Suchergebnisse

Recent debates on this topic have been heavily shaped by two paradigms: Asad's deconstructivism and Taylor's Catholic/Hegelian revisionism. This article outlines the arguments of each but frames them within the longer history of arguments that make claims for the reality of secularization and alternate sources for claims that "the secular" is a historically constructed category, including arguments from radical theology and (differently) in the anthropology of India. It is argued that implicit claims for the hierarchical ordering of reality in modernity, in which the political is seen as more real than the religious, continue to create disjunctures in the range of debate that new ethnography has the opportunity to address.

This article aims to assess the impact of Christian religious values on the development of Western societies and on Western concepts of freedom and democracy. The author calls for a stronger presence of religion in politics, in which Christian values can continue to be at the heart of policymaking.

Uses Adrian Peperzak's (1993) interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas's indictment of Western philosophy to identify the religious dimension of modern liberalism. At issue for Levinas are the Platonic elements of the Other & the Same, where in the case of modern liberalism, the Same represents everything in the framework of capitalist society, & the Other is everything outside of it. Levinas contends that Western philosophical tradition's idea of modernity, developed from Machiavellian & Hobbesian notions, mistakenly & arrogantly addresses Otherness through the language & mechanisms of the sameness framework (liberalism). By overcoming the limitations of this traditional philosophical approach, Levinas exposes the religious elements of modern liberalism, first in an ethical examination of the Other, & second by locating Western liberalism's metaphoric surrogate for God. Using this sort of negative theology, the liberalized concept of the sacred is exposed, & parallels are drawn between the liberal notion of totality & the religious concept of infinity. D. Bajo