Description
This book examines New Zealand’s culture and Christianity in relation to secularisation. This book, written by a group of New Zealand scholars, theologians, historians, and lawyers, examines the question of New Zealand’s Western culture and Christianity. The contributors explore recent debates over secularisation, exploring its merits and explanatory power, while also showing its limitations. Throughout the West diverse forms of religiosity and spirituality remain widespread, and, while changing form, show few signs of disappearing. The contributors insist that it is impossible to understand contemporary relations between the West and, for example, the Islamic world without understanding the religiosity on both sides of this complex and portentous divide. Several contributors raise questions about the extent to which Western political, intellectual and media élites really understand what ordinary Westerners, let alone Muslims, actually believe. The assumption still pervasive amongst secular Westerners that religion is dying out constitutes a species of wishful thinking that the twenty-first century world can no longer afford.
