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In recent years, the intellectual tide has moved strongly against the kind of secular thinking that characterized Gellner's work. Whether couched in terms of postcolonialism, multiculturalism, genealogy, global understanding, political theology, or the revival of normative, metaphysical and openly religious perspectives, today's postsecular and even anti-secular mood in social theory seems to consign Gellner's project to the dustbin of history: a stern but doomed attempt to shore up western liberal rationalism. Under some revisionary lights, it has even become pointless to distinguish flexible secular thinking which still retains some firm 'bottom lines' from what is routinely portrayed as rampant ideological secularism. Unconvinced by key assumptions and motivations on this terrain, I reactivate Gellner's essential concerns and propositions around secularity and secularism, feeding these into the current debates. Whilst Gellner's stringent, unrivalled exposure of intellectual cant continues to be hugely valuable, and his sense of the utter historicity of social life and thought indispensable, Gellner's critical positivism could not, by his own admission, produce a coherent cultural politics.

They describe the role of Iranian civil society in the process of transition to democracy in Iran and offer insight about the enduring legacy of previous social and political movementsstarting with the Constitutional Revolution of . ; 1st (Edition) ; Published version

"Secularism and Religion" published on by Oxford University Press.

"Secularism in Political Philosophy" published on by Oxford University Press.

"Secularism and Politics" published on by Oxford University Press.

Tharun Venkat explores the root causes of modern-day conflicts in India over political-religious questions and the role of the consititutional principle of secularism.

The 'Indian' lives in a land of diverse traditions and his­- tories. The 'we' as a collective, inclusive of multiple identities, both regional and religious, is one that, rooted in the particular, celebrates plurality. Indian secularism is the ideal tool to allow for integration, and poses a challenge to fundamentalism. However, there are divisive forces that bring to fore the question of the possibility of a diverse people co-existing in free, respectful spaces. It shakes our foundations and leaves citizens questioning the future and the validity of ideals they believed they practiced as a nation. This paper shall explore an Indian worldview of secularism in plurality and the threats that are posed to it. An Indian worldview of secularism in plurality, in the final analysis depends on the defini­- tion that its citizens, as participatory agents, give to itself.

The following is intended to suggest a fairly simple contention concerning a number of interconnected propositions made in connection with the debates on modernity and secularism. None of these propositions is particularly novel, nor is this the first time that they have been put forward. Yet the issues raised have remained with us and become all the more pressing; I can see that points that were made, against the flow, more than two decades ago, now stand out more cogently than ever, and are being revisited, rediscovered or simply discovered by many. The simple contention I wish to start with concerns Islamism, often brought out emblematically when secularism and modernity are discussed. Like other self-consciously retrogressive identitarian motifs, ideas, sensibilities, moods and inflections of politics that sustain differentialist culturalism and are sustained by it conceptually, Islamism has come to gain very considerable political and social traction over the past quarter of a century. This had until recently reached the extent that it, as a perceptual grid of social and cultural purchase relating to societies and countries that many associate with Islam, has become hegemonic in public discussions about society and politics and, until recently, hegemonic without serious challenge. It has also been crucial for triggering the latest round of antisecular discussions and polemics. The following discussion will proceed in three stages. First, an overall characterisation of anti-secular polemics and motifs in their broader discursive and other contexts and motifs will be offered, with special attention to writings characterised as post-colonialist. Next will be offered a discussion of some keywords that come up in this context and which indicate the conceptual profile in question. The essay will then move on to discuss two specific methods of using history in arguments against secularism. Finally, the essay will concentrate on post-colonialist discussions of Islam and secularism, exemplified in a particular case.:1 Sentiment, Pathos, Rhetoric.4 2 Moods and Keywords.11 3 Actually Existing Secularism and the Challenge of Fate.21 4 One Genealogy of Post-colonialist Eminence.38 5 Bibliography.51

What is sometimes talked about as the 'post-secular' or a 'crisis of secularism' is, in Western Europe, quite crucially to do with the reality of multiculturalism. By which I mean not just the fact of new ethno-religious diversity but the presence of a multiculturalist approach to this diversity, namely: the idea that equality must be extended from uniformity of treatment to include respect for difference; recognition of public/private interdependence rather than dichotomized as in classical liberalism; the public recognition and institutional accommodation of minorities; the reversal of marginalisation and a remaking of national citizenship so that all can have a sense of belonging to it. I think that equality requires that this ethno-cultural multiculturalism should be extended to include state-religion connexions in Western Europe, which I characterise as 'moderate secularism', based on the idea that political authority should not be subordinated to religious authority yet religion can be a public good which the state should assist in realising or utilising. I discuss here three multiculturalist approaches that contend this multiculturalising of moderate secularism is not the way forward. One excludes religious groups and secularism from the scope of multiculturalism (Kymlicka); another largely limits itself to opposing the 'othering' of groups such as Jews and Muslims (Jansen); and the third argues that moderate secularism is the problem not the solution (Bhargava).

In apologetic work below author compares the ideal types of secular ideology (being understood as superstition) and religious one (as faith in God), showing a competitive and conflictual nature of their interaction. The article demonstrates ideological and moral bankruptcy of secular worldview, his apophatic, negative pathos of pseudo freedom from one's duties and relations, and, as a result, from the meaning and true value of human life.The purpose of this document is to criticize the theology of political correctness, i.e. attempts to soften the adherence to Biblical principles of moral evaluation of the atheistic way of life, as well to criticize the false spirituality of New Age movement that would return a civilized consumer to the pagan deification of human instincts.Separation of Church and State, bought with the lives of thousands of Protestants, is one of the major achievements of Modern time. Solving the problem of moral degradation of society lies not in the reduction of the space of freedom like it was in the medieval Catholic Europe, but in the following moral precepts of the Gospel by the Church, not the short-term political order, albeit with a religious tinge, and the continued execution of the Great Commission.