Explore the vast range of titles available.

Jesus had preached the arrival of Kingdom. It was time to start living the life of the Last World, as if you were standing at the very end of Time. And that is the position in which I find myself, a secular Christian at the end of my world. At times I have called my religion ‘Emptiness and Brightness’, ‘Empty radical humanism’, ‘the religion of life’, and ‘Kingdom theology’. It’s nothing very special; it’s where we post-Christian Westerners now are. And I rather like it: I’m not complaining.

Not in the Heavenstraces the rise of Jewish secularism through the visionary writers and thinkers who led its development. Spanning the rich history of Judaism from the Bible to today, David Biale shows how the secular tradition these visionaries created is a uniquely Jewish one, and how the emergence of Jewish secularism was not merely a response to modernity but arose from forces long at play within Judaism itself. Biale explores how ancient Hebrew books like Job, Song of Songs, and Esther downplay or even exclude God altogether, and how Spinoza, inspired by medieval Jewish philosophy, recast the biblical God in the role of nature and stripped the Torah of its revelatory status to instead read scripture as a historical and cultural text. Biale examines the influential Jewish thinkers who followed in Spinoza's secularizing footsteps, such as Salomon Maimon, Heinrich Heine, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. He tells the stories of those who also took their cues from medieval Jewish mysticism in their revolts against tradition, including Hayim Nahman Bialik, Gershom Scholem, and Franz Kafka. And he looks at Zionists like David Ben-Gurion and other secular political thinkers who recast Israel and the Bible in modern terms of race, nationalism, and the state. Not in the Heavensdemonstrates how these many Jewish paths to secularism were dependent, in complex and paradoxical ways, on the very religious traditions they were rejecting, and examines the legacy and meaning of Jewish secularism today.

This book offers a mature assessment of themes preoccupying David Martin over some fifty years, complementing his book On Secularization. Deploying secularisation as an omnibus word bringing many dimensions into play, Martin argues that the boundaries of the concept of secularisation must not be redefined simply to cover aberrant cases, as when the focus was more on America as an exception rather than on Europe as an exception to the 'furiously religious' character of the rest of the world. Particular themes of focus include the dialectic of Christianity and secularization, the relation of Christianity to multiple enlightenments and modes of modernity, the enigmas of East Germany and Eastern Europe, and the rise of the transnational religious voluntary association, including Pentecostalism, as that feeds into vast religious changes in the developing world. Doubts are cast on the idea that religion has ever been privatised and has lately reentered the public realm. The rest of the book deals with the relation of the Christian repertoire to the nexus of religion and politics, including democracy and violence and sharply criticises polemical assertions of a special relation of religion to violence, and explores the contributions of 'cognitive science' to the debate

Conflicts involving religion have returned to the forefront of international relations. And yet political scientists and policymakers have continued to assume that religion has long been privatized in the West. This secularist assumption ignores the contestation surrounding the category of the \"secular\" in international politics. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations shows why this thinking is flawed, and provides a powerful alternative. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd argues that secularist divisions between religion and politics are not fixed, as commonly assumed, but socially and historically constructed. Examining the philosophical and historical legacy of the secularist traditions that shape European and American approaches to global politics, she shows why this matters for contemporary international relations, and in particular for two critical relationships: the United States and Iran, and the European Union and Turkey.

This paper replies to Kong’s (2010) lament that geographers of religion have not sufficiently intervened in religious studies. It advocates ‘grounded theologies’ as a rubric by which to investigate contemporary geographies of religion in a secular age. Arguing that secularization can itself be conceived as a theological process, the paper critiques a religious/secular dichotomy and argues that individualized spiritualities presently prevalent are indicative of Taylor’s (2007) nova effect of proliferating grounded theologies. Case studies are drawn from social and cultural geographies of religious intersectionalities and from critical geopolitics.

The term \"postsecular\" is proliferating in the writings of scholars working in the humanities and social sciences. This article assesses the variety of meanings attributed to the term, groups them in six clusters of ideas, and raises questions about the tensions that exist between some of its different meanings. Taking the central idea that religions enjoy relatively high visibility in the public sphere of postsecular societies, the article then considers how well this applies to the case of Britain. It argues that the visibility of religion in Britain's public sphere—far from being postsecular in any of the current meanings of the term—is actually associated with the state's \"interpellation \"of selected religions as partners in the delivery of public policies for managing diversity, combating inequality, and promoting social enterprise.

This article seeks to understand neo-Pentecostalism in Latin America as a religious and political movement within the framework of multiple modernities, based on an ethnographic study in evangelical churches in Chile and Mexico. The study focuses on two main axes: the discourse of the “Kingdom of God” and the experience of the Holy Spirit. The former explores the conception of public space, while the latter examines the experiential dimensions, both individual and collective, that confer meaning and legitimacy to this religious movement. Neo-Pentecostalism emerges as a complex phenomenon where religion and politics intertwine in novel ways, responding to the intricacies of the region. Contrary to the notion of a monolithic and reactionary movement, this article demonstrates how neo-Pentecostalism is a movement that navigates the interstices between the religious and the secular.

Anyone specialising in Islamic theology at a Western university is aware of the fact that their teaching and research will either be recognised by the institution as falling under the category of “Islamic Studies” or “Divinity”. In the first case, Islam is predominantly considered a cultural phenomenon and studied as such. In the second case, for reasons that have to do with what Marianne Moyaert in her latest book Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other has conceptualised as “Christian normativity” and the “religionisation” of other faiths, Islamic theology is de facto understood as Islamic speculative theology (kalām). In both cases, the understanding of how Islam theorises and practices theology is significantly restricted, when not altogether ignored. This article unpacks the genealogy of the secular version of a Christian epistemic framework that dominates the study of Islamic theology in the West and engages with the issues related to its application in the field of Islamic theology. In doing so, it opens a critical space for the investigation of Islamic literary productions as both dissensual and consensual theological terrains, through the analysis of the poetry of two theologians and polymathic scholars from two different periods of Islamic history, namely Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1235) and Sidi Muḥammad Ibn al-Ḥabīb (d. 1390/1971).

This paper explores the distinction between secularism as ideology and secularism as statecraft principle. By secularism as statecraft principle, I understand simply some principle of separation between religious and political authority, either for the sake of the neutrality of the state vis-a-vis each and all religions, or for the sake of protecting the freedom of conscience of each individual, or for the sake of facilitating the equal access of all citizens, religious as well as nonreligious, to democratic participation. Such a statecraft doctrine neither presupposes nor needs to entail any substantive \"theory,\" positive or negative, of \"religion.\" Indeed, the moment the state holds a particular view of \"religion\" one enters the realm of ideology. Secularism becomes an ideology the moment it entails a theory of what \"religion\" is or does. It is this assumption that \"religion,\" in the abstract, is a thing that has an essence or that produces certain particular and predictable effects that is the defining characteristic of modern secularism. Adapted from the source document.

Beyond Secular Order is the first of a two-volume work that expands upon renowned theologian John Milbank's innovative attempt to understand both theology and modern thought begun in his previously published classic text Theology and Social Theory.  * Continues Milbank's innovative attempt to understand both theology and modern thought begun in Theology and Social Theory – considered a classic work in the development of systematic theology * Authored by one of the world's most influential and highly regarded contemporary theologians * Draws on a sweep of ideas and thinkers to argue that modern secularism is a form of Christian heresy that developed from the Middle Ages and can only be overcome by a renewed account of Christendom * Shows how this heresy can be transformed into a richer blend of religion, modernity and politics * Reveals how there is a fundamental homology between modern ideas about ontology and knowledge and modern ideas about political action, expressed in both theory and practice