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This book explores the culture, politics, and ideas of the nineteenth-century German secularist movements of Free Religion, Freethought, Ethical Culture, and Monism. In it, Todd H. Weir argues that although secularists challenged church establishment and conservative orthodoxy, they were subjected to the forces of religious competition.
Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) was a tireless campaigner against the political enforcement of religion in the early modern confessional state. In a whole series of combative disputations - against heresy and witchcraft prosecutions, and in favour of religious toleration - Thomasius battled to lay the intellectual groundwork for the separation of church and state and the juridical basis for pluralistic societies. In this text, Ian Hunter departs from the usual view of Thomasius as a natural law moral philosopher. In addition to investigating his anti-scholastic cultural politics, Hunter discusses Thomasius' work in public and church law, particularly his disputations arguing for the toleration of heretics, providing a revealing comparison with Locke's arguments on the same topic. If Locke sought to base toleration in the subjective rights protecting Christian citizens against an intolerant state, Thomasius grounded it in the state's duty to impose toleration as an obligation on intolerant citizens.
This innovative edited collection provides a comprehensive analysis of modern secularism across Asia which contests and expands prevailing accounts that have predominantly focused on the West. Its authors highlight that terms like ‘secular’, ‘secularization’, and ‘secularism’ do not carry the same meanings in the very different historical and cultural contexts of Asia. Critiquing Charles Taylor’s account of secularism, this book examines what travelled and what not in ‘the imperial encounter’ between Western secular modernity and other traditions outside of the West. Throughout the book, state responses to religion at different points in Chinese and South-East Asian history are carefully considered, providing a nuanced and in-depth understanding of post-secular strategies and relations in these areas. Particular attention is given to Catholicism in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Singapore, and Hinduism and Chinese religion in Malaysia, Singapore, and India. This theoretically engaged work will appeal to students and scholars of Asian studies, anthropology, religious studies, history, sociology, and political science.
Estonia is often described as one of the most secularised countries in the world in terms of de-institutionalisation and de-Christianisation. Old Religion, New Spirituality: Implications of Secularisation and Individualisation in Estonia, edited by Riho Altnurme, starts with the question: what are the historical reasons for Estonia to be so secularised? The decisive factor in the diminishment in the importance of Christianity was the overlap between social classes and ethnicities. The national identity of Estonians became disconnected to any religion. Second, what are the consequences? How are the secularity of Estonia and the picture of individualised religiosity in this country linked? This book provides fresh results from surveys, archival work and analysis by a group of Estonian researchers. Contributors include: Riho Altnurme, Lea Altnurme, Priit Rohtmets, Indrek Pekko, Toomas Schvak, Ringo Ringvee, Alar Kilp, and Marko Uibu.
How the Catholic Church redefined its relationship to the state in the wake of the French Revolution Catholicism and Democracy is a history of Catholic political thinking from the French Revolution to the present day. Emile Perreau-Saussine investigates the church's response to liberal democracy, a political system for which the church was utterly unprepared. Looking at leading philosophers and political theologians—among them Joseph de Maistre, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Charles Péguy—Perreau-Saussine shows how the church redefined its relationship to the state in the long wake of the French Revolution. Disenfranchised by the fall of the monarchy, the church in France at first embraced that most conservative of ideologies, "ultramontanism" (an emphasis on the central role of the papacy). Catholics whose church had lost its national status henceforth looked to the papacy for spiritual authority. Perreau-Saussine argues that this move paradoxically combined a fundamental repudiation of the liberal political order with an implicit acknowledgment of one of its core principles, the autonomy of the church from the state. However, as Perreau-Saussine shows, in the context of twentieth-century totalitarianism, the Catholic Church retrieved elements of its Gallican heritage and came to embrace another liberal (and Gallican) principle, the autonomy of the state from the church, for the sake of its corollary, freedom of religion. Perreau-Saussine concludes that Catholics came to terms with liberal democracy, though not without abiding concerns about the potential of that system to compromise freedom of religion in the pursuit of other goals.
The Leiden Circle pioneered the systematic exclusion of theologically grounded argument in areas of thought from the natural sciences to international relations. Somos uses richly contextualised portraits of Scaliger, Heinsius, Cunaeus and Grotius to develop a new model of secularisation.
Policies dealing with religious diversity in liberal democratic states—as well as the established institutions that enforce those policies—are increasingly under pressure. Politics and political theory are caught in a trap between the fully secularized state and neo-corporate regimes of selective cooperation between states and organized religion. This volume proposes an original, comprehensive, and multidisciplinary approach to problems of governing religious diversity—combining moral and political philosophy, constitutional law, history, sociology, and religious anthropology. Drawing on such diverse scholarship, Secularism or Democracy? proposes an associational governance—a moderately libertarian, flexible variety of democratic institutional pluralism—as the plausible third way to overcome the inherent deficiencies of the predominant models.
This volume widens the scope of research into the relation between religion and Enlightenment. The contributions demonstrate the impact of changing worldviews in a variety of intellectual disciplines and cultural milieus.
The Death of Christian Britain uses the latest techniques to offer new formulations of religion and secularisation and explores what it has meant to be 'religious' and 'irreligious' during the last 200 years. By listening to people's voices rather than purely counting heads, it offers a fresh history of de-christianisation, and predicts that the British experience since the 1960s is emblematic of the destiny of the whole of western Christianity. Challenging the generally held view that secularization has been a long and gradual process beginning with the industrial revolution, it proposes that it has been a catastrophic short term phenomenon starting with the 1960's. Is Christianity in Britain nearing extinction? Is the decline in Britain emblematic of the fate of western Christianity? Topical and controversial, The Death of Christian Britain is a bold and original work that will bring some uncomfortable truths to light.
Questions of secularity and modernity have become globalized, but most studies still focus on the West. This volume breaks new ground by comparatively exploring developments in five areas of the world, some of which were hitherto situated at the margins of international scholarly discussions: Africa, the Arab World, East Asia, South Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe. In theoretical terms, the book examines three key dimensions of modern secularity: historical pathways, cultural meanings, and global entanglements of secular formations. The contributions show how differences in these dimensions are linked to specific histories of religious and ethnic diversity, processes of state-formation and nation-building. They also reveal how secularities are critically shaped through civilizational encounters, processes of globalization, colonial conquest, and missionary movements, and how entanglements between different territorially grounded notions of secularity or between local cultures and transnational secular arenas unfold over time.