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Religion, Power, and the Rise of Shinto in Early Modern Japan (Bloomsbury Shinto Studies)
This book sheds new light on the relationship between religion and state in early modern Japan, and demonstrates the growing awareness of Shinto in both the political and the intellectual elite of Tokugawa Japan, even though Buddhism remained the privileged means of stately religious control. The first part analyses how the Tokugawa government aimed to control the populace via Buddhism and at the same time submitted Buddhism to the sacralization of the Tokugawa dynasty. The second part focuses on the religious protests throughout the entire period, with chapters on the suppression of Christians, heterodox Buddhist sects, and unwanted folk practitioners. The third part tackles the question of why early Tokugawa Confucianism was particularly interested in “Shinto” as an alternative to Buddhism and what “Shinto” actually meant from a Confucian stance. The final part of the book explores attempts to curtail the institutional power of Buddhism by reforming Shinto shrines, an important step in the so called “Shintoization of shrines” including the development of a self-contained Shinto clergy.
Religion-Regime Relations in Zimbabwe: Co-operation and Resistance (Routledge Studies on Religion in Africa and the Diaspora)
This book explores religion-regime relations in contemporary Zimbabwe to identify patterns of co-operation and resistance across diverse religious institutions. Using co-operation and resistance as an analytical framework, the book shows how different religious organisations have interacted with Emmerson Mnangagwa’s "Second Republic", following Robert Mugabe’s departure from the political scene. In particular, through case studies on the Zimbabwe Council of Churches, Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops Conference and Pentecostals, African Traditional Religions, Islam, and others, the book explores how different religious institutions have responded to Mnangagwa’s new regime. Chapters highlight the complexities characterising the religion-regime interface, showing how the same religious organisation might co-operate and resist at the same time. Furthermore, the book compares how religious institutions co-operated or resisted Mugabe’s earlier regime to identify patterns of continuity and change. Overall, the book highlights the challenges of deploying simplistic frames in efforts to understand the interface between politics and religion. A significant contribution to global scholarship on religion-regime interfaces, this book will appeal to academics and students in the field of Religious Studies, Political Science, History and African Studies
Religion, Terror and Violence: Religious Studies Perspectives
September 11 and the subsequent War on Terror continues to cast a long shadow over the world. Religion, Terror and Violence brings together a group of distinguished scholars from a range of backgrounds and disciplines to explore the claim that acts of violence – most spectacularly the attack of September 11, 2001 and the international reaction to it – were intimately linked to cultural and social authorizing processes that could be called 'religious.' This book provides a nuanced but incisive insight into the reaction of the discipline of religious studies to the post 9/11 world.
Religion und Säkularisierung: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch
Verschwindet die Religiosität in der Moderne oder ist im Gegenteil eine Rückkehr der Religionen zu verzeichnen? Das Handbuch beleuchtet die Dialektik von Säkularisierung und Revitalisierung der Religionen aus philosophischer, soziologischer und religionswissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Vorgestellt werden grundlegende Konzepte, z. B. von Durkheim, Weber, Habermas, Blumenberg und Luhmann. Der zweite Teil untersucht Begriffe wie das Böse, das Heilige, Pluralismus etc. in ihrer Bedeutung im Kontext der Säkularisierung. Abschließend geht es um Konflikte wie Glauben und Wissen, Religion und Menschenrechte oder Säkularisierung und die Weltreligionen.
Religious Disagreement and Pluralism
Epistemological questions about the significance of disagreement have advanced alongside broader developments in social epistemology concerning testimony, the nature of expertise and epistemic authority, the role of institutions, group belief, and epistemic injustice, among others. During this period, related issues in the epistemology of religion have re-emerged as worthy of new consideration, and available to be situated with new conceptual tools. Does disagreement between, and within, religions challenge the rationality of religious commitment? How should religious adherents think about exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist frameworks as applied to religious truth, or to matters of salvation or redemption or liberation? This volume explores many of these issues at the intersection of the epistemology of disagreement and religious epistemology. It engages in careful reflection on religious diversity and disagreement, offering ways to balance epistemic humility with personal conviction. Recognizing the place of religious differences in our social lives, it provides renewed efforts at how best to think about truths concerning religion.
Religious Diversity in Australia: Living Well with Difference
This book documents the structure of religious diversity in Australia and examines this diversity in the context of the law, migration, education, policing, the media and interfaith communities.Focusing on Melbourne and Tasmania, it articulates the benefits and opportunities of diversity, alongside the challenges that confront religious and ethnic minorities, including discrimination and structural inequalities generated by Christian and otherforms of privilege. It articulates constructive strategies that are deployed, includingencouraging forms of belonging, structured ways of negotiating disagreement and respectful engagement with difference.While scholars across the West are increasingly attuned to the problems and promises of growing religious diversity in a global age, in-depth empirical research on the consequences of that diversity in Australia is lacking. This book provides a rich, well-researched, and timely intervention.
Religious Diversity in Europe: Mediating the Past to the Young
Drawing on research funded by the European Commission, this book explores how religious diversity has been, and continues to be, represented in cultural contexts in Western Europe, particularly to teenagers: in textbooks, museums and exhibitions, popular youth culture including TV and online, as well as in political speech. Topics include the findings from focus group interviews with teenagers in schools across Europe, the representation of minority religions in museums, migration and youth subculture.
Religious Education and the Challenge of Pluralism
The essays in this volume offer a groundbreaking comparative analysis of religious education, and state policies towards religious education in seven different countries and in the European Union as a whole. They pose a crucial question: can religious education contribute to a shared public sphere and foster solidarity across different ethnic and religious communities? In many traditional societies and even in what are largely secular European societies, our place in creation, the meaning of good and evil, and the definition of the good life, virtue, and moral action, are all primarily addressed in religious terms. It is in fact hard to come to grips with these issues without recourse to religious language, traditions, and frames of reference. Yet, religious languages and identities divide as much as unite, and provide a site of contestation and strife as much as a sense of peace and belonging Not surprisingly, different countries approach religious education in dramatically different ways. Religious Education and the Challenge of Pluralism addresses a pervasive problem: how can religious education provide a framework of meaning, replete with its language of inclusion and community, without at the same time drawing borders and so excluding certain individuals and communities from its terms of collective membership and belonging? The authors offer in-depth analysis of such pluralistic countries as Bulgaria, Israel, Malaysia, and Turkey, as well as Cyprus - a country split along lines of ethno-religious difference. They also examine the connection between religious education and the terms of citizenship in the EU, France, and the USA, illuminating the challenges of educating our citizenry in an age of religious resurgence and global politics.
Religious Exemptions
Exemptions from legal requirements, especially religious exemptions, have been a major topic of political debate in recent years. For example, bakers in various states have sought the right to refuse to make wedding cakes for gay and lesbian couples, despite the Supreme Court's validation of same-sex marriage. Many parents are granted exemptions from vaccinating their children, despite public health laws requiring otherwise. Various religious organizations as well as some corporations have sought an exemption from the requirement to provide contraceptive coverage in employee healthcare plans, as required by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Religious exemptions have a long history in the United States, but they remain controversial. Exemptions release some people from following laws that everyone else must follow, raising questions of fairness, and exemptions often privilege religious belief, raising concerns about equal treatment. At the same time there are good reasons to support exemptions, such as respect for the right of religious freedom and preventing religious organizations from becoming too closely intertwined with government. The essays in this volume represent valuable contributions to the complex debate about exemptions from legal requirements. In particular, they contribute to the moral dimensions of religious exemptions. These essays go beyond legal analysis about which exemptions are constitutionally appropriate, and ask instead when religious exemptions are morally required or morally prohibited.
The Religious Heritage Complex: Legacy, Conservation, and Christianity (Bloomsbury Studies in Material Religion)
The Religious Heritage Complex examines religious institutions and heritage-making, arguing that the relationship between the two is not as clear-cut as some might think. In fact, the authors show that religious activity has always combined care for the past with conscious practices of heritage-making, which they term “the religious heritage complex.”The book considers the ways patrimony, religion, and identity interact in different contexts worldwide and how religious objects and sites function as identity. It focuses on heritage-making as a religious and material activity for the groups in charge of a religious inheritance, and considers heritage activities as a form of spiritual renewal and transmission. Case studies explore Christian, Afro-Brazilian, Muslim, and Buddhist traditions located in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. By investigating the longstanding and tightly-enmeshed connections that weave together religion and cultural heritage, this book allows us to think through the ambiguity of religious heritage.
The Religious History of the Roman Empire: The Republican Centuries (Oxford Readings in Classical Studies)
The Religious History of the Roman Empire: The Republican Centuries is the second Oxford Readings in Classical Studies volume on the religious history of the Roman Empire, accompanying the volume on paganism, Judaism, and Christianity. This volume presents fourteen chapters dealing with aspects of the religious life of Republican Rome between c. 500 BCE and the fall of the Republican constitution in c. 30 BCE. The topics covered include Iron Age rituals (Christopher Smith); Roman Priesthood (John Scheid; Mary Beard); religion and war (Jörg Rüpke); religious behaviour in the context of polytheism (Andreas Bendlin); religious ritual in early and middle Republic (John North); Italian warfare practices (Olivier de Cazanove); the role of women (Rebecca Flemming); sacrificial ritual in Roman poetry (Denis Feeney); the centuriation-ritual (Daniel Gargola); Roman divination (Mary Beard); Augustan Peace and the stars (Alfred Schmid); the great cult-places of Italy (John Scheid); the grove of Pesaro (Filippo Coarelli). Originally published between 1981 and 2011, these chapters provide a vivid picture of key issues under discussion in this period, providing a missing link in the historiography of Roman republican religion. A central question concerns the balance to be found between ritual and belief, both problematic concepts in interpreting this religious tradition. While there can be no question that the performance of rituals was a regular traditional activity to which Romans attached great significance, particularly those who were in a responsible position as priests or senators, the later years of the Republic increasingly saw religious issues taken as matters for debate, and books on religious themes, unknown before the age of Cicero and Varro, began to appear.
Religious Landscapes in Contemporary Spain: The Impact of Secularization on Religious Pluralism (Liverpool Studies in Spanish History)
Spain is no longer exclusively identified with Catholicism. This book sets out to understand the social dynamics of twenty-first century Spain through the perspective of religion and religious pluralism. Divided into three parts, Part I, Secularization in Spain, frames the analysis of this secularization process throughout the twentieth century and beyond, with particular attention to the process during the Second Republic and the quiet secularization of society that began under Franco's regime. Part II, Religious Change in Spain, establishes the broad framework of the process, addressing the changes that have taken place within Catholicism and the reaction of the Protestant minority as social mores became increasingly fast moving. Part III, Islam in Spain, addresses both its history (including colonial management) and current dynamics (how Islam is viewed by other religions; the impact of the March 11, 2004, attacks; and Islamophobic discourse). Religious Landscapes in Contemporary Spain is essential reading for scholars and students in History and Contemporary Affairs.
Religious Pluralism in Indonesia: Threats and Opportunities for Democracy (Cornell Modern Indonesia Project)
In 1945, Sukarno declared that the new Indonesian republic would be grounded on monotheism, while also insisting that the new nation would protect diverse religious practice. The essays in Religious Pluralism in Indonesia explore how the state, civil society groups, and individual Indonesians have experienced the attempted integration of minority and majority religious practices and faiths across the archipelagic state over the more than half century since Pancasila. The chapters in Religious Pluralism in Indonesia offer analyses of contemporary phenomena and events; the changing legal and social status of certain minority groups; inter-faith relations; and the role of Islam in Indonesia's foreign policy. Amidst infringements of human rights, officially recognized minorities—Protestants, Catholics, Hindus, Buddhists and Confucians—have had occasional success advocating for their rights through the Pancasila framework. Others, from Ahmadi and Shi'i groups to atheists and followers of new religious groups, have been left without safeguards, demonstrating the weakness of Indonesia's institutionalized "pluralism."Contributors: Lorraine Aragon, Christopher Duncan, Kikue Hamayotsu, Robert Hefner, James Hoesterey, Sidney Jones, Mona Lohanda, Michele Picard, Evi Sutrisno, Silvia Vignato
Religious Responses to Pandemics and Crises: Isolation, Survival, and #Covidchaos (Routledge Studies in Religion)
Religious Responses to Pandemics and Crises explores various dimensions of the interrelations between the individual, community, and religion. With their global scope, the contributions to this volume represent reflections on the rich and multifaceted spectrum of human responses in a variety of different religions and cultures to the current SARS-2-COVID-19 pandemic and similar crises in the past.The contributions are organized in three thematic parts focusing on strategies, rituals, and past and present responses to pandemics and crises. They reflect on the intersection of personal or communal responses and state-mandated policies relative to SARS-2-COVID-19 while outlining different strategies to cope with the pandemic crisis. Timely questions explored include: How do individuals connect with or disconnect from religious and spiritual communities during times of personal and collective crises, including pandemics? How do religious practices such as rituals bridge individuals and communities? How do religious texts from past and present highlight and represent crises and pandemics? Dynamic and multidisciplinary in its inquiry, this volume is an outstanding resource for scholars of religion, theology, anthropology, social sciences, ritual theory, sex and gender studies, and contemporary medical science.
Religious Truth: Towards a Jewish Theology of Religions (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization)
Truth informs much of the self-understanding of religious believers. Accordingly, understanding what we mean by ‘truth’ is a key challenge to interreligious collaboration. The contributors to this volume, all leading scholars, consider what is meant by truth in classical and contemporary Jewish thought, and explore how making the notion of truth more nuanced can enable interfaith dialogue. Their essays take a range of approaches: some focus on philosophy proper, others on the intersection with the history of ideas, while others engage with the history of Jewish mysticism and thought. Together they open up the notion of truth in Jewish religious discourse and suggest ways in which upholding a notion of one’s religion as true may be reconciled with an appreciation of other faiths. By combining philosophical and theological thinking with concrete case studies, and discussion of precedents and textual resources within Judaism, the volume proposes new interpretations of the concept of truth, going beyond traditional exclusivist uses of the term. A key aim is to help Jews seeking dialogue with other religions to do so while remaining true to their own faith tradition: in pursuit of this, the volume concludes with suggestions of how the ideas presented can be applied in practice. CONTRIBUTORS: Cass Fisher, Jerome Yehuda Gellman, Alon Goshen-Gottstein, Avraham Yizhak (Arthur) Green, Stanislaw Krajewski, Tamar Ross
Religious Violence Today [2 volumes]: Faith and Conflict in the Modern World [2 volumes]
Through sections containing overview essays and reference entries related to particular religions, this resource explores the rise of religious violence, hate crime, and persecution around the world.Religious violence and persecution have been growing steadily both within the United States and around the world. Drawing on the expertise of a wide range of scholars, this current and comprehensive reference helps readers understand the persecution of members of particular faiths as well as violence committed by members of those faiths. In doing so, it promotes a greater understanding of the role of religion in global politics, domestic and international terrorism, and religious bigotry.The book contains sections on particular religious traditions from around the world. Each section begins with an overview essay surveying violence related to that particular religion, whether committed by or against members of that faith. Reference entries in each section then provide objective, fundamental information about particular topics related to violence and the religion discussed. The entries provide cross-references and suggestions for further reading, and the work closes with a bibliography of resources for further study.
Religious Voting in Western Democracies
This book offers a systematic exploration of the role of religion and religiosity in electoral politics in Catholic, Protestant, and religiously mixed countries across Western Europe and in the United States. The chapters approach the relationship between religion, religiosity, and electoral behaviour from a variety of different angles. They include analyses of secularization trends; comparative studies of the links between vote choice and religiosity; longitudinal single country studies; and a novel discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of the politicization of religion that provides a radically new framework for the analysis of the role of religiosity in election studies. The volume shows that despite the expectations of secularization theory, religiosity remains relevant when casting votes. It also argues that the traditional notion of religious cleavage should be replaced with the more accurate idea of religious voting. Chapters draw on National Election Studies data and comparative datasets such as European Values Studies (EVS), European Social Surveys (ESS), and European Election Studies (EES) to empirically test expectations regarding religious voting. The results show that variations in religious voting are conditional on both the agency of political and ecclesiastical leaders when politicizing religious issues and the legacies of previous societal and political religious conflicts, regardless of whether the original party system had a predominant religious cleavage.
Remembering for the Future: 3 Volume Set: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide
Focused on 'The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide', Remembering for the Future brings together the work of nearly 200 scholars from more than 30 countries and features cutting-edge scholarship across a range of disciplines, amounting to the most extensive and powerful reassessment of the Holocaust ever undertaken. In addition to its international scope, the project emphasizes that varied disciplinary perspectives are needed to analyze and to check the genocidal forces that have made the Twentieth century so deadly. Historians and ethicists, psychologists and literary scholars, political scientists and theologians, sociologists and philosophers - all of these, and more, bring their expertise to bear on the Holocaust and genocide. Their contributions show the new discoveries that are being made and the distinctive approaches that are being developed in the study of genocide, focusing both on archival and oral evidence, and on the religious and cultural representation of the Holocaust.
Renewing Philosophy of Religion: Exploratory Essays
This book is animated by a shared conviction that philosophy of religion needs to change: thirteen new essays suggest why and how. The first part of the volume explores possible changes to the focus of the field. The second part focuses on the standpoint from which philosophers of religion should approach their field. In the first part are chapters on how an emphasis on faith distorts attempts to engage non-western religious ideas; on how philosophers from different traditions might collaborate on common interests; on why the common presupposition of ultimacy leads to error; on how new religious movements feed a naturalistic philosophy of religion; on why a focus on belief and a focus on practice are both mistaken; on why philosophy's deep axiological concern should set much of the field's agenda; and on how the field might contribute to religious evolution. The second part includes a qualitative analysis of the standpoint of fifty-one philosophers of religion, and also addresses issues about humility needed in continental philosophy of religion; about the implausibility of claiming that one's own worldview is uniquely rational; about the Moorean approach to religious epistemology; about a Spinozan middle way between 'insider' and 'outsider' perspectives; and about the unorthodox lessons we could learn from scriptures like the book of Job if we could get past the confessional turn in recent philosophy of religion.The goal of the volume is to identify new paths for philosophers of religion that are distinct from those travelled by theologians and other scholars of religion.
Reporting Islam: Muslim Women in the New York Times, 1979-2011 (Gender and Islam)
Reporting Islam examines the coverage of Muslim women in the New York Times from 1979-2011. The analysis addresses the nature of the coverage; whether there are parallels in the depiction of Muslim women from the Middle East and South Asia and with the US government policies toward these countries; and the relationship between feminism in the US and the representation of Muslim women in the US. At a time when women often become the iconic representatives of their nations, their cultures and their religions, this book offers unique insight into how a dramatic period of contemporary history for the Middle East and South Asia was depicted by the leading print newspaper in the world. The coverage captures the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the rise of Islamist movements across the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, the first Gulf War, the 9/11 events, the second Gulf War, the War on Terror, and the Arab uprisings. The book asks critical questions about the wider implications of the misrepresentation of Muslim women in the media, and the links between print news, US foreign policy and women.
Representing Religion in Film (Critiquing Religion: Discourse, Culture, Power)
This is the first full-length exploration of the relationship between religion, film, and ideology. It shows how religion is imagined, constructed, and interpreted in film and film criticism. The films analyzed include The Last Jedi, Terminator, Cloud Atlas, Darjeeling Limited, Hellboy, The Revenant, Religulous, and The Secret of my Success. Each chapter offers: - an explanation of the particular representation of religion that appears in film - a discussion of how this representation has been interpreted in film criticism and religious studies scholarship - an in-depth study of a Hollywood or popular film to highlight the rhetorical, social, and political functions this representation accomplishes on the silver screen - a discussion about how such analysis might be applied to other films of a similar genre Written in an accessible style, and focusing on Hollywood and popular cinema, this book will be of interest to both movie lovers and experts alike.
A Research Agenda for Religious Tourism (Elgar Research Agendas)
Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary.Incisive and interdisciplinary, this Research Agenda broaches topics that have been under-researched within religious tourism, including: place attachment and marketing; memory and modification of sacred landscapes for tourism needs; the darker sides of religious tourism; multi-stakeholder governance; mission-trips; and allied forms of tourism.With contributions from top scholars, the book includes cases from across Europe and Asia, exploring pilgrimage sacred landscapes for different religions. Building on emerging themes including the importance of governance, conflicts associated with pilgrimage and religious tourism, gender and gendered dimensions, resilience in the wake of the recent pandemic, and newer ways of performing religious tourism such as virtual reality, it sets a research agenda for future inquiry.This thought-provoking Research Agenda will be a valuable resource for scholars of tourism, human geography, heritage studies, anthropology, and religious studies.
Responses to 7 October: Antisemitic Discourse (Studies in Contemporary Antisemitism)
One of three volumes responding to the 7 October attack, Antisemitic Discourse focuses on the ideology that motivated it and the antisemitism that shaped many responses to it.It examines the provenance of the Jew-hatred, from English history to Palestinian Islamism; from toxic 19th century ‘Jewish Question’ rhetoric to the perversion of the Trotskyist tradition that allowed parts of the left to embrace antisemitism. It includes Howard Jacobson’s lecture of 22 October on antisemitism and it focuses on what was significant about this attack. There is discussion from Britain, Germany, Poland, and Norway, and a linguistic account of responses.This work will appeal to scholars, students and activists with an interest in antisemitism, Jewish studies and the politics of Israel.
Responses to 7 October: Law and Society (Studies in Contemporary Antisemitism)
One of three volumes responding to the 7 October attack, Law and Society begins with a legal and a genocide studies critique of the claim that Israel is genocidal; another reflects on the absence of an understanding of antisemitism in international legal discourse.There are reflections on experiences in the Palestine solidarity movement and on the twists that discourse there takes. Contributions draw on Judaism, feminism, and sociology to face what happened and to trace how Israelis were transported back to a quintessentially pre-Israel Jewish experience. Others survey reports of antisemitism around the globe in the wake of 7 October, including pieces about Britain and Germany.This work will appeal to scholars, students, and activists with an interest in antisemitism, Jewish studies, and the politics of Israel.
Responses to 7 October: Universities (Studies in Contemporary Antisemitism)
One of three volumes responding to the 7 October attack, Universities focuses on the heartland of contemporary antisemitic thinking, which is scholarship; and its reflection in student discourse on campus.Contributions go back to Sartre and to debates of Marx’s time; another looks at the New Left forged in the civil rights movement, and shows how antisemitic responses to the 2023 violence were anticipated by some of the responses to the 1967 Arab League aggression. The feminist movement and ‘progressives’ more generally come under scrutiny, and there is analysis of antisemitism on campus after 7 October, showing how it is tolerated and protected there; including in archaeological attempts to deny that there is an ancient Jewish history in Israel.This work will appeal to scholars, students and activists with an interest in antisemitism, Jewish studies and the politics of Israel.