Religion without Instrumentalization

European Journal of Sociology

Volumn 47, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 421-434

  Silver, Daniel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 51249129050     PISSN: 00039756     EISSN: 14740583     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0003975606000166     Document Type: Review

References (36)

1. See Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994).
2. Peter Berger (ed.), The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington DC, Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999).
3. See R. Stephen Warner, “Work in Progress Toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States”, in The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 98, no 5 (Mars., 1993), pp. 1044–1093
4. David Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Burlington, Hants, Ashgate, 2005).
5. For a sampling of this literature, see Paul Heelas, “Challenging Secularization Theory: The Growth of ‘New Age’ Spiritualities of Life”, in The Hedgehog Review 8, no 1–2, 2005, pp. 46–58
6. Kelly Besecke, “Seeing Invisible Religion: Religion as a Societal Conversation about Transcendent Meaning”, in Sociological Theory 23 (2005), pp. 179–196
7. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford, Cambridge, Mass., Blackwell, 1994).
8. Norris and Inglehart 2004, p. 71.
9. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (ed.), Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers, 2002).
10. Norris and Inglehart 2004, p. 221.
11. Norris and Inglehart 2004, p. 24.
12. See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London, Sage Publications, 1992).
13. I take this term and description from Mark LlLLA, “Kant's Theological-Political Revolution”, The Review of Metaphysics, v. 52, no 2, 1998. Lilla contrasts the Epicurean school with an “Existentialist” school. I have chosen to substitute “Experientialist” for “Existentialist” in order to avoid association with existential philosophy and with Norris and Inglehart's term “existential insecurity”.
14. Norris and Inglehart 2004, p. 19.
15. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1994), p. 64 [italics added].
16. Norris and Inglehart 2004, p. 20.
17. Norris and Inglehart 2004, p. 20.
18. Norris and Inglehart 2004, p. 231.
19. Norris and Inglehart 2004, p. 71.
20. See David Martin 2005, note 3 p. 421.
21. And see Inglehart's own work on “post-materialist” societies: Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1977).
22. In Sacred and Secular, the authors write that, as “people move into a knowledge society… people's life experiences deal more with ideas than with material things” (p. 71).
23. Of course, the ways in which wonder is channeled into religious experience will vary in different national contexts, especially in terms of the different ways in which intellectual and religious life have either been allied or opposed. See Martin 2005, note 3 p. 421.
24. Johann P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt, and Björn WITTROCK (eds), Axial Civilizations and World History (Boston, Brill, 2005).
25. Heelas, see note 4 p. 422.
26. Norris and Inglehart 2004, p. 56.
27. It is important to note, against Norris and Inglehart, as well as most social thinkers, that non-institutional religion need not be private or individual. Other, less formal, not-yet-institutionalized forms of “conversations” and religious meanings are possible. See Besecke 2005, note 4 p. 422.
28. Norris and Inglehart 2004, p. 19.
29. Walter Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1965, p. 35).
30. Otto 1965, p. 29.
31. Otto 1965, p. 25. William James and Emile Durkheim can be read as also advocating a similar approach to religious experience, one rooted, respectively, in human individual and collective self-transcendence.
32. Otto 1965, p. 25.
33. See also Hans Joas, Do We Need Religion?: On the Experience of Self-Transcendence? (Boulder, Paradigm Publishers, 2007).
34. Paul Tillich, Shaking of the Foundations (New York, Scribner's Sons, 1948), ch. 18.
35. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, v. 1, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1973, p. 63).
36. Tillich distinguishes between “absolute” and “relative” anxiety. The philosopher Jonathan Lear has recently offered a similar distinction between “ontological” and “existential” vulnerability. See Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2006).