An important book fit for a wide audience, and Olivier Roy's erudition is simply flabbergasting. -- Nicholas Guilhot, author of The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and International Order Olivier Roy's central thesis about the way religion is going in today's world (a breathtakingly ambitious exercise) could and deserves to 'reset' debates about secularization and secularism and give birth to creative new departures in theory and research. -- David Lehmann, Cambridge University A highly complex book that critically examines the relationship between religion, culture, and globalization, Holy Ignorance provides theoretical keys to unlocking the riddle of the religious imagination and the 'deculturation' of religious movements in the modern world. Few scholars of religion are as qualified as Olivier Roy to write such erudite work on religious and cultural trends, to contextualize them and to make sense of them. -- Fawaz A. Gerges, London School of Economics Olivier Roy, the outstanding scholar of contemporary religions, has written a book of startling clarity and wisdom. Illuminating trends, issues, and movements that had before appeared bizarre or simply antipathetic, he provides us with tools for the comprehension of matters as diverse as coverage of the war on terror to the common individual confusion over one's own beliefs and skepticisms. -- John Lloyd Financial Times With Holy Ignorance, Olivier Roy moves beyond his established perch as one of contemporary Islam's foremost scholars to train his formidable analytical skills on the question of globalization's broader impact on religion. The result is a tour de force of comparative religious sociology and represents required reading for anyone seeking to understand the relationship between faith, culture, and the market. -- Peter Mandaville, George Mason University, author of Global Political Islam
Olivier Roy is professor of social and political theory at the European University Institute in Florence. His books with Columbia University Press are Secularism Confronts Islam, Globalized Islam, The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East, The Search for a New Ummah, and, with Mariam Abou Zahab, Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection.
Olivier Roy, the outstanding scholar of contemporary religions, has written a book of startling clarity and wisdom. Illuminating trends, issues and movements that had before appeared bizarre or simply antipathetic, he provides us with tools for the comprehension of matters as diverse as coverage of the war on terror to the common individual confusion over one's own beliefs and scepticisms Financial Times 8/30/10 [A] perceptive and thoughtful book. -- Richard Phelps The Guardian 1/12/11 this extraordinary book's disturbing message - that secularism may be religious fundamentalism's best friend - is worth taking very seriously. -- Keith Kahn-Harris Times Higher Education Supplement 3/31/2011 The book is an intriguing examination of contemporary religion outside of the usual secularization debate. Religion Watch Jan.-Feb.2010
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