Although religious innovation in America has historically been the norm rather than the exception, mainstream Americans have often viewed new religious movements with suspicion and occasionally with outright alarm. The question motivating many studies of new religious movements has been “why would someone join these religions?” In Antiquity and Social Reform, Dawn Hutchinson offers at least one answer to this often repeated query. She argues that followers of new religious movements in the 1960s...
The i-zation of Society, Religion, and Neoliberal Post-Secularism
by Adam Possamai
This book explores the elective affinity of religion and post-secularism with neoliberalism. With the help of digital capitalism, neoliberalism dominates, more and more, all aspects of life, and religion is not left unaffected. While some faith groups are embracing this hegemony, and others are simply following the signs of the times, changes have been so significant that religion is no longer what it used to be. Linking theories from Fredric Jameson and George Ritzer, this book presents the arg...
Righteous Gentiles (Studies in Critical Research on Religion)
by Sean Durbin
In Righteous Gentiles: Religion, Identity, and Myth in John Hagee's Christians United for Israel, Sean Durbin offers a critical analysis of America's largest Pro-Israel organization, Christians United for Israel, along with its critics and collaborators. Although many observers focus on Christian Zionism's influence on American foreign policy, or whether or not Christian Zionism is 'truly' religious, Righteous Gentiles takes a different approach. Through his creative and critical analysis of C...
Most sociologists of religion describe a general decline in religious faith and practice in Europe over the last two centuries. The destruction of the "sacred canopy" by religious pluralism, and the secularizing forces of the Enlightenment, science, industrialization, the influence of Freud and Marx, and urbanization are all felt to have diminished the power of the churches and demystified the human condition. In Andrew Greeley's view, the use of such overarching theories and frameworks do not b...
Examining the clergy marriage in general, this text looks at the effects of women's ordination on dual clergy marriages, their careers and family life. It is based on research done on clergy couples during the time leading up to and immediately after the ordination of women.
Dinge Zum Sprechen Bringen (Praktische Theologie Im Wissenschaftsdiskurs, #30)
Europeanization and Tolerance in Turkey (Identities and Modernities in Europe)
by A. Kaya
The book questions the popularity of the notion of tolerance in Turkey, and argues that the regime of tolerance has been strengthened in parallel with the Europeanization process, which has boosted the rhetoric of the Alliance of Civilizations in a way that culturalized what is social and political.
School Memories
This book reveals how school memories offer not only a tool for accessing the school of the past, but also a key to understanding what people today know (or think they know) about the school of the past. It describes, in fact, how historians' work does not purely and simply consist in exploring school as it really was, but also in the complex process of defining the memory of school as one developed and revisited over time at both the individual and collective level. Further, it investigates the...
Pastoral Care in a Korean American Context (Asian Christianity in the Diaspora)
This book provides theoretical background and pastoral strategies for pastors, lay leaders, and congregation members to foster a restoration of the human dignity imputed by God and the good community God desires. It addresses issues in pastoral care and pays particular attention to Korean and Korean American contexts. Some of the specific issues addressed include wisdom for common life (Chung Yong) as a theological and pastoral task, tension between Confucianism and feminism, care of the abused...
The popularization of yoga and meditation, public curiosity about shamanism, and the recent craze for kabbalah all demonstrate the rising appeal of these religious resources in western contemporary societies. What is it about them that fascinates the Westerns who take the classes and join the centers? Religious exoticism implies a deeply ambivalent relationship to otherness and to religion itself: traditional religious teachings are uprooted and fragmented in order to be appropriated as practica...
Secular Spirituality (Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, #4)
by Harald Walach
This book discusses spirituality as an emerging scientific topic from a historical perspective, with extensive discussion of the mind-body problem and of scientific concepts of consciousness. While the book focuses on the Western tradition of 'Enlightenment', it also implicitly addresses the double meaning of the term, with the Eastern tradition describing it as 'a state of true knowledge, which is an important goal on an individual's spiritual path' and the Western tradition seeing it as 'the c...
Drawing on ethnographic inquiry and the anthropological literature on doubt and atheism, this volume explores people's reluctance to pursue religion. The contributors capture the experiences of godless people and examine their perspectives on the role of religion in their personal and public lives. In doing so, the volume contributes to a critical understanding of the processes of disengagement from religion and reveals the challenges and paradoxes that godless people face.
For over four decades, events in Palestine-Israel have provoked raging conflicts within British universities around issues of free speech, 'extremism', antisemitism and Islamophobia. But why is this conflict so significant for student activists living at such a geographical distance from the region itself? And what role do emotive, polarised communications around Palestine-Israel play in the life of British academic institutions committed to the ideal of free expression? This book draws on origi...
Secularization in the Long 1960s: Numerating Religion in Britain provides a major empirical contribution to the literature of secularization. It moves beyond the now largely sterile and theoretical debates about the validity of the secularization thesis or paradigm. Combining historical and social scientific perspectives, Clive D. Field uses a wide range of quantitative sources to probe the extent and pace of religious change in Britain during the long 1960s. In most cases, data is presented for...
Religious Language and Asian American Hybridity (Asian Christianity in the Diaspora)
by Julius-Kei Kato
In this book, Julius-Kei Kato lets the theories and experiences of Asian American hybridity converse with and bear upon some aspects of Christian biblical and theological language. Hybridity has become a key feature of today's globalized world and is, of course, a key concept in postcolonial thought. However, despite its crucial importance, hybridity is rarely used as a paradigm through which to analyze and evaluate the influential concepts and teachings that make up religious language. This bo...