Imprisoned Religion

Imprisoned Religion PDF Author: Irene Becci
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317118308
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This book explores the profound transformations that prisons and offender rehabilitation programmes in Eastern Germany have undergone with respect to religion. Drawing on participant observation and interviews of inmates, ex-prisoners, chaplains and prison visitors, this book connects the institutional to individual: focusing on the religious changes individuals experience when they are imprisoned and released. Including comparative studies from Italy and Switzerland, Becci reveals that despite diverse local, historical, denominational, political and social contexts the transformation patterns of individuals' relationship to religion, and their use of religious resources, are strongly shaped by the total character of prisons. Becci also explores the difficulties faced by released people in keeping their religious life alive under the harsh conditions of social stigma in a highly secular outside society.

Imprisoned Religion

Imprisoned Religion PDF Author: Irene Becci
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317118308
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the profound transformations that prisons and offender rehabilitation programmes in Eastern Germany have undergone with respect to religion. Drawing on participant observation and interviews of inmates, ex-prisoners, chaplains and prison visitors, this book connects the institutional to individual: focusing on the religious changes individuals experience when they are imprisoned and released. Including comparative studies from Italy and Switzerland, Becci reveals that despite diverse local, historical, denominational, political and social contexts the transformation patterns of individuals' relationship to religion, and their use of religious resources, are strongly shaped by the total character of prisons. Becci also explores the difficulties faced by released people in keeping their religious life alive under the harsh conditions of social stigma in a highly secular outside society.

Prison Religion

Prison Religion PDF Author: Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691152535
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
More than the citizens of most countries, Americans are either religious or in jail--or both. But what does it mean when imprisonment and evangelization actually go hand in hand, or at least appear to? What do "faith-based" prison programs mean for the constitutional separation of church and state, particularly when prisoners who participate get special privileges? In Prison Religion, law and religion scholar Winnifred Fallers Sullivan takes up these and other important questions through a close examination of a 2005 lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a faith-based residential rehabilitation program in an Iowa state prison. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State v. Prison Fellowship Ministries, a trial in which Sullivan served as an expert witness, centered on the constitutionality of allowing religious organizations to operate programs in state-run facilities. Using the trial as a case study, Sullivan argues that separation of church and state is no longer possible. Religious authority has shifted from institutions to individuals, making it difficult to define religion, let alone disentangle it from the state. Prison Religion casts new light on church-state law, the debate over government-funded faith-based programs, and the predicament of prisoners who have precious little choice about what kind of rehabilitation they receive, if they are offered any at all.

Captive in Iran

Captive in Iran PDF Author: Maryam Rostampour
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
ISBN: 1414382200
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Maryam Rostampour and Marziyeh Amirizadeh knew they were putting their lives on the line. Islamic laws in Iran forbade them from sharing their Christian beliefs, but in three years, they’d covertly put New Testaments into the hands of twenty thousand of their countrymen and started two secret house churches. In 2009, they were finally arrested and held in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran, a place where inmates are routinely tortured and executions are commonplace. In the face of ruthless interrogations, persecution, and a death sentence, Maryam and Marziyeh chose to take the radical—and dangerous—step of sharing their faith inside the very walls of the government stronghold that was meant to silence them. In Captive in Iran, two courageous Iranian women recount how God used their 259 days in Evin Prison to shine His light into one of the world’s darkest places, giving hope to those who had lost everything and showing love to those in despair.

The Invention of Religion in Japan

The Invention of Religion in Japan PDF Author: Jason Ānanda Josephson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226412342
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call “religion.” There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea. In this book, Jason Ananda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed. More than a tale of oppression or hegemony, Josephson’s account demonstrates that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a valuable opportunity. In addition to carving out space for belief in Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of “superstitions”—and thus beyond the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular, science, and superstition.

American Sutra

American Sutra PDF Author: Duncan Ryūken Williams
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674986539
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion A Los Angeles Times Bestseller “Raises timely and important questions about what religious freedom in America truly means.” —Ruth Ozeki “A must-read for anyone interested in the implacable quest for civil liberties, social and racial justice, religious freedom, and American belonging.” —George Takei On December 7, 1941, as the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, the first person detained was the leader of the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist sect in Hawai‘i. Nearly all Japanese Americans were subject to accusations of disloyalty, but Buddhists aroused particular suspicion. From the White House to the local town council, many believed that Buddhism was incompatible with American values. Intelligence agencies targeted the Buddhist community, and Buddhist priests were deemed a threat to national security. In this pathbreaking account, based on personal accounts and extensive research in untapped archives, Duncan Ryūken Williams reveals how, even as they were stripped of their homes and imprisoned in camps, Japanese American Buddhists launched one of the most inspiring defenses of religious freedom in our nation’s history, insisting that they could be both Buddhist and American. “A searingly instructive story...from which all Americans might learn.” —Smithsonian “Williams’ moving account shows how Japanese Americans transformed Buddhism into an American religion, and, through that struggle, changed the United States for the better.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer “Reading this book, one cannot help but think of the current racial and religious tensions that have gripped this nation—and shudder.” —Reza Aslan, author of Zealot

Religion and Prison: An Overview of Contemporary Europe

Religion and Prison: An Overview of Contemporary Europe PDF Author: Julia Martínez-Ariño
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030368343
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
This volume offers a European overview of the management of religious diversity in prisons and provides readers with rich empirical material and a comparative perspective. The chapters combine both legal and sociological approaches. Coverage for each country includes historical background, current penitentiary organization, and recent changes or trends. In their exploration of legal aspects, the contributors look at such factors as the status of prison chaplains and regulations concerning religious practice and religious freedom. These include meals, prayers, and visits. The sociological analysis examines religious discrimination in prison, church-prison relations, conversion and proselytism, and more. The European coverage includes countries for which such information is seldom available. The book offers readers a better understanding of governance of religion in prisons. This text appeals to students, researchers and professionals in the field.

Break Every Yoke

Break Every Yoke PDF Author: Joshua Dubler
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190949155
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. Religious ideas and practices also offer a key for ending mass incarceration. These are the bold claims advanced by Break Every Yoke, the joint work of two activist-scholars of American religion. Once, in an era not too long past, Americans, both incarcerated and free, spoke a language of social liberation animated by religion. In the era of mass incarceration, we have largely forgotten how to dream-and organize-this way. To end mass incarceration we must reclaim this lost tradition. Properly conceived, the movement we need must demand not prison reform but prison abolition. Break Every Yoke weaves religion into the stories about race, politics, and economics that conventionally account for America's grotesque prison expansion of the last half century, and in so doing it sheds new light on one of our era's biggest human catastrophes. By foregrounding the role of religion in the way political elites, religious institutions, and incarcerated activists talk about incarceration, Break Every Yoke is an effort to stretch the American moral imagination and contribute resources toward envisioning alternative ways of doing justice. By looking back to nineteenth century abolitionism, and by turning to today's grassroots activists, it argues for reclaiming the abolition "spirit."

An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion

An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion PDF Author: Inger Furseth
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000934691
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
What are religion and nonreligion? How do fundamentalism and religious radicalization emerge and grow? How do social class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and other factors affect religious beliefs, practices, and organizations? Is religion a fundamental driving force or do political leaders use religion for their own purposes? In exploring these pertinent questions, An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion provides an overview of sociological theories of contemporary religious life. Theoretical discussion is accompanied by presentations of empirical research from several religious traditions in many parts of the world. The sociology of religion is linked closely to developments in general sociology. Some chapters are organized according to topic, while others offer brief presentations of classical and contemporary sociologists from Karl Marx to Patricia Hill Collins and their perspectives on social life, including on religion. This second edition has been thoroughly updated throughout with new chapters on religion and social inequalities, social and religious movements, and extremism. Covering classical sociology of religion as well as contemporary debates and topics, this book is ideal reading for students approaching the sociology of religion for the first time.

Incarceration and the Law, Cases and Materials

Incarceration and the Law, Cases and Materials PDF Author: Margo Schlanger
Publisher: West Academic Publishing
ISBN: 9781683287964
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1071

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Book Description
In the age of American mass incarceration, a complex legal regime governs prison conditions and presents a host of controversial questions at the intersection of constitutional liberty, statutory interpretation, administrative regulation, and public policy. This is a completely overhauled, re-titled, and much-expanded version of the leading casebook about incarceration. It addresses both pretrial and post-conviction incarceration, presenting Supreme Court and leading lower court case law, statutes, litigation materials, professional standards, academic commentary, and prisoner writing. Topics include conditions of confinement, civil liberties, particular prisoner populations and relevant legal issues (race and national origin discrimination, the particular issues/law governing treatment of incarcerated women, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities). Litigated remedies (injunctive litigation, damages, the Prison Litigation Reform Act, and criminal prosecution of prison staff), are also covered in detail, as is non-litigation oversight. The casebook is supplemented by an open-access website that offers additional resources and sources for further reading.

The Angola Prison Seminary

The Angola Prison Seminary PDF Author: Michael Hallett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317300610
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Corrections officials faced with rising populations and shrinking budgets have increasingly welcomed "faith-based" providers offering services at no cost to help meet the needs of inmates. Drawing from three years of on-site research, this book utilizes survey analysis along with life-history interviews of inmates and staff to explore the history, purpose, and functioning of the Inmate Minister program at Louisiana State Penitentiary (aka "Angola"), America’s largest maximum-security prison. This book takes seriously attributions from inmates that faith is helpful for "surviving prison" and explores the implications of religious programming for an American corrections system in crisis, featuring high recidivism, dehumanizing violence, and often draconian punishments. A first-of-its-kind prototype in a quickly expanding policy arena, Angola’s unique Inmate Minister program deploys trained graduates of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in bi-vocational pastoral service roles throughout the prison. Inmates lead their own congregations and serve in lay-ministry capacities in hospice, cell block visitation, delivery of familial death notifications to fellow inmates, "sidewalk counseling" and tier ministry, officiating inmate funerals, and delivering "care packages" to indigent prisoners. Life-history interviews uncover deep-level change in self-identity corresponding with a growing body of research on identity change and religiously motivated desistance. The concluding chapter addresses concerns regarding the First Amendment, the dysfunctional state of U.S. corrections, and directions for future research.