical engagement with religion's complex social consequences. By expanding conceptual categories, the essays reveal how aspects of the religious have always been part of allegedly non-religious spaces and show how, by attending to these intellectual blindspots, we can understand aspects of identity, modernity, and institutional life that have long been obscured. Religion on the Edge addresses a number of critical questions: What is revealed about the self, pluralism, or modernity when we look outside the U.S. or outside Christian settings? What do we learn about how and where the religious is actually at work and what its role is when we unpack the assumptions about it embedded in the categories we use? Religion on the Edge offers groundbreaking new methodologies and models, bringing to light conceptual lacunae, re-centering what is unsettled by their use, and inviting a significant reordering of long-accepted political and economic hierarchies. The book shows how social scientists across the disciplines can engage with the sociology of religion. By challenging many of its long-standing empirical and analytic tendencies, the contributors to this volume show how their work informs and is informed by debates in other fields and the analytical purchase gained by bringing these many conversations together. Religion on the Edge will be a crucial resource for any scholar seeking to understand our post-modern, post-secular world.

Author: Markus Dressler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199911290
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book conceives of "religion-making" broadly as the multiple ways in which social and cultural phenomena are configured and reconfigured within the matrix of a world-religion discourse that is historically and semantically rooted in particular Western and predominantly Christian experiences, knowledges, and institutions. It investigates how religion is universalized and certain ideas, social formations, and practices rendered "religious" are thus integrated in and subordinated to very particular - mostly liberal-secular - assumptions about the relationship between history, politics, and religion. The individual contributions, written by a new generation of scholars with decisively interdisciplinary approaches, examine the processes of translation and globalization of historically specific concepts and practices of religion - and its dialectical counterpart, the secular - into new contexts. This volume contributes to the relatively new field of thought that aspires to unravel the thoroughly intertwined relationships between religion and secularism as modern concepts.

Author: Anna Fedele
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429853181
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
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.

Author: José Mapril
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319437267
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This volume ethnographically explores the relation between secularities and religious subjectivities.As a consequence of the demise of secularization theory, we live in an interesting intellectual moment where the so-called ‘post-secular’ coexists with the secular, which in turn has become pluralized and historicized. This cohabitation of the secular and post-secular is revealed mainly through political dialectical processes that overshadow the subjective and inter-subjective dimensions of secularity, making it difficult to pinpoint concrete sites, agents, and objects of expression. Drawing on cases from South America, Africa, and Europe, contributors apply key insights from religious studies debates on the genealogies and formations of both religion and secularism. They explore the spaces, persons, and places in which these categories emerge and mutually constitute one another.

Author: Dick Houtman
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030696499
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Identifying scientism as religion’s secular counterpart, this collection studies contemporary contestations of the authority of science. These controversies suggest that what we are witnessing today is not an increase in the authority of science at the cost of religion, but a dual decline in the authorities of religion and science alike. This entails an erosion of the legitimacy of universally binding truth claims, be they religiously or scientifically informed. Approaching the issue from a cultural-sociological perspective and building on theories from the sociology of religion, the volume unearths the cultural mechanisms that account for the headwind faced by contemporary science. The empirical contributions highlight how the field of academic science has lost much of its former authority vis-à-vis competing social realms; how political and religious worldviews define particular research findings as favorites while dismissing others; and how much of today’s distrust of science is directed against scientific institutions and academic scientists rather than against science per se.

Author: Gustaaf Geeraerts
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135129606X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Post-Secular Society argues for several characteristics of the secular: the experience of living in a secular age and the experience of living without religion as a normal condition. Religion in the West is often seen as marked by both innovation and disarray. In spite of differing approaches and perspectives of secularization, rational choice and de-secularization, many scholars agree that the West is experiencing a general "resurgence" of religion across most Western societies. Post-Secular Society discusses the changes in religion related to globalization and New Age forms of popular religion. The contributors review religion that is rooted in the globalized political economy and the relationship of post-secularism to popular consumer culture. Also reviewed is innovative discourse as a religious belief system, theories of the post-secular, religious, and spiritual well-being, and healing practices in Finland and environmentalism. This paperback edition includes a new preface by Peter Nynas.