The Post-Secular in Question
I just got my copy of The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society, edited by Philip Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, John Torpey, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (published by NYU Press). This is the fruit of a conference at Yale University several years ago. My paper, now chapter 7, is entitled “Secular Liturgies and the Prospects for a ‘Post-Secular’ Sociology of Religion” (pp. 159-184).
It’s a fascinating collection that represents a kind of vanguard in social scientific understanding of both “religion” and “the secular.” (And how many books from NYU Press mention Cornelius Van Til and John Frame? And those citations aren’t even in my chapter!)
And the endorsements are notable:
| “In the last two decades we have witnessed constant deconstructions and reconstructions of the categories of religion, the secular, and now the post-secular. This volume is the best entry I know to the whole debate. It serves both as a perfect illustration of the shifting terrain and as a helpful analytical guide to its exploration.” |
| -José Casanova, author of Public Religions in the Modern World |
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| “The quality of almost all the chapters of this book is unusually high. One can learn things one didn’t know and see them in a way one hadn’t thought of by reading this diverse but very stimulating collection. The book does not solve the murky problem of the secular, much less the post-secular, but it gives new ways of thinking about them that have great promise as our work on these issues goes forward.” |
| -Robert Bellah, author of Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age |
