In his latest book, William Egginton laments the current debate over religion in America, in which religious fundamentalists have set the tone of political discourse--no one can get elected without advertising a personal relation to God, for example--and prominent atheists treat religious belief as the root of all evil. Neither of these positions, Egginton argues, adequately represents the attitudes of a majority of Americans who, while identifying as Christians, Jews, and Muslims, do not find fault with those who support different faiths and philosophies. In fact, Egginton goes so far as to question whether fundamentalists and atheists truly oppose each other, united as they are in their commitment to a "code of codes." In his view, being a religious fundamentalist does not require adhering to a particular religious creed. Fundamentalists--and stringent atheists--unconsciously believe that the methods we use to understand the world are all versions of an underlying master code. This code of codes represents an ultimate truth, explaining everything. Surprisingly, perhaps the most effective weapon against such thinking is religious moderation, a way of believing that questions the very possibility of a code of codes as the source of all human knowledge. The moderately religious, with their inherent skepticism toward a master code, are best suited to protect science, politics, and other diverse strains of knowledge from fundamentalist attack, and to promote a worldview based on the compatibility between religious faith and scientific method.

Anti-Catholicism has a long history in America. And as Philip Jenkins argues in The New Anti-Catholicism, this virulent strain of hatred--once thought dead--is alive and well in our nation, but few people seem to notice, or care.
A statement that is seen as racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, or homophobic can haunt a speaker for years, writes Jenkins, but it is still possible to make hostile and vituperative public statements about Roman Catholicism without fear of serious repercussions. Jenkins shines a light on anti-Catholic sentiment in American society and illuminates its causes, looking closely at gay and feminist anti-Catholicism, anti-Catholic rhetoric and imagery in the media, and the anti-Catholicism of the academic world. For newspapers and newsmagazines, for television news and in movies, for major book publishers, the Catholic Church has come to provide a grossly stereotyped public villain. Catholic opinions, doctrines, and individual leaders are frequently the butt of harsh satire. Indeed, the notion that the church is a deadly enemy of women--the idea of Catholic misogyny--is commonly accepted in the news media and in popular culture, says Jenkins. And the recent pedophile priest scandal, he shows, has revived many ancient anti-Catholic stereotypes.
It was said that with the election of John F. Kennedy, anti-Catholicism in America was dead. This provocative new book corrects that illusion, drawing attention to this important issue.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the peoples of Central Asia (Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) have been exposed to new, Western influences that stress individualism at the expense Central Asian traditions of family and communalism. Young men in particular are exposed to new ideas and lifestyles as they travel in large numbers outside their native republics for the first time, even as contemporary Islam exerts itself as a potent force for cultural conservatism (especially for women). As a result, young Central Asians today confront a complex mixture of the old and the new that strains personal relations, especially within the family, between generations, and between spouses. Relying on the authors fieldwork, conducted between 1994 and 2004, Muslim Youth devotes separate chapters to family life, education, dating, and marriage in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. Each chapter opens with a vignette that is emblematic of the theme of the chapter, and additional stories and characters are presented throughout each chapter to illustrate further points. revealed as central to the struggles between tradition and modernity.

In The Weight of the Past, Michael Lambek explores the complex ways that history shapes, constrains, and enables daily life. Focusing on ritual performances of spirit mediumship in a multifaceted religious landscape, Lambek's analysis reveals the multiple ways that Sakalava "bear" history. In Mahajanga, Madagascar to bear history is at once a weighty obligation, a creative re-birthing, a scrupulous cultivation, and an exuberant performance of the past.This book describes the division of labor, creative production, and ethical practice entailed in imagining, embodying, and serving the past. It is at once a vivid ethnography of Sakalava life and a significant intervention in anthropological debates on culture and history, structure and practice, advocating a theoretical approach informed by Aristotelian categories of understanding.

This book brings together from four years of study on Nigerian contemporary art's internationalization. The monograph integrates voices of African (Nigerian) artists and art market players into the growing discourse on the emerging art markets in the global South. It explores the logic of competition and dynamics of power relations in the global markets, focusing on the internationalization of contemporary art forms from peripheral regions. The book confirms that the internationalization of contemporary art form from Nigeria is limited due to systematic marginalization in the artistic field, which in this case based on postcolonialism, and debilitating socio-economic factors such as outmoded art education, unstructured support system and weak mechanism for local validation, and an inefficient political framework for art governance. It will therefore be useful to students and researchers in the sociology of art, art market studies, art history and culture polity.

This is a comparative study of the interaction between monasticism and society in Theravada Buddhism and medieval Catholicism. Building on Weber's classical analysis of religious virtuosity on one hand, and opposing recent comparative historical sociology's neglect of structures of meaning on the other, the author demonstrates the combined impact of religious orientations, macrosocietal structures, and virtuoso radicalism in shaping the ideological power of religious elites in the historical framework of the Great Traditions.

In high-Andean Peru, Rapaz village maintains a temple to mountain beings who command water and weather. By examining the ritual practices and belief systems of an Andean community, this book provides students with rich understandings of unfamiliar religious experiences and delivers theories of religion from the realm of abstraction. From core field encounters, each chapter guides readers outward in a different theoretical direction, successively exploring the main paths in the anthropology of religion. As well as addressing classical approaches in the anthropology of religion to rural modernity, Salomon engages with newer currents such as cognitive-evolution models, power-oriented critiques, the ontological reworking of relativism, and the "new materialism" in the context of a deep-rooted Andean ethos. He reflects on central questions such as: Why does sacred ritualism seem almost universal? Is it seated in social power, human psychology, symbolic meanings, or cultural logics? Are varied theories compatible? Is "religion" still a tenable category in the post-colonial world? At the Mountains' Altar is a valuable resource for students taking courses on the anthropology of religion, Andean cultures, Latin American ethnography, religious studies, and indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Near to the heart of the human predicament are impulses to avenge - what most of us will recognize to be negative, counterproductive reactions against others who pose a threat. By contrast, nothing re-establishes our faith in humanity more than extraordinary acts of concession, such as peace-making, generosity and sacrifice. In this study Garry Trompf shows how various aspects of 'payback', both negative and positive, provide the best indices to an understanding of Melanesian views of life. The book explores the reasons why people 'pay back' and opens up a whole dimension in the cross-cultural study of human consciousness. The author conducts his readers through the most complex anthropological pageant on earth, illustrating his arguments from western New Guinea to Fiji.

Americans love to eat. They are also deeply religious. So it’s no surprise that food has an important place in the religious lives of Americans.. They eat in worship services. They drink coffeein church basements. They feed neighbors and strangers in the name of their god. For countless American Protestants, food and church are inseparable. From dry cookies and punch at coffee hour to potlucks and spaghetti dinners, Whitebread Protestants looks at the role food plays in the daily life of white mainline Protestant congregations.

Professor Littlewood's lectures marshal arguments that help us understand more clearly how we interactively use religion and science/healing to come to terms with the world around us. The lectures draw in part on the author's clinical work as a psychiatrist with patients from religious movements in the West, but are primarily based on his earlier anthropological fieldwork with a new African-Caribbean religion in Trinidad, and more recently with ethical transformations in the older Caribbean cults and among the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Hasidim. There exists a close relationship between the explanations of misfortune, reconciliation, and restitution in the historical - and other - religions and in therapeutics. Professor Littlewood believes that cosmological and redemptive assumptions exist in any type of healing, whether physical or psychological. Spiritual and healing theories interact in surprising ways, and he examines the religious aspect in systems of therapeutics as well as the appearance of healing practices within social institutions that are generally regarded as religious.

Disenchantment is a key term in the self-understanding of modernity. But what exactly does this concept mean? What was its original meaning when Max Weber introduced it? And can the conventional meaning or Max Weber's view really be defended, given the present state of knowledge about the history of religion? In The Power of the Sacred, Hans Joas develops the fundamentals of a new sociological theory of religion by first reconstructing existing theories, from the eighteenth century to the present. Through a critical reading and reassessment of key texts in the three empirical disciplines of history, psychology, and sociology of religion, including the works of David Hume, J.G. Herder, Friedrich Schleiermacher, William James, Emile Durkheim, and Ernst Troeltsch, Joas presents an understanding of religion that lays the groundwork for a thorough study of Max Weber's views on disenchantment. After deconstructing Weber's highly ambiguous use of the concept, Joas proposes an alternative to the narratives of disenchantment and secularization which have dominated debates on the topic. He constructs a novel interpretation that takes into account the dynamics of ever new sacralizations, their normative evaluation in the light of a universalist morality as it first emerged in the "Axial Age," and the dangers of the misuse of religion in connection with the formation of power. Built upon the human experience of self-transcendence, rather than human cognition or cultural discourses, The Power of the Sacred challenges both believers and non-believers alike to rethink the defining characteristics of Western modernity.

"Wild Religion" is a wild ride through recent South African history from the advent of democracy in 1994 to the euphoria of the football World Cup in 2010. In the context of South AfricaOCOs political journey and religious diversity, David Chidester explores African indigenous religious heritage with a difference. As the spiritual dimension of an African Renaissance, indigenous religion has been recovered in South Africa as a national resource. "Wild Religion" analyzes indigenous rituals of purification on Robben Island, rituals of healing and reconciliation at the new national shrine, Freedom Park, and rituals of animal sacrifice at the World Cup. Not always in the national interest, indigenous religion also appears in the wild religious creativity of prison gangs, the global spirituality of neo-shamans, the ceremonial display of Zulu virgins, the ancient Egyptian theosophy in South AfricaOCOs Parliament, and the new traditionalism of South AfricaOCOs President Jacob Zuma. Arguing that the sacred is produced through the religious work of intensive interpretation, formal ritualization, and intense contestation, Chidester develops innovative insights for understanding the meaning and power of religion in a changing society. For anyone interested in religion, "Wild Religion" uncovers surprising dynamics of sacred space, violence, fundamentalism, heritage, media, sex, sovereignty, and the political economy of the sacred.

Global Citizens is a study of the Soka Gakkai Buddhist movement, which was founded in 1930 in Japan, spread rapidly after WWII, and has since developed a world-wide following. The book provides an historical overview of the importance of the development of the movement as an educational reform society, its development into a sect of Nichiren Buddhism. The book also explains the success of Soka Gakkai Buddhism with reference to continuity between Soka Gakkai teachings and the experience of people living in urban, industrial environments and Soka Gakkai's response to the surrounding social and cultural environment.

Few books on Saudi Arabia deal with primary sources in examining internal Saudi dissent. In contrast, Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent relies on field work and the analysis of more than 100 taped sermons by Saudi Islamic activists, examining their personal backgrounds, their rhetoric, and their strategies. Mamoun Fandy traces the evolution of Islamic opposition in Saudi Arabia, focusing on the Gulf War and its aftermath and scrutinizing the works of Safar al Hawali and Salman al-Auda. He also documents the history of the Shi`a Reform Movement and its leader, Sheik Hassan al-Safar, of Mohammed al-Mas`ari and his Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, of Sa'd al-Faqih and the Movement of Islamic Reform in Arabia, and finally the radical Usama bin Laden and his organization. By analyzing the Saudi opposition’s use of modern technologies of communication and discussing the ways in which supposedly fundamentalist thinkers have been influenced by global debates and events, this book contributes significantly to the theoretical debate on domination and resistance in the current age of globalization and postmodernity.

Jonestown, Waco, and Heaven's Gate resonate in the contemporary mind in the same way that Masada or Mount Tabor resonated in the minds of others long past. The members of these movements believed that the end of the world was at hand and that they had to act through violence or suicide to ensure its occurrence. Frederic Baumgartner explores the long, often violent, history of millennialism as it has affected Western civilization. From ancient Zoroastrians to Concerned Christians of 1998, a belief in the imminent end of the world and the coming of the new age has motivated hundreds of sects and cults, some of which have burned out in an orgy of violence to become a permanent part of Western history.

"This book is extremely valuable. Shupe et al. have done an excellent job...highly recommended; it is a must-read."--"Criminal Justice Review"

""Bad Pastors" raises all the good questions and provides many hypothetical answers, and for these reasons alone it should be read by all sociologists of religion with an interest in wrongdoings."
--"Sociology of Religion"

Child-molesting priests, embezzled church treasures, philandering ministers and rabbis, even church-endorsed pyramid schemes that defraud gullible parishioners of millions of dollars: for the past decade, clergy misconduct has seemed continually to be in the news.

Is there something about religious organizations that fosters such misbehavior? Bad Pastors presents a range of new perspectives and solidly grounded data on pastoral abuse, investigating sexual misconduct, financial improprieties, and political and personal abuse of authority. Rather than focusing on individuals who misbehave, the volume investigates whether the foundation for clergy malfeasance is inherent in religious organizations themselves, stemming from hierarchies of power in which trusted leaders have the ability to define reality, control behavior, and even offer or withhold the promise of immortality. Arguing that such phenomena arise out of organizational structures, the contributors do not focus on one particular religion, but rather treat these incidents from an interfaith perspective.

Bad Pastors moves beyond individual case studies to consider a broad range of issues surrounding clergy misconduct, from violence against women to the role of charisma and abuse of power in new religious movements. Highlighting similarities between otherforms of abuse, such as domestic violence, the volume helps us to conceptualize and understand clergy misconduct in new ways.

Applying a cultural sociology of performance, this book interrogates how the meaning of sport intersects with gender. Trygve B. Broch points out uncertainties in the causal arguments made by key figures in the cultural studies tradition, instead advancing a meaning-centered study of sports as involving both a social and an athletic performance. Sports not only reflect or reverse social realities, but capture and keep our attention when we use and experience them as a means to reflect on social life, injustice, and hierarchy. More specifically, blending approaches from media studies with ethnography, Broch explores the women-dominated sport of handball in Norway, a country that considers gender equality a basis of democracy. As such, the analyses here show how broadly available meanings about sameness and equality are mediated and experienced through a performative feel for the game.

Women often appear invisible in what is widely perceived as the male-oriented society of Islam. Women in the Medieval Islamic World seeks to redress the balance with a series of original essays on women in the pre-modern phase of Islamic history. The reader will encounter here a colorful portrait gallery of rulers, politicians, poets and patrons, as well as some larger than life fictitious females from the pages of Arabic, Persian and Turkish literature. No less authentic are the accounts of quiet or troubled lives of ordinary women preserved in the court records of Mamluk Egypt and Ottoman Turkey, reminders that historical research can resuscitate the lives of subaltern as well as elite women from the past.

This book provides the answers to controversial questions about religious liberties in the United States and connected issues through balanced, thorough, and nonjudgmental coverage of the issues in a reference format. The subject of religious freedom is important to all American citizens, regardless of religious affiliation or ethnicity. Are the rights of religious individuals being eroded, or is religion being unfairly used to deny basic secular rights to individuals? How will religious institutions adapt to changes in legislation that have an impact on how they operate? Does the Supreme Court have the right to enforce these changes? Finally, how can the precarious separation of church and state be maintained while simultaneously respecting both institutions? This single-volume work provides an introduction that addresses the historical background of religious freedom in America, accurately explains the latest legal developments in religious freedom in the United States, and presents an unbiased account of the probable impact of the new Freedom of Religion laws in the continuing culture war. Readers will gain insight into key controversies such as prayer in public schools, creationism versus evolution, abortion, religious objections to medical care, religious displays in public places, same-sex marriage and LGBT rights, and state and federal religious freedom acts. The book also includes perspective essays by outside contributors, a selection of useful primary documents, a listing of print and nonprint resources, a chronology, and a glossary of terms. Ideally suited for students and general readers who want to learn more about the history and current events concerning religious freedom in an easy-to-understand fashion Includes a Perspectives chapter that allows readers to "hear" opposing voices from individuals who are concerned with religious freedom in America Presents the facts about religious freedom so that readers can reach their own conclusions Highlights the challenge of reaching an agreement on the line of church/state separation that exempts some individuals from obeying laws because of their religious beliefs in an increasingly pluralistic society comprising members of diverse faiths

This exciting new and original collection locates dance within the spectrum of urban life in late modernity, through a range of theoretical perspectives. It highlights a diversity of dance forms and styles that can be witnessed in and around contemporary urban spaces: from dance halls to raves and the club striptease; from set dancing to ballroom dancing, to hip hop and swing, and to ice dance shows; from the ballet class, to fitness aerobics; and 'art' dance which situates itself in a dynamic relation to the city.

This book serves as a conversational, colourful, engaging, and provocative introduction to the sociology of religion for undergraduates. Written in lively prose, this volume introduces students to the major themes, problems and goals of the sociological study of religion while also summoning the sense of wonder and curiosity for the enterprise itself.

For roughly two thousand years, the veneration of sacred fossil ammonites, called Shaligrams, has been an important part of Hindu and Buddhist ritual practice throughout South Asia and among the global Diaspora. Originating from a single remote region of Himalayan Nepal, called Mustang, Shaligrams are all at once fossils, divine beings, and intimate kin with families and worshippers. Through their lives, movements, and materiality, Shaligrams then reveal fascinating new dimensions of religious practice, pilgrimage, and politics. But as social, environmental, and national conflicts in the politically-contentious region of Mustang continue to escalate, the geologic, mythic, and religious movements of Shaligrams have come to act as parallels to the mobility of people through both space and time. Shaligram mobility therefore traverses through multiple social worlds, multiple religions, and multiple nations revealing Shaligram practitioners as a distinct, alternative, community struggling for a place in a world on the edge.

This book provides an excellent handbook to the Islamic movements in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya and fills a major gap in the scholarship on Islam and the Arab West.

What makes a body of sound appear as an aesthetic object as well as a method for knowledge? In Sounding Bodies Sounding Worlds, Mickey Vallee argues that we must impose our sonic imagination onto the non-sonic, and embrace how we sound to ourselves, sound with our animal companions, and sound in very earth itself. From the invention of the laryngoscope to the role of the spectrogram, from the call of the bird to the tumble of a rockslide, from the deep listening of environmental immersion to the computational listening of bioacoustics research, Vallee offers a wide range of cases to convincingly argue that all life shares in a continuous, embodied and ethical vibration.