Product Description: What is the future of Christianity in the twenty-first century West? Are Western societies growing more secular, leaving cherished religious traditions behind? Or have modernity's secularizing currents generated equally powerful desecularizing and resacralizing currents? Should secularization theory, the dominant paradigm in the social scientific study of religion for much of the twentieth century, be thrown in the dustbin, as some scholars have suggested? Or does it remain useful, even indispensable, despite its limitations? How are globalizing processes, bringing diverse religious communities into increasingly close contact, affecting Western Christian communities? Such questions have attracted increasing attention from scholars in many disciplines during recent years and are at the heart of the essays in this volume...read more

Product Description: For much of the twentieth century, New Zealand historians, like most Western scholars, largely took it for granted that as modernity waxed religion would wane. Secularization-the fading into insignificance of religion-would distinguish the modern era from previous ages...read more

Product Description: This book, written by a group of New Zealand scholars, theologians, historians, and lawyers, examines the question of New Zealand’s culture and Christianity. The contributors explore recent debates over secularization, exploring its merits and explanatory power, while also showing its limitations...read more

This innovative collection of original essays focuses on the ways in which geography, gender, race, and religion influenced the reception of Darwinism in the English-speaking world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The contributions to this volume collectively illustrate the importance of local social, physical, and religious arrangements, while revealing that neither distance from Darwin's home at Down nor size of community greatly influenced how various regions responded to Darwinism. Essays spanning the world from Great Britain and North America to Australia and New Zealand explore the various meanings for Darwinism in these widely separated locales, while other chapters focus on the difference it made in the debates over evolution. (view table of contents)

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