Abstract
How might we view secularism differently if we read it through the eyes of its religious “other?” This chapter is a venture in answering this question. Although secularism is more aptly viewed as secularisms, distinctive formations that refract the history and politics of particular places, this collection tracks similar patterns across the country cases that reflect the global diffusion of the religion/secular classification and similar challenges stemming from its oppositional construction. As there is no single religious lens, of course, no reading can stand in for them all, though any one might generate insights that travel. In this chapter I read secularism through the lens of the Western theological tradition, with attention to its embodiment within the American context.
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Notes
Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, “Times Like These,” in Secularisms, ed. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 6.
José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 38–39.
See, for example, William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 36.
H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), 32.
Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 49.
Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 218.
Leigh Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 13
Hugh Heclo, Christianity and American Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 35.
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© 2010 Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
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Cady, L.E. (2010). Reading Secularism through a Theological Lens. In: Cady, L.E., Hurd, E.S. (eds) Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106703_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106703_15
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38327-6
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