El porvenir de la religión es una lúcida reflexión en la que Salvador Giner considera, desde una mirada ecuánime, el futuro previsible de las creencias sobre lo sobrenatural y sobre la presencia de Dios en nuestras vidas. Su indagación va más allá de una sociología de la religión para afianzar sus argumentos en los del laicismo, sin ignorar los que esgrimen los creyentes. Este ensayo está orientado a enriquecer nuestros conocimientos sobre la dimensión religiosa de los humanos en nuestros días, cuando graves conflictos y mudanzas culturales transforman nuestro universo económico y político, así como nuestras vidas cotidianas. Por su rigor y originalidad, este ensayo contribuye a la concepción avanzada racional de la fe y en los esfuerzos por establecer un diálogo y conversación fraternal entre quienes poseen distintas convicciones.

En este libro innovador, J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., MD, y Clare Aukofer, ofrecen un estudio completo pero sucinto de cómo y por qué la mente humana genera la creencia religiosa. Dr. Thomson, un psiquiatra muy respetado con credenciales y práctica en psiquiatría forense y psicología evolutiva, investiga metódicamente los componentes y las causas de las creencias religiosas de la misma manera que cualquier científico investigaría el movimiento de los cuerpos celestes o la evolución de la vida a través del tiempo, es decir, como un fenómeno puramente natural. Proporcionando evidencia convincente de la psicología, las neurociencias cognitivas, y otros campos relacionados, él, y la Sra. Aukofer, presentan un caso convincente de fácil acceso y con carácter excepcional que dios (es) fueron creados por el hombre, y no viceversa. Con este libro de bolsillo, el Dr. Thomson se establece como un pensador de lectura obligatoria y la voz líder en la primacía de la razón y de la ciencia sobre la superstición y la religión. In this groundbreaking volume, J. Anderson Thomson Jr., MD, and Clare Aukofer offer a succinct yet comprehensive study of how and why the human mind generates religious belief. Dr. Thomson, a highly respected practicing psychiatrist with credentials in forensic psychiatry and evolutionary psychology, methodically investigates the components and causes of religious belief in the same way any scientist would investigate the movement of astronomical bodies or the evolution of life over time—that is, as a purely natural phenomenon. Providing compelling evidence from psychology, the cognitive neurosciences, and related fields, he, with Ms. Aukofer, presents an easily accessible and exceptionally convincing case that god(s) were created by man—not vice versa. With this slim volume, Dr. Thomson establishes himself as a must-read thinker and leading voice on the primacy of reason and science over superstition and religion.

Centenary Subjects examines the ideological debates and didactic exercises in subject formation during the centenary era of independence (the decade of the 1910s)—the peak of arielismo—and proposes a new reading of the arielista archive that brings into focus the racial anxieties, epistemological and spiritual fissures, and iconoclastic agendas that structure, and at times smother, the ethos of that era. Arielismo takes its name from José Enrique Rodó’s foundational essay Ariel (1900), a wide‑ranging gospel dedicated to Latin American youth that incited a cultural awakening under the banner of the spirit throughout the Americas at an ominous juncture—when the US co-opted the Cuban War of Independence in 1898, effectively rebranding it as the Spanish‑American War. Rodó’s optimistic message of transcendence as an antidote to the encroaching empire quickly became one of the most pervasive and malleable paradigms of regional empowerment, reverberating throughout a range of Latin Americanist projects in the twentieth and twenty‑first centuries. Centenary Subjects recovers a series of important but understudied essays penned by arielista writers, radicals, pedagogues, prophets, and politicians of diverse stripes in the early twentieth century, and analyzes how, under the auspices of the arielista platform, young people emerged as historical subjects invested with unprecedented cultural capital, increasing political power, and an urgent mandate to break with the past and transform the sociopolitical and cultural landscape of their countries. But their respective designs harbor racial, epistemological, aesthetic, and anarchistic strains that bring into sharper relief the conflicting signals that the centenary subject had to parse with respect to race, reason, and rupture.

Science and Catholicism in Argentina (1750–1960) is the first comprehensive study on the relationship between science and religion in a Spanish-speaking country with a Catholic majority and a "Latin" pattern of secularisation. The text takes the reader from Jesuit missionary science in colonial times, through the conflict-ridden 19th century, to the Catholic revival of the 1930s in Argentina. The diverse interactions between science and religion revealed in this analysis can be organised in terms of their dynamic of secularisation. The indissoluble identification of science and the secular, which operated at rhetorical and institutional levels among the liberal elite and the socialists in the 19th century, lost part of its force with the emergence of Catholic scientists in the course of the 20th century. In agreement with current views that deny science the role as the driving force of secularisation, this historical study concludes that it was the process of secularisation that shaped the interplay between religion and science, not the other way around.

Readings in the Sociology of Religion