Return to Religion

RETURN TO RELIGION The cover story of the April 8, 1966, issue of the American TIME magazine was titled Is God Dead? This was more than half a century ago. But today, in the Western world, such books and articles are being published continuously, and their titles are just the opposite, indicating a growing interest in and return to religion. People increasingly turn back to religion because man’s ‘secular gods’ have failed. This return to religion is a return to man’s innate nature— that is, to the awareness of the God embedded in human nature—and not simply to some religious concepts of inherited religious traditions. In the USA and several other Western countries, religion is again coming alive after a brief period. Religious Studies classes in colleges that were once empty are now filled. There has been an extraordinary increase in the number of readers of spiritual literature. Conferences on religion are currently being held in large numbers. There is a fantastic increase in interest in religion in many circles. In an article by Fran Schumer titled ‘A Return to Religion’ published in the Span magazine (December 1984), Harvey R. Cox, Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, referred to a tremendous resurgence of religious interest. Cox’s bestselling 1965 book, The Secular City, suggested people lost interest in the sacred. A book he wrote later, Religion in the Secular City (1984), described the