Future of Christianity: Historical, Sociological, Political and Theological Perspectives from New Zealand

This book, written by a group of New Zealand scholars, theologians, historians, and lawyers, examines the question of New Zealands culture and Christianity. The contributors explore recent debates over secularization, exploring its merits and explanatory power, while also showing its limitations. Throughout the West, and particularly in the United States, diverse forms of religiosity and spirituality remain widespread, and, while changing form, show few signs of disappearing. The contributors insist that it is impossible to understand contemporary relations between the West and the Islamic world without understanding the religiosity on both sides of this complex and portentous divide. Several contributors raise questions about the extent to which Western political, intellectual and media elites really understand what ordinary Westerners, let alone Muslims, actually believe. The assumption still pervasive among secular Westerners that religion is dying out constitutes a species of wishful thinking that the twenty-first century world can no longer afford.