Returning to Religion | by Jonathan Benthall

Flikr photo by kevindooley used under a Creative Commons license. Returning to Religion is a new book by Jonathan Benthall that explores the resurgent interest in religion and explains why western liberal rationality has not taken hold in the way the secularization thesis might predict.  If anything, the universal human inclination towards religion has never been diminished; rather it has risen up against secularized structures in a more visible way. Jonathan Benthall is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. A former Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Founding Editor of Anthropology Today, his previous books are Disasters, Relief and the Media (1993) and The Charitable Crescent: Politics of Aid in the Muslim World (2003), both published by I.B.Tauris.

Checked out the

Submitted by on Thu, 02/26/2009 - 2:39pm.

Checked out the description:

Arguing that humanitarianism, environmentalism, the animal rights movement, popular archaeology and anthropology all have "religiod" aspects, his startling conclusion is that religion, rather than coming "back," in fact never went away.

Hm... I'm a bit dubious of that proposition. Secularism doesn't mean that we become some sort of strictly logical robots or Vulcans. It isn't at all clear that narrowly defined religion is going away and I think discussing the narrow definition is more interesting.

On the other hand, I haven't read the book. Maybe I'm underestimated how compelling his evidence is.