The Secular Spirit

Osama bin Laden is a person of faith and Al Qaeda is a faith-based initiative. This should serve to notify us that "faith" is not always a healthy human attribute. This book is a psychology of religion and explains why that is the case. Secularism began in Europe in the sixteenth century and has slowly spread to all parts of the globe. It rejects the authority of religious institutions. Globalization has made it impossible for traditional religions to avoid the pressure of secularism, and so they are now "painted into a corner" and must resist. Evangelical insurgency in the West and Islamic jihadism worldwide are two branches of this resistance. TABLE OF CONTENTS Bishops and Children I. THE HEART OF THE MATTER 1. The Argument 2. A Personal Preamble 3. The Alice Miller Finding 4. Two Kinds of Faith 5. The Jesus Question 6. Spiritual learning 7. The Secular Spirit II. THE BIG PICTURE 8. The Development of Spiritual Theory 9. The Development of Spiritual History III.CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA 10. The Mainline Protestant Churches 11. Those Catholics! 12. Evangelical Insurgency

Michael Ducey is a sociologist and a former Jesuit priest. He was born in 1933, left the Jesuits in 1967, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1975. He grew up in Chicago, was a missionary in India as a Jesuit, and now lives in New Y