Cultivating New Post-Secular Political Space

Mitchell, Roger Haydon (2019) Cultivating New Post-Secular Political Space. Routledge, London. ISBN 9780367236779

Abstract

This comprehensive volume provides crucial insights from contemporary academics and practioners into how positive interventions might be made into post-secular political spaces that have emerged in the wake of the economic, political and social upheavls of the 2008 financial crisis. The failure of liberal democracy to deal effectively with such challenges has led to scapegoating of the poor, immigrants, and Muslims, and contributed to the populist electoral success of, among others, the Leave campaign during the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, and Donald Trump's Presidential campaign. These shocks have highlighted contemporary political spaces defined by what has been termed "all the posts": postmodern, post-Christendom, post-liberal, post-political and post-secular. This collection examines emerging attempts to understand and advance the cause of wellbeing within this context. The authors address a variety of key issues including the following: (re)configuring mythologies for the common good, deploying love and friendship politically, motivating new social movements, valuing the other, recovering displaced and devalued political narratives, finding alternatives to the previously dominant neo-liberalism, listening deeply for social transformation, and overcoming adversarial party politics. This book was originally published onlin as a special edition of the journal Global Discourse.