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Stephen Strehle is a leading scholar of church/state issues. In this volume, he focuses his rigorous historical analysis and philosophical acumen upon a topic of great interest today and source of cultural wars around the globe—the process of secularization. The book starts with a discussion of early capitalism and how it saw the real world functioning well-enough on its own principles of individual struggle and self-interest, without needing religious or moral principles to meddle in its affairs and eventually dispelling the need for any intelligent design or providential orchestration of life through the work of Darwin. The book then discusses the growth of the secular point of view: how historians dismissed the impact of religion in developing modern culture, how scientists conceived of the universe running on self-sufficient or mechanistic principles, and how people no longer looked to the providential hand of God to explain their suffering. The book ends with a discussion of how the Deist concept of human autonomy became a political policy in America through Jefferson's concept of a wall of separation between church and state and how the US Supreme Court proceeded to dismiss the importance of religion in shaping or justifying the values of the nation and its laws. The book is accessible to most upper-level and graduate students in a wide-variety of disciplines, keeping technical and foreign words to a minimum and leaving scholarly details or debates to its extensive notes.

Western liberal societies are characterized by two stories: a positive story of freedom of conscience and the recognition of community and human rights, and a negative story of unrestrained freedom that leads to self-centeredness, vacuity, and the destructive compromise of human values. Can the Catholic Church play a more meaningful role in assisting liberal societies in telling their better story? Australian ethicist Robert Gascoigne thinks it can. In The Church and Secularity he considers the meaning of secularity as a shared space for all citizens and asks how the Church can contribute to a sensitivity to -- and respect for -- human dignity and human rights. Drawing on Augustine's City of God and Vatican II's Gaudium et spes, Gascoigne interprets the meaning of freedom in liberal societies through the lens of Augustine's "two loves," the love of God and neighbor and the love of self, and reveals how the two are connected to our contemporary experience. The Church and Secularity argues that the Church can serve liberal societies in a positive way and that its own social identity, rooted in Eucharistic communities, must be bound up with the struggle for human rights and resistance to the commodification of the human in all its forms

This article is based on theoretical analysis and empirical material gathered by means of socio-anthropological research. The aim is to present some reflections on the relations between ecology, spirituality and secularity as three intricate aspects of modern thought. First, the methodological contribution of the article is questioning the aprioristic association between New Age and spirituality. Later, there is an analysis of ecological thought and spirituality, addressing the broader context of secularity understood as immanent frame of experience. Finally, the article proposes some possible directions to the study of spirituality and ecology without the methodological pitfalls disentangled alongside the text.

AbstractThis article probes into the issue of secularity as a main node of the historic construction of modern power and the modern state in Europe. It builds an interpretative arch ranging from the Spanish Reconquista, stretching through the European Wars of Religion and the resistance to the "Turkish Threat" of the encroaching Ottoman armies, and reaching into the contemporary predicament of the presence of a growing population of Muslim background in the key states of Western Europe, notably those involved in the Reconquista, the resistance to the "Turkish Threat", and in the Wars of Religion. The analysis matches the interpretation of these historical traumata with philosophical and sociological reflections, from Spinoza and Vico to Asad and Casanova. The conclusions point to the inherent ambivalence and arbitrary character of the modern secular distinction between religion and politics. They suggest that the philosophical utopia of secularity is still an open issue for the European states and that the growing presence of Islam in Europe helps give evidence of the limits of the secular arrangements reigning in the continent thus far.

The changing context of the Christian life brings Christian life at a crossroads, the first whether to remain in a comfort zone or the second whether to enter into the realm of profane daily life. The urge to get out of selfness and deal with the public world makes the Church deal with questions about its own identity. In this article, I want to explore the question of incarnation in Johan Baptist Metz's secularity. However, the concept of incarnation is applied solely to Jesus Christ as the Divine Word became flesh. Ricoeurian hermeneutics could help explain the term secularity on incarnation to immediate. And corporeal suffering of the others. The turn to Ricoeur as a methodological resource for theology provides a philosophical account of the methodology behind critical theology. The article concludes that the human being in their relationship its suffering experience is an experience of encounter.