The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of seventy years of anti-religious policies—of a period in which religious expression was severely curtailed and religious institutions were always controlled, at times co-opted, and at other times brutally repressed, with the aim of effecting the demise of religion, an aim which was never fully realized. The post-1991 era was radically different, at least in those newly independent countries that adopted and implemented liberal laws regarding religious expression and organization. It might be expected that religious leaders and practitioners would have a straightforwardly positive view of this widening scope for religious activities, but this turned out not always to be the case.
Posts Tagged ‘privatization’
April 18th, 2012
Contradictions of religious freedom and religious repression
posted by Mathijs Pelkmans
September 20th, 2010
Skyping secularism: Religion and democracy
posted by Thomas Alberts , Ruth Braunstein , David Buckley and Grace YukichAt the end of our last post (an extension of our discussions at the IWM Summer School in Cortona), we asked whether secularism and liberalism in fact always go together, as is often supposed. In our second round of Skype conversations, we began to address this question by discussing a related one: to what degree are liberalism and privatized religion necessary for democracy? This discussion was inspired by our IWM course on “Religion and Democracy,” taught by José Casanova and Marcin Krol, which drew on examples of democratic societies to examine the variety of roles that public religion and liberalism, respectively, play in enhancing or inhibiting democratic life.
August 27th, 2010
The sounds of science
posted by Finbarr Curtis
As previous posts about The New Metaphysicals have illustrated, Courtney Bender’s spiritual but not religious subjects pose a number of definitional problems for theories of secularization. On one hand, her interlocutors describe spiritual experiences in languages that we tend to call religious, even while the new metaphysicals might resist the label (although some do use the word religion). Thus, Cambridge spiritual seekers might demonstrate the persistence of religious belief. On the other hand, their disinclination to recognize legitimate religious institutions or identify themselves as members of binding moral communities might demonstrate trends that confirm theories of secularization. While Bender stresses that spiritual experiences are produced and interpreted within social and cultural networks, these networks do not seem to wield the institutional or social authority that would debunk a Durkheimian assessment that her book is evidence of American religious privatization.
Subscribe to the RSS feed for privatization
