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  "textContent": "Pecora - Religion and Modernity in Current Debate - JCRT 4.2 \n\nReligion and Modernity in Current Debate\n\nVincent P. Pecora  \nUniversity of California, Los Angeles\n\n  \n\nAny attempt to talk briefly about such immense subjects as \"religion\" and \"modernity\" is a foolhardy enterprise at best, and I take up this task with many misgivings. But in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, a subsequent \"war\" focused mainly on what is now widely perceived to be global networks of religious (that is, primarily Islamic) terrorism, including renewed armed struggle between Palestinians and Israelis the religious elements of which cannot be ignored, it is hard not to go once again where better angels might fear to tread. The recent American invasion of Iraq has made the task of re-thinking the relationship of modernity and religion all the more pressing, since it now appears that a secular Western power with a still vibrant Christian culture'the United States'will attempt to create _ex nihilo_ a new government and civil society in Iraq, which was once the cradle of Islamic civilization. The resurgence of a lively discussion about a \"clash of civilizations,\" the invocation of \"crusades\" and _jihads_, and the large body of assumptions about the secular nature of the contemporary West and the religious sensibility of those who oppose it'assumptions that appear on both sides of this divide'make it almost impossible, I think, for informed people not to wonder once again about the complicated relationship between the so-called \"modern world\" and religious belief.\n\n    > The New York and Washington suicide bombers seem to have been middle-class, educated men, not poor refugees. Instead of getting a wise leadership that stresses education, mass mobilization and patient organization in the service of a cause, the poor and the desperate are often conned into the magical thinking and quick bloody solutions that such appalling models provide, wrapped in lying religious claptrap. This remains true in the Middle East generally, Palestine in particular, but also in the United States, surely the most religious of all countries. It is also a major failure of the class of secular intellectuals not to have redoubled their efforts to provide analysis and models to offset the undoubted sufferings of the large mass of their people, immiserated and impoverished by globalism and an unyielding militarism with scarcely anything to turn to except blind violence and vague promises of future salvation.\n\n    In such models, US retaliation in Afghanistan and the larger Western focus on Islam as the key to the nature of a modern Arab consciousness falsely assumes a uniformity of world view'one radical Islam'where in fact many and diverse Islams exist, some far more rationalized than others (not to mention very small pockets of equally impoverished Christians in the case of Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, and elsewhere). More to the point, this model argues that in blaming religious militancy for the economic and political shortcomings of the Arab Middle East and its violent reaction against the West, the West mistakes the symptom for the illness. The turn toward so-called fundamentalist, less rationalized forms of religion in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and so forth is for the liberal-left mainly an ambiguous consequence of neocolonialism.\n\n  \n\nWorks Cited\n\n> Ali, Tariq. _The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity_. London: Verso, 2002.\n> \n> Arnold, Matthew. _Complete Prose Works_, Vol. 5. Ed. R. H. Super. (11 Vols.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960-1977.\n> \n> Asad, Talal. _Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam_. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.\n> \n> Bellah, Robert. _Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World_. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.\n> \n> Berger, Peter L. _The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion_. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1967.\n> \n> Berkes, Niyazi. _The Development of Secularism in Turkey_. New York: Routledge, 1998.\n> \n> Buruma, Ian. \"The Blood Lust of Identity.\" _New York Review of Books_, XLIX: 6 (April 11, 2002), 12-14.\n> \n> Dobbelaere, Karel. \"Secularization: A Multi-Dimensional Concept.\" _Current Sociology_, 29:2 (Summer, 1981), 3-213.\n> \n> Durkheim, Emile. _The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life_. Trans. Joseph Ward Swain. New York: Free Press, 1965.\n> \n> Elon, Amos. \"No Exit.\" _New York Review of Books_, XLIX: 9 (May 23, 2002), 15-20.\n> \n> Geertz, Clifford. _Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics_. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.\n> \n> \\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_, ed. _Old Societies and New States_. New York: Free Press, 1963.\n> \n> Gellner, Ernest. _Nations and Nationalism_. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.\n> \n> Hill, Christopher. _Puritanism and Revolution: The English Revolution of the 17th Century_. New York: Schocken, 1964.\n> \n> Keddie, Nikki. \"Secularism and the State: Towards Clarity and Global Comparison.\" _New Left Review_, October-November, 1997, 21-40.\n> \n> Kosmin, Barry and Seymour P. Lachman. _One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society_. New York: Harmony Books, 1993.\n> \n> Lewis, Bernard. _What Went Wrong?_ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.\n> \n> Martin, David. _A General Theory of Secularization_. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978.\n> \n> Marx, Karl. \"On the Jewish Question.\" _Karl Marx: Selected Writings_. Ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.\n> \n> \\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_ and Frederick Engels. _The Communist Manifesto_. Trans. Samuel Moore. New York: International Publishers, 1948.\n> \n> Nietzsche, Friedrich. _On the Genealogy of Morals_. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.\n> \n> Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg). \"Christendom or Europe.\" _Novalis: Philosophical Writings_. Trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997, 137-52.\n> \n> Putnam, Hilary. \"Wittgenstein on Religious Belief.\" _On Community_. Ed. Leroy S. Rouner. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991, 56-75.\n> \n> Said, Edward. Commentary in Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 20-26 September 2001, No. 552.\n> \n> \\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_. _Orientalism_. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.\n> \n> Schmitt, Carl. _Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty_. Trans. George Schwab. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.\n> \n> Slackman, Michael. \"Tunisia's 2 Faces of Progress.\" _Los Angeles Times_, Monday, June 10, 2002, A1.\n> \n> Smith, Anthony D. _National Identity_. London: Penguin, 1991.\n> \n> Wallis, Roy, and Steve Bruce. \"Secularization: The Orthodox Model.\" _Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis_. Ed. Steve Bruce. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, 8-30.\n> \n> Weber, Max. _The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_. Trans. Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976.\n> \n> \\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_. _The Theory of Social and Economic Organization_. Ed. Talcott Parsons. Trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. New York: The Free Press, 1947.\n> \n> Wilson, Bryan. _Religion in Sociological Perspective_. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.\n> \n> Wittgenstein, Ludwig. _Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief_. Ed. Cyril Barrett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.\n\n  \n\nNotes\n  \n\n> Vincent P. Pecora is the Director of the Center for Modern and Contemporary Studies and the Director of the Humanities Consortium at UCLA. His work addresses modern literature, intellectual history, and literary theory. His books are: _Nations and Identities: Classic Readings_ (Blackwell Publishers, 2001), an edited anthology of historical documents focused on the various meanings of \"national identity\" in the West, from the Reformation to the present; _Households of the Soul_ (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), a study of the household as fact and metaphor in anthropology, literature, and literary theory in the modern period; and _Self and Form in Modern Narrative_ (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), an analysis of the rise of modernism in the context of the rationalized society. At present, he is working on a book about the question of religion in modern intellectual life.\n\n  \n\n> \n\n  \n\n ' 2003 Vincent P. Pecora. All rights reserved.  \nUpdated 07/28/21.   \nhttp://jcrt.org/archives/04.2/pecora/\n\n---",
  "title": "Religion and Modernity in Current Debate"
}