Abstract
The connections between religion and postmodernity are as yet quite unclear. In general, sociologists of religion have not exhibited much enthusiasm for postmodernity. Theorists of postmodernity often seem equally lukewarm about religion, an issue that does not figure prominently in their accounts. If modern sociology, appealing to secularisation theory, seemed to marginalise religion by assuming it was a dying phenomenon, then theorists of the postmodern have performed little better.
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Notes and References
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 195.
Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992).
James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
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See Barry Smart, postmodernity (London and Boston, MA: Routledge, 1993).
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See also Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 103–11 and Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).
Roland Roberston, ‘Humanity, globalization and worldwide religious resurgence’, Sociological Analysis, vol. 46, no. 3, 1985, pp. 219–42.
See Martin Marty, The Fundamentalism Project vols 1–4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991–4)
David Lyon, ‘A bit of a circus: notes on postmodernity and New Age’, Religion, vol. 23, no. 2, 1993, pp. 117–26; and Jonathan Sacks, The Persistence of Faith (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991).
Paul Heelas, ‘The New Age in Cultural Context: the premodern, the Modern and the postmodern’, Religion, vol. 23, no. 2, 1993, pp. 103–16.
Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 202–3.
Ivan Varga, ‘Modernity or pseudo-modernity? Secularization or pseudosecularization: reflections on east-central Europe’, in Richard R. Roberts (ed.), Religion and the Transformations of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 231–47.
Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 6.
William Westfall, Two Worlds: Nineteenth Century Protestantism in Ontario (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991).
For example, Bob Goudzwaard and Harry de Lange, Beyond Poverty and Affluence: Towards an Economy of Care (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).
John Milbank, ‘Problematizing the secular: the post-postmodern agenda’, in Phillipa Berry and Andrew Wernick (eds), Shadow of Spirit (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 43.
David Bebbington, Evangelicanism in Modern Britain (London: Unwin-Hyman, 1989), pp. 2–17.
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© 1999 Kieran Flanagan and Peter C. Jupp
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Lyon, D. (1999). Religion and the Postmodern: Old Problems, New Prospects. In: Flanagan, K., Jupp, P.C. (eds) Postmodernity, Sociology and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14989-6_2
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