The World's Religions: A Contemporary Reader

By: Arvind Sharma

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis: History is never contemporary, for the contemporary is perpetually slipping into history, but with some license one may refer to the immediate past as contemporary history. This point possesses some additional justification when the field to which it is applied is that of the world's religions because so much has happened in such a small time in the recent past, so far as this world's religions are concerned. To grasp this point one needs to realize that what may be called the "secular hypothesis" dominated the worldview not only of academia and the media but also the world of politicians and bureaucrats not that long ago. The belief was so widespread as to have been left virtually unarticulated, that religion as a factor in human affairs was either destined to oblivion, as the Communists would have us believe, or destined to retreat into the private realm, as liberal ideology, characterized by capitalism, would have us imagine. Not many cared about the world's religions at the turn of the century, when secularization, hand in hand with globalization, seemed to be proceeding apace, converting the world into both one market and one marketplace of ideas, promising homogeneity as a unifying force for humanity, destined to erode religious diversity as all of us became more like each other. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 could then be treated like a retrogressive hiccup of tradition in this forward march of modernity.