The Liquidation of the Church (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) - Softcover

De Groot, Kees

Softcover

ISBN 10: 036742522X ISBN 13: 9780367425227

Publisher: Routledge, 2020

Synopsis

Is religion dying out in Western societies? Is personal spirituality taking its place? Both stories are inadequate. Institutional religion is not simply coming to an end in Western societies. Rather, its assets and properties are redistributed: large parts of the church have gone into liquidation. Religion is crossing the boundaries of the parish and appears in other social contexts. In the fields of leisure, health care and contemporary culture, religion has an unexpected currency.

The metaphor of liquidation provides an alternative to approaches that merely perceive the decline of religion or a spiritual revolution. Religion is becoming liquid. By examining a number of case studies in the Netherlands and beyond, including World Youth Day, television, spiritual centers, chaplaincy, mental healthcare, museums and theatre, this book develops a fresh way to look at religion in late modernity and produces new questions for theological and sociological debate. It is both an exercise in sociology and an exercise in practical theology conceived as the engaged study of religious praxis. As such, the aim is not only to get a better understanding of what is going on, but also to critique one-sided views and to provide alternative perspectives for those who are active in the religious field or its surroundings.

About this title

About the Author

Kees de Groot is Professor of Worldviews and Public Mental Health and Lecturer at the department of Practical Theology and Religious Studies at Tilburg University. He has studied sociology at the University of Amsterdam, wrote a doctoral dissertation on religion and mental health care at Leiden University (1995), and studied theology at Tilburg University. He has contributed to various volumes in and on sociology of religion, and has published on Zygmunt Bauman, Catholicism, theatre, comics and chaplaincy in the International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, Social Compass, and Implicit Religion. He is member of the council of the International Society for Sociology of Religion.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 036742522X
• ISBN 13: 9780367425227
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 202