Not in the Heavens traces the rise of Jewish secularism through the visionary writers and thinkers who led its development. Spanning the rich history of Judaism from the Bible to today, David Biale ...shows how the secular tradition these visionaries created is a uniquely Jewish one, and how the emergence of Jewish secularism was not merely a response to modernity but arose from forces long at play within Judaism itself.
Much theorizing about secularization tells a “differentiation story” that puts a historical process of structural differentiation at the center of its understanding of secularization. The heart of ...the story is the claim that the increasing differentiation of social spheres over time freed the “secular” spheres of life (politics, economics, etc.) from religious control or domination. This conceptual framing has been widely shared by scholars in the field, not only by adherents of the classical secularization paradigm, but also their leading critics in the supply-side and historicist–revisionist schools. While the story sometimes serves a purely descriptive function, at other times it is used to explain secularization (i.e., differentiation causes secularization). A close examination of the differentiation story, however, raises questions about the historical accuracy and theoretical plausibility of some of its core assumptions. Aspects of the differentiation story that require critical reconsideration include the empirical accuracy of its historical generalizations, its underspecified notion of “spheres,” and its explanatory assumption that some spheres are innately or properly nonreligious.
This collection examines the mosaic of the religious & the secular in the GDR & contemporary Eastern Germany, focusing on the interplay between local bureaucracies & individual lives.
Virtually every discussion of secularization asserts that high levels of religiosity in the United States make it a decisive counterexample to the claim that modern societies are prone to ...secularization. Focusing on trends rather than levels, the authors maintain that, for two straightforward empirical reasons, the United States should no longer be considered a counterexample. First, it has recently become clear that American religiosity has been declining for decades. Second, this decline has been produced by the generational patterns underlying religious decline elsewhere in the West: each successive cohort is less religious than the preceding one. America is not an exception. These findings change the theoretical import of the United States for debates about secularization.
Over the last three decades, fruitful new lines of research and theorizing have revealed the inadequacy of secularization and rational choice explanations of religion. This article argues that ...sociological understandings of religion can best advance now by building on the empirical findings that have emerged under the banner of “lived religion,” but grounding that work in theories of social practice. Going beyond the Western, individualist focus of recent research, the approach explicated in this article details a multidimensional lens for the study of the practices themselves and an outline of the types of historical and legal cultural repertoires that shape practice around the world. Together these frameworks can facilitate sociological research on religion both inside and beyond religious institutions and across cultural contexts.
This article exposes a research perspective which consists in comparing Mexico and Turkey, two countries which are not usually compared with each other, through the topics of laicity and ...secularization in education. Departing from a subjective and ethnographic experience, I start by presenting the grounds of a situated knowledge; afterwards, I go into aspects of historical and global contexts to look at the similarities in both countries; and I end by explaining the decolonial perspective which serves as the methodology that makes this comparison possible thorough a sharp critique of the process of secularization and (second) modernity. Through "weaving" a subjective perspective, a theoretical reflection as well as key historical facts in the 19th and 20th centuries in Mexico and Turkey, I propose fieldwork about Turkey which can contribute to a comparison of both countries, based on an empirical and qualitative perspective, as well as on ethnographic data.
It has been stated in academic studies and popular media that Islam began its rise in dominance in Turkey with the accession of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power in 2002 under the ...leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. However, contrary to claims of societal Islamization, in light of quantitative and qualitative studies this study argues that despite the AKP and its leader Erdoğan being in power, the following evidence has been observed in Turkey: praying rates have decreased, extramarital sexual relationship has become prevalent, the number of mosques per person has decreased, the belief in virginity is a point of honour for fewer people, people‘s clothes have become more flatteringly formfitting and more attractive, including women’s head-scarves; secular experts rather than religious officials are being sought for help concerning problems in daily life, homosexuality has become more socially acceptable visible, traditional family structures has been shattered. Therefore, it is claimed that AKP (or Erdoğan) has failed in efforts to Islamize Turkey over the past 15 years (2002-2017) despite having all the governmental means and opportunities to do so. This study argues that the classical theory of secularization, which claims that modernization leads to secularization, can still explain not only the social transformation seen in historically Christian and Western European countries and their offshoots, but also the social transformation of Turkey, a Muslim-majority country that has been governed for the past 15 years by a political party with clear Islamic sensitivities.
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