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In the ongoing scholarly debate about the secularisation of Scottish (and British) society, churchgoing is one of the few metrics for which longitudinal data exist, albeit fragmentarily. This article assembles and analyses the evidence about levels of church attendance in Scotland's capital (and second largest) city during the nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries. It draws upon quantitative data (nine religious censuses, with varying methodologies, in 1836, 1851, 1882 and between 1980 and 2016) and qualitative sources (chiefly local newspapers). Relative to population, churchgoing in Edinburgh and Leith appears to have declined continuously since the mid-nineteenth century, in-person attendance standing at an estimated 3.59% of the city's residents on an average Sunday in 2022–3, somewhat lower than in Glasgow. Possible explanations for this decrease are briefly explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the electoral decline of Social democracy has received considerable attention in the literature, much less is known about how the structural changes experienced by advanced capitalist societies in the past decades have affected support for the mainstream right. In order to fill this gap, this article examines the relationship between secularisation, educational expansion and support for Conservative and Christian democratic parties in 18 West European democracies since the 1960s. The analysis reveals that secularisation is negatively associated with support for the mainstream right, but the effect is only significant for Christian democratic parties. Moreover, the findings support the expectation that social conservatism tends to damage the electoral prospects of mainstream right parties in highly educated societies. This suggests that, although engaging in cultural wars might sometimes seem like a winning strategy in the short term, it is unlikely to produce long-term positive electoral returns for the centre-right in post-industrial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I present the main findings of an empirical study about contemporary spirituality in Italy begun in 2017 by reasoning about the analysis of twelve case studies which are particularly eloquent concerning the different spiritual worlds emerging in Catholic Italy. I argue that three main narratives—the spirituality of nature, wellbeing, and mystery—are useful to synthesize the heterogeneousness of groups, communities, festivals, and organizations engaged in the Italian "holistic milieu". In order to address this reflection, firstly I will trace the international sociological debate that has accompanied the concept of contemporary spirituality and the relationship between spirituality and religion, a couple which I have named "frenemies". Then, I will extend the analysis to the concept of the secular, examining the intertwining of the spiritual, religious, and secular spheres. After illustrating the landscape of contemporary spirituality in Catholic Italy more broadly, I shall focus on the case studies taken as examples of the spirituality of nature, the spirituality of health and wellbeing, and the spirituality of mystery. In the Discussion and Conclusion, I shall raise some fundamental questions that the study of contemporary spirituality poses for the sociology of religion with reference to secularisation, one of its most classic and yet contested paradigms. I shall claim that future research paths could further contribute to strengthening the idea, raised in this article, that secularisation can also be understood not only as an antithetical force to religion but as the process in Western history that has led to the emergence of a secular social space in dialogue with the religious sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the work of Paolo Prodi (1932–2016), which is characterised by a constant reflection on secularisation. As a democratic Catholic, he explored the relationship between the Roman Church and the modern world starting from the Council of Trent and from the dual figure of the pope as a temporal ruler and spiritual guide. His original contribution concerned the conflict between law and conscience: a problem that led him to design a triptych of books on the foundations of the western world. He was influenced not only by Verfassungsgeschichte (German constitutional history), but also by Harold Berman. If for Weber the modern world was born from the Reformation, for Berman it was the 'Gregorian revolution' that changed the fate of Latin Europe. For Prodi, too, the medieval conflict between canon and civil law introduced a peculiar structure in Europe that would last until the triumph of the nation states and the so-called 'political religions'. In his three books (the first dedicated to the oath, the second to justice, the last to economics), Prodi placed at the centre of his analysis the notion of forum; the history of moral theology and casuistry and the relationship between penitence and justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In European culture the sacred and the secular have existed in a dialectical relationship. Prodi sees the fifteenth-century crisis of Christianity as opening up three paths that eroded this dualism and tended towards modernity: civic-republican religion, sacred monarchy, and the territorial churches. Important counter-forces, which sought to maintain dualism, included the Roman-Tridentine Compromise, and those forms of Radical Christianity which rejected confessionalisation outright. During the Eighteenth Century, all these phenomena tended to contribute to one of two tendencies: towards civic religion, or towards political religion. The former preserved a distinction between conscience and law; the latter comprised a state religion which sought to perfect all of human nature. It was civic religion which become embodied in the early USA, alienating God from worldly power, but leaving him as the guarantor of agreements between humans. Back in Europe, Prodi tracks the relationship between the Catholic Church and the new national states. He then turns to the political religions of the Twentieth Century. Prodi concludes by emphasising that this dualism of sacred and secular power lay at the centre of Western modernity, and expresses his fears about the collapse of civic religion into political religion, especially in the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Did early modern European states make themselves sacred? The historian Paolo Prodi insisted that they did, whereas for the philosopher Giorgio Agamben sacred and secular power were so indistinguishable that the question was moot. This group of articles seeks to explain and explore the approaches of these two accomplished Italian scholars to the problem of early modern sacralisation. This introduction reviews the context in which Prodi and Agamben worked, sketches brief biographies, and describes the arguments that they advanced which are most relevant to early modern history. Their work emerged from the debate on secularisation in the German-speaking lands, the confessionalisation thesis as it was advanced by German historians of Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Catholic Reform, and twentieth-century Catholic thought about the relationship between religion and totalitarian states. Both Prodi and Agamben belonged to traditions that sat at an angle to the liberalism that underpins historical and philosophical thought in the English-speaking world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Early Third Republic (c. 1880–1914), the role of Catholic educators was called into question by the convergence of two different calls for change within French society. As the government of the Third Republic sought to reform primary-school instruction, there were renewed debates in French society about the role of Catholic institutions. Cast as untrained and partisan teachers by advocates of Republican educational reform, Catholic teachers and pedagogues sought to assert their place among modern educators. A close reading of late nineteenth-century Catholic pedagogical materials reveals, however, that objections to Republican education came from its content and not its form. The education of the senses, the progression from known to unknown, and the introduction of children to abstract concepts were all pedagogical techniques that could be reconciled with Catholic educational practice. In response, advocates for the role of Catholicism in primary education stressed their role in shaping future citizens and sought to establish their credentials as educators. This case study, which focuses on French primary education, speaks to the growth in international pedagogical norms in the late nineteenth century and the dynamism of French Catholicism's attempts to reconcile tradition and modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the course of the institutionalisation of modern school systems, the originally confessional schooling sector was largely transformed into a system regulated by public law, a process which is interpreted as secularisation. In a historical-comparative analysis, the secularisation paths of the classical educational nations England and France are retraced to identify their causal and path-dependent determinants. While the educational secularisation in France made the Catholic Church and its schools move into private education, in England the Anglican Church and other Christian denominations continue to be involved in the public school system through both religious education in state schools and their own private schools. It is argued that the various configurations of the nation-state context that developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, along with the changing relationship between state and church in the nineteenth century, can explain the course of secularisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay interacts with the call for papers for the "Magic and Mischief: Text and Practices in Philosophy, Theology, and the Sciences" conference. It is a self-reflection on the theoretical frameworks and definitions guiding projects of reflection and theorising. Breaking the discourse of religion, theology, and science, as well as that of science and magic, down into its discourse-components to get at the speech acts performed, it shows the mythmaking inherent in particular historical understandings of religion and magic, and religion, magic, and science. By performing a kind of archaeology of discourse one gets to see the social, cultural, and political character of the discourse work. And thus, a study of discourse being a site for analysing social formations, the myths of Enlightenment, secularisation, and disenchantment become avenues for understanding the political and socially formative, and the culturally definitive, character of those acts we prefer to call thinking about religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Ephata is the property of Ephata and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article looks at the contribution of secularisation debates to a critical theory of society. As the relations between the 'religious' and 'secular' aspects of modern life grow more vexing, it argues critical theory must eschew its previous secularisation-as-progress metanarrative. Instead, processes of secularisation are better understood as those relationships between public and private beliefs and practices that take place at the boundaries between modern society's commitment to procedural institutions and substantive value commitments. The article then revisits four different understandings of secularisation that, coming from a variety of intellectual traditions, help us redefine it beyond an exclusive focus on institutional religions: normative questions on the rise and decline of autonomous values; temporal questions on the self-positing of modernity as an historical epoch; political questions on the desacralisation of modern sovereignty and practical questions on the non-technological dimensions of technology. This framework is put to the test in relation to the procedural challenge of democratic fallibility and the substantive challenge of planetary survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Religion in Australia survey (RIA) that was conducted in 1966. Led by sociologist Hans Mol, this was the first major survey of religion in Australia. Mol's findings were published in his landmark monograph, Religion in Australia (1971), which is arguably the most comprehensive work ever written on the religious lives of Australians. To reveal the varieties of Christian belief and practice, Mol developed a typology that categorised Australians into different kinds of believers (not unbelievers). However, Mol's efforts were circumscribed by the computational, statistical and practical limitations of the time, and he barely engaged with the secularisation literature or other social developments. Using cutting-edge statistical procedures (latent class analysis), this article re-examines Mol's empirical study of Australian religion and offers deeper and more complex insights into the 'religious patterns of the Australian population' in the 1960s. The article highlights Mol's pioneering empirical sociology of religion and the contribution that he made to the understanding of post-war religion in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article discusses four different concepts: disenchantment, secularisation, post-secularism, and re-enchantment, analysing their theoretical entanglements and problematising their applicability to recent and contemporary social realities in formerly socialist Europe. It also offers a conceptual tuning of re-enchantment in particular, basing it on both empirical evidence as well as on readings from the now rather rich scholarly literature that operationalises this concept. A typology is also presented that illustrates a variety of re-enchanted social phenomena that populate the religious and spiritual horizons of late modern centraleastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Co-herencia is the property of Universidad EAFIT and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article, we analyse the religiosity and secularisation processes of secondary school youth on several selected levels: religious affiliation, changes in religiosity, belief in a personal God, compulsory and non-compulsory religious practices, i.e. personal prayer. These analyses are based on the results of a sociological survey as part of the research project 'Religious education of Polish youth - current state, opportunities and challenges', conducted in November and December 2022 and January 2023. The study involved 1,672 male and female students from secondary schools across Poland. The results of the study confirm the increasingly dynamic secularisation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary conflicts about secularity in 'the West' tend to focus on public space. Although collective Christian heritage means that public space is rarely exclusively neutral, conflicts continue to arise over the relationship between secularity and religious symbolism, and especially over those symbols which derive from religious minorities. This contribution critically considers the designation of space as either sacred or secular in political imaginaries, approaching processes of secularisation as part of a fragmentation of the sacred and of sacred space. We introduce the concept of trans-liminal space: spaces which can contain multiple and potentially conflicting ascriptions of meaning. Conceptualising public space as trans-liminal allows for contemporaneous and competing ascriptions of the secular, the sacred, the secular-sacred, the sacred-secular, without being exclusively grounded in either. Trans-liminality does not preclude public space to be predominantly secular, but it does problematise the phenomenon of normative exclusions of religious symbols from public spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nouvelles Perspectives en Sciences Sociales is the property of Editions Prise de parole and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The diversity of worldviews and growing pluralism should not encompass only religious standpoints; more attention should also be paid to the certainly not thus far sufficiently grasped fields of non-religiosity. This represents another realm within the religious landscape; it is a form of diversity within diversity, as there are many types of worldviews, attitudes and their typologies. With this kick-off essay we attempt to identify several approaches to the study of non-religion, with a focus on the European and American context. We attempt to outline the difficulties connected with labelling and the uncertain boundaries and multiplicity of interrelations between the spheres of religiosity, spirituality and non-religiosity. Our attention is focused on the social perception of the broader sphere of non-religiosity, with the complexity of the often stereotypical perception of this group. Practical reflections of non-religion are presented through the optics of quantitative data from selected countries and qualitative data, such as a brief outline of ethnographic research conducted in Slovakia in 2019–2021. e main idea of the contribution is to point out that without a redefinition of all labelling categories used to denote the profile of modern religiosity, spirituality and irreligiosity, we can hardly use the term “nones” in the proper sense. To make such a deep reflexive turn, we need to pay attention to qualitative research and focus on multi-sited ethnographies that can shed light on the shadowy places of current research and clarify not only labels but also our knowledge on what religion is and what roles it plays in modern societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last twenty years, a significant shift has taken place in Greek society. On the one hand, the religious context has been altered due to the arrival of immigrants and refugees with different religious backgrounds. On the other hand, young people seem to distance themselves from religion and the Orthodox Church in various ways. With the above in mind, this article will try to answer a number of questions: Are young people in contemporary Greek society religious? What do they think about the role of the Orthodox Church? How do they value the Church's public discourse on issues such as immigration, gender equality, and homosexuality? Where do they stand on state–Church relations? How close are they to the Orthodox Church? Based on theoretical discussions about secularisation, secularism, and the post-secular, this article builds upon quantitative and qualitative research on young people from 17 to 35 years of age. The main argument is that young people seem to gradually move away from religion and the Orthodox Church, while in some cases, religion becomes a private matter; this indicates that there seems to be a process of secularisation underway, although further research is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the history of the polysemous word millet from early Ottoman times up to the reign of Mahmud II (r. 1808–39), challenging the view that the Ottoman term millet had an exclusively religious meaning before the nineteenth century. In the early Ottoman era, millet had at least three different meanings: in theological discourse, it was used as an abstract concept related to dīn and sharīʿa ; when pertaining to religious groups, it meant "a people shaped through belief"; and, in a more vernacular register, it was used in the sense of "a people". The article examines how these meanings shifted over the longue durée of Ottoman history. In the process, it addresses major social, political, and cultural changes that affected the sociolinguistics of Ottoman Turkish: the development of an elaborate imperial language grounded on shariatic ethics from the mid-sixteenth century; the Ottoman Porte's growing acquaintance with Westphalian diplomacy from the early eighteenth century; and the development of an Ottoman confessional policy from the mid-eighteenth century, notably under Mahmud II. I conclude that the meaning of millet in two registers has shifted in modern times to the modern concepts of "nation" and "confession", thereby combining two arguably antithetical aspects of Ottoman secularisation in one polysemous word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The awareness of secularisation may not have served as a focus for curricula development in theological education, yet it critically shapes the entire educational process influencing values and practices. Australian theological colleges need to be aware of, and alert to their secular, westernised culture that places a high premium on individual rights, personal liberty, and freedom. This article reports on an Australian study discussing the nature of secularised contexts and the relevance of evangelical theological education to these contexts, especially the role of spiritual formation as a key component to better equip theological students to deal with their secular context. The article argues for stronger awareness of, and preparedness for robust engagement with secularised contexts. It highlights the importance of engaging the influence of secularisation values in theological education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Scripta is the property of Scripta and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Scripta is the property of Scripta and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In a recent publication, I introduced the theoretical framework of neosecularisation with regard to the Orthodox Church and society in Bulgaria. I argued that neosecularisation, as a complex process of decline of religion's importance and the hold of religious authority over the social system, while genealogically different from communist secularisation, explicates patterns of continuity with the communist past. Important aspects of this continuity include the persistent grassroots feminisation of the Church and the co-optation of the Church by the state. Drawing on those theoretical insights, in this paper, I seek to understand the rise of anti-gender politics in Bulgaria since 2018 in relation to the condition of neosecularisation and its impact on the Church. I argue that (neo)secularisation remains a much feared "threat" for the Church and plays a role in ecclesiastical anti-gender mobilisation. However, the Church is not a major factor in anti-gender politics in Bulgaria; the roles of far-right nationalists and certain transnationally connected evangelical actors are to be seriously considered. Furthermore, anti-genderism cannot be understood merely as a religious or cultural backlash. It needs to be discussed as a larger protest movement against liberal democracy's failure to live up to its promises and against the pathologies of neoliberal globalisation, a movement in which the Orthodox Church is only tangentially involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) is a Brazilian Pentecostal church known for its incessant struggle against the Devil. Internationalisation has challenged the Church's institutional discourse against evil, which originally targeted the local spirits of its home country—specifically Afro-Brazilian entities—during exorcism rituals. This article uses interviews and participant observation to analyse the differences between UCKG exorcisms in Brazil and Madrid. The data indicate that demonic spirits are more secularised in Spain, where they no longer belong to the pantheon of rival religions in Brazil. In Madrid, UCKG demons are more closely aligned with problems of everyday life, such as the health and wealth of Church members. In this analysis of UCKG demonology in Madrid, I also observe how the dialogue between institutional discourse and local beliefs arises, while also assessing its impact on exorcism performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship about the concept of the conscience has languished in the past half century, although some recent works have sought to revive it. One recent attempt proposes that the key to reviving the concept is its secularisation, since this secularisation would make it less dogmatic and more useful to a wider audience. In this paper, I argue that this process already occurred in American collegiate moral education. Yet, when the moral conscience in America became separated from its religious roots and the functions inspired by those roots, it eventually lost its place in any general approach to collegiate moral education. The secularisation of the concept cut it off from the roots nourishing its earlier multi-faceted religious understanding and led it not to be reutilised for a broader audience but to it being replaced by a secularised form of reason. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Collectanea Theologica is the property of Uniwersytet Kardynala Stefana Wyszynskiego w Warszawie and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The place of theology is under threat in the modern university. It is denied a place, except insofar as it is useful in the training of religious professionals or as a phenomenon in its own right, on the grounds that relate to an unscientific scientism that both makes metaphysical assumptions it itself does not recognise as scientific or denies its own epistemological commitments. This article argues that the notion of education in 'liberal knowledge' or 'universal knowledge', the idea at the heart of John Henry Newman's The Idea of a University provides a sufficiently robust counter to these assaults on the place of theology proper in the modern university and that refusing such a place to it undermines the claim of universities to use the name at all. It is precisely the uselessness of theology that guarantees its place in the university committed to universal knowledge and universal enquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orthodox theology confronted the Enlightenment and its concomitant secularisation already during the 18th century, and not afterwards--or even at all--as it is sometimes assumed. The present study attempts to identify this confrontation in terms of the interface between the new spirit of secularisation and the age-long tradition of the Orthodox Church by looking into the work of two prominent figures of Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment, namely, Eugenios Voulgaris (1716-1806) and St Nikodemos the Hagiorite (1749-1809). Voulgaris emerged as a pioneer Enlightenment proponent who ended up a guardian of tradition, but not a true patristic character. Although he exhibited a genuine eschatological disposition, the latter was rather weak and thus, eventually, Voulgaris remained under the spell of ideology. On the other hand, Nikodemos the Hagiorite proved to be an authentic patristic figure that did not succumb to the Weltanschauung crisis of the time, but instead managed to transcend it. Notwithstanding this, his solution did not win over the mainstream or even become socially viable; but it did offer a very positive outcome, i.e., it demonstrated the value of gnoseological pluralism and the eschatological responsibility for its reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article I consider the depiction of the Egyptian hieroglyph in several seventeenth-century English religio-historiographical works that engage with the problems posed by the Egyptian dynastic records – records that challenged the validity of biblical chronology. Critical tradition has been keen to view the hieroglyph in the context of esoteric European scholarship, while scholarship on the English Enlightenment has tended to overlook the importance of religious motivations in "secular" intellectual projects. I show here, however, that some of the first apparently "secular" approaches to the hieroglyphs in England were not in works that espoused proto-Enlightenment linguistics or other intellectual ideals, but in religiously-motivated projects that, seeking to buttress sacred history and the primacy of the Judaic tradition against the threat of pagan chronologies, aimed to discredit the hieroglyph as an icon of pagan learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how a British Christian intellectual group perceived the crises of the 1930s and 1940s as an epochal transformation and sought to restore 'true' freedom to a society dominated by 'materialism' and the loss of 'community'. It sought to make Christianity relevant in new, 'modern' circumstances, asserting the transcendent elements of Christianity while condemning many Christians' refusal to accept 'secular' knowledge and the 'autonomy of the secular' in some spheres of life. Its members were convinced that it would be possible to go at least 'part of the way together' with non-Christians in building a better modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that essentialist models of modernity are always ideological, and that Britain's dominant ideology of modernity was transformed from the mid-1950s, with revolutionary consequences for British Christianity and secularisation. Before the mid-1950s Britain's predominant 'civilisation' ideology portrayed Christianity as more advanced than secularity. The mid-1950s global crisis, however, created widespread belief in a radical break between 'tradition' and 'the modern world'. This perception rapidly legitimated the further belief, promoted by radical Christians, that 'the modern world' is inherently 'secular'. Once accepted by the national media, the ideological belief that modernity is secular made possible the 1960s 'secular revolution'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Theological Review / Bogoslovska Smotra is the property of University of Zagreb, Catholic Faculty of Theology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The essay gives an account of David Martin's use of the arts in his sociology of religion, in particular in his treatment of secularisation. Because he saw Christianity as lying 'against the grain' of social necessity, he regarded the inevitable accommodations of the faith to each particular social and political structure in which it became embedded as successive forms of secularisation. He saw this as the price Christianity paid in order to infiltrate its alternative message of transcendent hope into the culture, symbols and institutional life of any society. The essay discusses David's conception of sociology as one of the humanities because of the importance of meaning in its analyses. It summarises his accounts of music and architecture as aspects of the dialectic between the social, or Durkheimian, 'sacred' and the Christian 'sacred' in the history of the Christian and post-Christian West and ends with an outline of his book on narratives of secularisation through the lens of English poetry published in January 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this review article, Graeme Smith, A Short History of Secularism , is reviewed with its main arguments regarding secularisation debate. A radical reconsideration of secularism and its social history, starting with the Greeks and continuing to modernity and the contemporary period, are offered by this book. The book's attempt to construct a historical narrative of Christianity is an essential contribution to literature. It highlights the changes Christianity is exposed to as it moved across Europe and different mindsets that influenced people during this period. Students who are interested in studies in pastoral psychology, religion, and secularism are the primary audience for this monograph. However, anyone interested in the secularism debate will find it interesting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]