The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere

The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023152725X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere represents a rare opportunity to experience a diverse group of preeminent philosophers confronting one pervasive contemporary concern: what role does or should religion play in our public lives? Reflecting on her recent work concerning state violence in Israel-Palestine, Judith Butler explores the potential of religious perspectives for renewing cultural and political criticism, while Jürgen Habermas, best known for his seminal conception of the public sphere, thinks through the ambiguous legacy of the concept of "the political" in contemporary theory. Charles Taylor argues for a radical redefinition of secularism, and Cornel West defends civil disobedience and emancipatory theology. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen detail the immense contribution of these philosophers to contemporary social and political theory, and an afterword by Craig Calhoun places these attempts to reconceive the significance of both religion and the secular in the context of contemporary national and international politics.

The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere

The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023152725X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere represents a rare opportunity to experience a diverse group of preeminent philosophers confronting one pervasive contemporary concern: what role does or should religion play in our public lives? Reflecting on her recent work concerning state violence in Israel-Palestine, Judith Butler explores the potential of religious perspectives for renewing cultural and political criticism, while Jürgen Habermas, best known for his seminal conception of the public sphere, thinks through the ambiguous legacy of the concept of "the political" in contemporary theory. Charles Taylor argues for a radical redefinition of secularism, and Cornel West defends civil disobedience and emancipatory theology. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen detail the immense contribution of these philosophers to contemporary social and political theory, and an afterword by Craig Calhoun places these attempts to reconceive the significance of both religion and the secular in the context of contemporary national and international politics.

Religion and the Public Sphere

Religion and the Public Sphere PDF Author: James Walters
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351609289
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
Religion and the Public Sphere: New Conversations explores the changing contribution of religion to public life today. Bringing together a diverse group of preeminent scholars on religion, each chapter explores an aspect of religion in the public realm, from law, liberalism, the environment and security to the public participation of religious minorities and immigration. This book engages with religion in new ways, going beyond religious literacy or debates around radicalisation, to look at how religion can contribute to public discourse. Religion, this book will show, can help inform the most important debates of our time.

Religious Actors in the Public Sphere

Religious Actors in the Public Sphere PDF Author: Jeff Haynes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136661719
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book seeks to argue that religious actors play a crucial role in the complex processes of entering or re-entering the public spheres of state, political, and civil society. Seeking to ameliorate the analytical lacuna and concentrating on both the meso and micro levels of religious public involvement, the contributors explain how representatives from religious and political institutions act and interact in a variety of ways for various purposes. Analysing empirical examples from both Europe and beyond, and including a variety of religions, including multi-faith platforms, the volume examines selected religious actors’ objectives, means and strategies and effects in order to address the following questions: • What are selected religious actors’ public and/or political activities and objectives? • In what ways and with what results do selected religious actors operate in various public spheres? • What are the consequences of religious actors’ political involvement, and which factors condition the degree to which they are successful? Whilst focusing mainly on Europe, the book also utilizes examples from Egypt, Turkey and the USA to provide a valuable and unique comparative focus. The contributors demonstrate that various religious actors, whether functioning as interest groups or social movements, and almost irrespective of the religious tradition to which they belong and the culture from which they emanate, do not necessarily differ markedly in terms of strategies. This important study will be of great interest to all scholars of International Politics, Religion, and Public Policy.

Religious Complexity in the Public Sphere

Religious Complexity in the Public Sphere PDF Author: Inger Furseth
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319556789
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is an empirical comparative study of the complexity of religion in the public spheres of the five Nordic countries. The result of a five-year collaborative research project, the work examines how increasingly religiously diverse Nordic societies regulate, debate, and negotiate religion in the state, the polity, the media, and civil society. The project finds that there are seemingly contradictory religious trends at different social levels: a growing secularization at the individual level, and a deprivatization of religion in politics, the media, and civil society. It offers a critique of the current theories of secularization and the return of religion, introducing religious complexity as an alternative concept to understand these paradoxes. This book is for scholars, students, and readers with an interest in understanding the public role of religion in the West.

Habermas and Religion

Habermas and Religion PDF Author: Craig Calhoun
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745674267
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
To the surprise of many readers, Jürgen Habermas has recentlymade religion a major theme of his work. Emphasizing bothreligion's prominence in the contemporary public sphere and itspotential contributions to critical thought, Habermas's engagementwith religion has been controversial and exciting, putting much ofhis own work in fresh perspective and engaging key themes inphilosophy, politics and social theory. Habermas argues that the once widely accepted hypothesis ofprogressive secularization fails to account for the multipletrajectories of modernization in the contemporary world. He callsattention to the contemporary significance of "postmetaphysical"thought and "postsecular" consciousness - even in Western societiesthat have embraced a rationalistic understanding of publicreason. Habermas and Religion presents a series of original andsustained engagements with Habermas's writing on religion in thepublic sphere, featuring new work and critical reflections fromleading philosophers, social and political theorists, andanthropologists. Contributors to the volume respond both toHabermas's ambitious and well-developed philosophical project andto his most recent work on religion. The book closes with anextended response from Habermas - itself a major statement from oneof today's most important thinkers.

Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere PDF Author: Birgit Meyer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253111722
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
"... one of those rare edited volumes that advances social thought as it provides substantive religious and media ethnography that is good to think with." -- Dale Eickelman, Dartmouth College Increasingly, Pentecostal, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and indigenous movements all over the world make use of a great variety of modern mass media, both print and electronic. Through religious booklets, radio broadcasts, cassette tapes, television talk-shows, soap operas, and documentary film these movements address multiple publics and offer alternative forms of belonging, often in competition with the postcolonial nation-state. How have new practices of religious mediation transformed the public sphere? How has the adoption of new media impinged on religious experiences and notions of religious authority? Has neo-liberalism engendered a blurring of the boundaries between religion and entertainment? The vivid essays in this interdisciplinary volume combine rich empirical detail with theoretical reflection, offering new perspectives on a variety of media, genres, and religions.

Hindu Pluralism

Hindu Pluralism PDF Author: Elaine M. Fisher
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520966295
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Hindu Pluralism, Elaine M. Fisher complicates the traditional scholarly narrative of the unification of Hinduism. By calling into question the colonial categories implicit in the term “sectarianism,” Fisher’s work excavates the pluralistic textures of precolonial Hinduism in the centuries prior to British intervention. Drawing on previously unpublished sources in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu, Fisher argues that the performance of plural religious identities in public space in Indian early modernity paved the way for the emergence of a distinctively non-Western form of religious pluralism. This work provides a critical resource for understanding how Hinduism developed in the early modern period, a crucial era that set the tenor for religion's role in public life in India through the present day.

Between Naturalism and Religion

Between Naturalism and Religion PDF Author: Jürgen Habermas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745694608
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
Two countervailing trends mark the intellectual tenor of our age – the spread of naturalistic worldviews and religious orthodoxies. Advances in biogenetics, brain research, and robotics are clearing the way for the penetration of an objective scientific self-understanding of persons into everyday life. For philosophy, this trend is associated with the challenge of scientific naturalism. At the same time, we are witnessing an unexpected revitalization of religious traditions and the politicization of religious communities across the world. From a philosophical perspective, this revival of religious energies poses the challenge of a fundamentalist critique of the principles underlying the modern Wests postmetaphysical understanding of itself. The tension between naturalism and religion is the central theme of this major new book by Jürgen Habermas. On the one hand he argues for an appropriate naturalistic understanding of cultural evolution that does justice to the normative character of the human mind. On the other hand, he calls for an appropriate interpretation of the secularizing effects of a process of social and cultural rationalization increasingly denounced by the champions of religious orthodoxies as a historical development peculiar to the West. These reflections on the enduring importance of religion and the limits of secularism under conditions of postmetaphysical reason set the scene for an extended treatment the political significance of religious tolerance and for a fresh contribution to current debates on cosmopolitanism and a constitution for international society.

Religion in the Public Sphere

Religion in the Public Sphere PDF Author: Solange Lefebvre
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442626305
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Get Book Here

Book Description
The place of religion in the public realm is the subject of frequent and lively debate in the media, among academics and policymakers, and within communities. With this edited collection, Solange Lefebvre and Lori G. Beaman bring together a series of case studies of religious groups and practices from all across Canada that re-examine and question the classic distinction between the public and private spheres. Religion in the Public Sphere explores the public image of religious groups, legal issues relating to “reasonable accommodations,” and the role of religion in public services and institutions like health care and education. Offering a wide range of contributions from religious studies, political science, theology, and law, Religion in the Public Sphere presents emerging new models to explain contemporary relations between religion, civil society, the private sector, family, and the state.

Cosmopolitanism, Religion and the Public Sphere

Cosmopolitanism, Religion and the Public Sphere PDF Author: Maria Rovisco
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317812212
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although emerging scholarship in the social sciences suggests that religion can be a potential catalyst of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship, few attempts have been made to bring to the fore new theoretical positions and empirical analyses of how cosmopolitanism -- as a philosophical notion, a practice and identity outlook -- can also shape and inform concrete religious affiliations. Key questions concerning the significance of cosmopolitan ideas and practices – in relation to particular religious experiences and discourses -- remain to be explored, both theoretically and empirically. This book takes as its starting point the emergence of cosmopolitanism -- as a major interdisciplinary field -- as a springboard for generating a productive dialogue among scholars working within a variety of intellectual disciplines and methodological traditions. The chapter contributions offer a serious attempt to critically engage both the limitations and possibilities of cosmopolitanism as an analytical and critical tool to understand a changing religious landscape in a globalizing world, namely, the so-called ‘new religious diversity’, religious conflict, and issues of migration, multiculturalism and transnationalism vis-à-vis the public exercise of religion. The contributors’ work is situated in a range of world sites in Africa, India, North America, Latin America, and Europe. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of globalization, religion and politics, and the sociology of religion.