Do you have serious questions or doubts about your faith, ot the teaching of your church? Do you find more excitement and inspiration outside the church than within it? Do you sometimes feel like you're losing your religion? This book offers a framework of support trying to understand their spiritual jouney beyond Evangelical faith, as well as those trying to help others through the process.

It is often claimed that we live in a secular age. But we do not live in a desacralized one. Sacred forms - whether in 'religious' or 'secular' guise - continue to shape social life in the modern world, giving rise to powerful emotions, polarized group identities, and even the very concept of moral society. Analyzing contemporary sacred forms is essential if we are to be able to make sense of the societies we live in and think critically about the effects of the sacred on our lives for good or ill.
The Sacred in the Modern World is a major contribution to this task. Re-interpreting...

This Reader brings together a selection of key writings to explore the relationship between religion, media and cultures of everyday life. It provides an overview of the main debates and developments in this growing field, focusing on four major themes:

• Religion, spirituality and consumer culture
• Media and the transformation of religion
• The sacred senses: visual, material and audio culture
• Religion, and the ethics of media and culture.

This collection is an invaluable resource...

Progressive, modern societies hold the promise of the triumph of reason and the banishing of primitive, religious impulses to a bygone age. If this statement is orthodoxy to much of Western liberal thought, then Gordon Lynch's On the Sacred is heresy. Challenging the myth of the idealized rational society, Lynch argues that emotionally-charged forms of the sacred remain an inevitable foundation of social life. Modernity has not rid us of the sacred, but merely presented us with new sacred forms focused around humanity, nature and the nation. Drawing on examples from the changing status of the...

Over the past ten years there has been an explosion of interest in how religion and the sacred connect with the media and cultures of everyday life. How are religious communities, identities and rituals being transformed by new media such as the Internet? What is the significance of the media when for many people it becomes the primary source of images and of an encounter with religious traditions? Do the media and popular culture themselves take on religious significance, and how do people make use of these popular resources to ""do"" religion in the contemporary world? As researchers have...