Exploration of postsecularism in theory and practice of urban life, evaluating the secular-to-postsecular shift in terms of public space, building use, governance and civil society.

The re-emergence of the religious in secular domains has led prominent scholars such as Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor to speculate about a new ‘postsecular’ age. The alleged shift from the secular to the postsecular is most visible in the spheres of urban public space, governance and civil society. This volume addresses contemporary relations between religion, politics and urban societies primarily from a theoretical perspective, while also paying attention to empirical manifestations of the central conceptual ideas. The primary focus is the relations between public religion, deprivatization of religion and theorizations of modernity and modernities, with the secondary and closely related focus on theorizing postsecular urbanism including the role of faith based organizations (FBOs) in cities. Contributors include: Justin Beaumont, James A. Beckford, Luke Bretherton, Paul Cloke, Candice Dias, Wilhelm Gräb, Maaike de Haardt, Jason Hackworth, Christoph Jedan, Kim Knott, Michiel Leezenberg, Bernice Martin, David Martin, Gregor McLennan, Arie L. Molendijk, Nihan Özdemir Sönmez, Martijn Oosterbaan, Andy F. Sanders, Anke Schuster, and Hetty Zock.

Post-Secular Society argues for several characteristics of the secular: the experience of living in a secular age and the experience of living without religion as a normal condition. Religion in the West is often seen as marked by both innovation and disarray. In spite of differing approaches and perspectives of secularization, rational choice and de-secularization, many scholars agree that the West is experiencing a general "resurgence" of religion across most Western societies. Post-Secular Society discusses the changes in religion related to globalization and New Age forms of popular religion. The contributors review religion that is rooted in the globalized political economy and the relationship of post-secularism to popular consumer culture. Also reviewed is innovative discourse as a religious belief system, theories of the post-secular, religious, and spiritual well-being, and healing practices in Finland and environmentalism. This paperback edition includes a new preface by Peter Nynas.

At a time of heightened neoliberal globalisation and crisis, welfare state retrenchment and desecularisation of society, amid uniquely European controversies over immigration, integration and religious-based radicalism, this timely book explores the role played by faith-based organisations (FBOs), which are growing in importance in the provision of social services in the European context. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the contributions to the volume present original research examples and a pan-European perspective to assess the role of FBOs in combating poverty and various expressions of exclusion and social distress in cities across Europe. This significant and highly topical volume should become a vital reference source for the burgeoning number of studies that are likely follow and will make essential reading for students and academics in social policy, sociology, geography, politics, urban studies and theology/ religious studies.

This book provides a conceptual, historical and contemporary context to the relationships between gender, religion and cities. It draws together these three components to provide an innovative view of how religion and gender interact and affect urban form and city planning. While there have been many books that deal with religion and cities; gender and cities; and gender and religion, this book is unique in bringing these three subjects together. This trio of inter-relationships is first explored within Western Christianity: in Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy and in the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. A wider perspective is then provided in chapters on the ways in which Islam shapes urban development and influences the position of Muslim women in urban space. While official religions have declined in the West there is still a desire for new forms of spirituality, and this is discussed in chapters on municipal spirituality and on the rise of paganism and the links to both environmentalism and feminism. Finally, ways of taking into account both gender and religion within the statutory urban planning system are presented. This book will be of great interest to those researching environment and gender, urban planning and sustainability, human geography and religion.

This book explores the hopeful possibility that emerging geographies of postsecularity are able to contribute significantly to the understanding of how common life may be shared, and how caring for the common goods of social justice, well-being, equality, solidarity and respect for difference may be imagined and practiced. Drawing on recent geographic theory to recalibrate ideas of the postsecular public sphere, the authors develop the case for postsecularity as a condition of being that is characterised by practices of receptive generosity, rapprochement between religious and secular ethics, and a hopeful re-enchantment and re-shaping of desire towards common life. The authors highlight the contested formation of ethical subjectivity under neoliberalism and the emergence of postsecularity within this process as an ethically-attuned politics which changes relations between religion and secularity and animates novel, hopeful imaginations, subjectivities, and praxes as alternatives to neoliberal norms. The spaces and subjectivities of emergent postsecularity are examined through a series of innovative case studies, including food banks, drug and alcohol treatment, refugee humanitarian activism in Calais, homeless participatory art projects, community responses to the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand, amongst others. The book also traces the global conditions for postsecularity beyond the Western and predominantly Christian-secular nexus of engagement. This is a valuable resource for students in several academic disciplines, including geography, sociology, politics, religious studies, international development and anthropology. It will be of great interest to secular and faith-based practitioners working in religion, spirituality, politics or more widely in public policy, urban planning and community development.

This book locates spatial dimensions possible for a global identity, while incorporating the presence of collaborative and contentious religious, psycho-social and physical borders. It highlights the significance of space in the construction of racial, gender, religious, cultural idiosyncrasies where private and public space projects the power mechanisms which allocate borders. The literary narratives discussed in this collection project a trajectory of voices of the East and West, male and female, crossing boundaries between identity, race, gender and class. The book proffers that spatial borders are social constructs to propagate the power mechanisms of hierarchical structures, defying imbrications, explored here, which may be used to reflect diversity as a model for global space. These explorations are journeys back and forth in time and space towards hierarchies formed through the imposition of borders defining race, gender and power which may be considered ‘post’ in the postmodern, postcolonial, post 9/11, post-secular and postfeminist senses.

Rescripting Religion in the City explores the role of faith and religious practices as strategies for understanding and negotiating the migratory experience. Leading international scholars draw on case studies of urban settings in the global north and south. Presenting a nuanced understanding of the religious identities of migrants within the 'modern metropolis' this book makes a significant contribution to fields as diverse as twentieth-century immigration history, the sociology of religion and migration studies, as well as historical and urban geography and practical theology.

This comprehensive volume provides crucial insights from contemporary academics and practitioners into how positive interventions might be made into post-secular political spaces that have emerged in the wake of the economic, political, and social upheavals of the 2008 global financial crisis. The failure of liberal democracy to deal effectively with such challenges has led to scapegoating of the poor, immigrants, and Muslims, and contributed to the populist electoral success of, among others, the Leave campaign during the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, and Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign. These shocks have highlighted contemporary political spaces defined by what has been termed ‘all the posts’: postmodern, post-Christendom, post-liberal, post-political, and post-secular. This collection examines emerging attempts to understand and advance the cause of wellbeing within this context. The authors address a variety of key issues including: (re)configuring mythologies for the common good; deploying love and friendship politically; motivating new social movements; valuing the other; recovering displaced and devalued political narratives; finding alternatives to the previously dominant neo-liberalism; listening deeply for social transformation; and overcoming adversarial party politics. This book was originally published online as a special issue of the journal Global Discourse.

Urban spaces have always functioned as cradles and laboratories for religious movements and spiritualities. The urban forms a central and nourishing agent for the creation of new religious expressions, and continually negotiates new ways of being spiritual and establishing spiritual ideas and practices. This book explores the intense and complex interplay between the (post) modern city and new religious and spiritual movement, bringing the city and its annexes into the foreground of current research into religion. It develops a new, ethnography-based analysis of the ways in which the pluralist experience of the "urban" inscribes itself into various religious practices and vice versa: how do religiosity and spirituality appropriate and transform meanings of the urban? It focuses on new religious expressions, cosmologies and ways of life that go beyond established belief systems and religious understandings, and explores new conceptions of the word "urban" in a world of increasingly extended urban environments. The book examines how cities are both considered as sites and sources of spirituality, where the globalization of religions takes place as well as the fact that globalization is linked closely to the process of localization. The socio-cultural and political uniqueness of the specific urban context are analyzed to present an innovative perspective on how the interplay between the urban, spiritual and religious should be understood. This book brings a timely new perspective and will be of interest to academics and students in geography, sociology, urban studies, cultural studies and anthropology, as well as for urban planners and policy makers.