Biothics, the Christian Citizen, and the Pluralist Game

The ascendancy of Christian activism in bioethical policy debateshas elicited a number of responses by critics of this activism.These critics typically argue that the public square ought toembrace Secular Liberalism (SL), a perspective that its proponentsmaintain is the most just arrangement in a pluralist society,even though SL places restraints on Christian activists thatare not placed on similarly situated citizens who hold moreliberal views on bioethical questions. The author critiquesthree arguments that are offered to defend SL: (1) the goldenrule contract argument, (2) the secular reason argument, and(3) the err-on-the-side-of-liberty argument. The author concludesthat each of these arguments fail to support SL.     

Neither Muslim nor Other: British Secular Muslims

Secular Muslims constitute a significant group within the Muslim population of the UK, though under the prevalent multicultural policies their voice is often ignored. This article introduces some of the more outspoken secular, ex-Muslim, and atheist British Muslims and analyses their positions toward major issues that preoccupy the Muslim community and society at large. The secularists are highly critical of multiculturalism for creating mutually hostile communities controlled by conservative religious leaders. In the heated public debate on Islamism, they oppose both its militant and its more pragmatic versions. They are strongly opposed to religious terrorism, and also to the imposition of Sharia law, the wearing of hijab, and separate Islamic schools, though they may differ as to the right ways to combat them. Caught between Islamism, which is often supported by the radical left, and the far right, Muslim secularists are among the staunchest supporters of universal human values and of integration.     

A Faith-Based Prescription for the Surgeon General: Challenges and Recommendations

This article summarizes how the Office of the Surgeon General can leverage faith-based resources to fulfill its mission and that of the Surgeon General of the United States. Such resources, personal and institutional, have been utilized historically in health promotion and disease prevention efforts and are a valuable ally for public health, an alliance that continues under the Obama Administration. This paper outlines the history and mission of the Office; details the recent history of federal faith-based initiatives; and advocates an expanded alliance between the faith-based and public health sectors sensitive to legal and professional boundaries.     

Together towards Life

Which are the convincing ways of evangelism in the secular, multicultural countries of western Europe? Does the new mission affirmation Together towards Life offer relevant contributions to this debate? This article explores recent developments in western Europe. It starts by reviewing the secular nature of these countries and then explains how migration has tested the secularization thesis. The transformation of western European cultures from secular toward secular/multi‐religious reopens the debate on secularism and religion. The article also reflects on the question of what the central ideas in the new mission affirmation – the affirmation of life, the power of the Holy Spirit, mission from the margins, and authentic evangelism as discipleship – may mean in these changing secular cultures. The author concludes that discipleship, provided it is authentic, may help to move beyond the apparent contradictions between secularism and religion and may help to find new ways of bringing forth the good news.     

Outside the Box: (Post) Secular Projects of Transcendence

Secular theology builds upon the growing recognition and critique of the limitations of the confining box of religion built in and through the modern secularist dispensation. A bipolar model of religion and the secular, and the classificatory web within which it is nestled, have limited theology's field of vision and engagement. This article explores several examples of projects of transcendence that resist easy identification with either the religious or the secular, illuminating the limitations of the religion‐secular classification and the diffuse cultural trends that are reconfiguring it, even leading beyond it.     

Bioethics critically reconsidered: Living after foundations

Given intractable moral pluralism, what ought one to make of the bioethics that arose in the early 1970s, grounded as it was in the false assumption that there is a common secular morality that secular bioethics ought to apply? It is as if bioethics developed without recognition of the crisis at the heart of secular morality itself. Secular moral rationality cannot of itself provide the foundations to identify a particular morality and its bioethics as canonical. One is not just confronted with intractable moral and bioethical pluralism, but with the absence of a secular ground that can show why one should act morally rather than self-interestedly. The result is not merely the deflation of much of traditional Western morality to life-style and death-style choices, but the threat of deflating to political slogans the now-dominant secular morality, including its affirmation of human autonomy, equality, social justice, and human dignity. All of this invites one critically to reconsider the meaning and force of secular bioethics.     

Turning Syrians into Frenchmen: The cultural politics of a French non-governmental organization in Mandate Syria (1920-67)--the French Secular Mission schools

Although the French Secular Mission (Mission Laïque Française (MLF)), founded in 1902, was not an official organ of the French state, its cultural politics, expressed through the establishment of overseas schools in places such as late Ottoman Salonica (in 1906), early twentieth-century Egypt, early Mandate Syria and elsewhere, paralleled and coincided with the official French government program to promote the use of the French language and a knowledge of its civilizational values amongst non-Francophone peoples as a means of furthering its foreign interests. These interests should be seen within the double context of the international French ' mission civilisatrice ' as well as with regard to France's longstanding rivalry with Great Britain in the economic, political and cultural domains. The present study examines the objectives of the MLF both in relation to the domestic situation in France during the first half of the twentieth century, especially as concerns the separation of church and state in 1905, which gave 'official' sanction to the MLF's mission to establish secular schools overseas in the name of France, and also as a cultural instrument, largely funded by Paris, to promulgate French Enlightenment values in regions of the world which were deemed important on the imperialistic scale. Turning Syrians into Frenchmen was not the goal but turning Syrians (not only Christians, but especially Muslims) into Francophiles was definitely part of the MLF strategy which straddled and swerved between the associationist and the assimilationist philosophies, creating an intellectual colonization amongst its students and thereby generating a sort of cultural schizophrenia (Daryush Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic societies confronting the West (Syracuse NY, Syracuse University Press, 1997).     

Religion,education and conflict in Northern Ireland

The aim of this article is to re‐evaluate and reaffirm the contribution of the churches and of Christianity to the realization in Northern Ireland schools of legitimate and progressive educational values such as the cultivation of tolerance, moral integrity and civic virtue. Implicit in this is a critique of educational initiatives that seek to undermine the influence of Christianity in schools. There is also discussion of the reasons why the increasing secularization of education in Northern Ireland should be resisted. The paper begins with a brief historical overview of the ongoing tension between religious and secular influences in education and notes the ways in which developments in education have tended to marginalize religion and to denude public education of Christian religious content and influence. Critical attention is then given to the role of religion in the Northern Ireland conflict, for it is the conviction that the conflict is religious that provides much of the stimulus for efforts to secularize education and schools. This is followed by some brief comments on the positive role that religion can play in religious education and in schools. The article concludes with a brief review of the reasons why a proper balance between secular and religious influences in schools in Northern Ireland should be maintained.     

THE DEEP CONDITIONS OF SECULARITY

In modern societies and cultures today, religion is widely perceived as basically even if not merely trivially “optional.” This is a contention strongly advocated by Charles Taylor, most notably in his monumental A Secular Age. Throughout his career, Taylor has made the question of religion in modernity the core of his interests. In his most recent work, A Secular Age, Taylor addresses challenging issues of what he calls the “contemporary spiritual experience” and speaks to “the spiritual hungers and tensions of secular modernity.” I critically consider three aspects of this immensely suggestive if not uncontroversial work: (1) I examine whether there is in fact a possible reversibility or revisability to the so‐called ‘optional’ nature of belief that Taylor thinks is characteristic of the secular age; (2) I scrutinize Taylor's notion of “immediacy” of belief in the same milieu; (3) I interrogate his use of the term “fullness” in delineating the temper of the secular age.     

In the letter of mere reason: Rethinking the universal secular intellectual with Immanuel Kant,Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

This article reconsiders a question, ‘Is Critique Secular?’, which ostensibly polarised Saba Mahmood and Stathis Gourgouris in the 2008 exchange forum of Public Culture. After positing that Mahmood and Gourgouris are mutually invested in challenging and overcoming the intransigence of epistemic secularism, the article canvasses Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's deconstruction of the Kantian ‘universal secular intellectual’. The article suggests that Spivak's reading of Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone constitutes a vital exercise in democratic criticism that sets into relief an important convergence between Mahmood and Gourgouris as interlocutors. Delineating imbrications among Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Judgment and Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, the article synthesises Jacques Derrida's work on Kantian aesthetics and Spivak's recalibration of the Kantian intellectual as a means to unsettle the recalcitrance of epistemic secularism in academic debate and public culture.     

Differentiating Islamophobia: Introducing a New Scale to Measure Islamoprejudice and Secular Islam Critique

Since 2001 there has been a steadily increasing awareness of discrimination against Muslims based on their religion. Despite the widespread use of the neologism Islamophobia to refer to this phenomenon, this term has been harshly criticized for confounding prejudiced views of Muslims with a legitimate critique of Muslim practices based on secular grounds. In the current research a scale was developed to differentiate Islamoprejudice (based on the influential Islamophobia definition of the British Runnymede Trust) and Secular Critique of Islam. Across two studies, Islamoprejudice was related to explicit and implicit prejudice, right‐wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation whereas Secular Critique was unrelated to any forms of prejudice but negatively related to religiosity and authoritarianism. The two scales were mostly independent or only moderately related. Importantly, the new Islamoprejudice scale outperformed all other scales in predicting actual opposition versus support for a heatedly debated, newly built mosque. These results demonstrate the necessity to differentiate between Islamoprejudice and Secular Critique in future research on attitudes towards Islam.     

Burnout and Depression Among Roman Catholic Secular,Religious, and Monastic Clergy

Burnout and depression among Roman Catholic secular, religious order, and monastic (Cistercian) priests was investigated using the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression (CESD) scale. Additionally, a Self-Report-Inventory (SRI) was included requesting information on demographics as well as four categories of predictor variables (vocational satisfaction, social support, spiritual activities, and physical environment) associated with burnout and depression. All participants were randomly selected. The survey yielded a return rate of 90.67%. Secular clergy reported significantly greater emotional exhaustion than did monastic clergy. Secular priests also had significantly greater depression (72%), when compared to religious (40.8%) and monastic (39.5) clergy. Overall group comparisons revealed that secular clergy experienced the highest degree of burnout and depression, monastics the least, and religious priests falling in between. The lack of social support and sense of isolation, for secular clergy, were key elements associated with their experience of both burnout and depression. Candidate in Psychology atand a Psychology Intern at the Ohio State University     

How Separable Are Spirituality and Theology in Psychotherapy?

The authors respond to D. A. Helminiak's (2001) article “Treating Spiritual Issues in Secular Psychotherapy.” They focus particularly on Helminiak's argument for secular spirituality (whether spirituality can be independent of theology/religion) and his inherent biases in discussing the nature and existence of spirituality. The authors argue that all spiritual conceptions have theological implications—and thus a theology, broadly defined—and that theology, in this sense, pervades the theory and practice of all psychotherapists, whether or not they are religious.     

论世俗道德的特点及其困境

世俗道德的产生是社会生活世俗化的必然结果,是经济发展的内在逻辑.它具有现实性、人本性和平凡性等特征.世俗道德不可避免地陷入利益主义、享乐主义和庸俗化等困境.只有"回到人本身",才能走出困境.     

Secular Spirituality and the Hermeneutics of Ontological Gratitude

In his 2010 article, ‘Secular Spirituality and the Logic of Giving Thanks’, John Bishop recalls a striking theme in a recent address by Richard Dawkins in which he appeared to enthusiastically endorse the appropriateness of a ‘naturalised spirituality’ that involved ‘existential gratitude’, and this led him to investigate the notion of a naturalised or secular spirituality with particular reference to Robert Solomon’s Spirituality for the Skeptic (2002). This essay looks to pick up on Bishop’s engagements with both Dawkins and Solomon, but to extend the conversation well beyond them in order to defend the credibility and integrity of secular spirituality in its movement of ontological gratitude. In this way it looks to offer a first sketch of what might be termed a ‘hermeneutics of ontological gratitude’. To this end – and via a distinction between gratitude for existence and life – the essay considers Dawkins’ argument and Solomon’s work in further detail, before turning to consider various other perspectives on the problem including Kenneth Schmitz’s existential Thomist notion of ontological contingency, Hannah Arendt’s concept of primary natality, and Emmanuel Levinas’ sketch of the self in its interiority and economy. My claim is that any serious naturalistic spirituality needs to take into account not only a gratitude for one’s existence per se, but for the whole context of individual and collective being.     

Secular ethics education as an alternative to religious education – Finnish teachers’ views

This study provides a Finnish perspective to international discussions on religious and worldviews education through the subject of secular ethics. This subject has been offered in Finland since 1985 throughout comprehensive schools and is primarily directed at students who are non-affiliated. Secular ethics education has scarcely been researched and is here investigated through secular ethics teachers’ views. The results highlight key characteristics of the subject, which in teachers’ views single out the subject from religious education classes. Key characteristics include gaining multiple perspectives on religions and worldviews, focusing on interactive, social and critical skills, and focusing on students’ personal identities and growth as human beings. In addition, specific challenges and possibilities of the subject of secular ethics arise, which may be taken into consideration in developing a future integrative subject of worldview education in Finland.     

ISLAMIC MODERNITY AND THE CHALLENGES FOR SECULAR LIBERALISM

In his recent book Islam Evolving: Radicalism, Reformation, and the Uneasy Relationship with the Secular West, Taner Edis discusses Islamic responses to the modern world and how the West deals and should deal with them. He argues convincingly that the biggest threat to secular liberalism is not fundamentalism but an Islamic form of modernity. He attributes some of the latter's success to Western neoliberalism and to the failure of secular liberals to come up with persuasive arguments. He thus puts part of the blame on the West. However, although self‐criticism is an essential aspect of a well‐functioning democracy, we should not take it too far. Instead, there exist convincing reasons why a secular liberal society is strongly preferable to a religious conservative one.     

Women and Ideology: Representations of Women in Religious and Secular Turkish Media1

The present research examined representations of women in Turkish religious and secular daily newspapers. Based on social identity theory, it was predicted that religious and secular newspapers would differ with respect to evaluative references to mother/homemaker, career woman, and vamp subtypes. Secular and religious newspapers were examined every other day for a month. Analyses reveal that secular newspapers included higher proportions of positive references to the career woman and vamp subtypes than did religious newspapers. The 2 types of newspapers also differed with respect to the proportion of women mentioned as agents and targets, and with respect to actions performed by women agents and items related to victimization of women.     

“LONG LIVE THE WEEDS AND THE WILDERNESS YET”: REFLECTIONS ON A SECULAR AGE

While we are deeply appreciative of Taylor's A Secular Age, we nonetheless worry that his use of the immanent/transcendent duality may introduce a certain kind of Christian Constantinianism that he wants to disavow. In particular, we worry that the immanent/transcendent duality is far too formal in its character. In order to develop this concern, we draw on Talal Asad's account of the secular to suggest how liturgy may provide an alternative way of understanding as well as challenging Taylor's worries about “the immanent frame.”     

Secular humanitarians and the postsecular: reflections on Habermas and the Typhoon Haiyan disaster response

The international humanitarian system aims to save lives and alleviate suffering following disasters worldwide. Secular and faith-based actors make up the system, but the system can operate to a secular standard that may, some have argued, marginalise religious experience and well-being post-disaster. This article assesses what can be learned from examining secular humanitarianism from a postsecular perspective. Debate on secularity in the humanitarian system is reviewed, before Jürgen Habermas’s conception of the postsecular is proposed as a theoretical lens. Habermasian postsecularism invites the secular to take part in a process of ‘complementary learning’ with the religious. Results from interviews and focus groups in the Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan are used. Results show the reflexivity of secular individuals within the humanitarian system, with cases demonstrating co-operation and consideration of other views at the interpersonal level. Yet, at a system-wide level, instances of marginalisation of religion were noted, such as responses to requests for chapel reconstruction and psycho-social assistance. While some organisations made a contextualised decision that either maintained their strict secularity or negotiated a compromise, in other cases, these decisions were based on preconceptions rather than deliberation. Overall, a level of reflexivity required in Habermasian postsecularism was found, but there were also further opportunities for complementary learning.