Spring 2009

Instructor: Professor Thomas Pfau

INTRODUCTION: To make a case for the topicality and relevance of the secular in contemporary Western European and North American societies today may seem like an exercise in redundancy. After all, with a steady stream of books issuing from the popular press, and featuring such nuanced titles as God is not Great (C. Hitchens), The God Delusion (R. Dawkins), or God: the Failed Hypothesis (V. Stenger)—to say nothing of a veritable torrent of equally shrill publications from the other side of an intensely polarized debate—the apparent antinomy of religion and the secular continues to give rise to an often militantly acrimonious culture of debate. Yet precisely this polemical nature of the ongoing debate over the secular also continues to forestall a genuinely informed and searching consideration of social processes that, for several centuries by now, have been often axiomatically viewed as teleologically oriented towards a fully secularized world. [Click for more]

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1. SECULARIZATION & MODERNITY
   

2. Interdisciplinary Readings, 1750-1920

1. Caspar David Friedrich, “Eldena Ruin near Greifswald”