Despite the oft-voiced conceit that religious traditions are largely immutable, it is now abundantly clear that religious believers today do not access and live out those traditions as did their forebears of even a generation or two earlier. At the same time, despite the continuing popularity of unduly confident versions of the so-called “secularization thesis,” it is also clear that modern societies remain overwhelmingly (albeit differently) religious. The purpose of this course, taught by Jerome Baggett at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, is to assist students in analytically surmounting such “either/or” conceptualizations and thus arrive at a more nuanced understanding of how the sacred and secular are inextricably entwined within everyday life, especially in terms of the ongoing project of identity construction.

Seminary: Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University
Keywords: Human identity, psychology, sociology of religion, history and philosophy of science