Lincoln Theological Institute

New Publication!

The New Visibility of Religion: Studies in Religion and Cultural Hermeneutics is the latest in the Continuum Studies in Religion and Political Culture series edited by Graham Ward and Michael Hoelzl and will be published in early October.

Synopsis

This is a unique collection of essays that brings together contributions from theology, aesthetics, social and political science, philosophy and cultural theory to examine the surge in the public visibility of religion.Since the late 1980s, sociologists have been drawing our attention to an international surge in the public visibility of religion. This has increasingly challenged two central aspects of modern western European culture: first, the assumption that as we became more modern we would become more secularised and religion would disappear; and secondly, that religion and politics should occupy radically differentiated spheres in which private conviction did not exert itself within the public realm. The new visibility of religion is not simply a matter of what Keppel famously called 'The Revenge of God', that is, the resurgence of Christian, Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism. Religion is permeating western culture in many different forms from contemporary continental philosophy, the arts and the media, to the rhetoric of international politicians.This collection of essays brings together a unique collection of voices from theology, aesthetics, social and political science, philosophy and cultural theory in an exploration of four major aspects of this new visibility of religion: the revision of the secularisation thesis, the relationship between religion and violence, the new re-enchantment of reality and the return of metaphysics.