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Document Details : Title: Catholicism and Modern Scholarship Subtitle: An Historical Sketch Author(s): TURNER, James Journal: Ethical Perspectives Volume: 7 Issue: 4 Date: December 2000 Pages: 279-287 DOI: 10.2143/EP.7.4.503814 Abstract : Few, if any, historical developments are more complex than the long evolution that historians and sociologists commonly and too loosely call `secularization.' That term encompasses a bewildering variety of ways in which, over the span of centuries, religion and religious institutions lost much of their importance and power in western European and American culture and society. There were also a bewildering variety of reasons why religion in so many different ways found itself more and more on the cultural margins. As western Europeans and North Americans, we live in a largely post-Christian world, and the question is how shall we live? Scholars need to ask this question about their work as much as other people do about theirs. My assignment is to provide some historical context in which the question can begin to be fruitfully answered. More specifically, I shall try to sketch briefly the process by which universities and scholarship became alienated from |
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