Religious Pluralism and the City Inquiries into Postsecular Urbanism [Hardcover]

Religious Pluralism and the Citychallenges the notion that the city is a secular place, and calls for an analysis of how religion and the city are intertwined. It is the first book to analyze the explanatory value of a number of typologies already in use around this topic  from holy city to secular city , from fundamentalist to postsecular city . By intertwining the city and religion, urban theory and theories of religion, this is the first book to provide an international and interdisciplinary analysis of post-secular urbanism.

The book argues that, given the rise of religiously inspired violence and the increasing significance of charismatic Christianity, Islam and other spiritual traditions, the master narrative that modern societies are secular societies has lost its empirical plausibility. Instead, we are seeing the pluralization of religion, the co-existence of different religious worldviews, and the simultaneity of secular and religious institutions that shape everyday life. These particular constellations of religious pluralism are, above all, played out in cities.

Including contributions from Peter L. Berger and Nezar Alsayyad, this book conceptually and empirically revokes the dissolution between city and religion to unveil its intimate relationship, and offers an alternative view on the quotidian state of the global urban condition.

Helmuth Berkingis Professor of Sociology and Fellow at the Institute of Sociology at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany.

Silke Steetsis a Heisenberg Fellow at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Philosophy at Leipzig University, Germany.

Jochen Schwenkis Lecturer and Post-doctoral Researcher at the Technische Universit?t Darmstadt, Germany.

List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Filling the Void?  Religious Pluralism and the City(Helmuth Berking,Technische Universit?t Berlin, GerlóX