Category Archives: Secularity & Secularization

The “Nonreligious” in the American Northwest

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by Frank L. Pasquale, Research associate of ISSSC engaged in the study of the nonreligious population of the U.S

In survey research, “seculars” has been a variable category encompassing distinguishable types of individuals. There is an ever­increasing amount of data emerging from survey work on “seculars” and Nones (those who profess no explicit religious identity or affliation). There has been less direct or detailed attention to the subset of Nones that might be characterized as “quintessential seculars”—the substantially or affrmatively non­transcendental/ not­religious, or “Nots.”

The “Nonreligious” in the American Northwest

Putting Secularity in Context

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by Bruce A. Phillips, Sociologist at the University of Southern California and professor of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles.

It has been correctly asserted that “Secularity and secular people in America have gone largely unresearched until now.” Indeed, Kosmin, Mayer, and Keysar have put secularism back on the scholarly agenda. The qualifer “largely” is important, however. Secularism did not entirely disappear from the sociology of religion, and putting these most recent fndings in the context of previous research raises a number of analytic challenges. In this chapter I look at these fndings in the context of previous research and suggest that the re-emergence of secularism in America needs to be understood in specifc analytic contexts.

Putting Secularity in Context

Contemporary Secularity and Secularism

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Barry A. Kosmin, Founding director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture and research professor of public policy and law at Trinity College

Secularism and its variants are terms much bandied about today, paradoxically, as a consequence of religion seeming to have become more pervasive and influential in public life and society worldwide. This situation poses a number of questions.

Contemporary Secularity and Secularism

Stock Markets: Evolution in Nature and Society

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by Edward Peter Stringham, Hackley Endowed ChairSchool of Business and Economics Fayetteville State University

Can the theory of evolution be applied to topics other than the evolution of species?French economist Alain Marcaino argues that both Charles Darwin and Nobel prizewinning economist Friedrich Hayek refer to the same theory of human nature, which isborrowed from the founding fathers of political economy, Hume and Smith. This essay provides support for the idea that theory of evolution can be used to describe many important market institutions. Markets involve people who are often consciously choosingvarious business practices so the analogy between evolution in markets and evolution innature has some importance differences. But just as different species vary or adapt so dodifferent economic practices. Those that are more suited for their time and place willbecome more successful and will be copied and replicate. The history of stock marketsillustrates this point well

Evolution in Nature and Society

Varieties of Political Secularism

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by Barry A. Kosmin, Founding director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture and research professor of public policy and law at Trinity College.

Secularism, which is the focus of this essay, is an approach, attitude or outlook towards society and the contemporary world. It makes no metaphysical claims. It is not a distinct or complete belief system and is not directly concerned about ultimate truth, matters of faith or spirituality. Thus Secularism is not a personal attribute. Rather, in our definition, it involves collective behavior, organizations and legal constructs that reflect the institutional expressions of the mundane, particularly in the political realm and the public life of a nation. By their nature, these variables are hard to quantify, especially when viewed globally. Nevertheless, in ideological terms we can assert that secularism essentially involves the rejection of the primacy of religious authority in the affairs of this world. This process which is usually referred to as secularization is most evident in the West in the governmental or political realm where the outcome has meant the “desacralization of the state” (Stark and Iannaconne,1994).

Varieties of Political Secularism

The Dao of Secularism: Political Transformation and Secular Values in 20th Century Asia

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by Michael Lestz, Associate Professor of History, Trinity College

I. Course Description:

In the 19th century, societies across the Asian map were governed by autocratic states that derived their legitimacy from religious or meta-religious worldviews and their accompanying ideologies. In China, the dynastic state based its legal and institutional framework on Song Neo-Confucianism; in Vietnam and Korea, Confucian monarchies, likewise, dominated the state. In Cambodia and Thailand, dynasties found legitimacy from the Hindu notion of the “god king” (devaraja). And in Japan, a hybrid mixture of Shinto and Confucianism provided a template for imperial and Shogunal rule.

These traditional schemes of legitimacy vanished in the twentieth century. Struggles against colonial rule, revolution, and complex post-colonial conflicts about the appropriate nature of the state yielded new states. Communism, development dictatorship, democracy, or military rule were the dominant political templates for the states that emerged in the ruins of the traditional order.

Within these states, secular values often motivated dramatic acts of personal sacrifice and passionate devotion to goals such as national unification, socio-economic transformation, and resistance to real and perceived forms of oppression. In addition, there was often an explicit renunciation of the traditional values as they were deployed in the political arena.

At the same time, however, the bedrock of the Confucian, Buddhist, or Shinto past continued to channel the “dao” or “way” of secular states.

Using memoirs, novels, documentary material, and historical monographs, this course will investigate the intellectual fabric of such powerful secular commitments in a number of Asian societies. The course will be formed around the lives of particular historical actors, revolutionaries, humanists, soldiers, and proponents of secular change, in China, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia and perhaps other East and Southeast Asian societies.

This course will be a senior seminar and will be offered during the 2010-2011 academic year.

II. Bibliography (abbreviated/*starred titles to be ordered or duplicated for the course):

  1. Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War, Penguin, 1996.
  2. David Chandler, Voices from S21, Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison, University of California Press, 2000.
  3. Dang Thuy Tram, Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, Harmony Books, 2007.
  4. Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York:  W.W. Norton and Company, 1999.
  5. Lloyd Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China Under Nationalist Rule, 1927-1937, Harvard University Press, 1974.
  6. Bernard Fall, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution and War, Selected Writings 1920-1966, New American Library, 1967.
  7. Kazuo Kawai, Japan’s American Interlude, University of Chicago Press.
  8. Joseph Lau, The Analects of Confucius.
  9. Joseph Lau and Howard Goldblatt, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, Columbia University Press, 2007.
  10. Michael Lestz, Pei-Kai Cheng, and Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, A Document Collection, Norton, 1999.
  11. Michael Lestz, Fascism in Republican China, 1924 to 1938, ms.
  12. Michael Lestz (trnsl.) Zhou Daguan’s A Record of the History and Customs of Cambodia (Zhenla Fengtuji), ms.
  13. Li Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story (2 vols),
  14. Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father, Harper Collins, 2000
  15. Mao Zedong, Collected Writings of Mao Zedong,
  16. Nikolai Ostrovsky, How the Steel Was Tempered
  17. Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, Macmillan, 2006.
  18. Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China, 1937.
  19. E. L. Voynich, The Gadfly, International Book and Publishing Company, 1900.
  20. Frederic Wakeman and Richard Edmonds, Reappraising Republican China, Oxford, 2000.
  21. Mary Wright, China in Revolution, The First Phase, 1900-1913, Yale University Press, 1971.

III. Class Schedule:

Week I: The Confucian State: China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan

  • *Selections from Lestz, Cheng, and Spence.
  • *Joseph Lau, The Analects of Confucius

Week II: The Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and the Republican State in China

  • Selections from Lestz, Cheng, and Spence
  • Mary Wright, (selections) including:
    • Ernest P. Young, “Yuan Shik-k’ai’s Rise to the Presidency.”  pp. 419-442.

Week III: Fascism in China

  • *Lestz, Fascism in China
  • Eastman, The Abortive Revolution (selected chapters)
  • Wakeman and Edmonds, Frederic Wakeman, A Revisionist View of the Nanjing Decade: Confucian Fascism, pp. 141-178

Week IV: Confucianism and the Yan’an Way in Northern Shaanxi

  • Dai Qing, Wang Shiwei and “Wild Lilies,” 1994. pp. 3-21
  • Ding Ling stories: Lau and Goldblatt, When I Was in Xia Village, pp. 132-146 and In the Hospital
  • Liu Shaoqi’s How to Be a Good Communist (nine sections):
    • http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1939/how-to-be/index.htm
  • Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature:
    • http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/YFLA42.html

Week V: The Plight of Korea: The Creation of New State Orders Below and Above the 38th Parallel in the Wake of Japanese Colonialism

Week VI: Occupation Japan: The MacArthur Constitution and the American-sponsored Invention of a New Constitutional Order

  • *Dower
  • Kazuo Kazai (selections)
  • documents

Week VII: Communist Revolution and Its Acolytes in Vietnam After 1954

  • Bao Ninh (selection)
  • *Dang Thuy Tram, Last Night I Dreamed of Peace
  • Ostrovsky (selection)
  • Voynich (selection)

Week VIII: Singapore and Li Kuan Yew: The Emergence of a Denatured Confucian Autocracy

Week IX: The Buddhist State: The Cambodian Variant

  • *Lestz,
  • Zhou Da Guan’s Zhenla Fengtuji

Week X: Sihanouk’s, the Devaraja System, and Development Dictatorship

  • Sihanouk memoirs

Week XI: The Pol Pot Experiment; A Communist State Founded on the Ruins of Angkor

  • *Chandler,
  • S-21 *Short selections

The Nature of Nature: Enlightenment Ideas about the Landscape

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by Bruce Coats, Professor of Art History, Scripps College

Rationale:

This course will explore changing attitudes toward nature developed during the 18th century in Europe by surveying representations of nature in the visual arts (paintings, gardens, architecture and furniture), in the performing arts (music, dance and theater) and in texts (essays, poetry and novels). Concepts of reason, liberty and society as formed by the natural world or reflected in nature will be examined, especially in England and France during the Enlightenment.

In the late 17th century, European concepts of nature were still informed by church teachings and by political systems of strict hierarchies, as typified by the reign of Louis XIV and his gardens and palaces at Versailles. Throughout the 18th century new secular ideas about nature, based on scientific discoveries, geographic explorations, agricultural experiments, political developments, and philosophical speculations, resulted in radically varied views about Nature and in extraordinary representations of the natural world in the visual and performing arts. Country estates, such as Stowe in Buckinghamshire, were designed to reflect these political and social changes, in the statuary and pavilions placed around the garden and in the freedom to roam without pathways or an imposed agenda. People were expected to enjoy nature (Edmund Burke), to learn from nature (Jean Jacques Rousseau) and to respond to nature through reason and emotion (Immanuel Kant). By the early 19th century, nature was seen by some as a source for personal spiritual understanding, outside religious institutions, and as a resource for social improvement in new towns, public parks, and landscaped cemeteries. Such varied attitudes toward the nature of nature reveal much about the Enlightenment in Europe.

Required textbook:

  1. M. Andrew, Landscape and Western Art (LWA)
  2. D. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Lecture/discussion sessions:

This seminar will survey the varied ways in which Nature and the landscape were viewed in Europe during the 17th -19th centuries, with particular attention to how developments in secularism affected traditional iconographic interpretations of natural elements and influenced the creation of gardens and the depiction of landscape scenes.

I Introduction and Changing Definitions of nature

II Divine Realms

  • LWA 1-51; Geneva Bible

III Biblical and mythological representations of the natural world

IV Moorish and medieval monastery gardens – visit to Margaret Fowler Garden

V Imperial RealmsFormal gardens in Italy and France as symbols of Music, theater and visual arts in the iconographic p

  • LWA 53-75 Medici and Bourbon politics rograms at Versailles

VI Fantasy RealmsRococo architecture and the paintings of Watteau Discussion of Defoe’s novel

  • Robinson Crusoe

VII Botanical Realms Rousseau’s essay Botany

  • Exercises in botanical classifications and illustrations

VIII Linnaeus and Botanic Gardens in Padua, Leyden, Paris Versailles and Oxford

IX Botanical Gardens and Menageries

  • LWA 77-175

X Political Realms Stowe and the early English landscape garden

  • Pope’s Letter to Lord B.

XI Seasonal Realms

  • Vivaldi’s poems & music Representing the changes in weather, seasons, and social hierarchies

XII Agricultural Revolutions: Plows, fertilizers, native plants, and exotic imports

  • handout: Landscape Painting and the Agricultural Revolution

XII Creating the Picturesque Landscape in paintings and gardens: freedom of thought and of movement

  • handout: Landscape and Ideology April:

XIV Man in Nature and the Sublime Landscape

  • handout: Rousseau’s Julie, La Nouvelle Heloise and Emile

XV The Sublime Realm: Ermenonville, Desert de Retz and Monceau

  • handout : Burke on Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful

XVI Poetic Realms and Picturesque Places

  • handout: Wordsworth’s poems Mapping our realm: seeing campus sites as “sublime” or “beautiful”

XVII Personalized Realms: self expression in Constable and Turner

  • handout: Landscape and Ideology:
  • LWA 176The Spiritual Realm: Kant, Blake and Friedrich
  • handout: Kant’s Critique of Judgement

XIX Analysis of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony “The Pastoral”

XX Conclusion: Knowledge, Culture and Representation of Nature

The Sacred and the Profane in the Middle Ages

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by John Eldevik, Ph.D, History Department, Pomona College

Catalogue Description

This course will attempt to understand and unravel the complex relationship between secular and sacred ideals of political and social order that characterized much of medieval intellectual discourse. We will examine the ways in which medieval jurists, theologians and religious dissenters reconciled notions of authority and order received from tradition and classical antiquity with the demands of divine revelation and the claims of the Church from the time of Augustine through the age of Conciliarism (ca. 300-1450).

Course Overview

Strictly speaking, “secularism” was an term coined in the nineteenth century. Yet the idea of defining a distinction between claims about life and society grounded in humanistic philosophies versus knowledge attained through divinely revealed texts or traditions is one that goes back to the Middle Ages. The Enlightenment was not an inevitability, but neither could it have taken place without the intellectual framework erected by medieval jurists and philosophers who grappled with the relationship between church and state, or, as they put it, regnum et sacerdotum – between priestly and royal authority in society. Out of this debate emerged the strains of thought – religious, historical and philosophical- that would eventually form the foundation of a modern idea of the political, that is, a sphere of thought and action based on empirical perceptions of the world and society and not beholden to revealed authority. The course will not attempt to locate the “origins” of secularism in any particular medieval discourse, but emphasize instead the enduring problem of authority and order and they ways in which those same questions resonate with us today in the form of debates over things like individual liberty versus the security of the state. Instead, medieval thinkers conceived of the universe and humanity as a single, divinely-ordered system, or body, but distinguished within it sacred and profane (rather than “secular”) spheres of authority, life and knowledge, and within those sacred and profane spheres, many nested orders of hierarchy. How those realms and their hierarchies related to each other within the body politic formed the crux of medieval political philosophy.

The three great monotheistic faiths that have shaped the Western tradition have all faced the same fundamental problem when it came to the question of civil governance and social order: is all government ordained by God, and thus to be structured according to Scriptural and hierocratic principles, or did God envision a dual system of governance for the world and his followers, namely a sacred and a profane? If so, were they equal, or did one have preeminence over the other? Is political organization, and by extension, civil government, a product of nature (Aristotle), or does it arise from divine providence, or merely the need to control evil in a fallen world? These questions were first articulated and debated in Christian antiquity, which inherited a complex metaphysical and tradition on one side from Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, and on the other from the Bible and patristic theology. Proceeding from the theopolitical synthesis presented in St. Augustine’s masterpiece, De civitate Dei, this course will trace the dialectic between hierocratic and royal/secular conceptions of political power and social authority across the medieval West, examining issues such as theories of kingship and divine rulership, ideologies of reform, social justice and political dissent in their historical contexts. The struggle to define the relationship between royal and papal authority will certainly occupy a central place in the syllabus, but we will also explore issues such as biblical exegesis and political theory, the Crusades, the formation of the ius commune (which blended canon and Roman legal traditions), as well as alternate systems of thought and dissent, particularly mysticism and popular theologies. An important part of the course will also consist of understanding the key contributions of Jewish and Islamic philosophy to Christian political philosophy in the Middle Ages.

Some of the key texts this course will utilize include the writings of St. Augustine, particularly The City of God, the Ten Books of History by Gregory of Tours, texts from the eleventh century reform movement and the Crusades, Peter Abelard, John of Salisbury, selected works by Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Thomas Aquinas, Marsilius of Padua, Dante, Bartolus of Sassoferato, William of Ockham and Lorenzo Valla.

Reading Schedule (by week) with possible texts

1. The Greco-Roman Tradition of Statecraft

  • Plato, Timaeus
  • Aristotle, Politics, Bks 1-4
  • Cicero, On Laws, Bk. 2

2. Religion & Politics in the Bible

  • I Samuel 8-31;
  • II Chronicles 1-9;
  • Romans 13

3. The Constantinian Revolution

  • Eusebius of Cesarea, Life of Constantine Roman Martyrology (selections)
  • Peter Brown, “The Rise of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity”

4. The Augustinian Synthesis

  • Augustine, Political Writings (selections)
  • Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Metaphysics, ch. 10
  • Al-Farabi, The Political Regime

5. The Politics of Holiness in the Dark Ages

  • Gildas, On the Ruin of the Britains
  • Gregory of Tours, Ten Books of History (selections)
  • Jonas of Bobbio, Life of St. Columbanus

6. Carolingian Thought

  • Readings from Agobard of Lyon, Einhard, Hrabanus Maurus and Hincmar of Rheims (ed. Dutton)
  • Mayke de Jong, “The Empire as Ecclesia: Hrabanus Maurus and Biblical Commentary for Rulers,” in Using the Past in the Early Middle Ages

7. Religion, War and Violence in the Age of Crusades

  • Adalbero of Laon, Poem for King Robert
  • Documents on the Peace of God (selections)
  • Gesta Francorum (selections)
  • Odo of Deuil, The Journey of Louis VII to the East (selections)
  • Bernard of Clairvaux, Letter to Pope Eugenius

8. Reform and Politics in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

  • Texts on the Reform Movement & Investiture Controversy (ed. Miller) Maureen Miller, “Religion Makes a Difference”

9. The New Schools of the Twelfth Century and Political Theology

  • Peter Abelard, Christian Theology, Bk. II
  • John of Salisbury, Policraticus (selections)

10. The Iberian Masters

  • Avicenna, The Decisive Treatise (selections)
  • Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed (selections)
  • Isaac Abravanel, Biblical Commentaries (selections)

11. Aquinas and the Parisian Controversies

  • Thomas Aquinas, Selected readings

12. The Avignon Papacy and the Crisis of Church and State Part I: The Case for the Church

  • John of Paris
  • Giles of Rome
  • Bulls of Boniface VIII and John XXII
  • Donation of Constantine

13. The Crisis of Church and State Part II. The Case for the State

  • Marsilius of Padua
  • William of Ockham
  • Lorenzo Valla
  • Bartolus of Sassoferrato

14. The Politics of Faith and Popular Dissent

  • Arnold of Brescia (select texts)
  • John Wyclif Piers Plowman (selections, esp. Book VII)