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Author: Lori Beaman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000050556
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
This book explores the recent trend toward the transformation of religious symbols and practices into culture in Western democracies. Analyses of three legal cases involving religion in the public sphere are used to illuminate this trend: a municipal council chamber; a town hall; and town board meetings. Each case involves a different national context—Canada, France and the United States—and each illustrates something interesting about the shape-shifting nature of religion, specifically its flexibility and dexterity in the face of the secular, the religious and the plural. Despite the differences in national contexts, in each instance religion is transformed into culture or heritage by the courts to justify or excuse its presence and to distance the state from the possibility that it is violating legal norms of distance from religion. The cultural practice or symbol is represented as a shared national value or activity. Transforming the ‘Other’ into ‘Us’ through reconstitution is also possible. Finally, anxiety about the ‘Other’ becomes part of the story of rendering religion as culture, resulting in the impugning of anyone who dares to question the putative shared culture. The book will be essential reading for students, academics and policy-makers working in the areas of sociology of religion, religious studies, socio-legal studies, law and public policy, constitutional law, religion and politics, and cultural studies.
Author: Lori Beaman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000050556
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book explores the recent trend toward the transformation of religious symbols and practices into culture in Western democracies. Analyses of three legal cases involving religion in the public sphere are used to illuminate this trend: a municipal council chamber; a town hall; and town board meetings. Each case involves a different national context—Canada, France and the United States—and each illustrates something interesting about the shape-shifting nature of religion, specifically its flexibility and dexterity in the face of the secular, the religious and the plural. Despite the differences in national contexts, in each instance religion is transformed into culture or heritage by the courts to justify or excuse its presence and to distance the state from the possibility that it is violating legal norms of distance from religion. The cultural practice or symbol is represented as a shared national value or activity. Transforming the ‘Other’ into ‘Us’ through reconstitution is also possible. Finally, anxiety about the ‘Other’ becomes part of the story of rendering religion as culture, resulting in the impugning of anyone who dares to question the putative shared culture. The book will be essential reading for students, academics and policy-makers working in the areas of sociology of religion, religious studies, socio-legal studies, law and public policy, constitutional law, religion and politics, and cultural studies.
Author: Jens Koehrsen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000734641
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
Exploring faith-based organizations (FBOs) in current developmental discourses and practice, this book presents a selection of empirical in-depth case-studies of Christian FBOs and assesses the vital role credited to FBOs in current discourses on development. Examining the engagement of FBOs with contemporary politics of development, the contributions stress the agency of FBOs in diverse contexts of development policy, both local and global. It is emphasised that FBOs constitute boundary agents and developmental entrepreneurs: they move between different discursive fields such as national and international development discourses, theological discourses, and their specific religious constituencies. By combining influxes from these different contexts, FBOs generate unique perspectives on development: they express alternative views on development and stress particular approaches anchored in their theological social ethics. This book should be of interest to those researching FBOs and their interaction with international organizations, and to scholars working in the broader areas of religion and politics and politics and development.
Author: K. Healan Gaston
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022666399X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
“Judeo-Christian” is a remarkably easy term to look right through. Judaism and Christianity obviously share tenets, texts, and beliefs that have strongly influenced American democracy. In this ambitious book, however, K. Healan Gaston challenges the myth of a monolithic Judeo-Christian America. She demonstrates that the idea is not only a recent and deliberate construct, but also a potentially dangerous one. From the time of its widespread adoption in the 1930s, the ostensible inclusiveness of Judeo-Christian terminology concealed efforts to promote particular conceptions of religion, secularism, and politics. Gaston also shows that this new language, originally rooted in arguments over the nature of democracy that intensified in the early Cold War years, later became a marker in the culture wars that continue today. She argues that the debate on what constituted Judeo-Christian—and American—identity has shaped the country’s religious and political culture much more extensively than previously recognized.
Author: John Myhill
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902722711X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
This book discusses the historical record of the idea that language is associated with national identity, demonstrating that different applications of this idea have consistently produced certain types of results. Nationalist movements aimed at 'unification', based upon languages which vary greatly at the spoken level, e.g. German, Italian, Pan-Turkish and Arabic, have been associated with aggression, fascism and genocide, while those based upon relatively homogeneous spoken languages, e.g. Czech, Norwegian and Ukrainian, have resulted in national liberation and international stability. It is also shown that religion can be more important to national identity than language, but only for religious groups which were understood in premodern times to be national rather than universal or doctrinal, e.g. Jews, Armenians, Maronites, Serbs, Dutch and English; this is demonstrated with discussions of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the civil war in Lebanon and the breakup of Yugoslavia, the United Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
Author: Ryan P. Jordan
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761858121
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
This book uses the discourse of religious liberty, often expressed as one favoring a separation between church and state, to explore racial differences during an era of American empire building (1750–1900). Discussions of religious liberty in America during this time often revolved around the fitness of certain ethnic or racial groups to properly exercise their freedom of conscience. Significant fear existed that groups outside the Anglo-Protestant mainstream might somehow undermine the American experiment in ordered republican liberty. Hence, repeated calls could be heard for varying forms of assimilation to normative Protestant ideals about religious expression. Though Americans pride themselves on their secular society, it is worth interrogating the exclusive and even violent genealogy of such secular values. When doing so, it is important to understand the racial limitations of the discourse of religious freedom for various aspects of American political culture. The following account of the history of religious liberty seeks to destabilize the widespread assumption that the dominant American culture inevitably trends toward greater freedom in the realm of personal expression.
Author: Tisa Wenger
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469634635
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse--Wenger calls it "religious freedom talk--that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire. More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life. In so doing they posed sharp challenges to the racial and religious exclusions of American life. People of almost every religious stripe have argued, debated, negotiated, and brought into being an ideal called American religious freedom, subtly transforming their own identities and traditions in the process. In a post-9/11 world, Wenger reflects, public attention to religious freedom and its implications is as consequential as it has ever been.
Author: William T. Cavanaugh
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802866093
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207
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Book Description
Whether one thinks that religion continues to fade or has made a comeback in the contemporary world, there is a common notion that religion went away somewhere, at least in the West. But William Cavanaugh argues that religious fervor never left it has only migrated toward a new object of worship. In Migrations of the Holy he examines the disconcerting modern transfer of sacred devotion from the church to the nation-state. In these chapters Cavanaugh cautions readers to be wary of a rigid separation of religion and politics that boxes in the church and sends citizens instead to the state for hope, comfort, and salvation as they navigate the risks and pains of mortal life. When nationality becomes the primary source of identity and belonging, he warns, the state becomes the god and idol of its own religion, the language of nationalism becomes a liturgy, and devotees willingly sacrifice their lives to serve and defend their country. Cavanaugh urges Christians to resist this form of idolatry, to unthink the inevitability of the nation-state and its dreary party politics, to embrace radical forms of political pluralism that privilege local communities and to cling to an incarnational theology that weaves itself seamlessly and tangibly into all aspects of daily life and culture. William Cavanaugh continues to provide leadership and vision in the field of political theology. He addresses essential questions about the religious status of the nation-state, the political character of the church, and how the tradition of Christian political thought might be brought to bear upon contemporary politics. . . . Unfolds a theological response to present political conditions and a political response to our theological condition. Luke Bretherton King s College London Another vigorous but distinct voice in the burgeoning conversation about the role of religion generally and the church specifically in political life. . . . Worth a careful read. Robert Benne
Author: Karin Kittelmann Flensner
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319609491
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
This book answers the question on how students and teachers talk about religion when the mandatory and nonconfessional school subject of Religious Education is on the schedule in the “world’s most secular country” To do this, it analyses discourses of religion as they occur in the classroom practice. It is based on findings from participant observation of Religious Education lessons in several upper secondary schools in Sweden. The book discusses different aspects of the role and function of nonconfessional integrative Religious Education in an increasingly pluralistic, multireligious, yet also secularized society, at a general level. It looks at the religious landscape, different perspectives on school subjects, various models and the development of Religious Education, and discourses of religion of a secularist, spiritual and nationalistic nature. Religious Education is a school subject that manoeuvres in the midst of a field that on the one hand concerns crucial knowledge in a pluralistic society, and on the other hand deals with highly contested questions in a society characterized by diversity and secularity. In the mandatory, integrative and non-confessional school subject of Religious Education in Sweden, all students are taught together regardless of religious or secular affiliation. The subject deals with major world religions, important non-religious worldviews and ethics, from a non-confessional perspective. Thus, in the classroom, individuals who identify with diverse religious and non-religious worldviews, with a different understanding of what religion could be and what it might mean to be religious, are brought together. The book examines questions raised in this pluralistic context: What discourses of religion become hegemonic in the classroom? How do these discourses affect the possibility of reaching the aim of Religious Education which concerns understanding and respect for different ways of thinking and living in a society characterized by diversity?
Author: David M. Elcott
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268200599
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy highlights the use of religious identity to fuel the rise of illiberal, nationalist, and populist democracy. In Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy, David Elcott, C. Colt Anderson, Tobias Cremer, and Volker Haarmann present a pragmatic and modernist exploration of how religion engages in the public square. Elcott and his co-authors are concerned about the ways religious identity is being used to foster the exclusion of individuals and communities from citizenship, political representation, and a role in determining public policy. They examine the ways religious identity is weaponized to fuel populist revolts against a political, social, and economic order that values democracy in a global and strikingly diverse world. Included is a history and political analysis of religion, politics, and policies in Europe and the United States that foster this illiberal rebellion. The authors explore what constitutes a constructive religious voice in the political arena, even in nurturing patriotism and democracy, and what undermines and threatens liberal democracies. To lay the groundwork for a religious response, the book offers chapters showing how Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism can nourish liberal democracy. The authors encourage people of faith to promote foundational support for the institutions and values of the democratic enterprise from within their own religious traditions and to stand against the hostility and cruelty that historically have resulted when religious zealotry and state power combine. Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy is intended for readers who value democracy and are concerned about growing threats to it, and especially for people of faith and religious leaders, as well as for scholars of political science, religion, and democracy.
Author: Peter van der Veer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691219575
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
Does modernity make religion politically irrelevant? Conventional scholarly and popular wisdom says that it does. The prevailing view assumes that the onset of western modernity--characterized by the rise of nationalism, the dominance of capitalism, and the emergence of powerful state institutions--favors secularism and relegates religion to the purely private realm. This collection of essays on nationalism and religion in Europe and Asia challenges that view. Contributors show that religion and politics are mixed together in complex and vitally important ways not just in the East, but in the West as well. The book focuses on four societies: India, Japan, Britain, and the Netherlands. It shows that religion and nationalism in these societies combined to produce such notions as the nation being chosen for a historical task (imperialism, for example), the possibility of national revival, and political leadership as a form of salvation. The volume also examines the qualities of religious discourse and practice that can be used for nationalist purposes, paying special attention to how religion can help to give meaning to sacrifice in national struggle. The book's comparative approach underscores that developments in colonizing and colonized countries, too often considered separately, are subtly interrelated. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Benedict R. Anderson, Talal Asad, Susan Bayly, Partha Chatterjee, Frans Groot, Harry Harootunian, Hugh McLeod, Barbara Metcalf, and Peter van Rooden.
