BiblioVault - Books about Sociology of Religion

Identity in a Secular Age

Science, Religion, and Public Perceptions

Fern Elsdon-Baker and Bernard Lightman

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020

Although historians have suggested for some time that we move away from the assumption of a necessary clash between science and religion, the conflict narrative persists in contemporary discourse. But why? And how do we really know what people actually think about evolutionary science, let alone the many and varied ways in which it might relate to individual belief? In this multidisciplinary volume, experts in history and philosophy of science, oral history, sociology of religion, social psychology, and science communication and public engagement look beyond two warring systems of thought. They consider a far more complex, multifaceted, and distinctly more interesting picture of how differing groups along a spectrum of worldviews—including atheistic, agnostic, and faith groups—relate to and form the ongoing narrative of a necessary clash between evolution and faith. By ascribing agency to the public, from the nineteenth century to the present and across Canada and the United Kingdom, this volume offers a much more nuanced analysis of people’s perceptions about the relationship between evolutionary science, religion, and personal belief, one that better elucidates the complexities not only of that relationship but of actual lived experience.

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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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Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe

Regular, Repellant, and Redemptive Death

Sarah Schell

Amsterdam University Press, 2023

Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe explores the Office of the Dead as a site of interaction between text, image, and experience in the culture of commemoration that thrived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Office of the Dead was a familiar liturgical ritual, and its perceived importance and utility are evident in its regular inclusion in devotional compilations, which crossed the boundaries between lay and religious readers. The Office was present in all medieval deaths: as a focus for private contemplation, a site of public performance, a reassuring ritual, and a voice for the bereaved. Examining the images at the Office of the Dead and related written, visual, and material evidence, this book explores the relationship of these images to the text in which they are embedded and to the broader experiences of and aspirations for death.

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Importing Care, Faithful Service

Filipino and Indian American Nurses at a Veterans Hospital

Stephen M. Cherry

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Every year thousands of foreign-born Filipino and Indian nurses immigrate to the United States. Despite being well trained and desperately needed, they enter the country at a time, not unlike the past, when the American social and political climate is once again increasingly unwelcoming to them as immigrants. Drawing on rich ethnographic and survey data, collected over a four-year period, this study explores the role Catholicism plays in shaping the professional and community lives of foreign-born Filipino and Indian American nurses in the face of these challenges, while working at a Veterans hospital. Their stories provide unique insights into the often-unseen roles race, religion and gender play in the daily lives of new immigrants employed in American healthcare. In many ways, these nurses find themselves foreign in more ways than just their nativity. Seeing nursing as a religious calling, they care for their patients, both at the hospital and in the wider community, with a sense of divine purpose but must also confront the cultural tensions and disconnects between how they were raised and trained in another country and the legal separation of church and state. How they cope with and engage these tensions and disconnects plays an important role in not only shaping how they see themselves as Catholic nurses but their place in the new American story.

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In the Name of the Father

The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention

Carl L. Kell and L. Raymond Camp. Foreword by Kenneth Chafin

Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

In the Name of the Father: The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Conventionbegins with an analysis of the 1979 Southern Baptist Convention, the watershed convention where moderate forces fell before the powerful oratory of the ultraconservative faction, which has remained in power ever since. Communication professors Carl L. Kell and L. Raymond Camp investigate the rhetorical shift from moderate to ultraconservative in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest denomination in the South and the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.

Drawing on sermons delivered at national conventions from 1979 to the present, Kell and Camp outline the discourses of fundamentalism, inerrancy, and exclusion. These discourses, the authors assert, point to the SBC leaders’ call for a return to times before feminism and tolerance of varying sexual orientations allegedly brought chaos to society and shook believers from their theological foundations.

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Indian Shakers

A Messianic Cult of the Pacific Northwest

H. G. Barnett

Southern Illinois University Press, 1972

A thorough anthropological study of a distinct religious cult of the Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest. The book traces the Shaker cult’s development, its ceremonies, ritual elements, faiths, and doctrine.

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Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium

The Ambiguity of Religious Experience

Youval Rotman

Harvard University Press, 2016

In the Roman and Byzantine Near East, the holy fool emerged in Christianity as a way of describing individuals whose apparent madness allowed them to achieve a higher level of spirituality. Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium examines how the figure of the mad saint or mystic was used as a means of individual and collective transformation in the period between the birth of Christianity and the rise of Islam. It presents a novel interpretation in revealing the central role that psychology plays in social and historical development.

Early Christians looked to figures who embodied extremes of behavior—like the holy fool, the ascetic, the martyr—to redefine their social, cultural, and mental settings by reading new values in abnormal behavior. Comparing such forms of extreme behavior in early Christian, pagan, and Jewish societies, and drawing on theories of relational psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology of religion, Youval Rotman explains how the sanctification of figures of extreme behavior makes their abnormality socially and psychologically functional. The sanctification of abnormal mad behavior created a sphere of ambiguity in the ambit of religious experience for early Christians, which brought about a deep psychological shift, necessary for the transition from paganism to Christianity.

A developing society leaves porous the border between what is normal and abnormal, between sanity and insanity, in order to use this ambiguity as a means of change. Rotman emphasizes the role of religion in maintaining this ambiguity to effect a social and psychological transformation.

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Into Africa

A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change

Wall, Barbra Mann

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Winner of the 2016 Lavinia Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing

Awarded first place in the 2016 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in the History and Public Policy category

The most dramatic growth of Christianity in the late twentieth century has occurred in Africa, where Catholic missions have played major roles. But these missions did more than simply convert Africans. Catholic sisters became heavily involved in the Church’s health services and eventually in relief and social justice efforts. In Into Africa, Barbra Mann Wall offers a transnational history that reveals how Catholic medical and nursing sisters established relationships between local and international groups, sparking an exchange of ideas that crossed national, religious, gender, and political boundaries.

Both a nurse and a historian, Wall explores this intersection of religion, medicine, gender, race, and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the years following World War II, a period when European colonial rule was ending and Africans were building new governments, health care institutions, and education systems. She focuses specifically on hospitals, clinics, and schools of nursing in Ghana and Uganda run by the Medical Mission Sisters of Philadelphia; in Nigeria and Uganda by the Irish Medical Missionaries of Mary; in Tanzania by the Maryknoll Sisters of New York; and in Nigeria by a local Nigerian congregation. Wall shows how, although initially somewhat ethnocentric, the sisters gradually developed a deeper understanding of the diverse populations they served. In the process, their medical and nursing work intersected with critical social, political, and cultural debates that continue in Africa today: debates about the role of women in their local societies, the relationship of women to the nursing and medical professions and to the Catholic Church, the obligations countries have to provide care for their citizens, and the role of women in human rights.

A groundbreaking contribution to the study of globalization and medicine, Into Africa highlights the importance of transnational partnerships, using the stories of these nuns to enhance the understanding of medical mission work and global change.

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Inward

Vipassana Meditation and the Embodiment of the Self

Michal Pagis

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Western society has never been more interested in interiority. Indeed, it seems more and more people are deliberately looking inward—toward the mind, the body, or both. Michal Pagis’s Inward focuses on one increasingly popular channel for the introverted gaze: vipassana meditation, which has spread from Burma to more than forty countries and counting. Lacing her account with vivid anecdotes and personal stories, Pagis turns our attention not only to the practice of vipassana but to the communities that have sprung up around it. Inward is also a social history of the westward diffusion of Eastern religious practices spurred on by the lingering effects of the British colonial presence in India. At the same time Pagis asks knotty questions about what happens when we continually turn inward, as she investigates the complex relations between physical selves, emotional selves, and our larger social worlds. Her book sheds new light on evergreen topics such as globalization, social psychology, and the place of the human body in the enduring process of self-awareness.

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Irish Mormons

Reconciling Identity in Global Mormonism

Hazel O'Brien

University of Illinois Press, 2023

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of the international religions that have arrived from abroad to find adherents in Ireland. Drawing on fieldwork in two LDS communities, Hazel O’Brien explores how these adherents experience the Church in Ireland against the backdrop of the country’s increasingly complex religious identity. Irish Latter-day Saints live on the margins of the nation’s religious life and the worldwide LDS movement. Nonetheless, they create a sense of belonging for themselves by drawing on collective memories of both their Irishness and their faith. As O’Brien shows, Irish Latter-day Saints work to shift the understanding of Ireland’s religious landscape away from a predominant focus on Roman Catholicism. They also challenge Utah-based constructions of Mormonism in order to ensure their place in the Church’s powerful religious and cultural lineage.

Examining the Latter-day Saint experience against one nation’s rapid social and religious changes, Irish Mormons blends participant observation and interviews with analysis to offer a rare view of the Latter-day Saints in contemporary Ireland.

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An Irish-Speaking Island

State, Religion, Community, and the Linguistic Landscape in Ireland, 1770–1870

Nicholas M. Wolf

University of Wisconsin Press, 2014

After 1770, Ireland experienced the establishment of modern forms of Irish Catholicism, new engagement by the public with the political process, and the growth of the modern state, represented by new legal and educational systems. An Irish-Speaking Island investigates the role in these developments of the population who spoke Irish in their daily lives—whether as a first or second language—and links the history of language contact and bilingualism with the broader history of Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
As late as 1840, Ireland had as many as four million Irish speakers—a significant proportion of the total population—who could be found in every county of the island and in all social classes and religious persuasions. Their impact on the modern history of Ireland and the United Kingdom cannot be captured by a simple conclusion that they became anglicized. Rather, Nicholas M. Wolf explores the complex ways in which the transition from Irish to English placed a premium on adaptive bilingualism and shaped beliefs and behavior in the domestic sphere, religious life, and oral culture within the community. An Irish-Speaking Island will interest not only historians but also scholars of linguistics, folklore, politics, literature, and religion.

Winner, Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture, American Conference for Irish Studies

Winner, Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Books, American Conference for Irish Studies

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Islam and the Future of Tolerance

A Dialogue

Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz

Harvard University Press, 2015

“A civil but honest dialogue…As illuminating as it is fascinating.”
—Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Is Islam a religion of peace or war? Is it amenable to reform? Why do so many Muslims seem to be drawn to extremism? And what do words like jihadism and fundamentalism really mean? In a world riven by misunderstanding and violence, Sam Harris—a famous atheist—and Maajid Nawaz—a former radical—demonstrate how two people with very different religious views can find common ground and invite you to join in an urgently needed conversation.

“How refreshing to read an honest yet affectionate exchange between the Islamist-turned-liberal-Muslim Maajid Nawaz and the neuroscientist who advocates mindful atheism, Sam Harris…Their back-and-forth clarifies multiple confusions that plague the public conversation about Islam.”
—Irshad Manji, New York Times Book Review

“It is sadly uncommon, in any era, to find dialogue based on facts and reason—but even more rarely are Muslim and non-Muslim intellectuals able to maintain critical distance on broad questions about Islam. Which makes Islam and the Future of Tolerance something of a unicorn…Most conversations about religion are marked by the inability of either side to listen, but here, at last, is a proper debate.”
—New Statesman

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Israeli Society in the Twenty-First Century

Immigration, Inequality, and Religious Conflict

Calvin Goldscheider

Brandeis University Press, 2015

This volume illuminates changes in Israeli society over the past generation. Goldscheider identifies three key social changes that have led to the transformation of Israeli society in the twenty-first century: the massive immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union, the economic shift to a high-tech economy, and the growth of socioeconomic inequalities inside Israel. To deepen his analysis of these developments, Goldscheider focuses on ethnicity, religion, and gender, including the growth of ethnic pluralism in Israel, the strengthening of the Ultra-Orthodox community, the changing nature of religious Zionism and secularism, shifts in family patterns, and new issues and challenges between Palestinians and Arab Israelis given the stalemate in the peace process and the expansions of Jewish settlements. Combining demography and social structural analysis, the author draws on the most recent data available from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and other sources to offer scholars and students an innovative guide to thinking about the Israel of the future. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of contemporary Israel, the Middle East, sociology, demography and economic development, as well as policy specialists in these fields. It will serve as a textbook for courses in Israeli history and in the modern Middle East.

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