ABSTRACT
The field of sociology is frequently introduced to newcomers as the development of what C. Wright Mills described as the sociological imagination, the “vivid awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society”, the comprehension of relations between biography and history. As a social science, sociology can also be understood more broadly or philosophically as what Charles Taylor termed a modern Western social imaginary, a “common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy”. Beginning in the 1980s, the explosion of publications exploring the interface of sociology and Christianity was further evidence of its resurgent vitality. In seeking “to de-center sociology's overemphasis on Western modernization while still retaining the secular as an analytic category”, examination of the variant secularities in India, Japan, Africa, the Arab world, and post-communist countries reveals how secularities are shaped differently in different cultural contexts.
