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238 books match the query 'Religion, Politics & State' and 8 start with m

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Magna Carta

history, context and influence: Papers delivered at Peking University on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta

Edited by Lawrence Goldman

University of London Press, 2018

This book examines the history and influence of Magna Carta in British and American history. In a series of essays written by notable British specialists, it considers the origins of the document in the political and religious contexts of the thirteenth century, the relevance of its principles to the seventeenth century disputes that led to the Civil War, the uses made of Magna Carta to justify the American Revolution, and its inspiration of the radical-democratic movement in Britain in the early nineteenth century. The introductory essay considers the celebration of Magna Carta's 800th anniversary in 2015 in relation to ceremonials and remembrance in Britain in general. Given as papers to a joint conference of British and Chinese historians in Beijing in 2015, these essays provide a clear and insightful overview of the origins and impact of a medieval document that has shaped the history of the world. The open access edition of this book can be found at http://humanities-digital-library.org/index.php/hdl/catalog/book/goldman.

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Making Home

Faith, Love and the Politics of Belonging in Japanese-Filipino Families

Mario Ivan Lopez

National University of Singapore Press, 2026

An anthropological account of how religion helps sustain bonds within transnational families.

How do faith, family, and migration intersect in the intimate lives of transnational couples? This ethnography examines Japanese-Filipino marriages in contemporary Japan to reveal how gendered Catholic practices, cultural negotiation, and the politics of belonging shape everyday life. Set in Northern Kyushu, Making Home explores the often tense dynamics of these relationships—how love, faith, and social expectations are navigated across multiple domains. Through long-term fieldwork, it shows how Filipino migrants and their Japanese partners create “contact zones” where faith becomes both a resource for connection and a site of struggle.

Religion, far from being a private matter, becomes a powerful tool for migrants to sustain family ties, negotiate identities, and transform the intimate spaces they live in. Centering religious practices within migration studies, this book offers fresh insights into the evolving landscape of transnational families in Japan.

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Making Modern Spain

Religion, Secularization, and Cultural Production

Azariah Alfante

Bucknell University Press, 2024

In this elegantly written study, Alfante explores the work of select nineteenth-century writers, intellectuals, journalists, politicians, and clergy who responded to cultural and spiritual shifts caused by the movement toward secularization in Spain. Focusing on the social experience, this book probes the tensions between traditionalism and liberalism that influenced public opinion of the clergy, sacred buildings, and religious orders. The writings of Cecilia Böhl de Faber (Fernán Caballero), Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Benito Pérez Galdós, and José María de Pereda addressed conflicts between modernizing forces and the Catholic Church about the place of religion and its signifiers in Spanish society. Foregrounding expropriation (government confiscation of civil and ecclesiastical property) and exclaustration (the expulsion of religious communities), and drawing on archival research, the history of disentailment, cultural theory, memory studies, and sociology, Alfante demonstrates how Spain’s liberalizing movement profoundly influenced class mobility and faith among the populace.

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Marriage and Divorce in the Jewish State

Israel's Civil War

Susan M. Weiss and Netty C. Gross-Horowitz

Brandeis University Press, 2012

Israel currently has two recognized systems of law operating side by side: civil and religious. Israeli religious courts possess the exclusive right to conduct and terminate marriages. There is no civil marriage or divorce in Israel, irrespective of one’s religious inclinations. All Muslims must marry and divorce in accordance with shariya laws, all Catholics in accordance with canon law, and all Jews in accordance with Torah law (halakha). The interpretation and implementation of Torah law is in the hands of the Orthodox religious establishment, the only stream of Judaism that enjoys legal recognition in Israel. The rabbinic courts strenuously oppose any changes to this so-called status quo arrangement between religious and secular authorities. In fact, religious courts in Israel are currently pressing for expanded jurisdiction beyond personal status, stressing their importance to Israel’s growing religious community. This book shows how religious courts, based on centuries-old patriarchal law, undermine the full civil and human rights of Jewish women in Israel. Making a broad argument for civil marriage and divorce in Israel, the authors also emphasize that religious marriages and divorces, when they do occur, must benefit from legislation that makes divorce easier to obtain. Making this issue their focal point, they speak to a larger question: Is Israel a democracy or a theocracy?

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Married to Another Man

Israel's Dilemma in Palestine

Ghada Karmi

Pluto Press, 2007

Two rabbis, visiting Palestine in 1897, observed that the land was like a bride, 'beautiful, but married to another man'. By which they meant that, if a place was to be found for Israel in Palestine, where would the people of Palestine go? This is a dilemma that Israel has never been able to resolve.

No conflict today is more dangerous than that between Israel and the Palestinians. The implications it has for regional and global security cannot be overstated. The peace process as we know it is dead and no solution is in sight. Nor, as this book argues, will that change until everyone involved in finding a solution accepts the real causes of conflict, and its consequences on the ground.

Leading writer Ghada Karmi explains in fascinating detail the difficulties Israel's existence created for the Arab world and why the search for a solution has been so elusive. Ultimately, she argues that the conflict will end only once the needs of both Arabs and Israelis are accommodated equally. Her startling conclusions overturn conventional thinking -- but they are hard to refute.

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Mimetic Politics

Dyadic Patterns in Global Politics

Roberto Farneti

Michigan State University Press, 2015

War, violence, and the disruption of social orders are critical areas of focus in mimetic theory, and a mimetic perspective applied to the study of politics illuminates social processes and phenomena over and beyond typical explanations offered by mainstream political science. Unlike traditional political science ontology, the mimetic perspective highlights neither individuals nor groups, but “doubles,” or “mimetic twins.” According to this perspective, in order to grasp the fundamental rationales of political processes, we need to concentrate on the distinctive propensity of either individuals or groups to engage in mimetic contests resulting from their unreflective disposition to imitate each other’s desire. This disposition has been strikingly described by the French-American anthropologist Rene Girard: “Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what.” Via mimetic theory, Farneti highlights phenomena that political scientists have consistently failed to notice, such as reciprocal imitation as the fundamental cause of human discord, the mechanisms of spontaneous polarization in human conflicts (i.e., the emergence of dyads or “doubles”), and the strange and ever-growing resemblance of the mimetic rivals, which is precisely what pushes them to annihilate each other.

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Moral Issues

How Public Opinion on Abortion and Gay Rights Affects American Religion and Politics

Paul Goren and Christopher Chapp

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A new perspective on how beliefs about abortion and gay rights reshaped American politics.

Many believe that religious and partisan identities undergird American public opinion. However, when it comes to abortion and gay rights, the reverse may be closer to the truth.

Drawing on wide-ranging evidence, Paul Goren and Christopher Chapp show that views on abortion and gay rights are just as durable and politically impactful—and often more so—than political and religious identities. Goren and Chapp locate the lasting strength of stances on abortion and gay rights in the automatic, visceral emotions that the media has primed since the late 1980s. Moral Issues examines how attitudes toward these moralized issues affect, and can sometimes even disrupt, religious and partisan identities. Indeed, over the last thirty years, these attitudes have accelerated the rise of the religious “nones,” who have no religious affiliation, and promoted moral sorting into the Democratic and Republican parties.

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