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This book examines the role of faith-based organizations in managing international aid, providing services, defending human rights and protecting democracy. It argues that greater engagement with faith communities and organizations is needed, and questions traditional secularism that has underpinned development policy and practice in the North.
This collection brings together for the first time the theological essays of a 20th-century philosopher renowned for his defense of civil religious freedom. In this volume of essays, previously scattered among various periodicals over the course of thirty eyars, J. Leon Hooper, SJ, presents a selection of Murray's theological writings that outlines and highlights the integrity of Murray's moves toward a public theological discourse.
What would it mean to conceive of the sacred as a source of knowledge that is as vital as the secular? What insights does a contemplative approach yield in analysing neoliberal globalisation or Hindu fundamentalism? Is a dew drop sacred, or is it secular? In today’s charged atmosphere many believe that the sacred is best kept firmly apart from the realm of the secular. SacredSecular: Contemplative Cultural Critique offers a contrasting view. It argues that the two are indivisible and can productively interweave in illuminating key contemporary issues. Essays investigate the quotidian (trash, cut flowers), the philosophical (advaita, karma), the economic (work, globalisation) and the political (war, violence). Mani invites us to rethink the prevailing view that secularism is the only progressive response to religious authoritarianism. SacredSecular proposes a conceptual approach in which body, mind, heart, nature, matter and spirit are not merely equals, but equally crucial to crafting an inclusive vision and practice. This book addresses several audiences: scholars of contemporary Indian society and culture, spiritual practitioners striving to integrate their practice with their politics, and all those interested in contemplating the present and what it portends for our collective future.
The sacred-secular divide continues to threaten the health of the global church, disempowering lay Christians and undermining the call to integrate all aspects of life under the lordship of Christ. Theological educators seeking a path out of this dichotomy will find themselves both challenged and encouraged by this collection of essays drawn from the 2018 ICETE conference in Panama City. Within its four sections, contributors explore biblical frameworks for integration, urge seminaries to value identity formation as much as skill acquirement, call for a robust theology of work, and challenge theologians to consider their responsibility to the world beyond the church’s borders. Filled with thought-provoking questions and practical suggestions, this book is an excellent resource for all those pursuing a holistic approach to theological education.
The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.
The global humanitarian movement, which originated within Western religious organizations in the early nineteenth century, has been of most important forces in world politics in advancing both human rights and human welfare. While the religious groups that founded the movement originally focused on conversion, in time more secular concerns came to dominate. By the end of the nineteenth century, increasingly professionalized yet nominally religious organization shifted from reliance on the good book to the public health manual. Over the course of the twentieth century, the secularization of humanitarianism only increased, and by the 1970s the movement's religious inspiration, generally speaking, was marginal to its agenda. However, beginning in the 1980s, religiously inspired humanitarian movements experienced a major revival, and today they are virtual equals of their secular brethren. From church-sponsored AIDS prevention campaigns in Africa to Muslim charity efforts in flood-stricken Pakistan to Hindu charities in India, religious groups have altered the character of the global humanitarian movement. Moreover, even secular groups now gesture toward religious inspiration in their work. Clearly, the broad, inexorable march toward secularism predicted by so many Westerners has halted, which is especially intriguing with regard to humanitarianism. Not only was it a highly secularized movement just forty years ago, but its principles were based on those we associate with "rational" modernity: cosmopolitan one-worldism and material (as opposed to spiritual) progress. How and why did this happen, and what does it mean for humanitarianism writ large? That is the question that the eminent scholars Michael Barnett and Janice Stein pose in Sacred Aid, and for answers they have gathered chapters from leading scholars that focus on the relationship between secularism and religion in contemporary humanitarianism throughout the developing world. Collectively, the chapters in this volume comprise an original and authoritative account of religion has reshaped the global humanitarian movement in recent times.
For many centuries a false distinction between "sacred" and "secular" has plagued the church, divided the Body, and discouraged the people of God. For over twenty years, Michael Baer has been writing and speaking about the integration of all of life as sacred under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. He is one of the early founders of the modern Business as Mission movement, the founder of International Micro Enterprise Development (aka the Jholdas Project) and the author of numerous books on business, missions, and integrated Kingdom living.
As historical analyses of Diaspora Jewish visual culture blossom in quantity and sophistication, this book analyzes 19th-20th-century developments in Jewish Palestine and later the State of Israel. In the course of these approximately one hundred years, Zionist Israelis developed a visual corpus and artistic lexicon of Jewish-Israeli icons as an anchor for the emerging “civil religion.” Bridging internal tensions and even paradoxes, artists dynamically adopted, responded to, and adapted significant Diaspora influences for Jewish-Israeli purposes, as well as Jewish religious themes for secular goals, all in the name of creating a new state with its own paradoxes, simultaneously styled on the Enlightenment nation-state and Jewish peoplehood.
Debates about Islam and Muslim societies have intensified in the last four decades, triggered by the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and, later, by the events of 9/11. Too often present in these debates are wrongheaded assumptions about the attachment of Muslims to their religion and the impossibility of secularism in the Muslim world. At the heart of these assumptions is the notion of Muslim exceptionalism: the idea that Muslims think, believe, and behave in ways that are fundamentally different from other faith communities. In Sacred as Secular Abdolmohammad Kazemipur attempts to debunk this flawed notion of Muslim exceptionalism by looking at religious trends in Iran since 1979. Drawing on a wide range of data and sources, including national social attitudes surveys collected since the 1970s, he examines developments in the spheres of politics and governance, schools and seminaries, contemporary philosophy, and the self-expressed beliefs and behaviours of Iranian men, women, and youth. He reveals that beneath Iran’s religious façade is a deep secularization that manifests not only in individual beliefs, but also in Iranian political philosophy, institutional and clerical structures, and intellectual life. Empirically and theoretically rich, Sacred as Secular looks at the place of religion in Iranian society from a sociological perspective, expanding the debate on secularism from a predominantly West-centric domain to the Muslim world.