IMAGES OF THE WORLD (OIP),This collection of essays engages with the persistence of religion in the modern world, the rise of processes of rationalization, secularization, and cultural change. It argues that the rise of religion as a faith and as a political ideology made the last century a short one. Expectations of the decline of religion were never fulfilled. In these circumstances freedom of religion and religious pluralism acquired great salience. Secularism has been viewed critically and some forms of it have turned out to be seriously flawed. The volume further argues that the relationship between fundamentalism and secularism is more complex than previously imagined and not merely one of antagonism.