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Books > Religion & Spirituality > General > Religious intolerance, persecution & conflict > General
Stark and Corcoran have assembled remarkable facts and figures with
which to assess religious hatred and terrorism around the world.
Not content merely to document the extent of religious hatred and
terrorism, they also to explain why it occurs and whether it can be
overcome.
The world is aflame with religious hostility. Thousands of
people are dying for their religion, or because of it. Churches are
burned, mosques are blow up, and people are machine-gunned while
they pray. Hundreds of thousands of Christians are fleeing Muslim
nations - many more would join them if they had anywhere to go. In
too many schools the textbook advocate killing the Jews; in too
many families, daughters are honor killed on the basis of the
flimsiest suspicions. Far too many governments are actively
complicit in religious repression and terrorism, while too many
others fail to act. Meanwhile, religious hatred flourishes;
anti-Semitism, anti-Christianism, anti-Muslimism, as well as
anti-Atheism.
Over the last fifteen years, Pakistan has come to be defined
exclusively in terms of its struggle with terror. But are ordinary
Pakistanis extremists? And what explains how Pakistanis think? Much
of the current work on extremism in Pakistan tends to study
extremist trends in the country from a detached position-a top-down
security perspective, that renders a one-dimensional picture of
what is at its heart a complex, richly textured country of 200
million people. In this book, using rigorous analysis of survey
data, in-depth interviews in schools and universities in Pakistan,
historical narrative reporting, and her own intuitive understanding
of the country, Madiha Afzal gives the full picture of Pakistan's
relationship with extremism. The author lays out Pakistanis' own
views on terrorist groups, on jihad, on religious minorities and
non-Muslims, on America, and on their place in the world. The views
are not radical at first glance, but are riddled with conspiracy
theories. Afzal explains how the two pillars that define the
Pakistani state-Islam and a paranoia about India-have led to a
regressive form of Islamization in Pakistan's narratives, laws, and
curricula. These, in turn, have shaped its citizens' attitudes.
Afzal traces this outlook to Pakistan's unique and tortured birth.
She examines the rhetoric and the strategic actions of three actors
in Pakistani politics-the military, the civilian governments, and
the Islamist parties-and their relationships with militant groups.
She shows how regressive Pakistani laws instituted in the 1980s
worsened citizen attitudes and led to vigilante and mob violence.
The author also explains that the educational regime has become a
vital element in shaping citizens' thinking. How many years one
attends school, whether the school is public, private, or a
madrassa, and what curricula is followed all affect Pakistanis'
attitudes about terrorism and the rest of the world. In the end,
Afzal suggests how this beleaguered nation-one with seemingly
insurmountable problems in governance and education-can change
course.
For three centuries, a mixture of religion, violence, and economic
conditions created a fertile matrix in Western Europe that
racialized an entire diasporic population who lived in the urban
centers of the Latin West: Jews. This Element explores how religion
and violence, visited on Jewish bodies and Jewish lives, coalesced
to create the first racial state in the history of the West. It is
an example of how the methods and conceptual frames of postcolonial
and race studies, when applied to the study of religion, can be
productive of scholarship that rewrites the foundational history of
the past.
In the capital city of Nairobi, Kenya, African Catholic and Sunni
Muslim leaders addressing HIV and AIDS are faced with a unique
challenge. On the one hand, they are called to attend to the
spiritual wellbeing of the infected individual; on the other hand,
they are increasingly charged with serving as the stewards of the
physical bodies of those negatively affected by such a
physiologically debilitating and social stigmatized disease through
certain identifiable interreligious traditions common to both
faiths. This book explores this development firsthand. While
conducting fieldwork in Nairobi, Carey interviewed Muslim and
Catholic leaders working in three areas-HIV and AIDS prevention,
education, and destigmatization. These recorded observations and
accounts help to illustrate that religious officials from within
African Catholicism and Sunni Islam are attempting to provide the
common inter-religious traditions of mercy, hospitality, and
justice in a holistic manner for those living with the virus in the
city. The research that produced this book involved six weeks of
fieldwork during the summer of 2014 to help fill in the interstices
between anthropological, sociological, and ethnographic accounts
provided by other leading academics in their respective fields. It
presumed that religious traditions in Kenya exhibit a
susceptibility to culture and context and a practical openness to
its social environment which then affords this particular work a
unique theological perspective in its attempt to identify and
analyze patterns of social behavior and religious organization.
This book explores the ways Christian women in college make sense
of bisexual, transgender, polyamorous, and atheist others.
Specifically, it explores the ways they express tolerance for some
sexual groups, such as lesbian and gay people, while maintaining
condemnation of other sexual, gendered, or religious groups. In so
doing, this book highlights the limits of Christian tolerance for
the advancement of minority rights.
In the minds of many Americans, Islam is synonymous with the Middle
East, Muslim men with violence, and Muslim women with oppression. A
clash of civilizations appears to be increasingly manifest and the
war on terror seems a struggle against Islam. These are all
symptoms of Islamophobia. Meanwhile, the current surge in nativist
bias reveals the racism of anti-Muslim sentiment. This book
explores these anxieties through political cartoons and film--media
with immediate and important impact. After providing a background
on Islamic traditions and their history with America, it
graphically shows how political cartoons and films reveal
Americans' casual demeaning and demonizing of Muslims and Islam--a
phenomenon common among both liberals and conservatives.
Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Sentiment offers both fascinating
insights into our culture's ways of "picturing the enemy" as
Muslim, and ways of moving beyond antagonism.
The most devastating attacks against the Jews of medieval Christian
Europe took place during the riots that erupted, in 1391 and 1392,
in the lands of Castile and Aragon. For ten horrific months,
hundreds if not thousands of Jews were killed, numerous Jewish
institutions destroyed, and many Jews forcibly converted to
Christianity. Benjamin R. Gampel explores why the famed convivencia
of medieval Iberian society - in which Christians, Muslims and Jews
seemingly lived together in relative harmony - was conspicuously
absent. Using extensive archival evidence, this critical volume
explores the social, religious, political, and economic tensions at
play in each affected town. The relationships, biographies and
personal dispositions of the royal family are explored to
understand why monarchic authority failed to protect the Jews
during these violent months. Gampel's extensive study is essential
for scholars and graduate students of medieval Iberian and Jewish
history.
This Element reviews the state of the question regarding theories
of cultic violence. It introduces definitions and vocabulary and
presents relevant historical examples of religious violence. It
then discusses the 1960s and 1970s, the period immediately before
the Jonestown tragedy. Considerations of the post-Jonestown (1978),
and then post-Waco (1993) literature follow. After 9/11 (2001),
some of the themes identified in previous decades reappear. The
Element concludes by examining the current problem of repression
and harassment directed at religious believers. Legal
discrimination by governments, as well as persecution of religious
minorities by non-state actors, has challenged earlier fears about
cultic violence.
This collection of new essays examines third-generation Holocaust
narratives and the inter-generational transmission of trauma and
memory. This collection demonstrates the ways in which memory of
the Holocaust has been passed along inter-generationally from
survivors to the second-generation-the children of survivors-to a
contemporary generation of grandchildren of survivors-those writers
who have come of literary age at a time that will mark the end of
direct survivor testimony. This collection, in drawing upon a
variety of approaches and perspectives, suggests the rich and fluid
range of expression through which stories of the Holocaust are
transmitted to and by the third generation, who have taken on the
task of bearing witness to the enormity of the Holocaust and the
ways in which this pronounced event has shaped the lives of the
descendants of those who experienced the trauma first-hand. The
essays collected-essays written by renowned scholars in Holocaust
literature, philosophy, history, and religion as well as by
third-generation writers-show that Holocaust literary
representation has continued to flourish well into the twenty-first
century, gaining increased momentum as a third generation of
writers has added to the growing corpus of Holocaust literature.
Here we find a literature that laments unrecoverable loss for a
generation removed spatially and temporally from the extended
trauma of the Holocaust. The third-generation writers, in writing
against a contemporary landscape of post-apocalyptic apprehension
and anxiety, capture and penetrate the growing sense of loss and
the fear of the failure of memory. Their novels, short stories, and
memoirs carry the Holocaust into the twenty-first century and
suggest the future of Holocaust writing for extended generations.
This book studies the politics of Pentecostal conversion and
anti-Christian violence in India. It asks: why has India been
experiencing increasing incidents of anti-Christian violence since
the 1990s? Why are the Bhil Adivasis increasingly converting to
Pentecostalism? And, what are the implications of conversion for
religion within indigenous communities on the one hand and broader
issues of secularism, religious freedom and democratic rights on
the other? Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork amongst the
Bhils of Northern India since 2006, this book asserts that
ideological incompatibility and antagonism between Christian
missionaries and Hindu nationalists provide only a partial
explanation for anti-Christian violence in India. It unravels the
complex interactions between different actors/ agents in the
production of anti-Christian violence and provides detailed
ethnographic narratives on Pentecostal conversion, Hindu
nationalist politics and anti-Christian violence in the largest
state of India that has hitherto been dominated by upper caste
Rajput Hindu(tva) ideology.
Those who anticipated the demise of religion and the advent of a
peaceful, secularized global village have seen the last two decades
confound their predictions. Rene Girard's mimetic theory is a key
to understanding the new challenges posed by our world of resurgent
violence and pluralistic cultures and traditions. Girard sought to
explain how the Judeo-Christian narrative exposes a founding murder
at the origin of human civilization and demystifies the bloody
sacrifices of archaic religions. Meanwhile, his book Sacrifice, a
reading of conflict and sacrificial resolution in the Vedic
Brahmanas, suggests that mimetic theory's insights also resonate
with several non-Western religious and spiritual traditions. This
volume collects engagements with Girard by scholars of Judaism,
Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and situates them
within contemporary theology, philosophy, and religious studies.
The global persecution of Christians is an urgent human rights
issue that remains underreported. This volume presents the results
of the first systematic global investigation into how Christians
respond to persecution. World-class scholars of global Christianity
present first-hand research from most of the sites of the harshest
persecution as well as the West and Latin America. Their findings
make clear the nature of persecution, the reasons for it, Christian
responses to it - both non-violent and confrontational - and the
effects of these responses. Motivating the volume is the hope that
this knowledge will empower all who would exercise solidarity with
the world's persecuted Christians and will offer the victims
strategies for a more effective response. This book is written for
anyone concerned about the persecution of Christians or more
generally about the human right of religious freedom, including
scholars, activists, political and religious leaders, and those who
work for international organizations.
This three-volume reference provides a complete guide for readers
investigating the crucial interplay between war and religion from
ancient times until today, enabling a deeper understanding of the
role of religious wars across cultures. Containing some 500 entries
covering the interaction between war and religion from ancient
times, the three-volume War and Religion: An Encyclopedia of Faith
and Conflict provides students with an invaluable reference source
for examining two of the most important phenomena impacting society
today. This all-inclusive reference work will serve readers
researching specific religious traditions, historical eras, wars,
battles, or influential individuals across all time periods. The
A-Z entries document ancient events and movements such as the First
Crusade that began at the end of the 10th century as well as
modern-day developments like ISIS and Al Qaeda. Subtopics
throughout the encyclopedia include religious and military leaders
or other key people, ideas, and weapons, and comprehensive
examinations of each of the major religious traditions' views on
war and violence are presented. The work also includes dozens of
primary source documents-each introduced by a headnote-that enable
readers to go directly to the source of information and better
grasp its historical significance. The in-depth content of this set
benefits high school and college students as well as scholars and
general readers. Enables readers to explore the ongoing and
important relationship between war and religion across history
through coverage of the wars themselves; the important leaders,
battles, and campaigns; and the treaties that resulted from these
wars Directs readers to further reading material and supplies a
comprehensive bibliography that guides further inquiry into the
topic of war and religion Supplies primary source documents that
include letters written by participants of the Crusades,
proclamations and declarations from the Protestant Reformation, and
UN documents related to war and religion
Toleration is one of the most studied concepts in contemporary
political theory and philosophy, yet the range of contemporary
normative prescriptions concerning how to do toleration or how to
be tolerant is remarkably narrow and limited. The literature is
largely dominated by a neo-Kantian moral-juridical frame, in which
toleration is a matter to be decided in terms of constitutional
rights. According to this framework, cooperation equates to public
reasonableness and willingness to engage in certain types of civil
moral dialogue. Crucially, this vision of politics makes no claims
about how to cultivate and secure the conditions required to make
cooperation possible in the first place. It also has little to say
about how to motivate one to become a tolerant person. Instead it
offers highly abstract ideas that do not by themselves suggest what
political activity is required to negotiate overlapping values and
interests in which cooperation is not already assured. Contemporary
thinking about toleration indicates, paradoxically, an intolerance
of politics. Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics argues for
toleration as a practice of negotiation, looking to a philosopher
not usually considered political: Michel de Montaigne. For
Montaigne, toleration is an expansive, active practice of political
endurance in negotiating public goods across lines of value
difference. In other words, to be tolerant means to possess a
particular set of political capacities for negotiation. What
matters most is not how we talk to our political opponents, but
that we talk to each other across lines of disagreement. Douglas I.
Thompson draws on Montaigne's Essais to recover the idea that
political negotiation grows out of genuine care for public goods
and the establishment of political trust. He argues that we need a
Montaignian conception of toleration today if we are to negotiate
effectively the circumstances of increasing political polarization
and ongoing value conflict, and he applies this notion to current
debates in political theory as well as contemporary issues,
including the problem of migration and refugee asylum.
Additionally, for Montaigne scholars, he reads the Essais
principally as a work of public political education, and resituates
the work as an extension of Montaigne's political activity as a
high-level negotiator between Catholic and Huguenot parties during
the French Wars of Religion. Ultimately, this book argues that
Montaigne's view of tolerance is worth recovering and reconsidering
in contemporary democratic societies where political leaders and
ordinary citizens are becoming less able to talk to each other to
resolve political conflicts and work for shared public goods.
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