Theos Report on Religious Freedom

Nick Spencer, How to Think About Religious Freedom (London: Theos, 2014).

Yet another new report from Theos...

Here’s part of Jonathan Chaplin’s recommendation:

‘In this report, Nick Spencer cuts through the complexities and offers us a wonderfully clear and judicious overview of what is at stake, why religious freedom is so important to human beings and can’t be taken for granted, and how it can be more intelligently and fairly balanced with the legitimate claims for equal treatment and nondiscrimination of which our society is justly proud.’

More information is available here, and the full report is available for download here.

Theos Report on Belief in Post-Religious Britain

The Spirit of Things Unseen: Belief in Post-Religious Britain (London: Theos, 2013).

The latest Theos report, The Spirit of Things Unseen, ‘is based on research, commissioned by CTVC and Theos and conducted by ComRes, which looks at the state of spiritual belief in “postreligious” Britain. It finds that spiritual beliefs, in particular the more esoteric ones, are no weaker today – and in some instances stronger – than they were in the past’.

More information is available here, and the full report is available for download here.

Three Theos Reports

Theos, Religion and Law (London: Theos, 2012).

Nick Spencer & Holly Weldin, Post-Religious Britain? The Faith of the Faithless (London: Theos, 2012).

Hats off to the ever-prodigious folk at Theos who are releasing three new reports before the year is out. The above two are already available, and the arrival of the third is imminent.

Religion and Law is ‘a collection of essays written by sixteen leading legal experts exploring the complex and often controversial relationship between religion and the law in Britain today’. According to the blurb, ‘it explores the often contested relationship between religious commitment and British law, seeking to challenge the ultimately oppressive reduction of religion to the private realm, and questioning, among other contentious matters, whether human rights and religious commitment are fully compatible’.

Post-Religious Britain? The Faith of the Faithless ‘examines the shape of unbelief in Britain today’. The report ‘llustrates the mistakes of the secularisation thesis, rejecting the common understanding that as we become less institutionally religious, we necessarily become more secular or atheist. It paints a different picture of modern society – one in which the lines between the religious and non-religious are becoming increasingly blurred’.

The third report, From Goodness to God: Why Religion Makes Sense of our Moral Commitments, to be published later this week, ‘argues that religious belief provides a better foundation for moral reasoning than atheism’.

Mark Vernon on Faith and Well-Being

The latest issue of The Tablet contains an interesting piece by Mark Vernon (available online here) on ‘why religion is good for you’.

After presenting some of the well-known indicators of this, he says that ‘the evidence becomes more complicated when a further, crucial question is asked. Just why is it that religion has positive effects?’, noting that ‘a range of possibilities are mooted, and hotly contested’.

A first possibility he explores is ‘the proscriptive character of religion’, adding that proscriptions work ‘not when they are perceived as persecutory commandments but rather when they are perceived as charting a path to a new way of life’, perhaps especially combined when an individual’s well-being ‘is boosted by the social support provided in groups’. Another possibility, via Richard Layard, is emotional habits, where ‘religious practices train individuals to control their feelings’.

Vernon (who has a book due out soon – The Big Questions: God) writes that ‘many of the researchers in the positive psychology field are searching for ways of reformulating such religious attitudes for a secular age’, exhibiting a desire ‘to raid religious traditions for their wisdom, while removing the theological scaffolding that has traditionally supported them’ (Alain de Botton is a well-known recent example of this).

But, if I have understood him correctly, Vernon wonders whether such researchers have overlooked... God, noting that, for believers, goodwill and well-being ‘are happy by-products of the main task, which is not actually to have a successful life. It is to come to know God’.

As he concludes:

‘It is striking that atheistic writers and researchers are coming to a new appreciation of religion. Going are the days when faith could simply be written off. Nonetheless, I suspect that their ideas will flounder because a basic and obvious question is being avoided... Might human well-being actually have something to do with God?’

Linda Woodhead on Religion in the Public Square

Linda Woodhead, ‘Restoring Religion to the Public Square: Faith’s Role in Civil Society’, The Tablet (28 January 2012).

One of the sample articles in this week’s The Tablet is by Linda Woodhead, on religion in the public square. Woodhead has been the director of a £12 million research project on ‘Religion and Society’, and she promises that some results of the research will be aired in future issues of The Tablet as well as through a series of ‘Faith Debates’ to be held in Westminster in the Spring.

At one point in this article, she draws an interesting analogy with feminism:

‘For decades, feminists battled to correct the distortion whereby the “male gaze” determined what was seen in history, literature, politics, and even the laboratory. The broadening of perspective that resulted changed the way we view the world. Now another revolution is needed: one to correct the secular gaze that airbrushes religion away. It’s a crazily narrow-minded approach, which has to turn a blind eye to the luxuriantly variegated religiosity of most of the world, and ignore the past. Including our own.’

Reminding us of four of the ‘most momentous events of our times’ – the revolution in Iran, the collapse of Communism, the attacks of 9/11, the Arab Spring – she notes the somewhat obvious point that ‘all had to do with religion as well as politics’.

Woodhead thinks there are some signs of change in higher education:

‘Students are now more openly interested in religion, and a new generation of academics is taking the subject more seriously, even in traditionally secular disciplines... [E]ven with British and other European students, there has been a shift since I started teaching in the early 1990s. They don’t carry the baggage about religion that their predecessors did. Often they carry no baggage at all: they are simply ignorant about religion. But their interest, and their open-mindedness, makes them eager for knowledge.’

An Interview with Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell

Richard Madsen, An Interview with Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, The Hedgehog Review 13.1 (Spring 2011), 59-68.

I’ve been told I need to read the latest book from Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell – American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

I haven’t done so yet, and might not do so given other priorities... Meanwhile, The Hedgehog Review carries an interview with Putnam and Campbell which might provide a glimpse into some of their insights.

Here’s the publisher’s blurb for the book:

‘American Grace is a major achievement, a groundbreaking examination of religion in America. Unique among nations, America is deeply religious, religiously diverse, and remarkably tolerant. But in recent decades the nation’s religious landscape has been reshaped. America has experienced three seismic shocks, say Robert Putnam and David Campbell. In the 1960s, religious observance plummeted. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, a conservative reaction produced the rise of evangelicalism and the Religious Right. Since the 1990s, however, young people, turned off by that linkage between faith and conservative politics, have abandoned organised religion. The result has been a growing polarisation – the ranks of religious conservatives and secular liberals have swelled, leaving a dwindling group of religious moderates in between. At the same time, personal interfaith ties are strengthening. Interfaith marriage has increased while religious identities have become more fluid. Putnam and Campbell show how this denser web of personal ties brings surprising interfaith tolerance, notwithstanding the so-called culture wars. American Grace promises to be the most important book in decades about American religious life.’

Sherif Girgis et al. on Marriage

Sherif Girgis, Robert George, and Ryan T. Anderson, ‘What is Marriage?’, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 34, (Winter 2010), 245-87.

Trevin Wax links to what looks like an interesting, and likely controversial piece on marriage in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

The abstract reads as follows:

‘In the article, we argue that as a moral reality, marriage is the union of a man and a woman who make a permanent and exclusive commitment to each other of the type that is naturally fulfilled by bearing and rearing children together, and renewed by acts that constitute the behavioral part of the process of reproduction. We further argue that there are decisive principled as well as prudential reasons for the state to enshrine this understanding of marriage in its positive law, and to resist the call to recognize as marriages the sexual unions of same-sex partners. Besides making this positive argument for our position and raising several objections to the view that same-sex unions should be recognized, we address what we consider the strongest philosophical objections to our view of the nature of marriage, as well as more pragmatic concerns about the point or consequences of implementing it as a policy.’

A Conversation with James Davison Hunter

Following an earlier review (by James K.A. Smith) of James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World, The Other Journal is now carrying a conversation between Smith and Hunter.

Forthcoming James Davison Hunter Book: To Change the World (2)

James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 368pp., ISBN 9780199730803.

Justin Taylor is blogging his way through this book (out in the USA, but not yet in the UK), starting here. I suspect he will not be the only one to do so.

He also draws attention to a website – Faithful Presence – ‘created to perpetuate a conversation that has already started around this book by those taken by its argument’, providing ‘resources and connections for those who seek to live faithfully present in our generation’.

Forthcoming James Davison Hunter Book: To Change the World (1)

James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 368pp., ISBN 9780199730803.

Coming with endorsements from Tim Keller, Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, this book is already being described as ‘one of the most important books published in 2010’ (see, for example, the earlier heads-up by Justin Taylor at Between Two Worlds, where the comments posted there give some early indications as to how some sectors may respond to the book) – and it’s not even been published yet.

The book can be found on the publisher’s UK website here, but there is more information on the US website here. The Amazon link allows a peak inside the book here.

The volume itself is divided into three main ‘essays’, each containing several chapters, as follows:

Essay One
Christianity and World-Changing

1. Christian Faith and the Task of World-Changing
2. Culture: The Common View
3. The Failure of the Common View
4. An Alternative View of Culture and Cultural Change in Eleven Propositions
5. Evidence in History
6. The Cultural Economy of American Christianity
7. For and Against the Mandate of Creation

Essay Two
Rethinking Power

1. The Problem of Power
2. Power and Politics in American Culture
3. The Christian Right
4. The Christian Left
5. The Neo-Anabaptists
6. Illusion, Irony, and Tragedy
7. Rethinking Power: Theological Reflections

Essay Three
Toward a New City Commons: Reflections on a Theology of Faithful Presence

1. The Challenge of Faithfulness
2. Old Cultural Wineskins
3. The Groundwork for an Alternative Way
4. Toward a Theology of Faithful Presence
5. The Burden of Leadership: A Theology of Faithful Presence in Practice
6. Toward a New City Commons

Here is the description of the book from the publishers:

‘The call to make the world a better place is inherent in the Christian belief and practice. But why have efforts to change the world by Christians so often failed or gone tragically awry? And how might Christians in the 21st century live in ways that have integrity with their traditions and are more truly transformative? In To Change the World, James Davison Hunter offers persuasive – and provocative – answers to these questions.

Hunter begins with a penetrating appraisal of the most popular models of world-changing among Christians today, highlighting the ways they are inherently flawed and therefore incapable of generating the change to which they aspire. Because change implies power, all Christian eventually embrace strategies of political engagement. Hunter offers a trenchant critique of the political theologies of the Christian Right and Left and the Neo-Anabaptists, taking on many respected leaders, from Charles Colson to Jim Wallis and Stanley Hauerwas. Hunter argues that all too often these political theologies worsen the very problems they are designed to solve. What is really needed is a different paradigm of Christian engagement with the world, one that Hunter calls “faithful presence” – an ideal of Christian practice that is not only individual but institutional; a model that plays out not only in all relationships but in our work and all spheres of social life. He offers real-life examples, large and small, of what can be accomplished through the practice of “faithful presence.” Such practices will be more fruitful, Hunter argues, more exemplary, and more deeply transfiguring than any more overtly ambitious attempts can ever be.

Written with keen insight, deep faith, and profound historical grasp, To Change the World will forever change the way Christians view and talk about their role in the modern world.’