Theorizing Modernities Articles

What is Contending Modernities?

Series:

What is “Contending Modernities”? In a sentence, it’s an effort to confront the fact that the relationship between religion and modernity is a lot more complex than many people anticipated. This relationship has proven more complex in at least two ways. One largely unanticipated complexity is that religion has proven pretty resilient in the face of modernity in all its forms. Religion and secularity are surviving and thriving together, creating a vast diversity of modern ways of life.

Read More →

Does Islam Need to Be “Modernized”?


I don’t know how many times I have heard Christians—Catholics included, strangely—say, “What Islam needs is a Reformation.” The normally sensible Cardinal Danneels of Brussels even went so far as to say that what Islam needs is to go through its French Revolution—which makes one want to ask when the Catholic Church was ever in favor of the Reformation or the French Revolution?

Read More →

Modern Conflict and Catholic Peacebuilding


I recently returned from an unprecedented gathering in Burundi of Catholic representatives from six countries in the Great Lakes region of Africa, a region that has become synonymous with genocide (Rwanda and Burundi), one of the world’s most ruthless rebel groups (the Lord’s Resistance Army), and perhaps the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II (the Congo). The church leaders met to formulate a strategic plan for regional peacebuilding.

Read More →