Since Sweden can be considered to be a secular society it is interesting to investigate how different actors experience swimming education in the course syllabus of sports and health education, for practicing Muslim girls in middle and high schools. The investigation is based on qualitative interviews with sports teachers, practicing Muslim girls and the staff of the public swimming center in Växjö. The result shows that swimming education can be somewhat problematic, since the Muslim girls only want to attend lessons that are gender separated. In the public swimming center, there are no pools exclusively intended for women, and there are only a few times available for women every week. However, the teachers stress opportunities instead of obstacles, and the students’ experience that their teachers are trying to create possibilities for them to have a gender separated swimming education. The question of swimming education for Muslim girls is analyzed by using Berger’s theories on secularization, pluralism and privatization, as well as discussions on gender and intersectionality. The school and the public swimming center can be seen as secular arenas, which are characterized by secular values and standards. This may lead to consequences, since the swimming education is not designed according to the wishes of the practicing Muslim girls. The subject of swimming education is to some extent negotiated in society, but the swimming education is not fundamentally changing. However there are some possibilities for the Muslim girls to attend, but this may be problematic based on a gender view.

In pursuit of a just political order, Will Kymlicka has defended a liberal conception of multiculturalism. The persuasive appeal of his argument, like that of secular-liberalism more generally, is due to presenting liberalism as a neutral and universal political project. Utilizing Charles Taylor’s genealogy of ‘exclusive humanism’ in A Secular Age, this thesis attempts to re-read Kymlicka in order to make certain theological commitments in his work explicit. Here I argue that Kymlicka, in order to make his conception of multiculturalism plausible, relies on a theologically-thick and controversial humanism operating under secular conditions of belief. By committing himself to a particular conception of the human and specific conditions of belief, Kymlicka’s liberal multiculturalism is rendered provincially incoherent because it fails to treat in a neutral manner certain theological commitments.

The purpose of this essay is to examine how Irish people on a rural location practice their faith in everyday life. The intention is also to find out what strategies my interviewees use to negotiate the abuse scandal and what their thoughts on the Catholic Church are. The material mainly consists of interviews with seven people part of a rural parish in Ireland. My research also entails smaller observations and conversations in the homes of the participants. The results indicate that they all consider themselves religious, however not all Catholic. All of the participants integrate their religion in everyday life. It also showed that almost all of them used a certain strategy when negotiating the knowledge of the abuse scandal leaving just one participant saying it negatively affected his faith. My results show that all of them are asking for changes within the Catholic Church when it comes to celibacy, ordaining women and same sex marriages. The results of my study are analyzed with Meredith McGuire’s theory on lived religion and Peter Berger’s theory on socialization and secularization. Religious activity is occurring in my participants’ everyday life and church-based practices such as Mass or Confessions are not as important for them as for instance prayer and humility. It also shows that my participants are socialized into Catholicism but that the Church no longer can serve as a sole legitimating power and is being severely questioned. I would also argue that today’s modern society with different religions and expressions has led to my participants questioning of the Church. In the location I have studied the results show that individuals let religion into their everyday lives and create their own version of it. With these results I would argue that my participants allow religion to influence their everyday tasks and create their own religious practice. The results suggest that my participants are indeed part of a secularization process, the objective secularization which separates the Church and state. However, religion is still alive within the subjectivity of my participants.

In 2002, Reginald Bibby surprisingly asserted that a renaissance of religion is, or soon will be taking place in Canada. However, the assertion clashes with the dominant belief based largely on Bibby’s accumulated data about Canadians’ religious beliefs and practices, that Canada is becoming an increasingly secularized society. Based on forty-two in-depth interviews, this dissertation tests the “renaissance thesis” and improves our grasp of how Canadians subjectively understand their religious involvements by comparing the views of active religious affiliates (those who identify with a religious group and attend religious services nearly every week) and marginal religious affiliates (those who identify with a religious group and attend religious services primarily on Christmas or Easter, or for rites of passage such as weddings and funerals). What explains their higher and lower levels of religious involvement, what is the likelihood that marginal affiliates could eventually become active affiliates, and how does this understanding help us to assess the degree of religiosity or secularity in Canada? I argue that active and marginal affiliates are distinct mainly because of their different experiences with the supernatural or their local congregation, and the social influences that either encourage or discourage involvement in a religious group. These conclusions emerge from a close examination and testing of fundamental principles in Rational Choice Theory, a theory currently popular in the sociology of religion and in Bibby’s ongoing analysis of religion in Canada. Contrary to Bibby’s prediction, there is little reason to believe that marginal affiliates will eventually become active affiliates, regardless of changes to the supply of religion in Canada. In general, marginal affiliates appear content with their current levels of religiosity. As a result, I think it is likely that we will witness continued secularization at the individual level in Canada, which if proven correct, could strain Canada’s civic fabric in the future.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 283-291). Also available on the Internet.

This dissertation is a work in intellectual history that chronicles racial theories within Western science and medicine. Therein, I address two interrelated questions. Firstly, has Christianity shaped modern scientific perceptions of race? Secondly, is the search for the origin of human life, vis-à-vis theories of race, a purely scientific matter or, a more basic human existential concern? To answer these questions I undertook archival research within the history of European and American racial science, analyzing contemporary scientific work, archival data of primary scientific material, biblical commentaries, literary monthlies, and early maps of the major continents. I argue that Christian ideas about nature, humanity, and history have facilitated modern scientific perceptions of race since the time of the Enlightenment. This is true despite what is believed to be the “Death of Adam” within Western science following the emergence of Darwinian evolution. In defense of my thesis I trace the currency of three ideas derived from Christianity that have shaped the assumptions and reasoning styles of early modern and contemporary scientific theorists of race. These ideas are: common human descent (derived from the Biblical creation narrative), the ontological uniqueness of human life (drawn from Biblical claims about the “image of God” mirrored in “mankind”), and the longevity of racial traits (an idea that has its roots in theological claims about the stability and inherent order of nature). I chart the development of these three Christian concepts across four different historical moments that reveal how religious and scientific perceptions of race share a common foundation in the West. These moment are: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s attempt to develop anthropology as a secular science during the end of the eighteenth-century; mid-nineteenth-century debates in the U.S. over common human descent; early twentieth-century theories of race and disease that relied on polygenist assumptions about distinct human ancestry; and finally the recent discovery of Neanderthal DNA exclusively in the descendents of Eurasia. Ultimately, this thesis concludes that religious and scientific ways of viewing race have been interconnected and are animated by irresolvable questions about what it means to be human.

This dissertation argues that Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy must be understood as an attempt to hold together a robust commitment to divine transcendence and an affirmation of immanent human activity. This argument is developed through an examination of Kant's Copernican revolution, or his account of how human beings must play an active rather than merely passive role in the theoretical and practical domains. Kant's revolution involves an appeal to what can be called our self-legislation, or our role in giving ourselves laws that structure our cognition and volition. A persistent strand of interpretation has maintained that Kant's emphasis on our self-legislation, signaled through his Copernican revolution, rules out any significant role for religious or theological claims. Indeed, Kant is often seen as initiating a modern anthropocentric turn, marking the shift away from a pre-modern theocentric perspective. This dissertation shows, however, that rather than privileging either a God-centered or a human-centered perspective, Kant is instead concerned both with what the divine and human share and with what distinguishes them from one another, and this theme is borne out in Kant's theoretical philosophy, his practical philosophy, and his philosophy of religion. The dissertation is divided into three parts, each of which corresponds to one of Kant's famous three questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? These questions map on to Kant's theoretical philosophy, practical philosophy, and philosophy of religion, respectively. Kant sometimes added a fourth question: What is the human being? The dissertation suggests that Kant's answers to these first three questions involve an account of what it means to be a human being and thereby also serve to address his fourth question. This examination of Kant's Copernican revolution suggests that his anthropology is not a substitute for a discarded theology, but is itself theologically inflected. The dissertation draws on a number of works from Kant's mature corpus, including his three Critiques and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, as well as other works of his theoretical and practical philosophy, including the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

Religion and music are two cultural entities that have been closely related over time (Bossius, Harris & Häger 2010:1). To investigate this close relationship the author of this paper has chosen to use two theories. The first is the secularization theory as it is presented by James A. Beckford in his book Social Theory & Religion (2003), which expresses the idea that religion will become less visible in a society as it evolves and progresses. The second theory is based on music and is brought forth by Theodor A. Adorno in his paper On Popular Music (2008); it states that popular music is highly standardized and inevitably inferior to “Serious” music. The two theories will be used in researching and trying to understand how religion and music are interrelated to each other in Fiasco’s music and to investigate if the artist uses private or public religion in his music, furthermore the standardization theory will be used to see if his music and message are standardized. The aim of this paper is use the aforementioned theories by James A. Beckford and Theodor A. Adorno and see how they work in cohesion with Lupe Fiasco.The conclusion of this paper is that religion is influential and relevant in Lupe Fiascos music. In all his songs that have been released on CD: s, a total of 54 songs; 42 of these songs contained a religious word or phrase. This shows that the secularization theory, which stated that religion, would diminish and disappear from the public sphere the more modern a society got is not the case within the investigated artist and his music. The artists’ use of religion was a mix between public and private religion depending on the theme and message of the song. The second theory, which stated that popular music is standardized, could be verified, the message in Lupe Fiascos music is not new and neither it the music that he makes use of, even though the artist tries to give it a new sound. All music is standardized within its own genre and therefore will sound similar/standardized for one who is uninitiated within the different genres. Keywords: popular music, Religion, Lupe Fiasco, secularization, standardization, rap music.

The reason behind this essay has been to study if previous research is relevant for Jehovah’s Witnesses in Sweden and see if secularization has affected the organization or not. The empirical material is made from two qualitative group- interviews and open observations during two meetings in the Kingdom Hall. These studies were performed in Oskarshamn and Mönsterås during the month of February. The reason that these studies have been limited to Oskarshamn and Mönsterås is mainly because they were the only ones willing to do an interview.  According to previous research by James A. Beckfors and Andrew Holden, it has been shown that the Jehovah’s Witnesses hasn’t been affected by secularization, neither by new interpretations nor from the decrease of predicators. In my study, the interviewees have experienced secularization over the last 10-15 years while they are out preaching the religion. The organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Sweden has been setting up rules for the members to follow, such as not live together before marriage or not get tattoos. This is rules set up to keep a distance between the members and the society and therefore the organization avoid the secularization.

This master thesis summarizes contemporary theories on secularization processes in the Western world, and compares these with the example of Sweden, which by many scholars is considered to be the most secularized country in the Western world. I do this by dividing the most influential theorists in five different groups. In each group I explain how the theorists formulate and motivate their positions. These groups are: 1) The secularization paradigm, where secularization always accompanies modernization. (Therorists: Steve Bruce and Peter Berger (in the 1960s) 2) The paradigm basically accepted, but revised to depend on existential security, rather than modernisation as such. (Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart) 3) Religion returned in the public sphere. (José Casanova) 4) The paradigm completely revised. (Peter Berger (after 1990), David Martin, Charles Taylor) 5) The post-secular society. (Jürgen Habermas, plus others) After this theoretical overview I compile empirical studies on the Swedish example, mainly using the scholars Eva Hamberg and Magnus Hagevi. Apart from these, I mainly use material from Sverigeräkningen – a study of all church attendances in Sweden at one weekend in 1999; plus recurrent studies from the SOM Institute at Gothenburg University as well as from World Values Survey. This essay concludes that there is good reason to think that the secularization paradigm is in need of revising. However, there still seems to be some truth in all these theoretical models, essentially because they do not necessarily contradict each other, as much as they deal with the issue from slightly different perspectives. The empirical studies of Sweden indicate that our country is indeed highly secularized. The reasons for this may be found partly in all of the theoretical models used in this essay. It is also argued that there may be good explanatory power in the market model, where secularization comes not only due to lack in demand, but also to a weakened supply of religion.