Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order

"More than two centuries after the Enlightenment movement had supposedly brought an end to religious war by confining religion to the private sphere, religion has returned, challenging this confinement and influencing politics all over the globe. John M. Owen IV, J. Judd Owen, and the brilliant lineup of authors they have assembled show that the results of this challenge are diverse, unpredictable, and surprisingly favorable to the claims and causes of the religious." Daniel Philopott, University of Notre Dame

Largely due to the cultural and political shift of the Enlightenment, Western societies in the eighteenth century emerged from sectarian conflict and embraced a more religiously moderate path. In nine original essays, leading scholars ask whether exporting the Enlightenment solution is possible---or even desirable---today

Contributors begin by revisiting the Enlightenment's restructuring of the West, examining its ongoing encounters with Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. While acknowledging the necessity of the Enlightenment emphasis on toleration and peaceful religious coexistence, these scholars nevertheless have grave misgivings about the Enlightenment's spiritually thin secularism. The authors ultimately upend both the claim that the West's experience offers a ready-made template for the world to follow and the belief that the West's achievements are to be ignored, despised, or discarded.

John M. Owen IV is associate professor of politics and faculty fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He is author of Liberal Peace, Liberal War and The Clash of Ideas in World Politics and lives with his wife and three children in Charlottesville, Virginia.
J. Judd Owen is associate professor of political science and a senior fellow at the center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. He is the author of Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism and is finishing a book on the Enlightenment's project of religious transformation. He lives with his wife and two children in Decatur, Georgia.