Living in an age of comfort: understanding religion in the twenty-first century

Authors

Gregory Melleuish, University of WollongongFollow

RIS ID

88482

Publication Details

Melleuish, G. (2014). Living in an age of comfort: understanding religion in the twenty-first century. Telos, (166), 9-24.

Link to publisher version (URL)

Telos

Abstract

In recent times the term “post-secular” has emerged to describe the age in which we are currently living. The term “post” is somewhat misleading because it is clear that the current age is strongly secular in a whole range of ways. Rather, post-secular is meant to indicate that the secularization metanarrative, the view that humanity is inevitably headed down a road that leads from a religious condition in the past to a secular age in the future, no longer holds.

The post-secular certainly does not mean something like the “return of religion,” or an idea that the secular age is over and that it is again “business as usual” for the various religions. In the West, at least, there has not been a reversal of the secular trends of the past thirty or forty years, especially in the public domain. For example, there is no massive popular movement advocating the return of Sunday observance.