A secularização e o sagrado : uma relação dialética com implicações na religiosidade contemporânea

Abstract

The current Master’s thesis in Theology, "Secularization and the Sacred: A dialectical relation and its implications for contemporary religiosity", examines the relationship between secularization and the sacred and its unfolding in historical becoming. As a historical-social phenomenon that occurred in the West, secularization brought about the loss of plausibility of the institutional religion that maintained temporal control over all aspects of society. With the advent of modernity, a paradigm shift has occurred, as theocentrism was replaced by anthropocentrism, and revelation by scientific knowledge. Rationalism and scientific knowledge brought unquestionable social and material improvements to mankind, nevertheless a gap has been opened, paradoxically, as new social and existential crises have emerged in secular society. Living with this existential emptiness, modern mankind opens itself again to spiritual reality, which does not mean a return to traditional religions, but a return to the sacred manifested in multiple forms so that contemporary human beings re-signify their spirituality.