The New Visibility of Religion Studies in Religion and Cultural Hermeneutics

by Ward, Graham; Hoelzl, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781847061324
• ISBN10: 184706132X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-12-09
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Since the late 1980s sociologists have been drawing our attention to an international surge in the public visibility of religion. This has increasingly challenged two central aspects of modern western European culture: first, the assumption that as we became more modern we would become more secularised and religion would disappear; and secondly, that religion and politics should occupy radically differentiated spheres in which private conviction did not exert itself within the public realm. The new visibility of religion is not simply a matter of what Keppel famously called 'The Revenge of God', that is, the resurgence of Christian, Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism. Religion is permeating western culture in many different forms from contemporary continental philosophy, the arts and the media, to the rhetoric of international politicians. This collection of essays brings together a unique collection of voices from theology, aesthetics, social and political science, philosophy and cultural theory in an exploration of four major aspects of this new visibility of religion: the revision of the secularisation thesis, the relationship between religion and violence, the new re-enchantment of reality and the return of metaphysics. The exploration is conducted through essays by and interviews with figures at the forefront of reflecting upon this major cultural shift and its implications. It is distinctively multidisciplinary, examining the phenomenon of the rise of religion in Western Europe from a number of interrelated perspectives. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Secularization
Revising Secularization Theory	p. 15
Five Ways of Relating Religion and Politics or Living in Two Worlds: Believer and Citizen	p. 30
Secularism, Faith and Freedom	p. 45
Violence
The Bloody Skin of the Victim	p. 59
The Ambiguous Cachet of Victimhood: On Violence and Monotheism	p. 68
Monotheism and Violence	p. 88
Aesthetics
The Art of Disappearing: Religion and Aestheticization	p. 99
The Re-enchantment of the World and the End of Modern Art	p. 117
'The End is Nigh': A Reflection on the Relationship between Media and Religion	p. 129
Theology
Radical Orthodoxy Ten Years On: The Return of Metaphysics	p. 151
Politics and the New Visibility of Theology	p. 170
Religion after Detraditionalization: Christian Faith in a Postsecular Europe	p. 187
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