1. The Future of Utopia.
- Author
-
van der Veer, Peter
- Subjects
MODERNITY ,CITIES & towns ,FUTURE, The ,URBAN planning ,ASIAN civilization ,CITIES & towns -- Religious aspects ,CHRISTIANITY & society ,RELIGION ,CHRISTIANITY - Abstract
The widespread notion that the city is secular and that therefore society’s future is secular is in need of serious reconsideration. This paper argues that religion does not melt away but rather morphs into modern forms of aspiration, speculation, and contention. Religion is therefore crucial to social inquiry into the nature of the urban. The paper argues that in Asia the Christian modern is close to the secular modern with fragments of rational planning and calculation in constant interplay with fragments of the magic of speculative modernity. Both communism and market capitalism are ideological cousins of Christian millenarianism. In a comparison of India, China, and Singapore it argues that the Christian form of modernity has been much better able to penetrate and coalesce with Sinic civilizational traditions than with Indic civilizational traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
- Published
- 2016
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