Hans Joas is director of the Max Weber Center at the University of Erfurt and professor of sociology and social thought at the University of Chicago. Klaus Wiegandt is founder and CEO of Forum fur Verantwortung.
Although this volume of conference papers is called Secularization and the World Religions, Hans Joas, one of its two editors, emphasises in his admirably clear introduction that religion will not exclusively be considered under the banner of 'retreat' and 'loss of importance' to people and society at large; as has predominantly been the case in works on secularisation. Rather, the contributors who come from a wide ranging field of disciplines such as Law, Sociology, History and Chinese Studies as well as Theology, Sinology and Religious and Islamic Studies were asked to examine a cluster of questions that Ernst Troeltsch already pondered in his 1912 seminal work, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches and Groups. According to Joas, the term 'Social Teaching' has today become more or less synonymous with social policy (i.e. a reduction of the term), whereas Troeltsch dug deeper in his wish to investigate 'fundamental ideas about the social realm within the Christian tradition' (p. 9). The Troeltsch method is to be emulated somewhat in the individual contributions. The first part of the book, which presents the strongest and most original contributions, looks at Catholic and Protestant Christianity respectively. Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism are also put under scrutiny. It analyses perceptions embedded in these religions regarding the political, social and individual order of society. The second part explores the religious situation in Europe, the USA, East Asia, Latin America, Africa and finally in the Middle East. The contributions of Cardinal Karl Lehmann, Catholic Bishop of Mainz and former Chairman of The Conference of the German Bishops and the renowned Munich Professor of Systematic Theology, Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (who has published extensively on the subject of whether secularisation is a useful 'category' to apply when researching the status of religion in contemporary society), are both excellent indeed. Lehmann distinguishes between 'Catholicism' and the 'Church', writing that: the distinction between Church and Catholicism might imply the erroneous ideas that the Church's impact on society is a feature of the Church only in an unreal sense, and that, in a state of ahistorical abstractness, the Church is always superior to the realities prevailing at a given time, itself having virtually no direct relationship with the public sphere. (pp. 42-43) The Church is realised in concrete forms through different Catholicisms, not just the one 'Catholicism'. The Cardinal also laments the lack of a scholarship tradition, which researches the many different forms that Catholicism takes within society (and the Church); scholarship illustrating the diversity of what it means to be Catholic today. Graf's focus is more narrowly on Protestantism within a German setting, but like Lehmann, he also speaks of different Protestantisms and looks at what constituted the spiritual core of the early reformers as well as of modern Protestantisms; thereby giving a historical account as well as drawing attention to the relationship between Protestantism and modernity. The Old Testament scholar Eckart Otto introduces the reader to the common roots of Catholicism and Protestantism in Judaism and, by drawing on the continuing relevance of the oeuvre of Max Weber, shows that within Judaism there is 'a core of messianic nonconformity' (p. 107) in everyday life, which is lacking from Christianity. This core makes Judaism more resistant to compromises between a transcendent God and the world and so more susceptible to secularisation, according to Otto. Gudrun Kramer writes about Islam and secularisation and carefully distinguishes between Islam and Islamism and secularisation and secularism. She rejects the understanding that religion and state 'in Islam' should have been more closely linked than in Europe in the Middle Ages. She sees the crucial issue today as being the relationship 'between Sharia and public order' (p. 121) and not that concerning the separation of Church and State. The Berlin Professor of Islamic Studies is convinced that the main conflict exists between those Muslims who advocate a profound secularisation of constitution, law and politics and those Muslims who have reservations about secularism, as they perceive it as being politically loaded and contaminated. Heinrich von Stietencron and Rudolf G. Wagner largely give historical overviews of Hinduism and Confucianism and Buddhism. The first author points out that, rather than being one religion, Hinduism actually contains several different types of religion and is not to be considered one of the world religions. Although Shivaism and Vedanta, for instance, are fundamentally different in their understanding of the identity and nature of the highest deity, they can be regarded as one religion when it concerns the values and responsibilities of human beings and their salvation. Von Stietencron points out that there are two major difficulties in applying the category of secularisation to Hinduism, as it presupposes the existence of a church or a collective priesthood. In India such existence can only be found in the periods where the country has been under foreign rule. Although Wagner has a great number of interesting things to say about the differences between the West and Asia (as well as elaborating about the remarkable similarities), it never becomes clear whether or not he regards the application of secularisation to either Confucianism and Buddhism as relevant. Two further chapters consider such classic questions as the relationship between Church and State and that of the natural sciences and the modern world before contributions on the contemporary situations in Europe, the United States, Africa and the Middle East follow. Any attention to Orthodox Christianity is completely missing from the volume but it does not detract from the fact that the publication of these conference papers is to be welcomed as the scope of them is precise and original, and the chapters generally are of a high quality. Finally, it has to be remarked that Alex Skinner has done a first-rate job of translating the papers into a flowing and coherent English. ... the publication of these conference papers is to be welcomed as the scope of them is precise and original, and the chapters generally are of a high quality. Finally, it has to be remarked that Alex Skinner has done a first-rate job of translating the papers into a flowing and coherent English.
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