Overview
- Comprehensive introduction to religious indifference
- Topical analysis of religious transformations in contemporary societies
- In-depth sociological, historical and anthropological case studies
- Concerted conceptualizations of religion, secularity and nonreligion
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Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book provides a conceptually and empirically rich introduction to religious indifference on the basis of original anthropological, historical and sociological research.
Religious indifference is a central category for understanding contemporary societies, and a controversial one. For some scholars, a growing religious indifference indicates a dramatic decline in religiosity and epitomizes the endpoint of secularization processes. Others view it as an indicator of moral apathy and philosophical nihilism, whilst yet others see it as paving the way for new forms of political tolerance and solidarity.
This volume describes and analyses the symbolic power of religious indifference and the conceptual contestations surrounding it. Detailed case studies cover anthropological and qualitative data from the UK, Germany, Estonia, the USA, Canada, and India analyse large quantitative data sets, and provide philosophical-literary inquiries into the phenomenon. They highlight how, for different actors and agendas, religious indifference can constitute an objective or a challenge. Pursuing a relational approach to non-religion, the book conceptualizes religious indifference in its interrelatedness with religion as well as more avowed forms of non-religion.
Reviews
“This book provides rigorous, path-breaking analyses of secularity, non-religion, secularization, irreligion, and most importantly, social identities, positions, and postures that are neither anti-religious nor pro-religious, but hovering in a realm characterized by detachment, disengagement, irrelevance, inconsequence, unimportance, and insignificance. … Religious Indifference is a path-breaking contribution to the study of secularism and nonreligion, no doubt.” (Phil Zuckerman, Reading Religion, readingreligion.org, September, 2017)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Johannes Quack is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Zurich. His (ethnographic) research interests include popular Hinduism, secularism and nonreligion, therapeutic pluralism, and knowledge (trans)formations in general. He is the author of Disenchanting India: Organized Rationalism and Criticism of Religion in India (OUP, 2012) and co-edits the book series Religion and Its Others: Studies in Religion, Nonreligion, and Secularity (De Gruyter).
Cora Schuh was a research associate in the Emmy Noether Project “The Diversity of Nonreligion”, headed by Johannes Quack. She graduated from Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig, where she was also part of the project “Multiple Secularities”, headed by Monika Wohlrab-Sahr. She is currently working on her PhD thesis on “Nonreligion, Secularity and Politics: Social Liberalism in the Netherlands” (working title).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Religious Indifference
Book Subtitle: New Perspectives From Studies on Secularization and Nonreligion
Editors: Johannes Quack, Cora Schuh
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48476-1
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-48474-7Published: 21 April 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-83951-6Published: 08 May 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-48476-1Published: 11 April 2017
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 273
Number of Illustrations: 3 illustrations in colour
Topics: Sociology of Religion, Sociological Theory, Religious Studies, general