This volume addresses a central problem of contemporary states, namely how to manage the eruption of public religions. While the liberal framework formerly regarded religion as simply a matter of private practice and conscience, in modern states religion has often come to challenge the so-called Westphalian model of church-state relations, and has brought into question many liberal notions of secularism and tolerance. There is much discussion about post-secular society in which religion has to be taken seriously in public affairs. This ...

The Management of Religion is an Inevitable Part of Modern Government Despite previous predictions from sociologists, religion not only occupies an important place for many in our modern world, but remains even more accessible through increased levels of literacy and access to mass media. Religion and the State argues that it is the duty of modern states to intervene in religious affairs to minimise inter-faith conflict. Gerardo Marti finds that the book gives the subject of secularisation the analytical depth that it deserves.

[Introduction] We find ourselves, in Europe and in America, after centuries of separation between religion and the state: religion is regarded as a matter of freedom of conscience, concerning the private life of a person, while the state deals with the administration, neutral in relation to the private convictions of citizens, in the public interest. The modern state is built on the premise of a separation: public interest actions originate in secular reasons and people have the unrestricted freedom to promote their religious beliefs, in their private life and in worship places.

This review essay synthesizes fifteen years of scholarship challenging the presumed relationship between secularism and democracy—that state secularism provides the normative or institutional baseline for modern governance. The idea that states and societies become more secular as they develop economically is no longer supported by most social scientists, including its original proponents. Sociologists and anthropologists have increasingly studied secularism as a project, rather than a teleological process embedded in modernization, and the new scholarship on " comparative secularisms " demonstrates that the manifestations of secularism are complicated and varied. Despite these advances, the new scholarship suffers from insufficient attention to the measurement challenges posed by the diverse content of religion. And while scholars continue to debate the content and characteristics of our secular age, all of the recent scholarship highlights important differences between traditional and modern religion. In view of the current state of the literature, this essay lays out an agenda for research on religion and modernity, or, on modernization without secularization.

The article titled "Secularisation and Church-State Relations: Towards a Typology" is an attempt to address the lack of clear definition of the term “secularisation”. The paper is divided into four parts. In the beginning, the author, taking into account previous research, compiles various concepts of origin and the meaning of the term "secularisation”, including authors such as Berger, Casanova, Taylor and Mazurkiewicz. The second part presents different attitudes towards secularisation and secularism. It also explains differences between the two concepts. Moving on to the third section of the paper, the author here includes selected historical aspects of secularisation and the influence of this process on the state-church relationship. A historical analysis is followed by a new typology of secularisation, consisting of five different categories which are possible to apply in Political Science. In the last part of the article a preliminary attempt to analyze the term "semi-secularization" is carried out. In his research, the author outlines the elements that make up that process. The absence of a single, commonly accepted definition of ‘secularisation’ suggests that the term attempts to embody not one, but a variety of distinctive patterns of the phenomenon; thus, the analytical and descriptive power of the term is weakened or lost altogether. By sifting through and classifying the range of definitions and theories of secularisation, while also examining aspects of the historical phenomenon development within the Latin West, it is possible to propose a typology comprising five different patterns of this phenomenon.

Since the inception of democracy in the early revolution age, there have been so many issues raised from time to time concerning religion (and the Church), democracy (and the state) and how the two are interwoven together. The relationship between them has passed through stages of development, each time synthesizing into something different as the years come and pass by. Even though some argue that religion is as old as man himself on earth, there are still certain salient issues concerning people’s view of religion and the dogma it causes due to human reasoning and high thinking ability. Is the church and the state separate or equal, is one of the questions that have been lingering in my mind ever since I was old enough to think of it. In most cases, the issue of the church been separate from the state is viewed from the point that churches should stay out of politics, and that those who venture into politics should strictly do politics and maintain or keep their religious believes. This is simply thought of by the Europeans in the sixteenth century that the two cannot be interwoven together; as they think one can influence the activities of the other thereby leading to a gross, or some kind of deviation in the duties of such.