Religious Pluralism, Legal Development, and Societal Complexity: Rudimentary Forms of Civil Religion

1974 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 177 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Cole ◽  
Phillip E. Hammond
Keyword(s):  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Legal Development

“The Chief Characteristical Mark of the True Church”: John Locke's Theology of Toleration and His Case for Civil Religion

2014 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron L. Herold
Keyword(s):  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Radical Enlightenment

AbstractThis essay argues that Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity provides a morally robust argument for religious pluralism—one which avoids the pitfalls of relativism and official neutrality by elucidating the need for a civil religion of toleration. The work thus contains Locke's friendly critique of his more radical Enlightenment contemporaries who had openly debunked the Bible. This critique is friendly, I argue, because Locke ultimately agrees with Spinoza and Hobbes about revelation, miracles, and religion's psychological causes. While Locke joined these thinkers in a common project to make Christianity less sacrificial and friendlier to enlightened selfishness, his analysis also reveals the need to retain some of its self-abnegating spirit in liberalism's service. But Locke has difficulty accounting for that spirit itself, and this problem in one of liberalism's original theorists may help explain the dissatisfactions and anxieties troubling tolerant societies today.

Toward a Contextualized Concept of Civil Religion

2009 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lüchau
Keyword(s):  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Public Versus Private

A new definition of civil religion is needed because there are almost as many definitions as there are writers on the subject. By combining two existing concepts it can be shown that most existing definitions of civil religion are related. The two concepts are religious pluralism versus monoculture and public versus private religion. The first takes into consideration that civil religion will look different in a mono-religious country than in a multi-religious country. The second makes a distinction between civil religion at a rhetorical level (e.g. speeches) and at a personal level (individual religiosity). Although there are many different definitions of civil religion, the differences can be reconciled if the religious situation and the analytical level are taken into consideration. Hopefully this will make future discussions and analyses of civil religion more comparable.

Identity of Catholic Schools in Multi-religious Contexts

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 183-194
Author(s):  
Edmund Kee-Fook Chia
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Catholic Schools ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
The Church

The phenomenon of religious pluralism is a fact that needs no further discussion. How society and institutions are negotiating its impact, however, certainly needs further scrutiny. Schreiter's call for the construction of local theologies invites us to explore how the preaching of the Gospel has to adapt to the realities of new situations. The present article focuses on Catholic educational institutions and how they are dealing with the multi-cultural and multi-religious communities that are now found not only outside of the schools and universities but also within them as well. Its concern is with how the identity and mission of these Catholic institutions are expressed and measured in the new contexts, taking seriously the teachings of the Church on the role they play in its evangelizing mission.

Refusal to Mourn

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Runions
Keyword(s):  
American Politics ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
American People ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
The Us ◽  
Robert Bellah

In her recent book Precarious Life, Judith Butler points out that not more than ten days after 9/11, on 20 September 2001, George W. Bush urged the American people to put aside their grief; she suggests that such a refusal to mourn leads to a kind of national melancholia. Using psychoanalytic theory on melancholia, this article diagnoses causes and effects of such national melancholia. Further, it considers how a refusal to mourn in prophetic and apocalyptic texts and their interpretations operates within mainstream US American politics like the encrypted loss of the melancholic, thus creating the narcissism, guilt, and aggression that sustain the pervasive disavowal of loss in the contemporary moment. This article explore the ways in which the texts of Ezekiel, Micah, Revelation, and their interpreters exhibit the guilt and aggression of melancholia, in describing Israel as an unfaithful and wicked woman whose pain should not be mourned. These melancholic patterns are inherited by both by contemporary apocalyptic discourses and by the discourse of what Robert Bellah calls ‘American civil religion’, in which the US is the new Christian Israel; thus they help to position the public to accept and perpetuate the violence of war, and not to mourn it.

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