This collection of satirical poems homes in on the inconsistencies and downright perversities of what passes in our culture as "Holy Writ." Turning to satire, with its long and distinguished record of exposing folly and bringing enlightenment through humor, the author leaves no doubt that primitive religion posing as eternal truth is just the sort of folly that satire is meant to correct.
He lets his poetic imagination roam widely, as he takes on the roles of Eve, Noah, Sarah, Jonah, David, Mary, Jesus, Judas, and even the biblical Jehovah Himself, ("I never apologize, never explain."). We also hear from priests, televangelists, and faith healers, as well as some sensible contemporaries, commenting on what it means to live a life of reason.
At the conclusion to the introduction, the author says: "Intelligent and well-meaning people have argued for centuries against the fatal attraction of foolishness, but their efforts have been largely unproductive, partly because many people seem impervious to rational discussion. So perhaps satire is our most effective way of lighting candles in the darkness and communicating effectively to those who are immune to reason. That is, at any rate, the hope, and the rationale, of this book."
In this age of suicide bombers and resurgent fundamentalism, we need these lighted candles like never before.

This is an authoritative guide to contemporary debates and issues in the sociology of religion providing a clear examination of classical secularization and the post-secularization paradigm. "Secularization and Its Discontents" provides an illuminating overview of major current debates in the sociology of religion, exploring changing patterns of religious practice in the West during the past 150 years. Examining classical secularization theory as well as modified versions that allow for difference between national and social contexts, Rob Warner also explores the proposed post-secularization paradigm, as well as its close offshoot, rational choice theory. Possibilities for a spiritual revolution and the feminisation of religion are scrutinised, and also theories of the durability of conservative religion. The author goes on to develop a new interpretation of resilient religion from an analysis of 21st century trends in religious participation. These are categorised as entrepreneurial and experiential-therapeutic, before the volume finally focuses upon individual identity construction through autonomous religious consumption. This book provides a clear and penetrating overview of theoretical frameworks and develops a new theoretical synthesis derived from fresh examination of empirical data, and will be of interest to academics and students in religious studies, practical theology and the sociology of religion.

This detailed examination of the "Torah" (the first five books of the Bible) lays particular emphasis on the role and character of the Torah's transcendent God, as its central protagonist. Viewing both the 'Torah' and its God as purely human creations, humanist Jordan Jay Hillman seeks in no way to devalue this hugely influential book. His aim instead is to reinterpret it as a still vital text that used theistic means appropriate to its time to inspire people toward their worthiest human purposes. It is thus for its 'timeless themes' rather than its 'dated particularities' (including its model of a transcendent God) that we should honour the 'Torah' in our time as both the wellspring of Judaic culture and a major influence on Christian and Islamic ethics and morals. From his humanist perspective and his background as a lawyer and professor of law at North-western University (now emeritus), Hillman offers many insights into the narrative and wide-ranging legal code of "Genesis", "Exodus", "Leviticus", "Numbers", and "Deuteronomy"- including their many contradictions and anomalies. His analysis draws on a broad scholarly consensus regarding the 'Documentary Theory', as it bears on the identities and periods of the Torah's human sources. This thorough explication of an often misunderstood ancient text will help humanists, and many theists alike, to appreciate the rich moral, ethical, and cultural heritage of the 'Torah' and its enduring relevance to our time.

The study of New Religious Movement (NRMs) is one of the fastest growing areas of religous studies. There are now several journals dedicated to the study of NRMs, as well as an academic association (CESNUR), in addition to a section of the American Academy of Religion devoted to NRMs. This handbook covers the current state of the field and breaks new ground. Its contributors are drawn equally from sociology and religious studies and include both established scholars and 'rising stars' in the field. The core chapters deal with such central issues as conversion, the brainwashing debate, millennialism, and modernisation. Another section deal with NRM subfields such as neopaganism, satanism, and UFO religions. The final section considers NRMs in a global perspective. This book will be indispensible resource for every scholar and student of this field.

This fascinating book considers systems of belief and practice which are not religions in the full-blown sense, but which nevertheless affect human life in ways similar to the role played by the recognised religions. Professor Smith's thorough account compares the features which Humanism, Marxism and Nationalism share with recognised religions, analysing each in turn, and asks whether there is not always a threat of the demonic when any contingent reality - man, the economic order, or the state - is made absolute.

There is currently much confusion about the nature of humanism and a good deal of interest in its point of view. As the object of attack and suspicion by fundamentalists, conservatives, and traditional religionists, Howard B. Radest believes that humanism deserves a clear and responsible treatment. He accomplishes this in this book by clarifying the nature of humanism in historical and current thought. The Enlightenment, Radest states, gave birth to a number of humanist values that are still being worked out in today's societies. He reconstructs how humanist values have been considered dangerous by those who fear a change in the status quo. Humanism, Radest maintains, is the true descendant of the age of reason and freedom.

In this unique volume, humanism is viewed as being misunderstood by both traditionalists and the humanists themselves. Radest does not wish to disparage traditional beliefs, but he emphasizes that humanism is a legitimate philosophical, ideological, and religious alternative--a party to the current struggle for a postmodern life philosophy. "The Devil and Secular Humanism" examines humanism in a more comprehensive way than most current literature, and it includes an assessment of the prospects for humanism in the years ahead. It will be of great use to a literate, but nontechnical, audience who are engaged in philosophy, religion, law, and politics.

Samuel Stefan Osusky was a leading intellectual in Slovak Lutheranism and a bishop in his church. In 1937 he delivered a prescient lecture to the assembled clergy, "The Philosophy of Fascism, Bolshevism and Hitlerism", that clearly foretold the dark days ahead. As wartime bishop, he co-authored a "Pastoral Letter on the Jewish Question", which publicly decried the deportation of Jews to Poland in 1942; in 1944 he was imprisoned by the Gestapo for giving moral support to the Slovak National Uprising against the fascist puppet regime. Paul R. Hinlicky traces the intellectual journey with ethical idealism's faith in the progressive theology of history that ended in dismay and disillusionment at the revolutionary pretensions of Marxism-Leninism. Hinlicky shows Osusky's dramatic rediscovery of the apocalyptic "the mother of Christian theology", and his input into the discussion of the dialectic of faith and reason after rationalism and fundamentalism.

Varieties of Secularism is an ethnographically rich, theoretically well-informed, and intellectually coherent volume which builds off the work of Talal Asad, Charles Taylor, and others who have engaged the issue of secularism(s) and in socio-political life. The volume seeks to examine theories of secularism/secularity and examine concrete ethnographic cases in order to further the theoretical discussion.

Whereas Taylor 's magisterial work draws up the conditions and problems of a belief in God in Western modernity, it leaves unexplored the challenges posed by the spiritual in modernity outside of the North Atlantic rim. This anthology seeks to begin that task. It does so by suggesting that the kind of secularity described by Taylor is only one amongst others. By attending to the shifting relationship between proper religion and bad faiths; between politically valorised and embarrassing spiritual phenomena; between the new visibilities and silences of magic, ancestors, and religion in democratic politics, this book seeks to outline the particular formations of secularism that have become possible in Asia from China to Indonesia and from Bahrain to Timor-Leste.

This book will appeal to students and scholars of Asian religion, politics and anthropology.

What do classical elitists like Pareto and Mosca have in common with Marxists like Labriola and Gramsci? In this collection of essays, Joseph Femia argues that all four thinkers are united by the 'worldly humanism' they inherited from Machiavelli. Their distinctively Italian hostility to the metaphysical abstractions of natural law and Christian theology accounted for similarities in their thought that are obscured by the familiar terminology of 'left' and 'right'. The collection includes critical essays on each of the four thinkers, as well as an introductory chapter on their links with Machiavelli.

This textbook demonstrates the relevance and importance of humanism as a non-religious worldview. Each chapter includes a helpful pedagogy including a general overview, case studies, suggestions for further reading, and discussion questions. Making this the ideal textbook for students approaching the topic for the first time. The textbook explores controversial topics that will instigate debate such as human rights, sexuality, relationship between science, humanism and religion, abortion, euthanasia, war and non-human life.

Tracing embodied transformation in the context of Gaga, the Israeli dance improvisation practice, this book demystifies what Lina Aschenbrenner coins as "neo-spiritual aesthetics." This book takes the reader on an analytical journey through a Gaga class, outlining the effective aesthetics of Gaga as an example for the broader field of neo-spiritualities. It distinguishes a threefold effect of Gaga practice-from a momentary extraordinary experience, to a lasting therapeutic effect, and finally Gaga's worldview potential. It situates the effect in an assemblage of interrelating aesthetics of environment, movement, and bodies. The book shows why seemingly leisure time activities such as Gaga form fruitful research objects to an academic study of religion and opens up research on neo-spiritual practices. In understanding the sensory effect of practice and its cultural and social implications, the book follows an Aesthetics of Religion approach. It departs from the idea that cognition is embodied and that the body is thus central to understanding cultural and social phenomena. Drawing upon a wide array of data gathered in the context of Gaga at the Suzanne Dellal Center in Tel Aviv, the book weaves together different methods of discourse, ritual, movement, body knowledge, and narrative analysis, while acknowledging insights from neuroscience and cognitive science.

There are many answers to the question of why life is worth living, but they all presuppose that good lives are sensuously enjoyable. Time seems to stand still in the moment when we enjoy food and drink, peaceful, laughing relationships with friends, or lay quietly, allowing the beauty of nature and human creations to unfold before us. Embodied Humanism: Toward Solidarity and Sensuous Enjoyment explores ways that enjoyment is also political. The history of political struggle is a history of fighting back against silencing, hunger, and violent domination, but also fighting for social peace, need-satisfaction, voice, and democratic power. Tracing the values of embodied humanism across history and across cultures and identities, the book finds a more comprehensive universal humanist ethic around which old and emerging struggles can be unified. Ultimately, Jeff Noonan argues, these struggles can be directed towards creating institutional structure and individual dispositions that will secure the social conditions in which our capacities for receptive openness and delight are satisfied for each and all.

This collection of essays presents groundbreaking work from an interdisciplinary group of leading theorists and scholars representing the fields of history, philosophy, political science, sociology, and anthropology. The volume will introduce readers to some of the most compelling new conceptual and theoretical understandings of secularism and the secular, while also examining socio-political trends involving the relationship between the religious and the secular from a variety of locations across the globe.
In recent decades, the public has become increasingly aware of the important role religious commitments play in the cultural, social, and political dynamics of domestic and world affairs. This so called ''resurgence'' of religion in the public sphere has elicited a wide array of responses, including vehement opposition to the very idea that religious reasons should ever have a right to expression in public political debate. The current global landscape forces scholars to reconsider not only once predominant understandings of secularization, but also the definition and implications of secular assumptions and secularist positions. The notion that there is no singular secularism, but rather a range of multiple secularisms, is one of many emerging efforts to reconceptualize the meanings of religion and the secular.
Rethinking Secularism surveys these efforts and helps to reframe discussions of religion in the social sciences by drawing attention to the central issue of how ''the secular'' is constituted and understood. It provides valuable insight into how new understandings of secularism and religion shape analytic perspectives in the social sciences, politics, and international affairs.

At the beginning of the twelfth century a group of scholars, mainly centred on Paris and Bologna, began an enterprise of unprecedented scope. Their intention was to produce a once-and-for-all body of knowledge that would be as perfect as humanity's fallen state permits, and which would provide a view of God, nature, and human conduct, promoting order in this world and blessedness in the next. Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe reconsiders this enterprise, and its long-term effects on European History. It describes the creative intellectual impulse that brought it into being and sustained it for two centuries, and shows how it was able to bring into existence a systematic body of knowledge of the natural and supernatural worlds, including the whole area of human relations, which together embraced all areas of possible truth and defined the conduct required of all members of western Christendom. The whole work will be in three volumes. This first is concerned with the beginnings, in the years between 1060 and 1160, when the main lines of scholastic thought were laid down and its agenda established. It examines the intellectual principles of enquiry and the sources used in developing the whole field of assured knowledge. It seeks to provide an understanding of the new outlook on the world, the supernatural and an organized Christian society, and to show why this proved so powerful and so attractive to the time. The book explores the social, intellectual, and political developments that provided the conditions to create the new system in the great schools of learning in France and Italy, and the rewards that attracted experts who could both administer the system and make it known and acceptable to the generality of people whose lives were affected by it. Elegantly written, enlivened with wit and vivid anecdote, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe will be a work of seminal importance for the understanding of the civilization of the Middle Ages, and of the evolution of modern European societies.

This book explores the implication of diversity for humanism. Through the insights of academics and activists, it highlights both the successes and failures related to diversity marking humanism in the US and internationally. It offers a timely depiction of how humanism in general as well as how particular humanist communities have wrestled with the nature of our changing world, and the issues that surface in relationship to markers of difference.

The Essays of Michel de Montaigne (1877) is a collection of essays and letters by Michel de Montaigne. Originally published in French as Essais (1580), this edition was translated by English poet Charles Cotton in the late-17th century and republished by William Carew Hazlitt, the grandson of renowned English essayist and critic William Hazlitt. "No man living is more free from this passion [of sorrow] than I, who yet neither like it in myself nor admire it in others, and yet generally the world, as a settled thing, is pleased to grace it with a particular esteem, clothing therewith wisdom, virtue, and conscience. Foolish and sordid guise!" In his masterful essays, Michel de Montaigne eschews the typical distancing required of the authorial voice in order to investigate public matters through a personal lens. As the subject of his own musings, he provides both a stirring self-portrait and an invaluable new voice that will resonate throughout Western literature. Unlike the Enlightenment thinkers who would follow in his footsteps, Montaigne is skeptical of the possibility of human certainty and takes an ethical stand against the European colonial project in the Americas and elsewhere. At times serious, at others tongue-in-cheek, his wide-ranging topics include conscience, politics, sorrow, solitude, fear, friendship, war, and poetry. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne were written at a crossroads in human history-between Renaissance and Enlightenment, Catholicism and Protestantism, Montaigne argues that to look outward requires we first look within, and that the quest for happiness requires us to accept what we cannot know. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Essays of Michel de Montaigne is a classic of French philosophy reimagined for modern readers.

Sasha Sagan's parents - the astronomer Carl Sagan and the writer and producer, Ann Druyan - taught her that the natural world and vast cosmos are full of profound beauty, and that science reveals truths more wondrous than any myth or fable. When Sagan herself became a mother, she began her own hunt for the phenomena behind our most treasured occasions - from births to deaths, holidays to weddings, anniversaries, and more - growing these roots into a new set of rituals for her young daughter to honour the joy and significance of each experience without relying on a religious framework. Part memoir, part handbook and part social history, For Small Creatures Such as We is a luminous exploration of all of Earth's marvels that requires no faith in order to be believed.

Islam in France is often regarded as a political 'issue' and much of the scholarly and public debates about Islam in contemporary France over the last three decades have concentrated on the supposedly 'antagonistic' relationship between France, Islam and its Muslims. Against such a troubled backdrop, however, this book looks at the ways in which certain prominent French Muslim intellectuals seek to articulate a vision of multi-faith co-existence, which embraces a critical secularism, and which simultaneously draw on religious and secular humanist traditions. Intellectuals have historically played a major part in French public life, yet relatively little is known about the work of Abdelwahab Meddeb, Malek Chebel, Leila Babes, Dounia Bouzar and Abdennour Bidar, whose writings and public interventions this book examines. Secularism, Islam and public intellectuals in contemporary France will be of particular interest to specialists, undergraduate and post-graduate students working across the Humanities and Social Sciences from disciplines such as Francophone Studies, Anthropology, Religious Studies or Sociology. -- .

Nineteenth-Century British Secularism offers a new paradigm for understanding secularization in the nineteenth century. It addresses the crisis in the secularization thesis by foregrounding a nineteenth-century development called 'Secularism' - the particular movement and creed founded by George Jacob Holyoake from 1851 to 1852. Nineteenth-Century British Secularism rethinks and reevaluates the significance of Holyoake's Secularism, regarding it as a historic moment of modernity and granting it centrality as both a herald and exemplar for a new understanding of modern secularity. In addition to Secularism proper, the book treats several other moments of secular emergence in the nineteenth century, including Thomas Carlyle's 'natural supernaturalism', Richard Carlile's anti-theist science advocacy, Charles Lyell's uniformity principle in geology, Francis Newman's naturalized religion or 'primitive Christianity', and George Eliot's secularism and post-secularism.

This textbook demonstrates the relevance and importance of humanism as a non-religious worldview. Each chapter includes a helpful pedagogy including a general overview, case studies, suggestions for further reading, and discussion questions. Making this the ideal textbook for students approaching the topic for the first time. The textbook explores controversial topics that will instigate debate such as human rights, sexuality, relationship between science, humanism and religion, abortion, euthanasia, war and non-human life.