John R Shook

Biographic Data

ID1016509
NAMEJohn R Shook
GIVEN NAMESJohn R
FAMILY NAMEShook
SIGNATURESHOOK J R
AFFILIATIONSUniversity at Buffalo, State University of New York
ORCID0000-0003-2562-9860
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS46
TOTAL CITATIONS8
AUTHOR COUNT20
EDITOR COUNT26
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1995
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX2

  • The sentience of animals in John Dewey’s organic naturalism

    Open AccessJohn R ShookARTICLEHistory & Philosophy of the Life…2026

  • Philosophical Historiography, Military History, and 2020s Crisis War

    Open AccessJohn R ShookARTICLEEidos A Journal for Philosophy of…2026

    Military history has to date shown little interest in war periodicity. It will soon witness the confirmation or disproof of a war forecast made over thirty years ago, by a socio-political model of Anglo-American culture that predicted a major civic and war crisis for the 2020s. Extending that model beyond the scope of original authors, Neil Howe and William Strauss, this essay finds a mathematical periodicity of major war over fourteen centuries …

  • A Place for Ancient Philosophy in Axial Age Historiography

    Open AccessJohn R ShookARTICLEComparative Philosophy An…2025

    Long-standing debates over historiographical approaches to the Axial Age have distracted the history of philosophy from its own disciplined inquiry into the breadth and depth of ancient thought beyond the Greeks. The philosopher Karl Jaspers offered a vista for seeing commonalities among ancient innovations and discerning continuities along history to modern times. That dual agenda divided Axial historiography with the question of whether axialit…

  • The Time Has Arrived for Post-Post-Secularism

    John R ShookARTICLESecular Studies2023

    Political secularism secures the disestablishment of religion by government. Religions sense an undemocratic power grab, and hence demand the disestablishment of secularism. The obvious options for political religion are few, to either promote populist majoritarianism, and/or control one or another branch of government. The options for political secularism in an age of secularization are no less momentous. Berlinerblau’s book Secularism: The Basi…

  • Pragmatism

    John R ShookBOOKPragmatism2023

  • Challenging the New Atheism: Pragmatic Confrontations in the Philosophy of Religion

    John R ShookARTICLEAmerican Journal of Theology &…2022

    This contribution to contemporary philosophy of religion turns out to be, as the last chapters unfold, an explication and defense of Josiah Royce's religious philosophy. If confrontations between pragmatism and atheism were this book's subject, Shepherd disguises a clash as a clever collaboration. Philosophy supplies their common ground. His hopes for philosophy of religion, revealed in the final chapter, situate philosophy in a supervisory role …

  • Animal Polis, or, Why Ethics Cannot Rule Politics

    Open AccessJohn R ShookARTICLEEidos A Journal for Philosophy of…2020

    Preview: /Review: Martha Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 310 pages./ For decades Martha Nussbaum allied herself whole-heartedly with cosmopolitanism. No longer. She appealed at length to the righteousness of Stoic cosmopolitanism in past publications such as Cultivating Humanity in 1997. Now, according to The Cosmopolitan Tradition, that founding ideal cannot be right…

  • The Meaning of ‘Secular’ as a Scientific Concept

    Open AccessJohn R ShookARTICLESecularism and Nonreligion2020

    The meaning of ‘secular’ in the scientific use of ‘secular trend’, ‘secular variation’, and similar terms is a topic that merits historical investigation. The scientific meaning for ‘secular’ has an origin and independent role apart from both religion and secularization. Fields in the social sciences, life sciences, and natural sciences have been using the concepts of ‘secular trend’ and ‘secular variation’ for almost two centuries. The field of …

  • Sacred, Secular, and Neosacred Governments in China and Taiwan

    Cheng-Tian Kuo, Cheng‐tian Kuo et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    This chapter explores a puzzle in comparative religion–state relations: both the atheist Chinese communist government and the democratic Taiwanese government have substantially restored the traditional, pluralistic, religious state of Chinese dynasties. After 1949, the Chinese government and the Taiwanese government developed different types of religion–state relations. The Chinese Communist government initially aimed to eliminate all religions b…

  • Secularism, Race, and Political Affiliation in America

    Juhem Navarro-Rivera, Yazmín García Trejo et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    This chapter introduces readers to a relatively unknown aspect of American secularism: its growing racial diversity. It discusses the importance of racial and ethnic minorities in the growth in the number of people with no religious affiliation (nones) in the United States since 1990. Furthermore, it argues and demonstrates that this growing racial diversity is a major source of the exodus of secular Americans away from the Republican Party and, …

  • Secular Spirituality

    R C Fuller, Phil Zuckerman et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    This chapter pursues some questions about religiosity’s intersections with contemporary secularity. Traditional religiosity persists in economically advanced nations, such as the United States. The nones, those who have abandoned religious affiliations, continue to hold various kinds of religious belief. In addition, forms of contemporary religiosity often embrace most of secularism’s basic premises. Eight central attributes of secular spirituali…

  • The Liberal Betrayal of Secularism

    Shadia B Drury, Phil Zuckerman et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    This chapter offers a philosophical overview of the historical relationship between liberalism and secularism in the West. It concludes that secularism has been betrayed by the current ascendancy of a multicultural brand of liberalism. The history of religion in the West has made secularism a necessary posture that the state must adopt in the face of the threat that monotheistic religions pose to political order and stability. Secularism and libe…

  • Secular Living

    Jesse M Smith, Phil Zuckerman et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    This chapter discusses the definitions, experiences, and sociocultural construction of secularity. How do people make meaning out of, and in relation to, the secular? The chapter focuses on those individuals and groups who either reject or are uninterested in religion and who hold no theistic beliefs. This is different task from an academic conversation about historical secularism, the functions of secular states or governments, or the historical…

  • The Imagined War between Secularism and Religion

    Mark Juergensmeyer, Phil Zuckerman et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    The case of the 2015 attack on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris illustrates the imagined war between secularism and religion that is in the background of many incidents of violence at the turn of the twenty-first century. The Enlightenment idea that there are two different worldviews—two distinctly different spheres of understanding about reality, one of them secular and the other religious—is inherently problematic. T…

  • Secular Ethics, East and West

    Sor‐hoon Tan, Sor-Hoon Tan et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    One can find secular ethics in Aristotle’s philosophy; one can also find secular ethics in Confucianism. Debates about the religious status of Confucianism date back several centuries and continue today. Ethical concepts in the Classical Confucian texts and the ethical life they advocate can be accepted on their own, independent of any otherworldly religious beliefs. This chapter reconstructs a Confucian secular ethics from the textual resources …

  • Nonreligious People in Religious Societies

    Will M Gervais, Maxine B Najle et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    Although secularism is on the rise, with fewer people identifying with a specific religion, atheists still face a significant degree of prejudice. This chapter discusses that social phenomenon and research efforts to reveal its causes and potential ways to reduce antipathy toward atheists. Social psychology can inquire into causes for prejudice and discrimination against the nonreligious, covering related matters such as origins of unbelief, how …

  • Ethics, Secular and Religious

    John Teehan, Phil Zuckerman et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    Morality from an evolutionary perspective is a code of conduct that regulates behavior within a group in order to promote social cohesion and stability. Both religion and secularism are grounded in the same moral psychology. How should the distinction between secular and religious ethics be assessed? Religious morality is a late-comer to the natural history of morality, reinforcing much of morality with a worldview about unnatural powers that hum…

  • Black Infidels

    Sikiyu Hutchinson, Phil Zuckerman et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    African Americans are among the most religious groups in the United States. Consequently, secular humanism and atheism are largely anathema to mainstream African Americans. Nonetheless, secular humanist and atheist traditions have coexisted with religious traditions in African American social thought and community as a progressive political and cultural counterweight to black religious orthodoxy. Radical or progressive humanism is specifically co…

  • Secularization in Israel

    Guy Ben-Porat, Phil Zuckerman et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    Neither the study of the political system nor surveys of individual religiosity capture the full picture of secularization in Israel. The power of religious parties seems unshaken, and formal changes in religious policies and legislation are few. A large number of Israelis maintain their attachment to Jewish religion in beliefs and practices, and the Jewish majority agrees that Israel is and must remain a “Jewish state.” However, economic and dem…

  • Soviet Atheism and Its Aftermath

    Sonja Luehrmann, Phil Zuckerman et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    If Soviet atheism is a variety of secularism, it more resembles eliminationist movements viewing religions as obstacles to the political integration of citizens into the state. Before World War II, the Bolshevik government issued decrees to disentangle the state from the church. Later, Khrushchev emphasized atheism and closed churches as part of a general populist, mobilizational approach to promoting communist values. By the 1970s, religious pra…

  • Identifying (with) the Secular

    Johannes Quack, Phil Zuckerman et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    This chapter discusses two academic strands with respect to scholarly attempts to identify the secular. Based on a review of criticism brought forward against the classical secularization thesis, it outlines, on one hand, what consequences have been drawn by descriptive and explanatory social scientists and how they apply notions such as secularity, secularism, and secularization today, and, on the other, examines the conceptual histories as well…

  • Secular Government in Sub-Saharan Africa

    Baffour K Takyi, Phil Zuckerman et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    This chapter looks at religion in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the context over a contested “secularization” debate in contemporary societies. The chapter contends that a genuine transformation is underway in many parts of SSA following its independence from European colonial rule. However, these postcolonial advances are yet to significantly affect the belief systems of many Africans. On the contrary, in many SSA countries, there is evidence of a…

  • Secularism in India

    Vidhu Verma, Phil Zuckerman et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    This chapter examines the historical emergence of secularism through movements, debates, and legal formulations to explain specific features that the concept has acquired in the context of India. The first part examines the tensions between the theoretical narratives of Indian constitutionalism and the practices of politics that led to the acceptance of certain essential conditions of secularism. The approach towards secularism found in writings …

  • Varieties of Secular Experience

    David Eller, Phil Zuckerman et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    Investigators should discover how particular groups, institutions, and societies talk about and practice secularism—if in fact they do at all—rather than impose a speciously unified concept, derived from one society’s experience, on all places and times. A critical perspective on “the secular” is presented in this chapter, illustrating how to acknowledge and analyze its extraordinary diversity. Insights into African, Japanese, Jewish, Muslim, and…

  • Political Secularism and Democracy in Theory and Practice

    Jonathan Fox, Phil Zuckerman et al.BOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Secularism2017

    An overwhelming majority of democracies, no matter how the concept of democracy is defined, restrict the religious practices and institutions of minority religions, substantially support religion, and give de jure and de facto preferences to a single religion or a few religions. Since so few democracies meet any standard of political secularism, political secularism is either not essential to liberal democracy or these countries’ status as libera…