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.
Christopher Cameron
Vanderbilt University Press, 2021
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.
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.
Abiodun Alao
Duke University Press, 2022
Mayfair Yang
Duke University Press, 2020
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.
Marwa Elshakry
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Tat-siong Benny Liew
SBL Press, 2024
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.
Rabbi Judith Schindler and Judy Seldin-Cohen
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2018
Donnalee Dox
University of Michigan Press, 2016
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.
Margaret Harper McCarthy
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
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.
William A. Mirola
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Jacob M. Baum
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Lawrence J. McAndrews
Catholic University of America Press, 2015
Marian Burchardt
Rutgers University Press, 2020
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?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.
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.
Pedro Ramet, ed.
Duke University Press, 1988
Nukhet A. Sandal
Ohio University Press, 2022
Paul Djupe
Temple University Press, 2015
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.
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.
Ben Fallaw
Duke University Press, 2012
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.
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.
Philip E. Muehlenbeck
Vanderbilt University Press, 2012
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.
Olufemi Vaughan
Duke University Press, 2016
Sally M. Promey
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Muriel Schmid
University of Utah Press, 2017
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.
Ian Hodder
University Press of Colorado, 2018
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.
David Little
University of Chicago Press, 1984
Leerom Medovoi and Elizabeth Bentley, editors
Duke University Press, 2021
Dwight N. Hopkins, Lois Ann Lorentzen, Eduardo Mendieta, and David Batstone, eds.
Duke University Press, 2001
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
Donovan O. Schaefer
Duke University Press, 2015
Anya Bernstein
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Kimba Allie Tichenor
Brandeis University Press, 2016
Helen Alvare
Catholic University of America Press, 2022
Edited by James Walters
Gingko, 2018
John Corrigan
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Daphna Ephrat
University of Utah Press, 2014
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.
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.
Mark Wild
University of Chicago Press, 2019
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.
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.
Susan Martha Kahn
Duke University Press, 2000
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.