Secularization (or secularisation) is the transformation of a society from close identification with religious values and institutions toward nonreligious (or irreligious) values and secular institutions. The secularization thesis refers to the belief that as societies "progress", particularly through modernization and rationalization, religion loses its authority in all aspects of social life and governance. The term secularization is also used in the context of the lifting of the monastic restrictions from a member of the clergy.

Secularization has many levels of meaning, both as a theory and a historical process. Social theorists such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim, postulated that the modernization of society would include a decline in levels of religiosity. Study of this process seeks to determine the manner in which, or extent to which religious creeds, practices and institutions are losing social significance. Some theorists argue that the secularization of modern civilization partly results from our inability to adapt broad ethical and spiritual needs of mankind to the increasingly fast advance of the physical sciences.

Father Adolfo Nicolás Pachón, S.J., S.T.D. (born April 29, 1936) is a Spanish priest of the Roman Catholic Church. He is the thirtieth and current Superior General of the Society of Jesus, the largest male religious order in the Church.

Adolfo Nicolás was born in Villamuriel de Cerrato, Palencia, and entered the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as the Jesuits, in the novitiate of Aranjuez in 1953. He studied at the University of Alcalá, there earning his licentiate in philosophy, until 1960, whence he traveled to Japan to familiarize himself with Japanese language and culture. Nicolás entered Sophia University in Tokyo, where he studied theology, in 1964, and was later ordained to the priesthood on March 17, 1967.

From 1968 to 1971, he studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, from where he earned a doctorate in theology. Upon his return to Japan, Nicolás was made professor of systematic theology at his alma mater of Sophia University, teaching there for the next thirty years.

Hamza Yusuf Hanson is an American Islamic scholar, and (with Zaid Shakir and Hatem Bazian) is co-founder of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California, United States. He is a convert to Islam, and is one of the signatories of A Common Word Between Us and You, an open letter by Islamic scholars to Christian leaders, calling for peace and understanding. He has described the 9/11 attacks as "an act of 'mass murder, pure and simple'". Condemning the attacks, he has also stated "Islam was hijacked ... on that plane as an innocent victim".The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom reported that he "is arguably the west's most influential Islamic scholar" and added that "many Muslims find his views hard to stomach."

Hamza Yusuf was born to two academics in Washington State and raised in Northern California. In 1977, he became Muslim and subsequently traveled to the Muslim world and studied for ten years in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, as well as North and West Africa. Hamza Yusuf spent four years studying in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere in the Middle East. Later he traveled to West Africa and studied in Mauritania, Medina, Algeria, and Morocco under such scholars as Murabit al Haaj; Baya bin Salik, head of the Islamic court in Al-'Ain, United Arab Emirates; Muhammad Shaybani, Mufti of Abu Dhabi; Hamad al-Wali; and Muhammad al-Fatrati of Al Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt.^{[citation needed]} After more than a decade abroad, he returned to the United States and earned degrees in nursing from Imperial Valley College and religious studies at San José State University.^{[citation needed]}

José Casanova (died 8 December 1987) was a Peruvian international footballer who played as a midfielder.

Casanova died in the 1987 Alianza Lima air disaster.

Marianne Weber, (born Marianne Schnitger on August 2, 1870 in Oerlinghausen, died March 12, 1954 in Heidelberg), sociologist, women's rights activist and wife of Max Weber.

Marianne Schnitger was born on August 2, 1870 in Oerlinghausen to medical doctor Eduard Schnitger and his wife Anna Weber, daughter of a prominent Oerlinghausen businessman Karl Weber. After the death of her mother in 1873 she moved to Lemgo and was raised for the next fourteen years by her grandmother and aunt. During this time, both her father and his two brothers went mad and were institutionalized. When Marianne turned 16, Karl Weber sent her off to fashionable finishing schools in Lemgo and Hanover, from which she graduated when she was 19. After the death of her grandmother in 1889, she lived several years with her mother's sister Alwine in Oerlinghausen.

In 1891, Marianne began to spend time with the Charlottenburg Webers, Max, Jr. and his mother Helene in particular. She became very close to Helene, who she would refer to as being "unaware of her own inner beauty." In 1893 she and Max Weber married in Oerlinghausen and moved into their own apartment in Berlin.