The new world

In the propenultimate session of Theorizing Religion, we talked about the demise of secularization theory and the significance of globalization. The implications for the theory of religion are staggering, as I only fully understood as I was prattling on about it in class. *This often happens.) Most of the theory of religion presupposes the state system, the myth of the autonomous agent, the idea that there are different spheres of life - politics, religion, ethics, art, etc.- each with its own essence (or Eigengesetzlichkeit, as Max Weber called it, translating svadharma). The anchor for our discussion was this passage from a very useful summary of recent theoretical work called Globalizing the Sacred:

[M]any ordinary believers and institutions find in religion resources to bridge the multiple identities and functions that they must perform in an increasingly complex world. More importantly, religion helps to link realities that modernity dichotomized and that globalization has now destabilized: the global and the local, tradition and modernity, the sacred and the profane, culture and society, and the private and the public.

Manuel A. Vasquez & Marie Friedmann Marquardt, Globalizing the Sacred:
Religion across the Americas (New Brunswick, NJ & London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 29