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The dynamic secularisation of Polish young people and the fact that many of them are opt­ing out of religious classes prompts a critical analysis of the current model of Religious Education and the development of proposals that respond to contemporary socio-cultural challenges. In others words this article will seek to outline potential directions for modifying the current Religious Education model intended for secondary school students in Poland. This paper attempts to provide a synthetic answer to the following questions: Why is Religious Education in secondary schools today not leading to the expected results? What elements of it are inadequate for contemporary conditions? What should the model of Religious Education for young people look like in the context of a decline in religiousness? Where and how should catechesis be provided? This paper contributes to the discussion on the shape of Religious Education for young people in a changing society.

L’article présente la situation actuelle de l’étude de la théologie en Roumanie. D’une part, il aborde les institutions et l’organisation de l’enseignement et de la recherche en théologie, dans le contexte de diverses institutions académiques, notamment les facultés de théologie des universités d’État ; d’autre part, il aborde les défis les plus récents pour l’enseignement et la recherche théologiques, en particulier dans le contexte d’une société de plus en plus sécularisée, exigeant de nouvelles façons de penser la théologie et de l’appliquer dans la pratique pastorale

The article provides a theological analysis of the figure of Hugo Grotius, one of the founders of the modern international law, who had a great influence for the peace-process in the last time of the Thirty Years’ War. He also played a role in the European history of the Enlightenment and secularisation eras. In our time analysis of Grotius’s heritage is connected with new liberal understanding of religion in the spirit of tolerance, as well as with the connection between religion and politics. Grotius recommends to build a foundation of law and peace without any use or misuse of the name of God — could it be helpful also in our time? The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer expected a non-religious time, but we have to see a growing influence of religion for political decisions and in consequence a growing mistrust against religion in the secular society. But it gives also an overview about new literature to Grotius and about his life and works and his significance in contemporary theological discussions. A short point is the reception of Grotius in the Russian tradition. The article is based on the report made at the historical conference devoted to the Thirty Years War (Saint-Petersburg, Russia, 2018).

The present paper focuses on the Italian Freemasonry’s engagement in the educational field. From 1868 to 1925, the lodges under the Grand Orient of Italy fostered and helped many educational establishments. The article considers the following three cities: Turin, Milan and Rome. These important urban centres were different but shared a large number of initiatives and were willing to experiment with new secular learning models (Boarding schools, institutes, leisure courses, evening classes and Popular Universities).

La période qui s’étend de l’indépendance du Mexique (1821) à la République restaurée (1867) est connue dans l’histoire mexicaine moderne comme une période perdue. Ce pays a connu des guerres internes, des interventions étrangères et la chute totale de son économie. Malgré cela, c’est aussi à cette période qu’apparaissent les idées fondatrices du Mexique moderne, des idées telles que la sécularisation et la laïcisation, et d’autres telles que la citoyenneté et l’éducation du peuple. Ces idées se développeront jusqu’à prendre une place primordiale dans les années qui suivent mais surtout tout au long du XXe siècle.

Pope John Paul II, following in the steps of his predecessors, strongly advocated the critical appraisal of the influence of culture on people’s spirituality. This article responds to his directive by seeking to develop an interpretation of how and why contemporary spirituality has changed that will better inform the work of religious educators in Catholic schools. A number of constructs like secularisation, privatisation of religion etc. have been used to describe the significant change in spirituality of many of the young people in Australian Catholic schools over the last 50 years from a more traditional religious spirituality to something that is more secular, eclectic and individualistic. To some extent, this change has been acknowledged; but the religion curricula in Catholic schools still give the impression that all of the students are, or should be, regular church goers – as if Sunday mass attendance was to be the end point of their education in spirituality. An interpretation of change in spirituality in terms of change in cultural meanings has been developed for the purpose of understanding contemporary spiritualities in other than a deficit model. Such an interpretation may be more persuasive in getting Catholic education authorities and religious educators firstly to accept, rather than condemn or ignore, the significant change in contemporary spiritualty; and then secondly, to take steps to address this change positively and constructively in the Catholic school religion curriculum. This article is concerned with the first step – understanding contemporary spirituality; it is intended that the second question will be considered in a follow up article.

Procuramos mostrar neste breve artigo que o processo de secularização estudado por Max Weber, levou a religião a adaptar-se num ambiente de livre-escolha, conduzindo os sujeitos a uma escolha na qual o indivíduo, diante de inúmeras possibilidades e necessidades, é capaz de optar por aquela que melhor lhe servir. Apesar de a secularização ter perdido sua hegemonia, ela continua a suscitar calorosas discussões e inúmeros debates entre os pesquisadores do fenômeno religioso, particularmente sobre o pluralismo, as mudanças dos papéis sociais das organizações religiosas, a competição entre agências produtoras de sentido, as novas possibilidades de escolhas. Diante desse quadro, procuramos mostrar que o movimento neopentecostal oferece ao indivíduo inúmeras opções de bens religiosos, provocando com isso o trânsito religioso. Esse trânsito tem feito com que os líderes das igrejas neopentecostais, na tentativa de atrair novos adeptos, produzam com maior intensidade “novos” bens religiosos, assim como busquem fidelizar esses novos membros à sua igreja. Como resultado, percebemos dentro do campo religioso brasileiro uma intensa movimentação de fiéis, bens e igrejas produzindo e consumindo religião para o seu próprio deleite e consumo. Palavras-chave: Neopentecostalismo; Secularização; Trânsito Religioso. Abstract The purpose of this paper is to show that the process of secularization studied by Max Weber, led religion to adapt itself in an environment of free choice, leading subjects to a personal choice, where the individual, confronted by innumerous possibilities and necessities, can opt for the one that bests suits him. Although secularization has lost its hegemony, it keeps on inspiring discussions and debates among researchers of religious phenomena, particularly on pluralism, the changes on social roles of religious organizations, the competition among agencies producing meaning, the new possibilities of choices.Given the situation, we demonstrate that the neo-pentecostal offers the individual, various options of religious goods, generating what can be called “religious transit”. This flow of people has caused the leaders of the neo-Pentecostal churches, in search of new followers, to produce with greater intensity “new” religious goods in order to attract more people and make them faithful to their churches. As a result of that, we can perceive in the brazilian religious field an intense flow of believers, religious symbols and churches producing and consuming religion for their own pleasure and consumption. Key words: Pentecostalism; Secularisation; Religious Traffic.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, a time of “tension management” between “the old hegemony of Catholicism and nationalism and the emergence of liberalism and materialism” (Fogarty 1984: 102), Ireland’s self-image as a moral community came under the influence of secularisation. The country’s secularisation process speeded up when it decided to embrace new technologies – and consequently met with huge economic success – in the early 1990s, the results of which for Catholicism in Ireland were the visible and apparently irreversible undermining of the institution. However, I believe that Ireland’s secularisation through economic and psychological transformation affected the Irish Catholic Church as a whole, that is to say, its people as well as the institution. My argument in this article is that, whereas in an Ireland which many viewed as a traditional, well-integrated religious nation, it was possible for Irish Catholics to live their faith in an institutionalised manner through the idealised moral community desirable both to Church and State, economic success and increased internationalisation made this idea of community less sustainable. Indeed, in what has now become a “network society” (Castells 1996: 469), there has emerged a new breed of Catholics who no longer live their religion as a transcendent inheritance but as an immanent choice, and who, therefore, seem to “connect” to their religion more than they “commune” with it.

In the present article, the author contextualises and reasons about the concept of inclusive laicity, which is so necessary for good coexistence in our society, where at certain times in history both the attempt to impose religion or denominationalism and the attemptto exclude it from public life and deny it as a carrier of valid values have occurred. The perspective of inclusive laicity offers an appropriate framework for the different cultural and religious traditions to be able to dialogue in order to establish a large consensus on the principles and values that should be set up based on civic dialogue among those who have something to contribute to this project. The different religious denominations, and the Catholic Church in particular, given its social importance, should heed the invitation made by the project of inclusive laicity and debate, in the public space, what values should be integrated into this Agreement for Coexistence. Today the Spanish society faces the challenge of progressing toward a new understanding of laicity capable of taking advantage of the ethical energy of religious denominations and liberating thought.

This article analyses the process of secularisation in Spain, primarily based on three interrelated social logics, the first two as result of historical processes and the third with a more recent point of departure: a) the logic of the secularisation of consciences; b) the logic of the secularisation of society and the State; and c) the logic that could be called the breaking up of cultural homogeneity, which started with the flow of transnational immigration that Spain began to receive very close to the end of the 20th century. For this, the author divides the process into three different waves of secularisation that go from the 19th century to the present day, and he demonstrates its evolution with statistics.

In this work, the author examines the place that religion currently occupies in society as well as its capacity for organising the perception of identities and influencing certain policies. Itargues that, beyond the effectiveness of religious practice, a rather minority phenomenon, today religion plays a not inconsiderable role as a social language of identification in an increasinglyheterogeneous social space due to the multiplicity of cultural, religious and ideological refer ences that characterise it. After reviewing the diversity of denominational models that characterisethe different countries of Europe, and their relationship with the process of secularisation, he focuses on the idea of secularisation in order to try to demonstrate the extent to which it is a fundamental notion for the organisation of civil society and its democratic space. Finally, the author points out the need to separate this notion from any dogmatic approach that consists of rigidly separating religion and society, public space and private space, as well as opening it up to a detailed and democratically negotiated recognition of cultural and religious diversity.

The extension of the Spanish diplomatic and consular networks in the Mediterranean, beyond the limits of Christian Europe, bears witness to a late process of secularization that did not affect only diplomacy. Due to the controversial public debates they gave rise to in Spain, the military expeditions against Algiers during the 1770s and 1780s and the negotiation of the peace treaties with the regencies of Tripoli (1784), Algiers (1786) and Tunis (1791) contributed to the formation of a secularized political sphere. The reorientation of Spanish diplomacy puts in evidence the specific norms of the legal space created through the negotiations between Europeans and Maghrebis. The representatives of the Catholic monarchy, which up to this date had refused to recognize this legal space outside the Res publica christiana, had to go through a difficult learning process. The lack of experimented negotiators affected especially the negotiations with Algiers.