Cases in Point

Abstract

The return of the religious pattern of sensemaking into mainstream public debate in western societies has been widely noted by philosophers of culture and acknowledged by the media. All major institutional religions have seen increases in membership, and the prognoses of secularization as the inevitable aftermath of modernization and the growth of material welfare have been quietly shelved. This may be the result of the promise of stepping ‘outside’ material life, which religion — as opposed to science, scholarship, philosophy and ideology — offers, while humanist scholars deem it impossible: ‘Perhaps it is impossible to generalize intelligently about human life, because in order to do so we would have to step outside it’ (Eagleton, 2007, p. 138).