Infin de siècleArgentina a secularist ideology of science was part of the positivist world view espoused by liberals and socialists. Between the years 1910 and 1935, a period in which the Catholic Church experienced a significant cultural expansion, the activities of the Catholic naturalist Ángel Gallardo and the astronomer and priest Fortunato Devoto challenged the so far prevailing idea of science as opposed to religion. This paper explores the connections between the scientific, religious and political aspects of those figures in (...) order to get some insights into the complexity of the relationships between science and secularization in societies with a Catholic majority. (shrink)

Many young dreamers who want to be modern up to the tips of their toes, and who think they have gotten rid of these barely imaginable old-fashioned ideas, are, without realizing it, mystics in search of a spiritual experience. (Gauchet 2003, p. 311)Several sociologists of science have mobilized secularization metaphors to describe developments in the study of science. Similar to how secularization refers to a decreasing status of religion and God as a transcendent factor in society, the secularization of science (...) refers to an abandonment of Science as something “sacred” and Nature as transcendent. This article aims to explore these secularization metaphors, by arguing for a parallel between how sociologists and philosophers of religion differ and how similar disagreements between sociologists of science and the work of Bruno Latour exist, whose work should rather be linked with that of other philosophers, such as Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe political public sphere is at one and the same time both public, and private and religion operates in both the public and the private spheres in the modern way of life. This article approaches the dynamics between the cultural and the political public sphere from the point of view of religion; how the cultural intelligentsia developed its worldview fuelled with attitudes towards religion in times of political turmoil. The case study, based on the empirical analysis of cultural periodicals and (...) societies around them, concerns the Finnish liberal intelligentsia in the early twentieth century. The first decade of the 1900s was a particularly important period of formation for the Finnish public sphere; the societal turmoil highlighted the importance of cultural periodicals in defining what was important for the national public sphere. The case of religion is an illustrative example of it, particularly from the point of view of the liberal intelligentsia of the era. (shrink)