An Introduction

So let's begin
Religion and Society-A Colloquium@Sugamo

Ours is a learning group which meets, occasionally but regularly, to discuss how religious individuals/peoples/groups/institutions live their faiths in various social settings.

We read books and find reading materials from the Net or we may even do some fieldwork to see how religious individuals/peoples/groups/institutions express their faiths in various social settings.

What we are interested in is the intersection(s) of religion and society.

Those who accept a predominant view of "the secularization thesis" think that religion has a very limited role to play in contemporary society;

They think that organized religions are mostly interested in their own survival by recruiting new members and soliciting money from people;

They think that religion is just superfluous and has no consequence for society at large;

They think that faith is a private matter entertained by people at their leisure time.

We want to challenge such a narrow-minded view.

Religion is very much alive today, not only in the individuals' private lives - in various forms of "spirituality" - but also in the public sphere - sometimes in very violent ways as we know from the terrorist attacks by the Aum-Shinrikyo which were masterminded by its guru Shoko Asahara from the late 1980's to the mid-1990's.

Why Asahara had attempted a series of such horrendous and mind-boggling acts of terrorism is yet unknown.
Scholars and researchers looked for reasons in many directions but no satisfactory answer to put all the pieces together into a whole picture has not been found yet.


But Aum-Shinrikyo is just one example to show that religion is a serious issue even in our secularized society.


We believe that it's essential to put religion back into the picture to understand what's going on in our society.

We do not take religion as a mere factor.

We try to see religion at the root of many of our societal problems, looking at both its goods and ills.

We hope to provide a forum/platform to start exploring the contemporary issues of Religion and Society.

We hope to provide research tools to understand the issues, namely, the Sociology of Religion and Social Ethics, the latter in both Christian and Comparative-Religious standpoints.