According to Ostwalt, what happens when individuals, not institutions, define religious expression? How have you seen this in your personal experiences? As religious institutions adopt an individualistic secular orientation, they become increasingly defined by the values of secular society, rather than by their own values. This not only results in a dilution of the message, but it also displaces religion's traditional role as a critic of secular values. Religious institutions

This work provided an intensive discussion historical forces that were to lead to modern humanism but also succeeds in placing these aspects into the context of the larger social, historical and political milieu. . Online sources and databases proved to be a valid and often insightful recourse area for this topic. Of particular note is a concise and well-written article by Stephen Weldon entitled Secular Humanism in the United States.

As a result, explicit religious control over social and political life diminishes, but it still retains its ability to control and constrain individuals; it simply relies more on its individual adherents than formal church hierarchies and leadership. This process has played itself out in a number of different contexts, and although the particular religious response to secularization differs according to nations and societies, in each case these responses disprove the

Religion and Spirituality in a Broad Sense Spirituality and religion are two terms that have rather unstable, historically changing definitions, characterized by numerous implied and explicit theological considerations. Further, the general contention is that these definitions are either overly specific or overly generic. A more astonishing fact is, possibly, these researches' level of concurrence that spirituality represents a private, budding, personal and emotional sphere, whilst religion is more public, group-based and

Catholic church and public policy have remarked that the members of American clergy in general, without even excepting those who do not admit religious liberty, are all in favour of civil freedom; but they do not support any particular political system. They keep aloof from parties, and from public affairs. In the United States religion exercises but little influence upon laws, and upon the details of public opinion; but it

Esposito finds that the premodernist revival movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed to the pattern of Islamic politics that developed and left a legacy for the twentieth century. These movements were motivated primarily in response to internal decay rather than external, colonial threat (Esposito 40-41). At the same time, many areas of the Islamic world experienced the impact of the economic and military challenge of an emerging and