Available in English for the first time, Imperfect Garden is both an approachable intellectual history and a bracing treatise on how we should understand and experience our lives. In it, one of France's most prominent intellectuals explores the foundations, limits, and possibilities of humanist thinking. Through his critical but sympathetic excavation of humanism, Tzvetan Todorov seeks an answer to modernity's fundamental challenge: how to maintain our hard-won liberty without paying too dearly in social ties, common values, and a coherent and responsible sense of self. Todorov reads afresh the works of major humanists--primarily Montaigne, Rousseau, and Constant, but also Descartes, Montesquieu, and Toqueville. Each chapter considers humanism's approach to one major theme of human existence: liberty, social life, love, self, morality, and expression. Discussing humanism in dialogue with other systems, Todorov finds a response to the predicament of modernity that is far more instructive than any offered by conservatism, scientific determinism, existential individualism, or humanism's other contemporary competitors. Humanism suggests that we are members of an intelligent and sociable species who can act according to our will while connecting the well-being of other members with our own. It is through this understanding of free will, Todorov argues, that we can use humanism to rescue universality and reconcile human liberty with solidarity and personal integrity. Placing the history of ideas at the service of a quest for moral and political wisdom, Todorov's compelling and no doubt controversial rethinking of humanist ideas testifies to the enduring capacity of those ideas to meditate on--and, if we are fortunate, cultivate--the imperfect garden in which we live.

Drawing on ethnographic research, this book explores individualized religion in and around Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire. Claire Wanless demonstrates that counter to the claims of secularization theorists, the combination of informal structures and practices can provide a viable basis for socially significant religious activity that can sustain itself. The subjects of this research claim a variety of religious identities and practices, and are suspicious of religious institutions, hierarchies, rules and dogmas. Yet they participate actively in an overlapping and cross-linking informal network of practice communities and other associations. Their engagements propagate and sustain a core ideology that prioritizes subjectivity, locates authority at the level of the individual, and also predicates itself on ideals of sharing, mutuality and community. Providing a new theory of religious association, this book is a nuanced counterpoint to the secularization thesis in the UK and points the way to new research on individual religion.

Calmly engaging the philosophical arguments posed by best-selling authors Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, and to a lesser extent, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, Gregory Ganssle's A Reasonable God is a nuanced, charitable, and philosophically well-informed defense of the existence of God. Eschewing the rhetoric and provocative purposes of the New Atheists, Ganssle instead lucidly and objectively analyzes each argument on its own philosophical merits, to see how persuasive they prove to be. Surveying topics including the relationship between faith and reason, moral arguments for the existence of God, the Darwinian theories of the origin of religion, he pays particular attention to, and ultimately rejects, what he determines is the strongest logical argument against the existence of god posed by the new atheists, put forth by Dawkins: that our universe resembles more of what an atheistic universe would be like than it does with what a theistic universe would be like.

To what extent was the evolution of secularism in South and Southeast Asia between the end of the First World War and decolonisation after 1945 a result of transimperial and transnational patterns? To capture the diversity of twentieth-century secularisms, Clemens Six explores similarities resulting from translocal networks of ideas and practices since 1918. Six approaches these networks via a framework of global intellectual history, the history of transnational social networks, and the global history of non-state institutions. Empirically, he illustrates his argument with three case studies: the reception of Ataturk's reforms across Asia and the Middle East; translocal women's circles in the interwar period; and private US foundations after 1945.

Russian Orthodoxy and Secularism surveys the ways in which the Russian Orthodox Church has negotiated its relationship with the secular state, with other religions, and with Western modernity from its beginnings until the present. It applies multiple theoretical perspectives and draws on different disciplinary approaches to explain the varied and at times contradictory facets of Russian Orthodoxy as a state church or as a critic of the state, as a lived religion or as a civil religion controlled by the state, as a source of dissidence during Communism or as a reservoir of anti-Western, anti-modernist ideas that celebrate the uniqueness and superiority of the Russian nation. Kristina Stoeckl argues that, three decades after the fall of Communism, the period of post-Soviet transition is over for Russian Orthodoxy and that the Moscow Patriarchate has settled on its role as national church and provider of a new civil religion of traditional values.