About the book

Largely due to the cultural and political shift of the Enlightenment, Western societies in the eighteenth century emerged from sectarian conflict and embraced a more religiously moderate path. The book ask whether exporting the Enlightenment solution is possible—or even desirable—today. It begins by revisiting the Enlightenment's restructuring of the West, examining its ongoing encounters with Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. While acknowledging the necessity of the Enlightenment emphasis on toleration and peaceful religious coexistence, the book nevertheless has grave misgivings about the Enlightenment's spiritually thin secularism. It ultimately upends both the claim that the West's experience offers a ready-made template for the world to follow and the belief that the West's achievements are to be ignored, despised, or discarded.

Content:

1.  The Enlightenment Revisited: Theoretical Questions

1. Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order
2. Religious Violence or Religious Pluralism: The Essential Choice
3. Religion, Enlightenment, and a Common Good
4. How and Why the West Has Lost Confidence in Its Foundational Political Principles

2.  The Enlightenment, Secularity, and the Religions

5. The Enlightenment Project, Spinoza, and the Jews
6. Puritan Sources of Enlightenment Liberty
7. India: The Politics of Religious Reform and Conflict
8. Reason and Revelation in Islamic Political Ethics
9. Islam, Constitutionalism, and the Challenge of Democracy
10. Religion and Politics: The Identity of the Christian Democrat Movement and Theory of Democracy
11. Concluding Thoughts