Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- Society, State and Religion: Their Relationship from the Perspective of the World Religions: An Introduction
- 1 Catholic Christianity
- 2 Protestantism
- 3 The Departure and Return of God: Secularization and Theologization in Judaism
- 4 Islam and Secularization
- 5 Hinduism
- 6 Secularization: Confucianism and Buddhism
- 7 From Hostility through Recognition to Identification: State–Church Models and their Relationship to Freedom of Religion
- 8 ‘Science Doesn't Tremble’: The Secular Natural Sciences and the Modern Feeling for Life
- 9 The Religious Situation in Europe
- 10 The Religious Situation in the USA
- 11 The Religious Situation in East Asia
- 12 The Relevance of the European Model of Secularization in Latin America and Africa
- 13 The Desecularization of the Middle East Conflict: From a Conflict between States to a Conflict between Religious Communities
- Afterword
6 - Secularization: Confucianism and Buddhism
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- Society, State and Religion: Their Relationship from the Perspective of the World Religions: An Introduction
- 1 Catholic Christianity
- 2 Protestantism
- 3 The Departure and Return of God: Secularization and Theologization in Judaism
- 4 Islam and Secularization
- 5 Hinduism
- 6 Secularization: Confucianism and Buddhism
- 7 From Hostility through Recognition to Identification: State–Church Models and their Relationship to Freedom of Religion
- 8 ‘Science Doesn't Tremble’: The Secular Natural Sciences and the Modern Feeling for Life
- 9 The Religious Situation in Europe
- 10 The Religious Situation in the USA
- 11 The Religious Situation in East Asia
- 12 The Relevance of the European Model of Secularization in Latin America and Africa
- 13 The Desecularization of the Middle East Conflict: From a Conflict between States to a Conflict between Religious Communities
- Afterword
Summary
‘Secularization’ is a Latinism used in European languages referring to the helplessness of the individual whose world-regulating God has died on him. All that is left to him is to cope, at his own risk and taking full responsibility, with the finite and fragile nature of his individual and social existence in this time and in this world.
The word claims to describe a historical state of global dimensions. It is difficult to conceive of the existence of God as a regional or local phenomenon and just as difficult to imagine that His absence applies only as far as the Bosphorus. Yet, however much the notion of secularization may make sense in Europe, it fails to do so in the USA of the ‘moral majority’, the revivalist gatherings of the Pentecostal movement in Latin America or in large parts of the Islamic world. With his finger on this contemporary pulse and one eye on the newspaper headlines, Jürgen Habermas, in conversation with Cardinal Ratzinger, believes we have already entered a ‘post-secular age’. While in this reading we have now wound up with the opposite of secularization, we are not out of the woods yet. Our horizon is still dominated by monotheism, and that means we have remained within a geographically and culturally delimited part of the world, for the notion of secularization or that of the post-secular age makes sense solely within this horizon.
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- Information
- Secularization and the World Religions , pp. 141 - 159Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2009