Richard Amesbury

Richard Amesbury is Associate Professor of Ethics at Claremont School of Theology and Associate Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Morality and Social Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Faith and Human Rights (Fortress, 2008). His current research and teaching interests include the relation between religion and human rights; the place of religion in liberal democracies; theories of secularization; the ethics of belief and citizenship; the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein; the implications of religious plurality; and the construction of "religion" as a category.

Posts by Richard Amesbury:

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Multi-religious denominationalism and American identity

secular_age1Charles Taylor has argued that those of us living in North America and Europe are witnessing a shift in our social imaginary from a “Durkheimian” self-understanding, according to which political identity is tied to religious belonging, towards a “post-Durkheimian” view, in which the two are no longer seen as intrinsically linked. In the emerging dispensation, Taylor predicts, “it will be less and less common for people to be drawn into or kept within a faith by some strong political or group identity, or by the sense that they are sustaining a socially essential ethic.” Whatever its merits as an analysis of contemporary European self-understanding—and these are surely significant—Taylor’s reading strikes me as underdetermined by the American evidence…

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