Religious America, Secular Europe?

Religious America, Secular Europe?
Author: Peter Berger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 105
Release: 2021-11-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1351904728

Europe is a relatively secular part of the world in global terms. Why is this so? And why is the situation in Europe so different from that in the United States? The first chapter of this book - the theme - articulates this contrast. The remaining chapters - the variations - look in turn at the historical, philosophical, institutional and sociological dimensions of these differences. Key ideas are examined in detail, among them: constitutional issues; the Enlightenment; systems of law, education and welfare; questions of class, ethnicity, gender and generation. In each chapter both the similarities and differences between the European and the American cases are carefully scrutinized. The final chapter explores the ways in which these features translate into policy on both sides of the Atlantic. This book is highly topical and relates very directly to current misunderstandings between Europe and America.

Religious America, Secular Europe?

Religious America, Secular Europe?
Author: Peter L. Berger
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2008
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780754658337

Europe is a relatively secular part of the world in global terms. Why is this so? And why is the situation in Europe so different from that in the United States?The first chapter of this book - the theme - articulates this contrast. The remaining chapters - the variations - look in turn at the historical, philosophical, institutional and sociological dimensions of these differences. Key ideas are examined in detail, among them: constitutional issues; the Enlightenment; systems of law, education and welfare; questions of class, ethnicity, gender and generation. In each chapter both the similarities and differences between the European and the American cases are carefully scrutinized. The final chapter explores the ways in which these features translate into policy on both sides of the Atlantic. This book is highly topical and relates very directly to current misunderstandings between Europe and America.

God and the Atlantic

God and the Atlantic
Author: Thomas Albert Howard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2011-01-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199565511

The first major work of cultural and intellectual history devoted to the subject of the transatlantic religious divide. Using nineteenth and early twentieth century commentary on the subject, Howard helps us understand why Americans have maintained much friendlier ties with traditional forms of religion than their European counterparts.

Is Europe Christian?

Is Europe Christian?
Author: Olivier Roy
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2020
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190099933

Latest from Olivier Roy offering a brilliant analysis of Europe's ongoing culture wars over identity, immigration and Islam, and what these mean for Christianity. As populism rises and historic identities are hotly contested, the idea of the 'Christian West' is under the spotlight.

Religion and the State

Religion and the State
Author: Joshua B. Stein
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2012-08-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0739171577

The historiography of church-state relations in America and Europe remains a live cultural, religious, and political issue on both sides of the Atlantic. Even more, current political invocations of history illuminate the need for a thoroughly trans-Atlantic approach to the history of church-state relations in the modern West. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the formative period for modern church-states relations we see vividly the complex interrelationship of developments from England, France, and America. Ever since, historians and political figures have compared the European and American efforts to discern the proper role of religion in government and government in religion. This work is an effort to illuminate that role or at the very least to bring to light the innumerable ways in which such roles were formed.

A Secular Europe

A Secular Europe
Author: Lorenzo Zucca
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2012-10-11
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0191644757

How to accommodate diverse religious practices and laws within a secular framework is one of the most pressing and controversial problems facing contemporary European public order. In this provocative contribution to the subject, Lorenzo Zucca argues that traditional models of secularism, focusing on the relationship of state and church, are out-dated and that only by embracing a new picture of what secularism means can Europe move forward in the public reconciliation of its religious diversity. The book develops a new model of secularism suitable for Europe as a whole. The new model of secularism is concerned with the way in which modern secular states deal with the presence of diversity in the society. This new conception of secularism is more suited to the European Union whose overall aim is to promote a stable, peaceful and unified economic and political space starting from a wide range of different national experiences and perspectives. The new conception of secularism is also more suited for the Council of Europe at large, and in particular the European Court of Human Rights which faces growing demands for the recognition of freedom of religion in European states. The new model does not defend secularism as an ideological position, but aims to present secularism as our common constitutional tradition as well as the basis for our common constitutional future.

Imagining Judeo-Christian America

Imagining Judeo-Christian America
Author: K. Healan Gaston
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2019-11-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 022666385X

“Judeo-Christian” is a remarkably easy term to look right through. Judaism and Christianity obviously share tenets, texts, and beliefs that have strongly influenced American democracy. In this ambitious book, however, K. Healan Gaston challenges the myth of a monolithic Judeo-Christian America. She demonstrates that the idea is not only a recent and deliberate construct, but also a potentially dangerous one. From the time of its widespread adoption in the 1930s, the ostensible inclusiveness of Judeo-Christian terminology concealed efforts to promote particular conceptions of religion, secularism, and politics. Gaston also shows that this new language, originally rooted in arguments over the nature of democracy that intensified in the early Cold War years, later became a marker in the culture wars that continue today. She argues that the debate on what constituted Judeo-Christian—and American—identity has shaped the country’s religious and political culture much more extensively than previously recognized.

A Secular Age

A Secular Age
Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 889
Release: 2018-09-17
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0674986911

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.

Culture and Redemption

Culture and Redemption
Author: Tracy Fessenden
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780691049632

Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions--or none. Culture and Redemption suggests otherwise. Tracy Fessenden contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others. At a moment when questions about the appropriate role of religion in public life have become trenchant as never before, Culture and Redemption radically challenges conventional depictions--celebratory or damning--of America's "secular" public sphere. Examining American legal cases, children's books, sermons, and polemics together with popular and classic works of literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Culture and Redemption shows how the vaunted secularization of American culture proceeds not as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but instead through concerted attempts to render dominant forms of Protestant identity continuous with democratic, civil identity. Fessenden shows this process to be thoroughly implicated, moreover, in practices of often-violent exclusion that go to the making of national culture: Indian removals, forced acculturations of religious and other minorities, internal and external colonizations, and exacting constructions of sex and gender. Her new readings of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Gilman, Fitzgerald, and others who address themselves to these dynamics in intricate and often unexpected ways advance a major reinterpretation of American writing.

Freedom of Religion and the Secular State

Freedom of Religion and the Secular State
Author: Russell Blackford
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2012-01-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 047065886X

Exploring the relationship between religion and the state Focusing on the intersection of religion, law, and politics in contemporary liberal democracies, Blackford considers the concept of the secular state, revising and updating enlightenment views for the present day. Freedom of Religion and the Secular State offers a comprehensive analysis, with a global focus, of the subject of religious freedom from a legal as well as historical and philosophical viewpoint. It makes an original contribution to current debates about freedom of religion, and addresses a whole range of hot-button issues that involve the relationship between religion and the state, including the teaching of evolution in schools, what to do about the burqa, and so on.