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Beyond Doubt
Demonstrates definitively that the secularization thesis is correct, and religion is losing its grip on societies worldwide In the decades since its introduction, secularization theory has been subjected to doubt and criticism from a number of leading scholars, who have variously claimed that it is wrong, flawed, or incomplete. In Beyond Doubt, Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, and Ryan T. Cragun mount a strong defense for the theory, providing compelling evidence that religion is indeed declining globally as a result of modernization. Though defenses of secularization theory have been mounted in the past, we now have many years’ worth of empirical data to illuminate trends, and can t...
Goodbye Religion
"Through careful analysis of the best empirical data, this book helps make sense of one of the most important questions regarding social change in the United States in recent decades-how and why are so many people leaving religion, and what does (and will) this mean for American society"--
Nonreligion in Late Modern Societies
This volume presents results from new and ongoing research efforts into the role of nonreligion in education, politics, law and society from a variety of different countries. Featuring data from a wide range of quantitative and qualitative studies, the book exposes the relational dynamics of religion and nonreligion. Firstly, it highlights the extent to which nonreligion is defined and understood by legal and institutional actors on the basis of religions, and often replicates the organisation of society and majority religions. At the same time, it displays how essential it is to approach nonreligion on its own, by freeing oneself from the frameworks from which religion is thought. The book ...
The Varieties of Nonreligious Experience
A fascinating exploration of the breadth of social, emotional, and spiritual experiences of atheists in America Self-identified atheists make up roughly 5 percent of the American religious landscape, comprising a larger population than Jehovah’s Witnesses, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus combined. In spite of their relatively significant presence in society, atheists are one of the most stigmatized groups in the United States, frequently portrayed as immoral, unhappy, or even outright angry. Yet we know very little about what their lives are actually like as they live among their largely religious, and sometimes hostile, fellow citizens. In this book, Jerome P. Baggett ...
Regulating Difference
2021 ISSR Best Book Award (International Society for the Sociology of Religion) Transnational migration has contributed to the rise of religious diversity and has led to profound changes in the religious make-up of society across the Western world. As a result, societies and nation-states have faced the challenge of crafting ways to bring new religious communities into existing institutions and the legal frameworks. Regulating Difference explores how the state regulates religious diversity and examines the processes whereby religious diversity and expression becomes part of administrative landscapes of nation-states and people’s everyday lives. Arguing that concepts of nationhood are key to understanding the governance of religious diversity, Regulating Difference employs a transatlantic comparison of the Spanish region of Catalonia and the Canadian province of Quebec to show how processes of nation-building, religious heritage-making and the mobilization of divergent interpretations of secularism are co-implicated in shaping religious diversity. It argues that religious diversity has become central for governing national and urban spaces.
Global Sceptical Publics
Global Sceptical Publics is the first major study of the significance of different media for the (re)production of non-religious publics and publicity. While much work has documented how religious subjectivities are shaped by media, until now the crucial role of diverse media for producing and participating in religion-sceptical publics and debates has remained under-researched. With some chapters focusing on locations hitherto barely considered by scholarship on non-religion, the book places in comparative perspective how atheists, secularists and humanists engage with media – as means of communication and forming non-religious publics – but also on occasion as something to be resisted. Its conceptually rich interdisciplinary chapters thereby contribute important new insights to the growing field of non-religion studies and to scholarship on media and materiality more generally.
Mission in Contemporary Scotland
Mission in Contemporary Scotland is the first book to fully examine the challenges and opportunities of Christian mission in contemporary Scotland. It covers all of the most important topics and questions engaging the church today, such as the reality of decline, the changing nature of domestic mission, the response of the Church to change, and the different models of mission that are being used today. Describing and analysing a wealth of concrete examples from a Scottish context, this study gives practical guidance to church leaders engaged in Fresh Expressions and church planting in a Scottish context. A major contribution of the book is to envisage ways in which the institutional Church can respond imaginatively to its secular and pluralist context. This is the first work of its kind and fills a significant gap in the market.
Society without God, Second Edition
An updated edition showcasing the social health of the least religious nations in the world Religious conservatives around the world often claim that a society without a strong foundation of faith would necessarily be an immoral one, bereft of ethics, values, and meaning. Indeed, the Christian Right in the United States has argued that a society without God would be hell on earth. In Society without God, Second Edition sociologist Phil Zuckerman challenges these claims. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with more than 150 citizens of Denmark and Sweden, among the least religious countries in the world, he shows that, far from being inhumane, crime-infested, and dysfunctional, highly secula...
Looking Back to Look Forward
The number of secular people has increased substantially over the past several decades, and research on secularism and non-religion has been on the rise these past years. Yet, until today, no publication had examined the evolution of organised freethought and subsequent secular humanism as it emerged in different Western countries in a comparative perspective. In this book, a team of historians brings together the histories of secular humanism in some pioneer countries. They examine how organised freethought evolved in the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain and the United States, in the aftermath of World War II. As secular humanist organisations in these countries are some of the cofounders and long-lasting members of Humanists International (formerly International Humanist and Ethical Union), this book reveals how Western humanism developed in different circumstances.
The Non-Religious and the State
As the number of the non-affiliated and religiously indifferent is on the rise, this book adds a hitherto absent historical dimension to the field of secular studies. It shows a variety of ways in which the non-religious at large - be it organizations, networks or even committed individuals - impact upon the interface between the state and the religious or the non-religious. To what specific legal statuses have these processes led? What elements were taken into consideration when making these decisions? Who opted for a recognition of a non-confessional lifestance and why? Conversely, who opted for a wall of separation and why? Are things that clear cut? Doesn't the variety of choices and frameworks offer a more varied spectrum? What continuities and discontinuities are to be observed in the history of seculars and their organizations? These patterns, divergent and entangled, are developed and explained within the broader conception of 'multiple secularisms'.
