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Author: Damon Mayrl
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316720705
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
Why does secularization proceed differently in otherwise similar countries? Secular Conversions demonstrates that the institutional structure of the state is a key factor shaping the course of secularization. Drawing upon detailed historical analysis of religious education policy in the United States and Australia, Damon Mayrl details how administrative structures, legal procedures, and electoral systems have shaped political opportunities and even helped create constituencies for secular policies. In so doing, he also shows how a decentralized, readily accessible American state acts as an engine for religious conflict, encouraging religious differences to spill into law and politics at every turn. This book provides a vivid picture of how political conflicts interacted with the state over the long span of American and Australian history to shape religion's role in public life. Ultimately, it reveals that taken-for-granted political structures have powerfully shaped the fate of religion in modern societies.
Author: Damon Mayrl
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316720705
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Get Book Here
Book Description
Why does secularization proceed differently in otherwise similar countries? Secular Conversions demonstrates that the institutional structure of the state is a key factor shaping the course of secularization. Drawing upon detailed historical analysis of religious education policy in the United States and Australia, Damon Mayrl details how administrative structures, legal procedures, and electoral systems have shaped political opportunities and even helped create constituencies for secular policies. In so doing, he also shows how a decentralized, readily accessible American state acts as an engine for religious conflict, encouraging religious differences to spill into law and politics at every turn. This book provides a vivid picture of how political conflicts interacted with the state over the long span of American and Australian history to shape religion's role in public life. Ultimately, it reveals that taken-for-granted political structures have powerfully shaped the fate of religion in modern societies.
Author: Susan Jacoby
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1400096391
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514
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Book Description
In a groundbreaking historical work that focuses on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with an uncompromising secular perspective, Susan Jacoby illuminates the social and economic forces that have shaped individual faith and the voluntary conversion impulse that has changed the course of Western history—for better and for worse. Covering the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin’s dour theocracy, American plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters’ religion—along with individual converts including Augustine of Hippo, John Donne, Edith Stein, Muhammad Ali, George W. Bush and Mike Pence—Strange Gods makes a powerful case that nothing has been more important in struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one’s choice or to reject belief in God altogether.
Author: Michal Kravel-Tovi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544812
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
Religious conversion is often associated with ideals of religious sincerity. But in a society in which religious belonging is entangled with ethnonational citizenship and confers political privilege, a convert might well have multilayered motives. Over the last two decades, mass non-Jewish immigration to Israel, especially from the former Soviet Union, has sparked heated debates over the Jewish state’s conversion policy and intensified suspicion of converts’ sincerity. When the State Winks carefully traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion to highlight the collaborative labor that goes into the making of the Israeli state and its Jewish citizens. In a rich ethnographic narrative based on fieldwork in conversion schools, rabbinic courts, and ritual bathhouses, Michal Kravel-Tovi follows conversion candidates—mostly secular young women from a former Soviet background—and state conversion agents, mostly religious Zionists caught between the contradictory demands of their nationalist and religious commitments. She complicates the popular perception that conversion is a “wink-wink” relationship in which both sides agree to treat the converts’ pretenses of observance as real. Instead, she demonstrates how their interdependent performances blur any clear boundary between sincere and empty conversions. Alongside detailed ethnography, When the State Winks develops new ways to think about the complex connection between religious conversion and the nation-state. Kravel-Tovi emphasizes how state power and morality is managed through “winking”—the subtle exchanges and performances that animate everyday institutional encounters between state and citizen. In a country marked by tension between official religiosity and a predominantly secular Jewish population, winking permits the state to save its Jewish face.
Author: David H. Darst
Publisher: Unc Department of Romance Studies
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
This study examines the many ways in which seventeenth-century Spanish authors manipulated the expected outcomes of secular literature to create religiously motivated endings prompted by some kind of conversion. In the late sixteenth century, the prevalent technique was to transform the secular material entirely, a lo divino. After 1598, however, writers developed the ingenious procedure of ostensibly following a secular account of events but subverting it by inserting an unanticipated religious ending. The specific kinds of conversion at closure examined here are the appropriation of earlier genres; conversion of non-Christian literary types; personal conversion of the native Spaniard through the Catholic ritual of confession, penitence, and absolution; conversion of the nation's historical material; and conversion of the very landscape upon which Christians walk in their pilgrimage through life.
Author: Goldie Osuri
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136302026
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
Drawing on the critical and theoretical concepts of sovereignty, biopolitics, and necropolitics, this book examines how a normative liberal and secular understanding of India’s religious identity is translatable by Hindu nationalists into discrimination and violence against minoritized religious communities. Extending these concepts to an analysis of historical, political and legal genealogies of conversion, the author demonstrates how a concern for sovereignty links past and present anti-conversion campaigns and laws. The book illustrates how sovereignty informs the making of secularism as well as religious difference. The focus on sovereignty sheds light on the manner in which religious difference becomes a point of reference for the religio-secular idioms of Bombay cinema, for legal judgements on communal violence, for human rights organizations, and those seeking justice for communal violence. This wide-ranging examination and discussion of the trajectories of (anti) conversion politics through historical, legal, philosophical, popular cultural, archival and ethnographic material offers a cogent argument for shifting the stakes and rethinking the relationship between sovereignty and religious freedom. The book is a timely contribution to broader theoretical and political discussions of (post) secularism and human rights, and is of interest to students and scholars of postcolonial studies, cultural studies, law, and religious studies.
Author: N. Marzouki
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137004894
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185
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Book Description
While globalization undermines ideas of the nation-state in the Mediterranean, conversions reveal how religion can unsettle existing political and social relations. Through studies of conversions across the region this book examines the challenges that conversions represent for national, legal and policy ways of dealing with religious minorities.
Author: Joseph Blankholm
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479809527
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
A radically new way of understanding secularism which explains why being secular can seem so strangely religious For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals. In The Secular Paradox, Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, they feel they have lost too much. Trying to strike the right balance, secular people alternate between the two sides of their ambiguous condition: absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition. Blankholm relies heavily on the voices of women and people of color to understand what it means to live with the secular paradox. The struggles of secular misfits—the people who mis-fit normative secularism in the United States—show that becoming secular means rejecting parts of life that resemble Christianity and embracing a European tradition that emphasizes reason and avoids emotion. Women, people of color, and secular people who have left non-Christian religions work against the limits and contradictions of secularism to create new ways of being secular that are transforming the American religious landscape. They are pioneering the most interesting and important forms of secular “religiosity” in America today.
Author: Marc Baer
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804768676
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
This is the first study of the modern history, experience, and ethno-religious identity of the Dönme, the descendants of seventeenth-century Jewish converts to Islam, in Ottoman and Greek Salonica and in Turkish Istanbul.
Author: Andrew Skotnicki
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190880848
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
The Cincinnati Penal Congress of 1870 ushered in the era of "progressive" penology: the use of statistical and social scientific methodologies, commitment to psychiatric and therapeutic interventions, and a new innovation--the reformatory--as the locus for the application of these initiatives. The prisoner was now seen as a specimen to be analyzed, treated, and properly socialized into the triumphal current of American social and economic life. The Progressive rehabilitative initiatives succumbed in the 1970s to withering criticism from the proponents of equally futile strategies for addressing "the crime problem": retribution, deterrence, and selective incapacitation. The early Christian community developed a methodology for correcting human error that featured the unprecedented belief that a period of time spent in a given penitential locale, with the aid and encouragement of the community, was sufficient in and of itself to heal the alienation and self-loathing caused by sin and to lead an individual to full reincorporation into the community. The "correctional" practice was based upon the conviction that cooperative sociability--or conversion--is possible, regardless of the specific offense, without any need to inflict suffering, or to use the act of punishment as a warning to potential offenders, or to undertake programmatic interventions into the lives of the incarcerated for the purpose of rehabilitating them. Andrew Skotnicki contends that the modern practice of criminal detention is a protracted exercise in needless violence predicated upon two foundational errors. The first is an inability to see the imprisoned as human beings fully capable of responding to an affirmative accompaniment rather than maltreatment and invasive forms of therapy. The second is a pervasive dualism that constructs a barrier between detainees and those empowered to supervise, rehabilitate, and punish them. In this book, Skotnicki argues that the criminal justice system can only be rehabilitated by eliminating punishment and policies based upon deterrence, rehabilitation, and the incapacitation of the urban poor and returning to the original justification for the practice of confinement: conversion.
Author: Joseph Blankholm
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479809497
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
"Secular people are strangely ambiguous. They feel a tension between what they don't share and what they have in common-between avoiding religion and embracing something like it. An event as ordinary as a wedding can be uncomfortable if it feels too religious, and even for those who are indifferent to religion, a passing reference to God can be cringeworthy. And yet, religion is tough to avoid completely without living in its remainder. The Secular Paradox explains why. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, Blankholm shows how secular people are both absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like tradition, which includes beliefs and institutions, as well embodied practices. Recovering this tradition makes legible what secular people share with one another and explains why the secular movement in the United States remains predominately white and male. Humanistic Jews, Hispanic Freethinkers, Ex-Muslims, and black nonbelievers are secular misfits whose stories reveal the contours of the secular most clearly by proving to be more and less than what remains when Christianity is removed. The Secular Paradox offers a radically new way of understanding secularism and secular people by explaining the origins of their inherent contradiction and its awkward effects on their lives. This new understanding matters for anyone who has ever avoided something because it felt too religious, everyone who considers themselves secular, and all those who want to understand them better"--
