BiblioVault - Books about Religious pluralism

Accidental Pluralism

America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497-1662

Evan Haefeli

University of Chicago Press, 2021

The United States has long been defined by its religious diversity and recurrent public debates over the religious and political values that define it. In Accidental Pluralism, Evan Haefeli argues that America did not begin as a religiously diverse and tolerant society. It became so only because England’s religious unity collapsed just as America was being colonized. By tying the emergence of American religious toleration to global events, Haefeli creates a true transnationalist history that links developing American realities to political and social conflicts and resolutions in Europe, showing how the relationships among states, churches, and publics were contested from the beginning of the colonial era and produced a society that no one had anticipated. Accidental Pluralism is an ambitious and comprehensive new account of the origins of American religious life that compels us to refine our narratives about what came to be seen as American values and their distinct relationship to religion and politics.

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Blessed Rage for Order

The New Pluralism in Theology

David Tracy

University of Chicago Press, 1995

In Blessed Rage for Order, David Tracy examines the cultural context in which theological pluralism emerged. Analyzing orthodox, liberal, neo-orthodox, and radical models of theology, Tracy formulates a new 'revisionist' model. He considers which methods promise the most certain results for a revisionist theology and applies his model to the principal questions in contemporary theology, including the meanings of religion, theism, and of christology.

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Church and State in the City

Catholics and Politics in Twentieth-Century San Francisco

William Issel

Temple University Press, 2012

Church and State in the City provides the first comprehensive analysis of the city’s long debate about the public interest. Historian William Issel explores the complex ways that the San Francisco Catholic Church—and its lay men and women—developed relationships with the local businesses, unions, other community groups, and city government to shape debates about how to define and implement the common good. Issel’s deeply researched narrative also sheds new light on the city’s socialists, including Communist Party activists—the most important transnational challengers of both capitalism and Catholicism during the twentieth century.

Moreover, Church and State in the City is revisionist in challenging the notion that the history of urban politics and policy can best be understood as the unfolding of a progressive, secular modernization of urban political culture. Issel shows how tussles over the public interest in San Francisco were both distinctive to the city and shaped by its American character.

In the series Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy, edited by Zane L. Miller, David Stradling, and Larry Bennett

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Debating Moderate Islam

The Geopolitics of Islam and the West

M A Muqtedar Khan

University of Utah Press, 2007

Utah Series in Middle East Studies

After 9/11, many Americans took the view that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the leading edge of a new war: Islam versus the West. Yet the attacks were also part of the current struggle within Islam between fundamentalist and moderate approaches and were staged for maximum effect in the Muslim world.

This book is based on a special-topic issue of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (Fall 2005), and brings together prominent Muslim voices from the policy and academic communities to debate the nature of moderate Islam and what moderation means in both a theological and a geopolitical sense. Participants reflect on the future of political Islam, its role in Muslim politics, western policies in the Muslim world, and the future of American-Muslim relations. This book and the debate it presents are vital to understanding these complex issues.

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The Diversity of Religions

A Christian Perspective

J. A. DiNoia, O.P.

Catholic University of America Press, 1992

DiNoia approaches the debate in the theology of religions with a fresh, lucid, critical and informed mind. . . . This book is timely, provocative and explores new territories and recasts old debates in a fresh and intelligent manner. It will appeal to philosophers, theologians, indologists and those concerned with the meeting of Christianity and the world religions.--Gavin D'Costa, University of Bristol

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Illiberal Politics and Religion in Europe and Beyond

Concepts, Actors, and Identity Narratives

Edited by Anja Hennig and Mirjam Weiberg-Salzmann

Campus Verlag, 2020

Despite the broadly assumed institutional separation of church and state in contemporary Western politics, there is a trend towards renewed alliances between illiberal interpretations of religion and right-wing populist politics that challenge liberal democracy. This book explores the theoretically and empirically complex ideological, structural, and historical linkage between religion and illiberal politics within a broad range of European states. It shows how political actors apply Christian identity narratives to push exclusionist anti-Muslim politics, while simultaneously showcasing the ways in which religious actors evolve as illiberal players searching for political allies. This timely volume offers a critical look at a key contemporary issue that challenges assumptions and the reputations of current relationships between church and state.

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Imagining Judeo-Christian America

Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy

K. Healan Gaston

University of Chicago Press, 2019

“Judeo-Christian” is a remarkably easy term to look right through. Judaism and Christianity obviously share tenets, texts, and beliefs that have strongly influenced American democracy. In this ambitious book, however, K. Healan Gaston challenges the myth of a monolithic Judeo-Christian America. She demonstrates that the idea is not only a recent and deliberate construct, but also a potentially dangerous one. From the time of its widespread adoption in the 1930s, the ostensible inclusiveness of Judeo-Christian terminology concealed efforts to promote particular conceptions of religion, secularism, and politics. Gaston also shows that this new language, originally rooted in arguments over the nature of democracy that intensified in the early Cold War years, later became a marker in the culture wars that continue today. She argues that the debate on what constituted Judeo-Christian—and American—identity has shaped the country’s religious and political culture much more extensively than previously recognized.

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Mimetic Theory and World Religions

Wolfgang Palaver

Michigan State University Press, 2017

Those who anticipated the demise of religion and the advent of a peaceful, secularized global village have seen the last two decades confound their predictions. René Girard’s mimetic theory is a key to understanding the new challenges posed by our world of resurgent violence and pluralistic cultures and traditions. Girard sought to explain how the Judeo-Christian narrative exposes a founding murder at the origin of human civilization and demystifies the bloody sacrifices of archaic religions. Meanwhile, his book Sacrifice, a reading of conflict and sacrificial resolution in the Vedic Brahmanas, suggests that mimetic theory’s insights also resonate with several non-Western religious and spiritual traditions. This volume collects engagements with Girard by scholars of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and situates them within contemporary theology, philosophy, and religious studies.

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One State Under God

A History of Religion in Texas

Joseph L. Locke

University of Texas Press, 2026

A broad and accessible history of religion in Texas, from prehistory to the present.

From sprawling megachurches to religious billboards and towering steel crosses, religion quite literally looms over Texas. Christian nationalism determines the state’s politics and, every school day, more than five million Texas children pledge allegiance to “one state under God.” But it wasn’t always this way.

In this wide-ranging chronicle, Joseph Locke uncovers the breadth of Texas’s religious history, from Indigenous painters of cosmological cave art and Spanish invaders who constructed missions to irreligious Anglo colonists, freethinking frontiersmen, Tejano folk saints, evangelical culture warriors, and Muslim immigrants. Locke traces the state’s religious transformations across the centuries, bringing them to life through his depiction of compelling figures, like enslaved preacher Anderson Edwards, fighting fundamentalist J. Frank Norris, and celebrated humanitarian Sister Norma Pimentel, and gripping moments, such as the murder of atheist newspaperman William Cowper Brann and the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. Comprehensive, fast-paced, and highly readable, One State Under God reveals how the Lone Star State’s spiritual path was blazed.

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Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana

Politics, Identity, and Faith in New Migrant Communities

Lois Ann Lorentzen, Joaquin Jay Gonzalez III, Kevin M. Chun and Hien Duc Do, eds.

Duke University Press, 2009

Based on ethnographic research by an interdisciplinary team of scholars and activists, Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana illuminates the role that religion plays in the civic and political experiences of new migrants in the United States. By bringing innovative questions and theoretical frameworks to bear on the experiences of Chinese, Filipino, Mexican, Salvadoran, and Vietnamese migrants, the contributors demonstrate how groups and individuals negotiate multiple religious, cultural, and national identities, and how religious faiths are transformed through migration. Taken together, their essays show that migrants’ religious lives are much more than replications of home in a new land. They reflect a process of adaptation to new physical and cultural environments, and an ongoing synthesis of cultural elements from the migrants’ countries of origin and the United States.

As they conducted research, the contributors not only visited churches and temples but also single-room-occupancy hotels, brothels, tattoo-removal clinics, and the streets of San Francisco, El Salvador, Mexico, and Vietnam. Their essays include an exploration of how faith-based organizations can help LGBT migrants surmount legal and social complexities, an examination of transgendered sex workers’ relationship with the unofficial saint Santisima Muerte, a comparison of how a Presbyterian mission and a Buddhist temple in San Francisco help Chinese immigrants to acculturate, and an analysis of the transformation of baptismal rites performed by Mayan migrants. The voices of gang members, Chinese and Vietnamese Buddhist nuns, members of Pentecostal churches, and many others animate this collection. In the process of giving voice to these communities, the contributors interrogate theories about acculturation, class, political and social capital, gender and sexuality, the sociology of religion, transnationalism, and globalization. The collection includes twenty-one photographs by Jerry Berndt.

Contributors. Luis Enrique Bazan, Kevin M. Chun, Hien Duc Do, Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola, Joaquin Jay Gonzalez III, Sarah Horton, Cymene Howe, Mimi Khúc, Jonathan H. X. Lee, Lois Ann Lorentzen, Andrea Maison, Dennis Marzan, Rosalina Mira, Claudine del Rosario, Susanna Zaraysky

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Religious Pluralism and the Nigerian State

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Simeon O. Ilesanmi

Ohio University Press, 1996

In the case of Nigeria, scholarship on religious politics has not adequately taken into account the pluralistic context and the idealistic pretensions of the state that inhibit the possibility of forging an enduring civic amity among Nigeria’s diverse groups. Ilesanmi proposes a new philosophy or model of religio-political interaction, which he calls dialogic politics. Dialogic politics celebrates pluralism and suggests that religious institutions he construed as mediating structures functioning as buffers between individual citizens in search of existential meaning and cultural identity and the impersonal state, which tends to gravitate toward instrumental objectives. Ilesanmi’s study offers a fresh perspective on the complex relations between political attitudes and religious convictions.

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The Spires Still Point to Heaven

Cincinnati's Religious Landscape, 1788–1873

Matthew Smith

Temple University Press, 2023

A case study about the formation of American pluralism and religious liberty, The Spires Still Point to Heaven explores why—and more importantly how—the early growth of Cincinnati influenced the changing face of the United States. Matthew Smith deftly chronicles the urban history of this thriving metropolis in the mid-nineteenth century. As Protestants and Catholics competed, building rival domestic missionary enterprises, increased religious reform and expression shaped the city. In addition, the different ethnic and religious beliefs informed debates on race, slavery, and immigration, as well as disease, temperance reform, and education.

Specifically, Smith explores the Ohio Valley’s religious landscape from 1788 through the nineteenth century, examining its appeal to evangelical preachers, abolitionists, social critics, and rabbis. He traces how Cincinnati became a battleground for newly energized social reforms following a cholera epidemic, and how grassroots political organizing was often tied to religious issues. He also illustrates the anti-immigrant sentiments and anti-Catholic nativism pervasive in this era.

The first monograph on Cincinnati’s religious landscape before the Civil War, The Spires Still Point to Heaven highlights Cincinnati’s unique circumstances and how they are key to understanding the cultural and religious development of the nation.

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