Public Religions in a Postsecular Era: Habermas and Gandhi on Revisioning the Political

An embedded ideology of the religious-secular binary in its various forms has assumed currency in recent continental and Anglo-American political thought. This ideology highlights the difference between religion under modernization, broadly defined by the secularization thesis, and that of religious revival in a period characterized by postsecularism. It reflects the rise of new epistemologies and the dissolution of the antinomies between faith and reason characteristic of a postsecular culture. A common argument found in these writings is that enlightenment secularization, which relegates the sacred to a private sphere, seems to have discovered its own parochialism as religion continues to provide

Postsecularity in twenty questions : a case study in Buddhist teens

This chapter aims to unpack the question of the sort of religiosity for which postsecularity reflects a resurgence—to answer the question of whether as well as being is a quality of an age or a culture, postsecularity is also a feature of the participant people—and to explore the relationship between boundary marking and postsecularism. Quantitative analysis to postsecularism is applied and a set of questions is compiled to identify postsecular attitudes—looking specifically at: (1) facets of modernism and secularity, (2) public and private spheres of religion, (3) liquid religion, (4) projection, and (5) boundary marking in a case study of teen Buddhists in Britain

Postsekularizam i suvremena duhovnost

The author of the article attempted to define the character of contemporary, new form of spirituality and show its connections with religion. The appearance of a new kind of spirituality is the result of processes taking place in social life. On the one hand, it is marked by secularization and secularism, on the other, it is desecularization and post-secularism. The analyzes were based on the belief that a new spirituality alone is insufficient in the life of a particular man, but it must find a complement to some religion. The article consists of three parts. In the first one the following phenomena were discussed: secularization, secularism, post-secularism. The second part analyzes the phenomenon of new spirituality. In the third, however, attention was drawn to the issue of religion, the traditional understanding of spirituality and the nature of the relationship between religion and spirituality.Autor članka je pokušao definirati karakter suvremenog, novog oblika duhovnosti i pokazati njezinu povezanost s religijom. Pojava nove duhovnosti rezultat je procesa koji se odvijaju u društvenom životu. S jedne strane je duhovnost obilježena sekularizacijom i sekularizmom, a s druge strane desekularizacijom i postsekularizmom. U radu se polazi od pretpostavke da nova duhovnost sama po sebi nije dovoljna u čovjekovu životu, već on ima stalnu potrebu njezina nadograđivanja na različitim dimenzijama religije. Članak se sastoji od tri dijela. U prvom dijelu se raspravlja o sljedećim pojavama: sekularizacija, sekularizam, postsekularizam. Drugi dio analizira fenomen nove duhovnosti. U trećem dijelu se pitanje religije pokušava kontekstualizirati kroz tradicionalno razumijevanje duhovnosti, a potom i odrediti kao dio prirodnog, ponekad i paradoksalnog, odnosa religije i duhovnosti

Rudolf Otto’s ‘The Absolute Other’ and a radical postsecular urban contextualization

This article proposes an idea of radical urban contextualisation that follows Rudolf Otto’s discussion on an encounter with the Absolute Other. The article critically reviews current applications of postsecularism to urban theory formulated in a general framework of Jurgen Habermas’ intervention in the early 21st century. The article argues that contemporary postsecular urban theory cannot fully answer fundamental challenges that contemporary cities are facing – both political and environmental – mostly because it focuses on linguistic and cultural aspects of a city. The article proposes the ‘radicalization’ of postsecularism, engaging directly with the ‘religious experience’ defined by Rudolf Otto as an encounter with The Absolute Other – the unknown and unpredictable. The Absolute Other notion allows to ultimately contextualize every urban situation in order to formulate conditions for future-oriented (post-capitalist) urbanism

Transnational Historical Fiction in a Postsecular Age: A Study of the Spiritual Theses in the Works of Luis Alberto Urrea and Bahiyyih Nakhjavani

This study, employing a postsecular theoretical prism, analyzes the spiritual theses given expression through the historical fiction of Mexican-American, or Chicano, author Luis Alberto Urrea and exiled Persian Bahá\u27í author Bahiyyih Nakhjavani. This study examines three novels: Nakhjavani\u27s The Woman Who Read Too Much, Urrea\u27s The Hummingbird\u27s Daughter, and its sequel Queen of America. These novels express world-views in which the spiritual has particular importance, not as a supersession of quotidian reality but in an integral partnership with it, the baseline upon which postsecular thought is built. This study concludes that such an expression of world-views signals towards the change in socio-political philosophy which philosopher and scholar Jürgen Habermas iterates in Faith and Knowledge, his acceptance address for the 2001 Peace Prize awarded by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association. As per Habermas, a significant change is occurring in twenty-first century Western society; this change, I argue, is evident in the spiritually charged transnational historical fiction of Urrea and Nakhjavani

The self is as a lens through which to study religion: Keiji Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness revisited

This article offers an analysis of Keiji Nishitani’s understanding of the religious self as a window into his wider understanding of religion. It serves two purposes: to motivate for a revisiting of Nishitani’s book Religion and Nothingness (1983) and to argue that his ideas offer innovative approaches to contemporary Religious Studies. The self is the focus of Nishitani’s understanding of religion. Nishitani argues that the self is in crisis, rooted in the following question: ‘For what purpose do I exist?’ At the point of our deepest doubt (what he terms ‘the Great Doubt’) emerges an awareness of nothingness. That paradoxically leads to the potential for conversion: a uniquely religious experience. Nishitani’s analysis of religion and the self in crisis is valuable for the study of the religion more broadly because it locates the self as an important focus in the study of religion. Nishitani’s argument for the importance of religion and conversion in peoples’ lives foreshadowed two contemporary theoretical topics in the study of religion, namely posthumanism and postsecularism. To be human, to be aware of one’s death as a human being and the absolute doubt it causes, drives us to understand that we share the same fate as all life in the wider ecology and forces us to recognise that we share our creatureliness with all other life forms. Postsecularism is based on the prevalence of religion globally, despite predictions of its demise by secularists. This article reads the later writings of Derrida in the frame of postsecularism. Contribution: This article contributes to the current research into religious experience in the field of Religious Studies. It also suggests that the current sociological research of religious expression concentrates on identity advocacy but does not acknowledge the opposite issue of identities in crisis. This article addresses the dearth of research on the latter

Postsecular planning? The idea of municipal spirituality

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. In the contemporary political context, religion is rarely out of the news, usually postulated as a regressive force, battling against modern liberal Western values. However, in everyday life, and specifically with regard to place value, the situation is more complex. This paper addresses the challenge this context and the attendant notion of postsecularism bring to planning practice. It argues that religious and spiritual values can be rearticulated as concepts which add a substantive positive dimension to planning and its conceptualisation and constructions of place. This is done by developing the notion of municipal spirituality, which draws on the theological conceptions of transcendence and the common good to redefine the value of places whose worth cannot easily be made in instrumental terms. In so doing, it challenges the current antagonistic opposition of religious and liberal democratic values, repositioning religious and spiritual concepts in an inclusive way. The idea of municipal spirituality illustrates how planning could have a role in defending and promoting such places. Further, it demonstrates the importance of engaging in agonistic rather than antagonistic debate, rearticulating the criteria on which places can be valued by planning practice