Religion and Modernity in the Himalaya, edited by Megan Adamson Sijapati and Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz.

Religion and Modernity in the Himalaya, edited by Megan Adamson Sijapati and Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. 191 pp. £104 (hb). ISBN 978-0-415-72339-8.

Lived Religion in Latin America

This book is about religion and modernity, how religion interacts with modern culture, and how modernity influences religion. “Modernity” signifies not only technological developments, but also the dynamics of capitalism, the differentiation of social functions, specialization of spheres of knowledge, and expansion of human rights. By religion is meant the cultural practices people use to connect with a suprahuman power that they experience as influencing their lives. The thesis presented is that in Latin America there is an interaction between modernity and religion, but the result has not been religion’s diminishment (secularization), but its transformation. Exploring religion as ordinary Latin Americans practice it, the research presented in this book discovered that there is more religion than secularists expect, but of a different kind than religious leaders would wish. The difficulty in assessing religiosity as it exists in Latin America is due in part to the continuing use of categories that were not designed for religious cultures outside the North Atlantic world. Those categories point us toward a different kind of dynamics, which in fact obscure Latin American religious dynamics. If we look at religion from the perspective of Latin America and of the people who practice it there, we will find a different definition and different conceptual tools for understanding the religious experience of Latin American people, and these new tools help us to look at religion in a different way.

The Inevitable Contingency of Ethics on Theistic Foundations

In this article, the author examines the dependence of ethics on theistic foundations. The Western conception is that ethics is a result of a natural evolutionary process. The Modern West has never accepted or believed in any ethical system governed by religion, and modernity has tried to establish that the universal moral principles are independent of any metaphysical context. The modernity project and rising secularization have taken charge of the field, and religious significance has gone absent from the mainstream, on account of which many challenges have occurred in moral and ethical matters. We will also examine whether Modern Western Civilization has established an ethical code independent of religion and whether we should follow the Western Model, if any. Moreover, this article examines how ethics is a cause and consequence of the development of personality, and no ethical system is ever there without any religious foundations. Human beings are built on the essence of servitude, and virtues evolve from the foundation of servitude. Another area the article focuses on is the challenges faced by the Muslims and how Modern Western Civilization made morality appears as a result of social and psychological evolution. We also study the possibility and impossibility of Good without an omniscient and omnipotent authority. The absoluteness of moral principles and values and the necessity of consciousness are also discussed in this article.

“Religion's Engine”: Theorizing Religion and Modernity in Jon Butler's God in Gotham

After reading Jon Butler's richly documented history of religion in Manhattan, I thought again of one of my favorite images: a 1939 watercolor by Ben Shahn called Self-Portrait among the Churchgoers, in which a photographer stands near a church on Sunday but points his camera toward the street and seems to ignore the gathering worshippers. Some U.S. historians might be relieved they do not need to learn more about those pious pedestrians, or what happens inside, but specialists in religious history might think the photographer has missed all the action. Has he? Well, in one sense, sure. Historians of religion must attend to churches and adherents, as Butler does, but, like Shahn's photographer, Butler also looks out to the wider cityscape. And that approach pays off as he asks how religion confronted “the challenge of modernity” in Manhattan, “the capital of American secularism.” More specifically, he hopes to explain why religion “didn't collapse in modernity's grasp,” as religion theorists like Max Weber and William James predicted.

Popular Religion and Modernity

This chapter begins with an account of the famous maskil Moses Leib Lilienblum’s mother-in-law, who sought all sorts of experts to help her bear a son. It discusses how Lilienblum’s mother-in-law epitomizes the complex cultural reality of many Jews in nineteenth-century eastern Europe of being open to modern trends, but at the same time still believing in superstition, popular religion, and magical medicine. It also analyzes the view on the Age of Enlightenment as a period in which European nations adopted new philosophical approaches that directed men and women to take rational control of their own fate. The chapter explores how the age of reason and rationality led to a weakening and eradication of certain religious faiths, including belief in witchcraft, magic, and superstition. It points out that the weakening of religious piety and popular religion amongst Jewish society in Europe over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a clear sign of cultural change.

Afterword: From Catholic Modernity to Religious Modernities

In a time when the two major strategies followed by Christian religious traditions in modernity have lost traction—Christendom and subcultural isolation on the one hand and liberal and socialist assimilation with modernity on the other hand—Charles Taylor’s Catholic modernity idea opens up a “third grand strategy,” a new perspective on the relationship between religion and modernity. Moreover, the perspective can be put to use in other religious traditions as well. We will, hence, argue for the extension from a Catholic modernity to a religious modernities perspective. With the help of the arguments and suggestions as well as the critiques put forward by Taylor and the other authors in this volume Modernity and Transcendence, we will chart some of the main axes of this vast research field: (1) the clarification of Catholic/religious modernity; (2) the generalization of the Catholic modernity idea into a religious modernities perspective; (3) the invention of an inspiring, post-Christendom Christianity/post-fusional religion and theology; (4) the issue of religious engagement in our time—what Taylor calls “the Ricci project”; (5 and 6) the need for encompassing theories of modernity and religion (transcendence).