Writing in the Christian Century, Philip Jenkins suggests that there are signs of an early stage European style “secularization” at work in parts of Latin America.
Posts Tagged ‘religious nones’
March 7th, 2013
Are some ‘nones’ combinative religionists?
posted by Per Smith
February 7th, 2013
The alienation of religion from the left
posted by Wei ZhuNoting that “nearly all of the white Americans who drifted away from organized religion in the last few decades were liberals,” Claude Fischer worries worries that this is problematic for both the left and the right.
December 3rd, 2012
Understanding “nones”
posted by Taline Cox
October 10th, 2012
What does spirituality mean in America today?
posted by Courtney Bender
But why, first of all, is this subject a significant one? And why does it appear especially pertinent at precisely the present moment? To begin with, growing numbers of “religious nones,” that is, people who have limited or no religious affiliation yet still claim to believe in some kind of divinity, signal an unprecedented shift in the American religious landscape, and many scholars who have sought to understand this phenomenon have indicated that something like “spirituality” might capture an important aspect of their outlook, if not their “identity.” We, for our part, certainly agree that this is a socially significant shift. Yet we also note that much of the interpretation and ensuing discussion about the “religious nones” draws upon and continues to assert uninvestigated understandings of religion and spirituality, where we would argue that the shifts underway should elicit some reconsideration of the terms that are deployed to analyze and interpret this allegedly “new” phenomenon.
October 10th, 2012
Elizabeth Drescher on religious “nones”
posted by Ruth BraunsteinNDSP Grantee Elizabeth Drescher responds to a new report, “‘Nones’ On the Rise,” released by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in affiliation with PBS’ Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.
March 27th, 2012
Rising alternatives to organized religion
posted by Phillip QuinteroIn a recent issue of TIME, Amy Sullivan writes of a 2009 study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and an example of American expats in Mexico that both suggest Americans may prefer to grow their own when it comes to religious congregations.
September 26th, 2011
Taking theology seriously
posted by Molly Worthen
What we need is a bird’s eye view, and that requires taking theology seriously, and considering a longer view of the history of Western civilization than any sociological survey can provide. [...] American Grace adopts a position of respectful skepticism toward theology. The authors dutifully reproduce the questionnaire of “measures of theological belief and religious commitment” included in their survey, but they express surprise that many Americans “have stable views on such seemingly arcane theological issues” as whether a person is saved by faith or by their own good deeds. (Calling this fundamental question “arcane” is a bit like expressing confusion at that obscure rule in baseball that allows a player to score a run by crossing home plate.)
May 20th, 2011
Physicists making religion headlines
posted by John D. BoyEver since he told a Guardian reporter last weekend that the idea of an afterlife is a “fairy story,” Stephen Hawking has been in the religion news. The author of A Brief History of Time isn’t the only physicist making religion headlines. Not long ago, a paper presented at the American Physical Society’s annual meeting led the BBC to report: “Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says.” Finally, the ongoing work on particle physics at CERN prompted its director to tell an interviewer: “we are crossing the boundary between knowledge and belief.”
March 18th, 2011
Surviving the secular
posted by Ari Y. Kelman
Whether you see “the secular” as a threat or a refuge, an option or an impulse, we are all trying to survive it, and one could argue that religious folks are trying to survive the secular far more ardently than secular folks are trying to survive the religious (at least in the United States). Of course, most of us fall somewhere in between—looking for and cobbling together meaning in and around the edges of religious and secular schools of thought and belief. Yet, for all of the boundary marking and making, secular and religious are not mutually exclusive; they are mutually constitutive.
And that’s where Lofton (along with an audience of millions) finds Oprah: at the intersection of religious and secular, in between spiritual and material, personal and communal, ritual and improvisational. And it is a brilliant discovery.
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