939 books match the query 'Religious aspects' and 70 start with r

cover of Race and the Power of Sermons on American Politics

Race and the Power of Sermons on American Politics

R. Khari Brown, Ronald E. Brown, and James S. Jackson

University of Michigan Press, 2021

This book examines the intersection of race, political sermons, and social justice. Religious leaders and congregants who discuss and encourage others to do social justice embrace a form of civil religion that falls close to the covenantal wing of American civil religious thought. Clergy and members who share this theological outlook frame the nation as being exceptional in God’s sight. They also emphasize that the nation’s special relationship with the Creator is contingent on the nation working toward providing opportunities for socioeconomic well-being, freedom, and creative pursuits. God’s covenant, thus, requires inclusion of people who may have different life experiences but who, nonetheless, are equally valued by God and worthy of dignity. Adherents to such a civil religious worldview would believe it right to care for and be in solidarity with the poor and powerless, even if they are undocumented immigrants, people living in non-democratic and non-capitalist nations, or members of racial or cultural out-groups. Relying on 44 national and regional surveys conducted between 1941 and 2019, Race and the Power of Sermons on American Politics explores how racial experiences impact the degree to which religion informs social justice attitudes and political behavior. This is the most comprehensive set of analyses of publicly available survey data on this topic.

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cover of Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter: Essays on a Moment and a Movement

Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter

Essays on a Moment and a Movement

Christopher Cameron

Vanderbilt University Press, 2021

Black Lives Matter, like its predecessor movements, embodies flesh and blood through local organizing, national and global protests, hunger strikes, and numerous acts of civil disobedience. Chants like “All night! All day! We’re gonna fight for Freddie Gray!” and “No justice, no fear! Sandra Bland is marching here!” give voice simultaneously to the rage, truth, hope, and insurgency that sustain BLM. While BLM has generously welcomed a broad group of individuals whom religious institutions have historically resisted or rejected, contrary to general perceptions, religion neither has been absent nor excluded from the movement’s activities.

This volume has a simple, but far-reaching argument: religion is an important thread in BLM. To advance this claim, Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter examines religion’s place in the movement through the lenses of history, politics, and culture. While this collection is not exhaustive or comprehensive in its coverage of religion and BLM, it selectively anthologizes unique aspects of Black religious history, thought, and culture in relation to political struggle in the contemporary era. The chapters aim to document historical change in light of current trends and current events. The contributors analyze religion and BLM in a current historical moment fraught with aggressive, fascist, authoritarian tendencies and one shaped by profound ingenuity, creativity, and insightful perspectives on Black history and culture.
 
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cover of Radicalization in Theory and Practice: Understanding Religious Violence in Western Europe

Radicalization in Theory and Practice

Understanding Religious Violence in Western Europe

Thierry Balzacq and Elyamine Settoul, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Radicalization is a major challenge of contemporary global security. It conjures up images of violent ideologies, “homegrown” terrorists and jihad in both the academic sphere and among security and defense experts. While the first instances of religious radicalization were initially limited to second-generation Muslim immigrants, significant changes are currently impacting this phenomenon. Technology is said to amplify the dissemination of radicalism, though there remains uncertainty as to the exact weight of technology on radical behaviors. Moreover, far from being restricted to young men of Muslim heritage suffering from a feeling of social relegation, radicalism concerns a significant number of converted Muslims, women and more heterogeneous profiles (social, academic and geographic), as well as individuals that give the appearance of being fully integrated in the host society. These new and striking dynamics require innovative conceptual lenses. 

Radicalization in Theory and Practice identifies the mechanisms that explicitly link radical religious beliefs and radical actions. It describes its nature, singles out the mechanisms that enable radicalism to produce its effects, and develops a conceptual architecture to help scholars and policy-makers to address and evaluate radicalism—or what often passes as such. A variety of empirical chapters fed by first-hand data probe the relevance of theoretical perspectives that shape radicalization studies. By giving a prominent role to first-hand empirical investigations, the authors create a new framework of analysis from the ground up. This book enhances the quality of theorizing in this area, consolidates the quality of methodological enquiries, and articulates security studies insights with broader theoretical debates in different fields including sociology, social psychology, economics, and religious studies.

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cover of Radio, Morality, & Culture: Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1919 - 1945

Radio, Morality, & Culture

Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1919 - 1945

Robert S. Fortner

Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

Radio, Morality, and Culture: Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1919–1945 examines the moral controversies surrounding radio’s development during its formative years. In comparing the fledgling medium in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, Robert S. Fortner documents how the church failed to participate in radio’s moral development and instead engaged in internecine warfare over issues of legitimacy and orthodoxy.

The church was arguing about theological turf and dealing with internal disputes while radio policy was being developed and communications history was being written. Fortner reveals how the church, doomed to play little more than a bit part in the future of radio, eventually lost its voice altogether in the continuing development of electronic media. Fortner effectively synthesizes cultural history and theory, communication studies, and the role religious organizations played in shaping the content and character of early radio. Geared to scholars of history, communications, and theology, Radio, Morality, and Culture provides a useful resource for research, scholarship, and public policy.

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cover of Rage and Carnage in the Name of God: Religious Violence in Nigeria

Rage and Carnage in the Name of God

Religious Violence in Nigeria

Abiodun Alao

Duke University Press, 2022

In Rage and Carnage in the Name of God, Abiodun Alao examines the emergence of a culture of religious violence in postindependence Nigeria, where Christianity, Islam, and traditional religions have all been associated with violence. He investigates the root causes and historical evolution of Nigeria’s religious violence, locating it in the forced coming together of disparate ethnic groups under colonial rule, which planted the seeds of discord that religion, elites, and domestic politics exploit. Alao discusses the histories of Christianity, Islam, and traditional religions in the territory that became Nigeria, the effects of colonization on the role of religion, the development of Islamic radicalization and its relation to Christian violence, the activities of Boko Haram, and how religious violence intermixes with politics and governance. In so doing, he uses religious violence as a way to more fully understand intergroup relations in contemporary Nigeria.
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cover of Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China

Re-enchanting Modernity

Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China

Mayfair Yang

Duke University Press, 2020

In Re-enchanting Modernity Mayfair Yang examines the resurgence of religious and ritual life after decades of enforced secularization in the coastal area of Wenzhou, China. Drawing on twenty-five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Yang shows how the local practices of popular religion, Daoism, and Buddhism are based in community-oriented grassroots organizations that create spaces for relative local autonomy and self-governance. Central to Wenzhou's religious civil society is what Yang calls a "ritual economy," in which an ethos of generosity is expressed through donations to temples, clerics, ritual events, and charities in exchange for spiritual gain. With these investments in transcendent realms, Yang adopts Georges Bataille's notion of "ritual expenditures" to challenge the idea that rural Wenzhou's economic development can be described in terms of Max Weber's notion of a "Protestant Ethic". Instead, Yang suggests that Wenzhou's ritual economy forges an alternate path to capitalist modernity.
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cover of Reading Biblical Texts Together: Pursuing Minoritized Biblical Criticism

Reading Biblical Texts Together

Pursuing Minoritized Biblical Criticism

Tat-Siong Benny Liew

SBL Press, 2022

A solid and suggestive foundation for the future of ethnic-racial minority biblical criticism

This volume, edited by Tat-siong Benny Liew and Fernando F. Segovia, expands the work begun in They Were All Together in One Place? Toward Minority Biblical Criticism (2009) by focusing on specific texts for scholarly engagement and exchange. Essays by scholars of racial/ethnic minoritized criticism of the Bible highlight the various factors and dynamics at play in the formation of power relations within and through four biblical texts: two from the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 21 and 1 Kings 12) and two from the New Testament (John 4 and Revelation 18). Contributors include Ahida Calderón Pilarski, Ronald Charles, Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, Lynne St. Clair Darden, Steed Vernyl Davidson, Mary F. Foskett, Jione Havea, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Roberto Mata, Henry W. Morisada Rietz, Raj Nadella, Miranda N. Pillay, David Arthur Sánchez, Timothy J. Sandoval, Fernando F. Segovia, Mitzi J. Smith, Angeline M. G. Song, Linzie M. Treadway, Nasili Vaka’uta, Demetrius K. Williams, and Gale A. Yee. Each essay expands our understandings of minoritization from a global perspective.

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cover of Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950

Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950

Marwa Elshakry

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In Reading Darwin in Arabic, Marwa Elshakry questions current ideas about Islam, science, and secularism by exploring the ways in which Darwin was read in Arabic from the late 1860s to the mid-twentieth century. Borrowing from translation and reading studies and weaving together the history of science with intellectual history, she explores Darwin’s global appeal from the perspective of several generations of Arabic readers and shows how Darwin’s writings helped alter the social and epistemological landscape of the Arab learned classes.
           
Providing a close textual, political, and institutional analysis of the tremendous interest in Darwin’s ideas and other works on evolution, Elshakry shows how, in an age of massive regional and international political upheaval, these readings were suffused with the anxieties of empire and civilizational decline. The politics of evolution infiltrated Arabic discussions of pedagogy, progress, and the very sense of history. They also led to a literary and conceptual transformation of notions of science and religion themselves. Darwin thus became a vehicle for discussing scriptural exegesis, the conditions of belief, and cosmological views more broadly. The book also acquaints readers with Muslim and Christian intellectuals, bureaucrats, and theologians, and concludes by exploring Darwin’s waning influence on public and intellectual life in the Arab world after World War I.
           
Reading Darwin in Arabic is an engaging and powerfully argued reconceptualization of the intellectual and political history of the Middle East.
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cover of Reading in These Times: Purposes and Practices of Minoritized Biblical Criticism

Reading in These Times

Purposes and Practices of Minoritized Biblical Criticism

Tat-siong Benny Liew

SBL Press, 2024

In this follow-up to They Were All Together in One Place? (2009) and Reading Biblical Texts Together (2022), biblical scholars from different racial/ethnic minoritized communities move beyond defining and pursing cross-cultural interpretation to investigating how spatial-geographical and temporal-historical locations affect the purposes and practices of minoritized biblical criticism today. Through an examination of a range of contemporary issues from HIV/AIDS to US immigration policy, contributors establish that how and why they engage the Bible are the result of the intersection of social and cultural factors. Contributors Cheryl B. Anderson, Hector Avalos†, Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Yii-Jan Lin, Vanessa Lovelace, Francisco Lozada Jr., Roger S. Nam, Aliou Cissé Niang, Hugh R. Page Jr., Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Fernando F. Segovia, Abraham Smith, and Vincent L. Wimbush demonstrate that interpretations carry broader implications for society and that scholars have ethical and political responsibilities to their communities and to the world.
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cover of Realized Religion: Research on the Relationship between Religion and Health

Realized Religion

Research on the Relationship between Religion and Health

Theodore J. Chamberlain

Templeton Press, 2001

 

Realized Religion includes research that investigates the impact of spirituality in health and healing, faith healing, religion and mental health, religion and life satisfaction, religion and mental disorders, religion and martial satisfaction, the effect of religion on suicide, and the effect of religion on alcohol use and abuse. This book documents over 300 scientific studies published by reputable scientific journals demonstrating that religion has an ameliorating effect on the survival rate of surgical patients, on depression and anxiety, on suicide rates, and on promotion of a healthy lifestyle.

Realized Religion presents useful and helpful information to researchers and scholars who seek to understand the subtle connection between healing and spirituality. It will be an invaluable resource for libraries and others interested in the emerging field of spirituality and healing.

 

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cover of Recharging Judaism: How Civic Engagement Is Good for Synagogues, Jews, and America

Recharging Judaism

How Civic Engagement Is Good for Synagogues, Jews, and America

Rabbi Judith Schindler and Judy Seldin-Cohen

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2018

Finalist of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice, Recharging Judaism offers a practical framework for implementing social action into our everyday lives. Using language that speaks to both those outside and inside synagogue life, the book inspires and guides Jews and Jewish institutions to address the challenges facing this country today.

Recharging Judaism is the essential and timely guide for every synagogue and community seeking to strengthen the bonds of Jewish communal life through advocating for social justice. This volume delves into the enriching civic engagement and acts of righteousness already undertaken by Jews and Jewish communities across the country, and further explores the positive differences we can all affect upon the future of America. There are a myriad of ways in which advocating for social justice and participating in civic engagement can create lasting change. Those inspired to affect such change will find new meaning in the texts and history of our tradition. Using real examples from both small and large congregations across the country, Recharging Judaism offers a framework to guide us through our journey of civic responsibility and social duty and into a brighter future for our country.
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cover of Reckoning with Spirit in the Paradigm of Performance

Reckoning with Spirit in the Paradigm of Performance

Donnalee Dox

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Performance has become a paradigm for analyzing contemporary culture, a pattern that structures a particular view of human interaction and experience. Performance is also widely used to better understand how we express values and ideas, including religious beliefs. Reckoning with Spirit in the Paradigm of Performance asks how the sensibilities of religious experience, which many people call spirituality, shape people's performance. When we observe people performing words, dances, music, and rituals they consider sacred, what (if any) conclusions can we draw about their experiences from what we see, read, and hear? By analyzing performances of spirituality and what people experience as "spirit," this book adds a new dimension to the paradigm of performance.

Rather than reducing the spiritual dimension to either biology or culture, the book asks what such experiences might have to offer a reasoned analysis of vernacular culture. The specific performances presented are meditative dance and shamanic drumming, including descriptions of these practices and exegesis of practitioners' writings on the nature of spiritual experience and performance.

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cover of Reclaiming the Spirit: Gay Men and Lesbians Come to Terms with Their Religion

Reclaiming the Spirit

Gay Men and Lesbians Come to Terms with Their Religion

Shallenberger, David

Rutgers University Press, 1998

In a world in which religion and homosexuality are often by definition incompatible, it is crucial to hear from gay men and women about how they perceive themselves to be religious or spiritual people. Eliciting powerful, frank, and sometimes troubling responses, David Shallenberger interviewed gay men and women who grew up in families that belonged to traditional religions-Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Protestant-that rejected homosexuality as an unacceptable life-style. When these children grew into adulthood and "came out," many rejected the religion of their childhood as they sought out a more accepting gay community. But once they became comfortable with their new gay identity, they began to experience a spiritual hunger and a desire to be part of a religious community. Some sought to return to the traditions from which they came; others desired membership in new religious communities.

The quest for an integration of homosexuality and spirituality is the focus of Reclaiming the Spirit. Shallenberger asks how individuals can balance both a gay and a religious identity, whether coming out is a spiritual experience, and how coming out affects an individual's relationship to a traditional religious community. Divided into chapters that correspond to the common stages of spiritual integration, Reclaiming the Spirit is immensely readable and introduces an important group of voices into the hotly contested debates surrounding religion and gay participation.

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cover of Recovering Origins: A Unique Healing Program for Adult Children of Divorce

Recovering Origins

A Unique Healing Program for Adult Children of Divorce

Margaret Harper McCarthy

Catholic University of America Press, 2021

Recovering Origins is a healing program offered to adult children of divorced parents who now, with a certain distance from the practical difficulties that burden younger children, wrestle with the core problem at the heart of those difficulties. Having lost the community that brought them into the world, they have suffered a “primal loss.” Children are the literal embodiment of that community. When it is voluntarily dismantled, and worse–wished never to have been–the effect is not negligible. Children of divorce, by their own description, are now “pulled apart” as if “between two worlds.” They are “torn asunder.” Paradoxically the idea for Recovering Origins was occasioned by this straight talk about divorce. For, by going to the depths of the loss of one’s primal community one can be opened up to the Community that stands at the root of it. “Deep calls unto deep,” as the Psalmist says. In short, Recovering Origins invites participants to move through the broken image of love that they see in their parents, to the loving Origin which is more fundamental than any human reflection of it, broken or not. Recovering Origins begins with an invitation to look honestly at the actual experience of divorce, beyond all the “happy talk” about the “good divorce.” Participants are then invited to follow the path of the Lord’s Prayer, to recover what is at once challenging and precious to those whose very identities are on uncertain ground: the memory of God the Father, the goodness of their lives, and the real possibility of a good future. In this way, the program offers adult children of divorce a path to healing in the deepest sense. Recovering Origins offers an occasion to encounter the Christian Faith more deeply, especially where it bears on fundamental question faced by children of divorce in a particularly dramatic way. Recovering Origins addresses adult children of divorce, then, not only as individuals in need of pastoral care, but as potential witnesses to something they can, perhaps, see more clearly: the goodness and fidelity of the One on whom their lives ultimately depend and the possibility (and need) that that be reflected in an irrevocable and fruitful love between the creatures made in his image.
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cover of Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk about Homosexuality

Recruiting Young Love

How Christians Talk about Homosexuality

Mark D. Jordan

University of Chicago Press, 2011

In the view of many Christians, the teenage years are simultaneously the most dangerous and the most promising. At the very moment when teens are trying to establish a sense of identity and belonging, they are beset by temptation on all sides—from the pressure of their peers to the nihilism and materialism of popular culture. Add the specter of homosexuality to the mix, and you’ve got a situation ripe for worry, sermonizing, and exploitation.


In Recruiting Young Love, Mark D. Jordan explores more than a half century of American church debate about homosexuality to show that even as the main lesson—homosexuality is bad, teens are vulnerable—has remained constant, the arguments and assumptions have changed remarkably. At the time of the first Kinsey Report, in 1948, homosexuality was simultaneously condemned and little discussed—a teen struggling with same-sex desire would have found little specific guidance. Sixty years later, church rhetoric has undergone a radical shift, as silence has given way to frequent, public, detailed discussion of homosexuality and its perceived dangers. Along the way, churches have quietly adopted much of the language and ideas of modern sexology, psychiatry, and social reformers—deploying it, for example, to buttress the credentials of anti-gay “deprogramming” centers and traditional gender roles.


Jordan tells this story through a wide variety of sources, including oral histories, interviews, memoirs, and even pulp novels; the result is a fascinating window onto the never-ending battle for the teenage soul.

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cover of Redeeming Time: Protestantism and Chicago's Eight-Hour Movement, 1866-1912

Redeeming Time

Protestantism and Chicago's Eight-Hour Movement, 1866-1912

William A. Mirola

University of Illinois Press, 2015

During the struggle for the eight-hour workday and a shorter workweek, Chicago emerged as an important battleground for workers in "the entire civilized world" to redeem time from the workplace in order to devote it to education, civic duty, health, family, and leisure.
 
William A. Mirola explores how the city's eight-hour movement intersected with a Protestant religious culture that supported long hours to keep workers from idleness, intemperance, and secular leisure activities. Analyzing how both workers and clergy rewove working-class religious cultures and ideologies into strategic and rhetorical frames, Mirola shows how every faith-based appeal contested whose religious meanings would define labor conditions and conflicts. As he notes, the ongoing worker-employer tension transformed both how clergy spoke about the eight-hour movement and what they were willing to do, until intensified worker protest and employer intransigence spurred Protestant clergy to support the eight-hour movement even as political and economic arguments eclipsed religious framing.
 
A revealing study of an era and a movement, Redeeming Time illustrates the potential--and the limitations--of religious culture and religious leaders as forces in industrial reform.
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cover of Reformation of the Senses: The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany

Reformation of the Senses

The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany

Jacob M. Baum

University of Illinois Press, 2018

We see the Protestant Reformation as the dawn of an austere, intellectual Christianity that uprooted a ritualized religion steeped in stimulating the senses--and by extension the faith--of its flock. Historians continue to use the idea as a potent framing device in presenting not just the history of Christianity but the origins of European modernity. Jacob M. Baum plumbs a wealth of primary source material from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to offer the first systematic study of the senses within the religious landscape of the German Reformation. Concentrating on urban Protestants, Baum details the engagement of Lutheran and Calvinist thought with traditional ritual practices. His surprising discovery: Reformation-era Germans echoed and even amplified medieval sensory practices. Yet Protestant intellectuals simultaneously cultivated the idea that the senses had no place in true religion. Exploring this paradox, Baum illuminates the sensory experience of religion and daily life at a crucial historical crossroads. Provocative and rich in new research, Reformation of the Senses reevaluates one of modern Christianity's most enduring myths.
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cover of Refuge in the Lord

Refuge in the Lord

Lawrence J. McAndrews

Catholic University of America Press, 2015

Rather than helping to overcome the growing political divide over immigration in the country and the church, Catholics on the outer edges of the issue contributed to it. By eschewing compromise in favor of confrontation, Catholic legislators from both parties too often helped prevent Congress from giving the presidents, and the public, most of what they wanted on immigration reform. By forsaking political reality in the name of religious purity, Catholic immigration advocates frequently antagonized the presidents whose goals they largely shared, and ultimately disappointed the immigrants they so badly wanted to help.
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cover of Regulating Difference: Religious Diversity and Nationhood in the Secular West

Regulating Difference

Religious Diversity and Nationhood in the Secular West

Marian Burchardt

Rutgers University Press, 2020

2021 ISSR Best Book Award (International Society for the Sociology of Religion)

Transnational migration has contributed to the rise of religious diversity and has led to profound changes in the religious make-up of society across the Western world. As a result, societies and nation-states have faced the challenge of crafting ways to bring new religious communities into existing institutions and the legal frameworks. Regulating Difference explores how the state regulates religious diversity and examines the processes whereby religious diversity and expression becomes part of administrative landscapes of nation-states and people’s everyday lives. Arguing that concepts of nationhood are key to understanding the governance of religious diversity, Regulating Difference employs a transatlantic comparison of the Spanish region of Catalonia and the Canadian province of Quebec to show how processes of nation-building, religious heritage-making and the mobilization of divergent interpretations of secularism are co-implicated in shaping religious diversity. It argues that religious diversity has become central for governing national and urban spaces.

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition.
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cover of Religion & Reconciliation in South Africa: Voices of Religious Leaders

Religion & Reconciliation in South Africa

Voices of Religious Leaders

Bernard Spong

Templeton Press, 2003

 

Postapartheid South Africa's efforts to come to terms with its past, particularly its Truth and Reconciliation Commission's emphasis on forgiveness and reconciliation, is of special interest to many in the world community. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was mandated to go beyond truth-finding and to "promote national unity and reconciliation in a spirit of understanding which transcends the conflict and divisions of the past." In contrast with other truth commissions, the TRC was led by clerics rather than lawyers and judge, and the TRC's approach to reconciliation was shaped by and imbued with religious content. The TRC submitted its final report to the Mandela administration in October 1998.

Over the next two years, the Rev. Bernard Spong, former communications director of the South African Council of Churches, conducted a series of in-depth interviews about the TRC with thirty-three key religious figures. In this volume, they discuss and evaluate the following issues:

•How should we understand the concept of national or political reconciliation and its requirements?
•What are the differences and similarities between religious and political approaches to reconciliation?
•Does national or political reconciliation require forgiveness between former victims and perpetrators?
•What is the appropriate role of religious representatives in a truth commission process? And is it recommended that other countries emulate the South African model?
•How do religious leaders assess the contributions and limitations of the TRC?
•What kind of initiatives are contemporary religious communities taking to promote reconciliation among their members and in the wider society?

The conversations presented in this volume, and the essays interpreting them, seek to illuminate issues and questions raised by the TRC model, including how to conceptualize reconciliation and the differences between political and religious approaches.

 

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cover of Religion and Economic Justice

Religion and Economic Justice

edited by Michael Zweig

Temple University Press, 1992

As Eastern European economies move to capitalism, many people there hope for a better life. But capitalism is no guarantee of prosperity. Economic deprivation, war, social marginalization, and powerlessness mark the lives of millions and spark social movements for economic justice aimed at correcting these conditions. Often these movements are based in religious communities, their activists motivated by religious commitment to human dignity and the need for personal empowerment. Although the new theology contains an economic critique, little dialogue has taken place between the religious and economic communities on matters of economic analysis. Religion and Economic Justice seeks to develop this exchange.

This book contains original essays by distinguished contributors from economics, religious ethics, and biblical studies. The authors provide a powerful critique of the individualism which underlies mainstream economic analysis and which fragments our communities, a critique that extends to the values implicit in the market system. The authors also show how social marginalization and economic deprivation are the consequences of economic organization, not simply the failings of individuals.

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cover of Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and East European Politics

Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and East European Politics

Pedro Ramet, ed.

Duke University Press, 1988

Religious organizations in many countries of the communist world have served as agents for the preservation, defense, and reinforcement of nationalist feelings, and in playing this role have frequently been a source of frustration to the Communist Party elites. Although the relationship between governments and religious groups varies according to the particular country and group in question, the mosaic of these relationships constitutes a revealing picture of the political reform shaping the lives of Soviet and East European citizens.
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cover of Religion and Peace: Global Perspectives and Possibilities

Religion and Peace

Global Perspectives and Possibilities

Nukhet A. Sandal

Ohio University Press, 2022

Can religion help societies achieve peace and stability? What actions can religious leaders take to facilitate conflict resolution? This book addresses these critical questions in terms of numerous contemporary conflicts within and between countries. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, public attention to religion shifted away from its relationship to politics and toward its connection to violence in civil conflicts, wars, and terrorism. Religion’s role in sowing discord became more prominent than its ability to unify. Only recently have discussions turned toward the positive impact of religion and spirituality in the public sphere and to the role of faith in resolving diplomatic, political, and social problems. The essays in this book contribute to this discourse by examining past, present, and future opportunities to promote peace through religion and spirituality. The contributors to this volume explore topics such as humanitarianism, philosophy, counterextremism, human rights, rituals, populism, foreign policy, and environmentalism. Some of the chapters approach these topics from a transnational perspective, while others focus on specific countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. Contributors: Jonathan C. Agensky Slavica Jakelic Afra Jalabi Brandon Kendhammer Loren D. Lybarger Cecelia Lynch Peter Mandaville Jeremy Rinker Margaret M. Scull Amy Erica Smith
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cover of Religion and Political Tolerance in America: Advances in the State of the Art

Religion and Political Tolerance in America

Advances in the State of the Art

Paul Djupe

Temple University Press, 2015

Religious institutions are often engaged in influencing the beliefs and values that individuals hold. But religious groups can also challenge how people think about democracy, including the extension of equal rights and liberties regardless of viewpoint, or what is commonly called political tolerance.

The essays in Religion and Political Tolerance in America seek to understand how these elements interrelate. The editor and contributors to this important volume present new and innovative research that wrestles with the fundamental question of the place of religion in democratic society. They address topics ranging from religious contributions to social identity to the political tolerance that religious elites (clergy) hold and advocate to others, and how religion shapes responses to intolerance.

The conclusion, by Ted Jelen, emphasizes that religion’s take on political tolerance is nuanced and that they are not incompatible; religion can sometimes enhance the tolerance of ordinary citizens.
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cover of Religion and Race: Southern Presbyterians, 1946 to 1983

Religion and Race

Southern Presbyterians, 1946 to 1983

Joel L. Alvis Jr

University of Alabama Press, 1994

Joel Alvis focuses on the relationships and tensions in the Presbyterian Church, U.S., whose ecclesiastical boundaries never expanded significantly beyond its original territory in the Confederacy and border South. By the time of the civil rights movement, the church was actively involved in ecumenical activities despite its regional isolation, and that involvement created unease in some quarters of the denomination. This concise institutional history traces how the church shaped and was shaped by its regional culture and explores the denomination's own cultural struggle to determine what role race issues would play in the definition of being Presbyterian.

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cover of Religion and Social Justice For Immigrants

Religion and Social Justice For Immigrants

Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette

Rutgers University Press, 2006

Religion has jumped into the sphere of global and domestic politics in ways that few would have imagined a century ago. Some expected that religion would die as modernity flourished.  Instead, it now stares at us almost daily from the front pages of newspapers and television broadcasts. Although it is usually stories about the Christian Right or conservative Islam that grab headlines, there are many religious activists of other political persuasions that are working quietly for social justice. This book examines how religious immigrants and religious activists are working for equitable treatment for immigrants in the United States.

The essays in this book analyze the different ways in which organized religion provides immigrants with an arena for mobilization, civic participation, and solidarity. Contributors explore topics including how non-Western religious groups such as the Vietnamese Caodai are striving for community recognition and addressing problems such as racism, economic issues, and the politics of diaspora; how interfaith groups organize religious people into immigrant civil rights activists at the U.S.–Mexican border; and how Catholic groups advocate governmental legislation and policies on behalf of refugees.

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cover of Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Ben Fallaw

Duke University Press, 2012

The religion question—the place of the Church in a Catholic country after an anticlerical revolution—profoundly shaped the process of state formation in Mexico. From the end of the Cristero War in 1929 until Manuel Ávila Camacho assumed the presidency in late 1940 and declared his faith, Mexico's unresolved religious conflict roiled regional politics, impeded federal schooling, undermined agrarian reform, and flared into sporadic violence, ultimately frustrating the secular vision shared by Plutarco Elías Calles and Lázaro Cárdenas.

Ben Fallaw argues that previous scholarship has not appreciated the pervasive influence of Catholics and Catholicism on postrevolutionary state formation. By delving into the history of four understudied Mexican states, he is able to show that religion swayed regional politics not just in states such as Guanajuato, in Mexico's central-west "Rosary Belt," but even in those considered much less observant, including Campeche, Guerrero, and Hidalgo. Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico reshapes our understanding of agrarian reform, federal schooling, revolutionary anticlericalism, elections, the Segunda (a second Cristero War in the 1930s), and indigenism, the Revolution's valorization of the Mesoamerican past as the font of national identity.

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cover of Religion and the Authority of the Past

Religion and the Authority of the Past

Tobin Siebers, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1993

Religion and the Authority of the Past looks at how the past has influenced religious authority, and demonstrates that authority has been, and continues to be, prevalent in all religions and cultures. This book shows, in a fascinating variety of ways, how religious doctrine, interpretation, behavior, and expression are affected by those in power.

The contributors—distinguished scholars from the fields of history, religion, classics, art, and Asian studies—find authority not only in places where one might expect it—in Islamic doctrine, Hindu religious texts, and the dogma of the Roman Catholic church, for example—but also in unimagined and intriguing locations: in the first U.S. archaeological expedition to the ancient Near East; in representations of heroic action in the Homeric epics and early Chinese classics; in the transmission of religious stereotypes from the Old World to the New; in the poetry of Paul Celan and Dan Pagis; and in a sculptor's attempts to create art for houses of worship, where architects, bishops, priests, and the laity assert a variety of forms of religious authority of their own.

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cover of Religion and the Cold War: A Global Perspective

Religion and the Cold War

A Global Perspective

Philip E. Muehlenbeck

Vanderbilt University Press, 2012

The lines of armed conflict, and the catastrophic perils they portended, were shaped with shocking clarity in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Less clear is the role religious ideology played in the conflicts that defined the Cold War era. All too often, beliefs held sacred by some became tools to motivate action or create friction. In Religion and the Cold War, Philip Muehlenbeck assembles an international team of specialists to explore how religion informed the ideological and military clashes across the globe in the second half of the twentieth century.


Students and scholars will find in this volume a level of comprehensiveness rarely achieved in Cold War studies. Each chapter reveals that the power and influence of ideas are just as important as military might in the struggles between superpowersand that few ideas, then as now, carry as much force as religious ideology. As Muehlenbeck and his contributors demonstrate, no area of the world, and no religious tenet, was safe from the manipulations of a powerful set of players focused solely on their own sphere of influence.

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Religion and the Making of Nigeria

Olufemi Vaughan

Duke University Press, 2016

In Religion and the Making of Nigeria, Olufemi Vaughan examines how Christian, Muslim, and indigenous religious structures have provided the essential social and ideological frameworks for the construction of contemporary Nigeria. Using a wealth of archival sources and extensive Africanist scholarship, Vaughan traces Nigeria’s social, religious, and political history from the early nineteenth century to the present. During the nineteenth century, the historic Sokoto Jihad in today’s northern Nigeria and the Christian missionary movement in what is now southwestern Nigeria provided the frameworks for ethno-religious divisions in colonial society. Following Nigeria’s independence from Britain in 1960, Christian-Muslim tensions became manifest in regional and religious conflicts over the expansion of sharia, in fierce competition among political elites for state power, and in the rise of Boko Haram. These tensions are not simply conflicts over religious beliefs, ethnicity, and regionalism; they represent structural imbalances founded on the religious divisions forged under colonial rule.
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cover of Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display

Religion in Plain View

Public Aesthetics of American Display

Sally M. Promey

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A revelatory critique of public display in the United States.
 
In Religion in Plain View, Sally M. Promey analyzes religion’s visible saturation of American public space and the histories that shaped this exhibitionary aesthetics. In street art, vehicle décor, signs, monuments, architecture, zoning policy, and more, Promey exposes American display’s merger of evangelicalism, capitalism, and imperialism. From this convergence, display materializes a distinctly American drive to advertise, claim territory, invalidate competitors, and fabricate a tractable national heritage. Charting this aesthetics’ strategic work as a Protestant technology of White nation formation, Religion in Plain View offers a dynamic critique of the ways public display perpetuates deeply ingrained assumptions about the proper shape of life and land in the United States.
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cover of Religion, Conflict, and Peacemaking: An Interdisciplinary Conversation

Religion, Conflict, and Peacemaking

An Interdisciplinary Conversation

Muriel Schmid

University of Utah Press, 2017

Discussions of the relationship between religion and violence have been on the rise since 9/11. Conversations have also focused on how religion can mediate conflict and help build peace. This volume offers a diversity of approaches to the subject, gathering essays from a cross-section of prominent scholars studying the role of religion in peacemaking.

Contributors from varied backgrounds share perspectives and insights gleaned from history, theory, practice, and case studies. While the authors acknowledge the role of religion in generating conflict, they emphasize the part religion can play in conflict resolution. Addressing the centrality of conflict to the human condition, they recognize the consequent difficulty in teasing out the exact role of religion. Overall, the authors assert the necessity of frank, knowledgeable dialogue to understanding sources of, finding grounds for resolving, and managing conflict. Many of the essayists offer creative solutions for building peace. Employing examples and viewpoints drawn from diverse faith traditions, academic traditions, and cultural backgrounds, contributors seek to foster respectful dialogue and debate by exploring the complex dynamic that interconnects religion, violence, and peace. 
 
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cover of Religion, Fundamentalism, and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Religion, Fundamentalism, and Violence

An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Edited by Andrew L. Gluck

University of Scranton Press, 2010

In Religion, Fundamentalism, and Violence, Andrew Gluck brings together distinguished scholars to address a fiercely debated topic: the intersection of religion and violence. Among the contributions is an anthropological analysis of the violence associated with the Abrahamic monotheistic religions of the Middle East, a compelling essay accounting for the violence in Hindu religious traditions, an informative look at the Israeli-Palestinian tensions of more recent times, and an essay on the Catholic just war theory. Each chapter is followed by a commentary and reply, making this volume indispensable for students and scholars of the history of religions.     

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cover of Religion, History, and Place in the Origin of Settled Life

Religion, History, and Place in the Origin of Settled Life

Ian Hodder

University Press of Colorado, 2018

This volume explores the role of religion and ritual in the origin of settled life in the Middle East, focusing on the repetitive construction of houses or cult buildings in the same place. Prominent archaeologists, anthropologists, and scholars of religion working at several of the region’s most important sites—such as Çatalhöyük, Göbekli Tepe, Körtik Tepe, and Aşıklı Höyük—contend that religious factors significantly affected the timing and stability of settled economic structures.
 
Contributors argue that the long-term social relationships characteristic of delayed-return agricultural systems must be based on historical ties to place and to ancestors. They define different forms of history-making, including nondiscursive routinized practices as well as commemorative memorialization. They consider the timing in the Neolithic of an emerging concern with history-making in place in relation to the adoption of farming and settled life in regional sequences. They explore whether such correlations indicate the causal processes in which history-making, ritual practices, agricultural intensification, population increase, and social competition all played a role.
 
Religion, History, and Place in the Origin of Settled Life takes a major step forward in understanding the adoption of farming and a settled way of life in the Middle East by foregrounding the roles of history-making and religious ritual. This work is relevant to students and scholars of Near Eastern archaeology, as well as those interested in the origins of agriculture and social complexity or the social role of religion in the past.
 
 
Contributors: Kurt W. Alt, Mark R. Anspach, Marion Benz, Lee Clare, Anna Belfer-Cohen, Morris Cohen, Oliver Dietrich, Güneş Duru, Yilmaz S. Erdal, Nigel Goring-Morris, Ian Hodder, Rosemary A. Joyce, Nicola Lercari, Wendy Matthews, Jens Notroff, Vecihi Özkaya, Feridun S. Şahin, F. Leron Shults, Devrim Sönmez, Christina Tsoraki, Wesley Wildman
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cover of Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa

Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa

Felicitas Becker

Ohio University Press, 2018

In recent years, anthropologists, historians, and others have been drawn to study the profuse and creative usages of digital media by religious movements. At the same time, scholars of Christian Africa have long been concerned with the history of textual culture, the politics of Bible translation, and the status of the vernacular in Christianity. Students of Islam in Africa have similarly examined politics of knowledge, the transmission of learning in written form, and the influence of new media. Until now, however, these arenas—Christianity and Islam, digital media and “old” media—have been studied separately.

Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa is one of the first volumes to put new media and old media into significant conversation with one another, and also offers a rare comparison between Christianity and Islam in Africa. The contributors find many previously unacknowledged correspondences among different media and between the two faiths. In the process they challenge the technological determinism—the notion that certain types of media generate particular forms of religious expression—that haunts many studies. In evaluating how media usage and religious commitment intersect in the social, cultural, and political landscapes of modern Africa, this collection will contribute to the development of new paradigms for media and religious studies.

Contributors: Heike Behrend, Andre Chappatte, Maria Frahm-Arp, David Gordon, Liz Gunner, Bruce S. Hall, Sean Hanretta, Jorg Haustein, Katrien Pype, and Asonzeh Ukah.

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cover of Religion, Order, and Law

Religion, Order, and Law

David Little

University of Chicago Press, 1984

"The issue of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism has been debated endlessly, but few scholars have seriously continued Weber's own research into the Reformation sources of seventeenth-century England. David Little's study was one of the first to do so, and remains an important contribution."—Guenther Roth, University of Washington
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cover of Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging

Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging

Leerom Medovoi and Elizabeth Bentley, editors

Duke University Press, 2021

Working in four scholarly teams focused on different global regions—North America, the European Union, the Middle East, and China—the contributors to Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging examine how new political worlds intersect with locally specific articulations of religion and secularism. The chapters address many topics, including the changing relationship between Islam and politics in Tunisia after the 2010 revolution, the influence of religion on the sharp turn to the political right in Western Europe, understandings of Confucianism as a form of secularism, and the alliance between evangelical Christians and neoliberal business elites in the United States since the 1970s. This volume also provides a methodological template for how humanities scholars around the world can collaboratively engage with sweeping issues of global significance.

Contributors. Markus Balkenhol, Elizabeth Bentley, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, David N. Gibbs, Ori Goldberg, Marcia Klotz, Zeynep Kurtulus Korkman, Leerom Medovoi, Eva Midden, Mohanad Mustafa, Mu-chou Poo, Shaul Setter, John Vignaux Smith, Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Ernst van den Hemel, Albert Welter, Francis Ching-Wah Yip, Raef Zreik
[more]
cover of Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases

Religions/Globalizations

Theories and Cases

Dwight N. Hopkins, Lois Ann Lorentzen, Eduardo Mendieta, and David Batstone, eds.

Duke University Press, 2001

For the majority of cultures around the world, religion permeates and informs everyday rituals of survival and hope. But religion also has served as the foundation for national differences, racial conflicts, class exploitation, and gender discrimination. Indeed, religious spirituality, having been transformed by contemporary economic and political events, remains both empowering and controversial. Religions/Globalizations examines the extent to which globalization and religion are inseparable terms, bound up with each other in a number of critical and mutually revealing ways.
As the contributors to this work suggest, a crucial component of globalization—the breakdown of familiar boundaries and power balances—may open a space in which religion can be deployed to help refabricate new communities. Examples of such deployments can be found in the workings of liberation theology in Latin America. In other cases, however, the operations of globalization have provided a space for strident religious nationalism and identity disputes to flourish. Is there in fact a dialectical tension between religion and globalization, a codependence and codeterminism? While religion can be seen as a globalizing force, it has also been transformed and even victimized by globalization.
A provocative assessment of a contemporary phenomenon with both cultural and political dimensions, Religions/Globalizations will interest not only scholars in religious studies but also those studying Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.

Contributors. David Batstone, Berit Bretthauer, Enrique Dussel, Dwight N. Hopkins, Mark Juergensmeyer, Lois Ann Lorentzen, Eduardo Mendieta, Vijaya Rettakudi Nagarajan, Kathryn Poethig, Lamin Sanneh, Linda E. Thomas

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cover of Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power

Religious Affects

Animality, Evolution, and Power

Donovan O. Schaefer

Duke University Press, 2015

In Religious Affects Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the notion that religion is inextricably linked to language and belief, proposing instead that it is primarily driven by affects. Drawing on affect theory, evolutionary biology, and poststructuralist theory, Schaefer builds on the recent materialist shift in religious studies to relocate religious practices in the affective realm—an insight that helps us better understand how religion is lived in conjunction with systems of power. To demonstrate religion's animality and how it works affectively, Schaefer turns to a series of case studies, including the documentary Jesus Camp and contemporary American Islamophobia. Placing affect theory in conversation with post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Schaefer explores the extent to which nonhuman animals have the capacity to practice religion, linking human forms of religion and power through a new analysis of the chimpanzee waterfall dance as observed by Jane Goodall. In this compelling case for the use of affect theory in religious studies, Schaefer provides a new model for mapping relations between religion, politics, species, globalization, secularism, race, and ethics.
 
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cover of Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism

Religious Bodies Politic

Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism

Anya Bernstein

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Religious Bodies Politic examines the complex relationship between transnational religion and politics through the lens of one cosmopolitan community in Siberia: Buryats, who live in a semiautonomous republic within Russia with a large Buddhist population. Looking at religious transformation among Buryats across changing political economies, Anya Bernstein argues that under conditions of rapid social change—such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union—Buryats have used Buddhist “body politics” to articulate their relationship not only with the Russian state, but also with the larger Buddhist world.
 
During these periods, Bernstein shows, certain people and their bodies became key sites through which Buryats conformed to and challenged Russian political rule. She presents particular cases of these emblematic bodies—dead bodies of famous monks, temporary bodies of reincarnated lamas, ascetic and celibate bodies of Buddhist monastics, and dismembered bodies of lay disciples given as imaginary gifts to spirits—to investigate the specific ways in which religion and politics have intersected. Contributing to the growing literature on postsocialism and studies of sovereignty that focus on the body, Religious Bodies Politic is a fascinating illustration of how this community employed Buddhism to adapt to key moments of political change.
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cover of Religious Crisis and Civic Transformation: How Conflicts over Gender and Sexuality Changed the West German Catholic Church

Religious Crisis and Civic Transformation

How Conflicts over Gender and Sexuality Changed the West German Catholic Church

Kimba Allie Tichenor

Brandeis University Press, 2016

This book offers a fresh interpretation of the connection between the West German Catholic Church and post-1950s political debates on women’s reproductive rights and the protection of life in West Germany. According to Tichenor, Catholic women in West Germany, influenced by the culture of consumption, the sexual revolution, Vatican II reforms, and feminism, sought to renegotiate their relationship with the Church. They demanded a more active role in Church ministries and challenged the Church’s hierarchical and gendered view of marriage and condemnation of artificial contraception. When the Church refused to compromise, women left en masse. In response, the Church slowly stitched together a new identity for a postsecular age, employing an elaborate nuptial symbolism to justify its stance on celibacy, women’s ordination, artificial contraception, abortion, and reproductive technologies. Additionally, the Church returned to a radical interventionist agenda that embraced issue-specific alliances with political parties other than the Christian parties. In her conclusion, Tichenor notes more recent setbacks to the German Catholic Church, including disappointment with the reactionary German Pope Benedict XVI and his failure in 2010 to address over 250 allegations of sexual abuse at twenty-two of Germany’s twenty-seven dioceses. How the Church will renew itself in the twenty-first century remains unclear. This closely observed case study, which bridges religious, political, legal, and women’s history, will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century European religious history, modern Germany, and the intersection of Catholic Church practice and women’s issues.
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cover of Religious Freedom after the Sexual Revolution: A Catholic Guide

Religious Freedom after the Sexual Revolution

A Catholic Guide

Helen Alvare

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

Laws mandating cooperation with the state’s new sexual orthodoxy are among the leading contemporary threats to the religious freedom of Catholic institutions in the United States. These demand that Catholic schools, health-care providers, or social services cooperate with contraception, cohabitation, abortion, same-sex marriage, or transgender identity and surgeries. But Catholic institutions’ responses seem thin and uninspiring to many. They are criticized as legalistic, authoritarian, bureaucratic, retrograde and hurtful to women and to persons who identify as LGBTQ. They are even called “un-Christian.” They invite disrespect both for Catholic sexual responsibility norms and for religious freedom generally, not only among lawmakers and judges, but also in the court of public opinion, which includes skeptical Catholics. The U.S. Constitution protects Catholic institutions’ “autonomy” – their authority over faith and doctrine, internal operations, and the personnel involved in personifying and transmitting the faith. Other constitutional and statutory provisions also safeguard religious freedom, if not always perfectly. Catholic institutions could take far better advantage of all of these existing protections if they communicated, first, how they differ from secular institutions: how their missions emerge from their faith in Jesus Christ, and their efforts both to make his presence felt in the world today, and to display the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God. Second, they need to draw out the link between their teachings on sexual responsibility and love of God and neighbor. Drawing upon Scripture, tradition, history, theology and empirical evidence, Helen Alvaré frames a more complete, inspiring and appealing response to current laws’ attempts to impose a new sexual orthodoxy upon Catholic institutions. It clarifies the “ecclesial” nature of Catholic schools, hospitals and social services. It summarizes the empirical evidence supporting the link between personnel decisions and mission, and between Catholic sexual responsibility norms and human flourishing. It grounds Catholic sexual responsibility teachings in the same love of God and neighbor that animate the existence, operations, and services of Catholic institutions.
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cover of Religious Imaginations: How Narratives of Faith are Shaping Today’s World

Religious Imaginations

How Narratives of Faith are Shaping Today’s World

Edited by James Walters

Gingko, 2018

Market globalization, technology, climate change, and postcolonial political forces are together forging a new, more modern world. However, caught up in the mix are some powerful religious narratives that are galvanizing peoples and reimagining – and sometimes stifling – the political and social order. Some are repressive, fundamentalist imaginations, such as the so-called Islamic Caliphate. Others could be described as post-religious, such as the evolution of universal human rights out of the European Christian tradition. But the question of the compatibility of these religious worldviews, particularly those that have emerged out of the Abrahamic faith traditions, is perhaps the most pressing issue in global stability today. What scope for dialogue is there between the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian ways of imagining the future? How can we engage with these multiple imaginations to create a shared and peaceful global society? Religious Imaginations is an interdisciplinary volume of both new and well-known scholars exploring how religious narratives interact with the contemporary geopolitical climate.
 
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cover of Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World

A History of Forgetting and Remembering

John Corrigan

University of Chicago Press, 2020

As the news shows us every day, contemporary American culture and politics are rife with people who demonize their enemies by projecting their own failings and flaws onto them. But this is no recent development. Rather, as John Corrigan argues here, it’s an expression of a trauma endemic to America’s history, particularly involving our long domestic record of religious conflict and violence.

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World spans from Christian colonists’ intolerance of Native Americans and the role of religion in the new republic’s foreign-policy crises to Cold War witch hunts and the persecution complexes that entangle Christians and Muslims today. Corrigan reveals how US churches and institutions have continuously campaigned against intolerance overseas even as they’ve abetted or performed it at home. This selective condemnation of intolerance, he shows, created a legacy of foreign policy interventions promoting religious freedom and human rights that was not reflected within America’s own borders. This timely, captivating book forces America to confront its claims of exceptionalism based on religious liberty—and perhaps begin to break the grotesque cycle of projection and oppression.
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cover of Religious Knowledge, Authority, and Charisma: Islamic and Jewish Perspectives

Religious Knowledge, Authority, and Charisma

Islamic and Jewish Perspectives

Daphna Ephrat

University of Utah Press, 2014

Utah Series in Middle East Studies

The issue of religious authority has long fascinated and ignited scholars across a range of disciplines: history, anthropology, the sociology of religion, and political science. Religious Knowledge, Authority, and Charisma juxtaposes religious leadership in premodern and modern Islam with examples from the Judaic tradition. By illustrating various iterations of authority in numerous historical and cultural contexts, this volume offers fresh insights into the nature of institutions of learning and other systems of establishing and disseminating authority, the mechanisms for cultivating committed adherents, and the processes by which religious leadership is polarized and fragmented.
 
Contributors tease out the sources and types of authority that emerged out of the Sunni and Shi'i milieu and the evolution of Muslim elites who served as formulators and disseminators of knowledge and practice. Comparative insights are provided by the examination of ideological and historical developments among Jewish sages who inculcated similar modes of authority from within their traditions. The rigorous exploration of the dynamic interface of knowledge and power in Islam and Judaism serves to highlight a number of present tensions common to both religions. By intertwining a historical span that traces trajectories of continuity and change, integrative discussion of cross-sectional themes, and comparative perspectives, this volume makes a distinct contribution.
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cover of Remains of Ritual: Northern Gods in a Southern Land

Remains of Ritual

Northern Gods in a Southern Land

Steven M. Friedson

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Remains of Ritual, Steven M. Friedson’s second book on musical experience in African ritual, focuses on the Brekete/Gorovodu religion of the Ewe people. Friedson presents a multifaceted understanding of religious practice through a historical and ethnographic study of one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast of Ghana: a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the northern region of the country. Each chapter of this fascinating book considers a different aspect of ritual life, demonstrating throughout that none of them can be conceived of separately from their musicality—in the Brekete world, music functions as ritual and ritual as music. Dance and possession, chanted calls to prayer, animal sacrifice, the sounds and movements of wake keeping, the play of the drums all come under Friedson’s careful scrutiny, as does his own position and experience within this ritual-dominated society.

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cover of Remaking the Godly Marriage: Gender Negotiation in Evangelical Families

Remaking the Godly Marriage

Gender Negotiation in Evangelical Families

Bartkowski, John

Rutgers University Press, 2001

While religious leaders often have enormous influence over their members’ beliefs and how they translate their beliefs into action in everyday life, the individual family remains the place where religious values are practiced through and ultimately transferred to the next generation. As such, the family is an extremely important, though frequently overlooked, topic of study for sociologists of religion.

In Remaking the Godly Marriage, John Bartkowski studies evangelical Protestants and their views on marriage and gender relations and how they are lived within individual families. The author compares elite evangelical prescriptions for godly family living with the day-to-day practices in conservative Protestant households. He asks: How serious are the debates over gender and the family that are manifested within contemporary evangelicalism? What are the values that underlie this debate? Have these internecine disputes been altered by the emergence of new evangelical movements such as biblical feminism and the Promise Keepers? And given the fact that leading evangelicals advance competing visions of godly family life, how do conservative religious spouses make sense of their own family relationships and gender identities?

Through in-depth interviews with evangelical married couples and an exhaustive study of evangelical family advice manuals, Bartkowski explores the disputes and ambivalence concerning traditional gender roles and patriarchal models of family life, which derive from the tension between evangelical Protestantism as a religious subculture and the broader American secular culture in which it is embedded. Bartkowski reveals how evangelical men and women jointly negotiate gender roles within their families and selectively appropriate values of the larger culture even as they attempt to cope with the conflicting messages of their own faith.

[more]
cover of Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II

Renewal

Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II

Mark Wild

University of Chicago Press, 2019

In the decades following World War II, a movement of clergy and laity sought to restore liberal Protestantism to the center of American urban life. Chastened by their failure to avert war and the Holocaust, and troubled by missionaries’ complicity with colonial regimes, they redirected their energies back home.

Renewal explores the rise and fall of this movement, which began as an effort to restore the church’s standing but wound up as nothing less than an openhearted crusade to remake our nation’s cities. These campaigns reached beyond church walls to build or lend a hand to scores of organizations fighting for welfare, social justice, and community empowerment among the increasingly nonwhite urban working class. Church leaders extended their efforts far beyond traditional evangelicalism, often dovetailing with many of the contemporaneous social currents coursing through the nation, including black freedom movements and the War on Poverty.

Renewal illuminates the overlooked story of how religious institutions both shaped and were shaped by postwar urban America. 
[more]
cover of Replanted: Faith-Based Support for Adoptive and Foster Families

Replanted

Faith-Based Support for Adoptive and Foster Families

Jenn Ranter Hook

Templeton Press, 2019

Many people embark on the journey of adoption and foster care but are unprepared for the challenges that await them along the way. Replanted takes an honest look at the joys and hardships that come with choosing this journey and provides a model of faith-based support made up of three parts to help families thrive: Soil, Sunlight, and Water. 

  • Soil, or emotional support, addresses the need for grace-filled settings where families can connect with other families who understand their experience. 
  • Sunlight, or informational support, focuses on obtaining helpful training to raise children who may have unique needs or challenges. 
  • Water, or tangible support, deals with concrete resources such as medical care, child care, and financial support. 

Throughout the book, the Replanted model is brought to life by stories and examples based on the clinical work and personal experiences of the authors. Their candid insight will serve families who are actively involved in adoption or foster care, as well as people who are eager to help support those families.

Replanted affirms that with the right support system in place, parents can answer this sacred call not only with open hearts but also with their eyes wide open.

[more]
cover of Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel

Reproducing Jews

A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel

Susan Martha Kahn

Duke University Press, 2000

There are more fertility clinics per capita in Israel than in any other country in the world and Israel has the world's highest per capita rate of in-vitro fertilization procedures. Fertility treatments are fully subsidized by Israeli national health insurance and are available to all Israelis, regardless of religion or marital status. These phenomena are not the result of unusually high rates of infertility in Israel but reflect the centrality of reproduction in Judaism and Jewish culture.

In this ethnographic study of the new reproductive technologies in Israel, Susan Martha Kahn explores the cultural meanings and contemporary rabbinic responses to artificial insemination, in-vitro fertilization, egg donation, and surrogacy. Kahn draws on fieldwork with unmarried Israeli women who are using state-subsidized artificial insemination to get pregnant and on participant-observation in Israeli fertility clinics. Through close readings of traditional Jewish texts and careful analysis of Israeli public discourse, she explains how the Israeli embrace of new reproductive technologies has made Jewish beliefs about kinship startlingly literal. Kahn also reveals how a wide range of contemporary Israelis are using new reproductive technologies to realize their reproductive futures, from ultraorthodox infertile married couples to secular unmarried women.

As the first scholarly account of assisted conception in Israel, this multisited ethnography will contribute to current anthropological debates on kinship studies. It will also interest those involved with Jewish studies.

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