Main Theme

Post-Secular Conceptualization of Religion: Formulating the Problem

The author develops a new conception of religion appropriate for modern post-secular conditions. In these conditions, neither secular model of religion, typical to Modernity, nor pre-secular understanding of religion / religiosity can be considered as fitting to socio-cultural reality. It is especially stressed that secular understanding of premodern religion distorts religion’s nature by allotting it a fixed and therefore limited place in line with the idea and practice of functional differentiation typical to European societies of the Modern age.

Religion in Postsecular Society

The author deals with the new functions of religion and the sacred in societies that are dubbed «postsecular». He makes an overview of famous social philosophers, such as Habermas, Taylor, Rorty and others, who write about religion and the secular. The author believes that philosophers often ignore the empirical reality and the sociological data and concentrate upon «beliefs» instead of deeper levels of social imbedding of religion, religious practices, and everyday behavior and values.

Secularization Falsified

The article gives a panorama of religious revival which is being witnessed all over the world. Special attention is devoted to Islam and Evangelicalism. This religious revival forces researchers to rethink their conclusions concerning the inevitability of secularization. Instead of expecting the disappearance of religion and its removal out of the public sphere, one should strive for moderation in religious questions, which could be the best defense against aggressive fundamentalists.

Pentecostalism: Transnational Voluntarism in the Global Religious Economy

This article deals with the phenomenon of global Pentecostalism, which, together with the other charismatic movements, is the fastest growing form of Christianity in most regions of the ‘Global South’ (especially in Latin Ameri- ca and Africa). The spread of Pentecostalism leads not only to a new format of inter-religious relations, but also to the aggravation of the contradictions between the logic of nation-states and the logic of transnational movements, which go across national borders.

The Modernity of ‘New Societies’: Trajectories of Post-Enlightenment non-European Modernities

Focusing on South Africa and Brazil, this contribution reflects on the modernity of those societies that emerged from colonial encounters, thus are shaped by European post-Enlightenment thought, but gain auto-interpretative and institutional shape in the response to the specificities of the respective colonial and post-colonial situation.

The Turkish Laboratory: Alternative Modernity and the Post-Secular in Turkey

It is well known that Turkey is a country in a state of flux. The ongoing transi- tion from a Kemalist ideology to a post-Kemalist one has a deep impact on many different levels and domains of the Turkish national life. The Western-like profile of the Kemalist project of modernization is starting to leave room for alternative forms and understandings of modernity. From international relations and foreign policy to TV soap operas and fictions, just to mention two relevant and different examples, Turkey seems in search for herself.

European Integration and Russian Orthodoxy: Two Multiple Modernities Perspectives

This article introduces a distinction in the paradigm of multiple modernities between a comparative-civilizational and a post-secular perspective. It argues that the first, comparative-civilizational perspective, helps to understand modernization-processes in large cultural-civilizational units; whereas the second, post-secular viewpoint, focuses on actors and cultural domains within civilizational units and on inter-civilizational crossovers. The two perspectives are complementary.

The New Religious Constellations in the Frameworks of Contemporary Globalization and Civilizational Transformation

This article deals with the new global civilizational constellations which are evolving before our eyes. These new constellations emerge by virtue of the ongoing social, political, institutional and cultural transformations.

From Secular Modernity to ‘Multiple Modernities’: Social Theory on the Relations Between Religion and Modernity

The author analyzes different views on the relations between religion and modernity, which appear in the social theory of the 20th–21st centuries. The paper provides critical analysis and assessment of secularization theories which claimed incompatibility between religion and modernity. Finally, the article deals with a relatively new contribution made by the concept of ‘multiple modernities’ elab- orated by Shmuel Eisenstadt. This concept both softens and shades the findings of the secularization theorists.

‘Multiple Modernities’, Russia’s ‘Cursed Issues’ and the Endurance of Secular Modernity (a Theoretical Essay)

Russia provides interesting material to test Eisentadt’s hypothesis of ‘multiple modernities’ and the idea that such alleged ‘multiplicity’ is determined by the differences of religious traditions. I argue that in Russia all attempts at modernization, starting from Peter the Great and including its Soviet version, were oriented towards the western ‘cultural program of modernity’, as an ideal type, rather than toward creating some special ‘Russian pattern’ of it.

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