World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 406

MAKING SENSE THE RETURN OF RELIGION
- P.K. Sasidharan
What may be simply called the 'fact of religion' ('religious-fact') seems continuing to be a bete noir for intellectuals. For, its status and mediation in the affairs of human life appear to be refusing any easy explanation and approach. Hence, most of the general assumptions that have been made in this regard, at the behest of philosophical as well as modern social scientific studies, are not found corroborated by the happenings in the world. It is equally applicable to both cases of making positive and negative accountings on religion and the matters related. There is hardly any agreement on the way it shapes and influences human relations, behaviours, ideologies, moral consciousness, social actions, political decisions, etc. Same is the case with the way religion gets itself changed or responds to the changing situations.
The present attempt is to understand the general ways in which academic scholars and popular intellectuals perceive some of the trends that have been taking place in the domain of religion in recent decades. Especially, this wants to look at the specific way of understanding a process of change in religion, which can be termed as 'return of religion' as it has been implicitly suggested by some of the dominant models of talk-of-religion. The implicated way of perceiving changes that are taking place in religion in terms of the notion of 'return' might lead to a suppression of certain ideological force carry with it, if sense of the term 'return' is being stipulated against its possibility of variance according to specific situations and contextual relationships. Thus, it wants to go into the possibilities of seeing multilayered explanations, which are inherent in the ways of seeing religious changes in terms or notion of return.
In recent decades, it is found to have occurred a phenomenal growth in religious belief and other faith related practices and activities all over the world. It is such an increase that has often been characterized as the emergence of religious revivalism, fundamentalism, communalism, fanaticism, extremism, or terrorism etc that has become a great cause of concern for the present-day world affairs. Especially since the worldwide campaign against religious terrorism, which began as consequence of 11/9 incident (the attack on the World Trade Centre of USA in 2001) religious phenomena in general have drawn much attention of intellectuals and socio-political leadership across the cultures. Even though it has prompted a very serious rethinking on the potential of religious consciousness for providing a greater force of action for people, it has been noticed that there prevails an imbalanced assessment in finding fault with particular religious tradition. Since the 11/ 9 is not an isolated event occurred all on a sudden in the history of man, there is felt unfairness in making it a civilizational fault line and paying
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