The Sacred Secular examines cultural spaces where people are experiencing something sacred. These places are not in the church. They’re in yoga studios, neighborhood potlucks, and TED Talks. Dottie Escobedo-Frank and Rob Rynders see lessons for the church in these spaces. They see new ways we can convey to people that the church is uniquely sacred and significant and that Jesus is for them. These glimpses into the sacred-secular will inspire creative church leaders to set aside their assumptions about what church looks like. The Sacred Secular nurtures empowerment, creativity, spiritual movement, and the courage to embody the sacredness and substance of our faith. “Many of us in the church (including clergy) feel we have more in common with the ‘spiritual but not religious’ than we have with lots of church folks these days. We are just as spiritually hungry and thirsty as ever, but we’re open to finding God in surprising places and spaces . . . including ‘secular’ ones. This beautifully written book is all about that phenomenon. I think you’re going to love it.” —Brian D. McLaren, author/speaker, brianmclaren.net “Be prepared to hear contemporary stories akin to the Apostle Peter discovering God in an ‘outsider’—Cornelius—in twenty-first–century urban America. This book is a jewel from two missional church practitioners in The United Methodist Church. It offers wisdom, vision, creativity, and humility that will mark the gospel-bearing church of the future. I highly recommend The Sacred Secular to pastors, church planters, and laity who want their congregations to know how to develop culturally connected faith communities in our rapidly changing world.” —Elaine A. Heath, Dean, Duke Divinity School, Duke University, Durham, NC

This book develops a theory of existential security. It demonstrates that the publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward more secular orientations during the past half century, but also that the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before. This second edition expands the theory and provides new and updated evidence from a broad perspective and in a wide range of countries. This confirms that religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially in poorer nations and in failed states. Conversely, a systematic erosion of religious practices, values and beliefs has occurred among the more prosperous strata in rich nations.

How do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled across the world? In exploring this theme, The Secular Sacred focuses on diverse topics such as the dynamic roles of Carnival in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria, and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands. The contributions focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce, and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. The Secular Sacred will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, political scientists, and social psychologists, as well as students and scholars of cultural studies and semiotics. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This secularization has long been recognized as a decisive turning point in the history of American education. John Roberts and James Turner identify the forces and explain the events that reformed the college curriculum during this era.".

Focusing on the important relationship between the 'sacred' and the 'secular', this book demonstrates that it is not paradoxical to think in terms of both secular and sacred or neither, in different times and places. International experts from a range of disciplinary perspectives draw on local, national, and international contexts to provide a fresh analytical approach to understanding these two contested poles. Exploring such phenomena at an individual, institutional, or theoretical level, each chapter contributes to the central message of the book - that the ‘in between’ is real, embodied and experienced every day and informs, and is informed by, intersecting social identities. Social Identities between the Sacred and the Secular provides an essential resource for continued research into these concepts, challenging us to re-think where the boundaries of sacred and secular lie and what may lie between.

Revolutionizing the lives and renewing the minds of believers and local churches from North America to Africa, the Kingdom Lifestyle Bible Studies help people grow in their relationships with the King and his kingdom. Each tested, insightful study is designed for group or individual use and equips believers to engage in a vibrant life with Christ and offer healing to a broken world.

For many centuries a false distinction between "sacred" and "secular" has plagued the church, divided the Body, and discouraged the people of God. For over twenty years, Michael Baer has been writing and speaking about the integration of all of life as sacred under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. He is one of the early founders of the modern Business as Mission movement, the founder of International Micro Enterprise Development (aka the Jholdas Project) and the author of numerous books on business, missions, and integrated Kingdom living.

Boyle examines influential readings on the Bible as literature--notably Herder, Schleiermacher, Hegel and Levinas--and then applies them to literary writings.

Sovereignty and the Sacred challenges contemporary models of polity and economy through a two-step engagement with the history of religions. Beginning with the recognition of the convergence in the history of European political theology between the sacred and the sovereign as creating “states of exception”—that is, moments of rupture in the normative order that, by transcending this order, are capable of re-founding or remaking it—Robert A. Yelle identifies our secular, capitalist system as an attempt to exclude such moments by subordinating them to the calculability of laws and markets. The second step marshals evidence from history and anthropology that helps us to recognize the contribution of such states of exception to ethical life, as a means of release from the legal or economic order. Yelle draws on evidence from the Hebrew Bible to English deism, and from the Aztecs to ancient India, to develop a theory of polity that finds a place and a purpose for those aspects of religion that are often marginalized and dismissed as irrational by Enlightenment liberalism and utilitarianism. Developing this close analogy between two elemental domains of society, Sovereignty and the Sacred offers a new theory of religion while suggesting alternative ways of organizing our political and economic life. By rethinking the transcendent foundations and liberating potential of both religion and politics, Yelle points to more hopeful and ethical modes of collective life based on egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. Deliberately countering the narrowness of currently dominant economic, political, and legal theories, he demonstrates the potential of a revived history of religions to contribute to a rethinking of the foundations of our political and social order.

Easter Sunday, 2009, was the Sunday heard ‘round the evangelical internet: NewSpring Church, the second-largest church in the Southern Baptist Convention and among the top one hundred largest churches in the US, had begun their service with the song “Highway to Hell” by hard rock band AC/DC. They had brazenly crossed the sacred/secular musical divide on the most important Sunday of the year, and commentary abounded on the value of such a step. Many were offended at the “desecration” of such a holy day, deriding Newspring as the “theater of the absurd.” Others cheered NewSpring’s engagement with “the culture” and suggested that music could be used to convert non-Christians. No mere debate over stylistic preferences, many expressed that foundational aspects of evangelical identity were at stake. While many books have been written about religious music that utilizes popular music styles (a.k.a. “contemporary Christian music”), there has yet to be a scholarly treatment of how and why popular, secular music is utilized by churches. This book addresses that lacuna by examining this emerging trend in evangelical and “emerging” churches in America. What is the motivation behind using music that seemingly has no connection to Christian theology, values, or themes—such as music by Katy Perry, AC/DC, or Van Halen—and what can we learn about post-denominational evangelical churches in America by uncovering these motives? In this book, April Stace uncovers several themes from an ethnographic study of these churches: the increasingly-porous boundary between the sacred and the secular, the importance placed on “authenticity” in contemporary American culture, how evangelicals are responding to what they perceive is an increasingly-secular society, the “turn to the subject” of contemporary culture, the desire to leave a space for expression of doubt in the worship service without fully authorizing that doubt, and the individualization of the construction of religious identity in the modern era.