Multiple Modernities: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism in a Globalizing Age by Robert Hefner

ARTICLE CRITIQUE: HEFNER, ROBERT. "MULTIPLE MODERNITIES: CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM AND HINDUISM IN A GLOBALIZING AGE." ANNUAL REVIEW OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 27 (1998): 83-104
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Hefner, Robert. "Multiple Modernities: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism in a Globalizing Age." Annual Review of Anthropology. 27 (1998): 83-104
There have been far reaching changes in the religion setting in the twentieth century. The critical engagement in such issues is the need for deeper understanding of the different religions modernity to provide well defined sets and their separated ideas. All the religions: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism play a role closely in terms of modernity centered on the compatibility among the religions and modernity itself. The existence of multiple modernities is a process that results in creation and evolution of modernity. The sociological foundation has claimed the idea of modernity to have occurred in early Christianity in Europe because there were conditions for it to thrive, but the societal and cognitive transformations such as secularism and beliefs are primacy of rationality and individualism.
Therefore, the belief of modernity is an introduction of imperial dimensions toward the narrative of modernization that ensures societies adapt to their religion model. Modernity is the overcoming process that presents newness into an art of civil society in the form of passion and heroism. There have been challenges in anthropology of religion due to religious influence in public, culture and politics globally. This is because modernity has driven from the means that provide meaning to the world it shapes. The outcome can not be considered as enlightenment, but rather it is a structure of economic and bureaucratic control. On the other hand modernity can be said to be an incomplete process where knowledge networks that a society embeds on is a rationality that produces similar order that allows modernity to rise. Modernities have become pillars of states and institutions that influence other societies in transforming to them.
Modernity development earlier provided a set of transformations which are valid for every culture reflecting the social context that created them. Cultural modernity provides the understanding of social background that differentiates between civilization and own culture. Therefore, social transformation of modernity is through cultural self reflection. There have been insistence on the need for religious nations on the basis of culture and majority among the Hindu and Muslims to make an internally homogenizing and externally hostile. There has been social change with these religions though the responses vary with the resources a religion has in encountering with modernity. Conversion in these re...