In Jesus Christ the Person, author Nikolai Vladimirov uses a socio-spiritual method of analysis that supposes the social perception of the invisible, hidden, transcendental sides of reality in order to investigate Jesus Christ as a real, existing Person.Vladimirov analyzes the main milestones in Jesus Christ's life chronologically: - the period before He was born- His socialization, taking place between childhood and adolescence- the reconstruction of His physical appearance and His language- His emotions- His way of thinking- the level of knowledge He gave people- His mission and deeds- His posthumous acts, resurrection, and returning to His fatherJesus Christ the Person shares Vladimirov's interpretation of a host of ideas related to sociological analysis of Jesus Christ the Person. He draws on his religious insight, using many examples to provide a guide for those seeking information about this aspect of Christian history.

This book is about how people construct career stories: the stories we use to make sense of our work life. Mark Scillio explores the idea of security in the current turbulent employment climate, investigating employment experiences in developed, wealthy countries like Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom-where careers have become fragmented, complex, and uncertain. Using Anthony Giddens' notion of ontological security, Scillio develops a concept of career security that goes beyond economic and financial concerns and encompasses the personal and social meaning of work. The ramifications of succeeding (or failing) to forge a good career narrative are explored through a series of detailed case studies.

This edited collection focuses on concepts of globalization, glocalization, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. The contributions provide evidence of how in practice, global dynamics and individual lives are interrelated. It presents theoretical reflections on how the local, the transnational and global dimensions of social life are entwined and construct the meaning of one another, and offers everyday examples of how individuals and organizations try to answer global challenges in local contexts. The book closely focuses on migration processes, as one of the main phenomena allowing a high number of people from contemporary society to directly experience supranational dynamics, either as migrants or inhabitants of the places where migrants pass through or settle down. Globalization, Supranational Dynamics and Local Experiences will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, migration studies and global studies.

This book is an invitation to rethink our understanding of Turkish literature as a tale of two "others." The first part of the book examines the contributions of non-Muslim authors, the "others" of modern Turkey, to the development of Turkish literature during the late Ottoman and early republican period, focusing on the works of largely forgotten authors. The second part discusses Turkey as the "other" of the West and the way authors writing in Turkish challenged orientalist representations. Thus this book prepares the ground for a history of literature which uncouples language and religion and recreates the spaces of dialogue and exchange that have existed in late Ottoman Turkey between members of various ethno-religious communities.

This book presents an historical and sociological account of the Italian mafia-type organisation known as the 'ndrangheta. It draws together diverse perspectives on the various 'ndrangheta clans and their behavioural models, focusing specifically on their organisational skills, their bonds with Calabrian society and Calabrian communities around the world, their mobility, and their characterisation as poly-crime organisations. The authors demonstrate that 'ndrangheta clans have an innovative way of being and doing mafia work through a dense network of relationships both in the 'upperworld' and in the 'underworld', a particularly acute sense of business, a reputation built on the protection of blood and family ties, and, last but not least, a symbiotic relationship and camouflage within Calabrian society. By focusing on both the structures and the activities of the clans and with findings based on judicial documents, this book explores why the 'ndrangheta is today labeled as "the most powerful Italian mafia". It will be of great interest to upper-level students and scholars of organised crime and sociology.

Religion's persistent and new visibility in political life has prompted a significant global debate. One of this debate's key features concerns the nature and impact of secularization. This collection of essays draws together leading sociologists, historians, philosophers of religion, and political theorists in order to provide a broad and up-to-date account of religion after secularization. Contributors explore the meaning and conceptual legacies of religion, as well as the unique features of the Australian case such as religion as it relates to law, education, gender, media, and radical political movements. Intervening in the current debate, this book provides summative accounts of the historical, cultural, and legal interactions that have informed Australia's relationship to religion and secularization. Contributors critically analyze and engage with secular political theory concerning the public sphere, while also dissecting deliberative politics and democratic practices. This book propels the debate over religion's place in public life in new directions and promotes urgently needed public understanding.

This book explores the ways in which religion is observed, performed, and organised in skateboard culture. Drawing on scholarship from the sociology of religion and the cultural politics of lifestyle sports, this work combines ethnographic research with media analysis to argue that the rituals of skateboarding provide participants with a rich cultural canvas for emotional and spiritual engagement. Paul O'Connor contends that religious identification in skateboarding is set to increase as participants pursue ways to both control and engage meaningfully with an activity that has become an increasingly mainstream and institutionalised sport. Religion is explored through the themes of myth, celebrity, iconography, pilgrimage, evangelism, cults, and self-help.

Our televisions bulge with weight-loss shows, as the news warn of the obesity epidemic. Fat is such a villain that larger people are stigmatized and we all are seduced by life-changing claims of a multi-billion pound diet industry. Yet, when we question if our bathroom scales can really tell us about our health, we start to ask just why and how fat holds such fascination. In this book, Jayne Raisborough explores interpretations of fat bodies from Palaeolithic Europe to Poverty Porn TV to argue that fat's materiality makes it ripe for stigmatising associations. However, especially in a social context that presents health as a matter of choice, fat also emerges as an ideal redemptive substance to be pummelled and starved into submission. This book presents a 'fat sensibility' to demonstrate how fat is helping us all become responsibilised healthy-citizens. It asks just what self are we being asked to diet ourselves into?

This handbook addresses the methodological problems and theoretical challenges that arise in attempting to understand and represent humour in specific historical contexts across cultural history. It explores problems involved in applying modern theories of humour to historically-distant contexts of humour and points to the importance of recognising the divergent assumptions made by different academic disciplines when approaching the topic. It explores problems of terminology, identification, classification, subjectivity of viewpoint, and the coherence of the object of study. It addresses specific theories, together with the needs of specific historical case-studies, as well as some of the challenges of presenting historical humour to contemporary audiences through translation and curation. In this way, the handbook aims to encourage a fresh exploration of methodological problems involved in studying the various significances both of the history of humour and of humour in history.

While the field of football studies has produced an abundance of literature on professional, top-league football, there is little research output to do with the non-top level football. This book explores the relationship between the top and lower leagues, laying open the drastic schisms that exist between the different levels. The study links the developments at the top level of English and German football in the past 30 years to transformational processes in lower league football. Illustrating how the hegemonic status of top football weighs hard on the spheres below, it depicts how it also serves as a blueprint for lower league football clubs' strategies in coping with a threefold dilemma of institutional legitimacy that shows itself in economic, cultural and social dimensions. Taking the different club structures in both national contexts as a starting point, it portrays both the efficacy of institutional frameworks and how these can be challenged from below. This research will be of interest to students and scholars across football studies, sports studies, the sociology of sport, and organisation studies.

Shamanism has always been of great interest to anthropologists. More recently it has been "discovered" by westerners, especially New Age followers. This book breaks new ground byexamining pristine shamanism in Greenland, among people contacted late by Western missionaries and settlers. On the basis of material only available in Danish, and presented herein English for the first time, the author questions Mircea Eliade's well-known definition of the shaman as the master of ecstasy and suggests that his role has to be seen as that of a master of spirits. The ambivalent nature of the shaman and the spirit world in the tough Arctic environment is then contrasted with the more benign attitude to shamanism in the New Age movement. After presenting descriptions of their organizations and accounts by participants, the author critically analyses the role of neo-shamanic courses and concludes that it is doubtful to consider what isoffered as shamanism.

This book is about multiculturalism, broadly defined as the recognition, respect and accommodation of cultural differences. Teo proposes a framework of multicultural denizenship that includes group-specific rights and intercultural dialogue, by problematising three issues: a) the unacknowledged misrecognition of non-citizens within the scholarship of multiculturalism; b) uncritical treatment of citizens and non-citizens as binary categories and; c) problematic parcelling of group-specific rights with citizenship rights. Drawing on the case of Singapore as an illustrative example, where temporary labour migrants are culturally stereotyped, socioeconomically disenfranchised and denied access to rights accorded only to citizens, Teo argues that understandings of multiculturalism need to be expanded and adjusted to include a fluidity of identities, spectrum of rights and shared experiences of marginalisation among citizens and non-citizens. Civic Multiculturalism in Singapore will be of interest to students and scholars of multiculturalism, critical citizenship studies, migration studies, political theory and postcolonial studies.

This book provides a critical feminist analysis of the Korean Protestant Right's gendered politics. Specifically, the volume explores the Protestant Right's responses and reactions to the presumed weakening of hegemonic masculinity in Korea's post-hypermasculine developmentalism context. Nami Kim examines three phenomena: Father School (an evangelical men's manhood and fatherhood restoration movement), the anti-LGBT movement, and Islamophobia/anti-Muslim racism. Although these three phenomena may look unrelated, Kim asserts that they represent the Protestant Right's distinct yet interrelated ways of engaging the contested hegemonic masculinity in Korean society. The contestation over hegemonic masculinity is a common thread that runs through and connects these three phenomena. The ways in which the Protestant Right has engaged the contested hegemonic masculinity have been in relation to "others," such as women, sexual minorities, gender nonconforming people, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.

This book examines the effects of faith schools on social cohesion and inter-ethnic relations. Faith schools constitute approximately one third of all state-maintained schools and two fifths of the independent schools in England. Nevertheless, they have historically been, and remain, controversial. In the current social climate, questions have been raised about the ability of faith schools to promote Community Cohesion and, included within that, their ability to promote tolerance. This book explores one aspect of the debate by examining the effect that faith schools have on their students' attitudes of tolerance. As well as asking what differences exist between students in faith and non-faith schools, it also looks at which aspects of the schools might be affecting the students and their attitudes towards different minorities. The book is a must-read for students and researchers in the fields of education and religious studies, as well as anyone with an interest in the place of faith schools in a modern multicultural society.

In Theory of Religious Cycles: Tradition, Modernity and the Baha'i Faith Mikhail Sergeev offers a new interpretation of the Soviet period of Russian history as a phase within the religious evolution of humankind by developing a theory of religious cycles, which he applies to modernity and to all the major world faiths of Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Sergeev argues that in the course of its evolution religion passes through six common phases-formative, orthodox, classical, reformist, critical, and post-critical. Modernity, which was started by the European Enlightenment, represents the critical phase of Christianity, a systemic crisis that could be overcome with the appearance of new religious movements such as the Baha'i Faith, which offers a spiritual extension of the modern worldview.

Mount Athos has been exercising its magnetic attraction on monks and pilgrims for over a thousand years. As the papers collected in this volume show (many of them delivered at a conference convened in Helsinki in 2006 to mark the opening of an exhibition of treasures of Mount Athos), monks have been drawn to its forests, cliffs, and caves in search of tranquillity and the inspiring teaching of charismatic elders since the ninth century. Through the Hesychastic renewal which began on Athos in the late Middle Ages the Holy Mountain acquired unprecedented importance throughout the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Russia and rapidly extended its spiritual influence from the Mediterranean to the White Sea. Many of the papers are concerned with aspects of pilgrimage to Athos and the effect that a visit to the Mountain has on pilgrims' lives. Today the magnetism has lost none of its force and, despite threats to its environment and its unique way of life, Athos continues to operate as a spiritual powerhouse offering refreshment to all who turn to it.

The South Asian diaspora is a diverse group who settled in different parts of the world, often concentrated in developed countries. There is an emerging trend of re-engagement of the diaspora in the South Asian region. Entrepreneurs in Japan and Singapore as well as the Malaysian Indian diaspora are involved in South India making the region a lucrative space for capital, talent and ideas. This volume expands into diasporic communities such as the Nepali community in Singapore and their contribution to their home economy through remittances. Beyond economics, the contributors explore how transnational politics overlap with religious ideologies amongst Pakistanis in United Kingdom and the Sathya Sai Baba movement which contributes to diasporic identity building in host countries. They also explore media and culture: in the last decade Bollywood films have portrayed life in the diaspora, and have featured the diaspora and Non Resident Indians (NRI) as fully formed stock characters and protagonists. The process of diaspora re-engagement has tremendous development implications for South Asian countries, both individually and for their regional integration.

Terrorism has become an everyday reality in most contemporary societies. In a context of heightened fear can juries be trusted to remain impartial when confronted by defendants charged with terrorism? Do they scrutinize prosecution cases carefully, or does emotion trump reason once the spectre of terrorism is invoked? This book examines these questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The authors look at the how jurors in terrorism trials are likely to respond to gruesome evidence, including beheading videos. The 'CSI effect' is examined as a possible response to forensic evidence, and jurors with different learning preferences are compared. Virtual interactive environments, built like computer games, may be created to provide animated reconstructions of the prosecution or defence case. This book reports on how to create such presentations, culminating in the analysis of a live simulated trial using interactive visual displays followed by jury deliberations. The team of international, transdisciplinary experts draw conclusions of global legal and political significance, and contribute to the growing scholarship on comparative counter-terrorism law. The book will be of great interest to scholars, students and practitioners of law, criminal justice, forensic science and psychology.

This book provides qualitative analyses of intercultural sense making in a variety of institutional contexts. It relies on the assumption that in an increasingly culturally diverse world, individuals often enter contexts that have communal, historically determined and stable sets of values, norms and expected identities, with little cultural compass to find their bearings in them. The book goes beyond interpreting differences in people's ethnic or linguistic roots and discusses instead people's interpretive efforts to navigate different sociocultural situations. The contributors examine such situations in educational, organizational, medical and community settings and look at how participants with different levels of sociocultural competences (such as, migrant patients, migrant adult learners, children) try to cope with institutional constraints and expectations, how they understand symbols, practices and identities in institutional contexts, and how their creative adjustments come to light. This book provides insights from the fields of psychology, education, anthropology and linguistics, and is for a wide readership interested in cultural meaning-making.

This book discusses one of the most noticeable and significant transformations in China over the past three decades is the rapid and massive urbanization of the country, which has brought shifts in political culture of Chinese urbanites. This book is a systematic and empirical study of political culture in urban China. The book covers various aspects of political culture such as political regime support, political interest, democratic values, political trust, and environmental attitudes and sub-political culture of Chinese urban Christians. This book will be of immense value to urban scholars, sinologists, and those wishing to get a closer look at the issues that affect the political future of a rising world power.

"Spiritual Fitness Training in Valor" is a bold spiritually-directed training guide that helps us to shift from a crisis to Christ. In his second volume of Crisis intervention/"Christ-is Intervention," the author/psychologist expands his spiritual balance training program to include a series of spiritual strength, weight, resistance and cardio-aerobic exercises. Dr. Cosenza shows us how to use "weights of prevailing" in crises. We learn how to handle life's pressures through spiritual resistance training. Finally, we encouraged to walk in our completeness in Christ through spiritual cardio-aerobic techniques. This unique spiritual fitness program in courage and resilience has major applications for crisis intervention by spiritual leaders, mental health professionals, teachers of pastoral counseling, health fitness trainers, and loyal followers of the Lord Jesus Christ who wants to help others.

This volume includes a wide range of papers that explore individual and institutional aspects of religion from a social-science perspective. The special section has articles related to the practice of prayer, and includes studies from the USA, Europe, and the Middle East. The general papers include studies on coping strategies, God representations, spirituality versus religion, self-control in a Muslim context, and faith-based organizations in Cambodia. Together these papers form a valuable collection indicating the depth and vibrancy of research in these fields.

The current refugee crisis sweeping Europe, and much of the world, closely intersects with largely neglected questions of religion. Moving beyond discussions of religious differences, what can we learn about the interaction between religion and migration? Do faith-based organisations play a role within the refugee regime? How do religious traditions and perspectives challenge and inform current practices and policies towards refugees? This volume gathers together expertise from academics and practitioners, as well as migrant voices, in order to investigate these interconnections. It shows that reconsidering our understanding and approaches to both could generate creative alternative responses to the growing global migration crisis. Beginning with a discussion of the secular/religious divide - and how it shapes dominant policy practices and counter approaches to displacement and migration - the book then goes on to explore and deconstruct the dominant discourse of the Muslim refugee as a threat to the secular/Christian West. The discussion continues with an exploration of Christian and Islamic traditions of hospitality, showing how they challenge current practices of securitization of migration, and concludes with an investigation of the largely unexplored relation between gender, religion and migration. Bringing together leading and emerging voices from across academia and practice, in the fields of International Relations, migration studies, philosophy, religious studies and gender studies, this volume offers a unique take on one of the most pressing global problems of our time.

Sociology addresses challenging social issues and seeks new ways to understand them. However, much sociological terminology suffers from multiple, vague, or uncertain meanings. This is true of many of the central terms that sociologists use, such as 'power', 'ideology', 'culture', 'social class', and even 'society'. The result is that the conclusions reached by sociological investigations are frequently subject to discrepant interpretations, and their validity is difficult to assess. The chapters in this book address several of the key terms employed by sociologists, examining the concepts associated with them in depth - from both an historical and an analytical perspective. The aim is not to develop an entirely new framework but rather to document the various meanings associated with these terms, and to suggest ways in which they could be refined or developed for the purposes of sociological analysis. Since the concepts addressed are of wide relevance, Troubling Sociological Concepts will be of interest and use to researchers and students across the social sciences.

Exploring mediated time, this book contemplates how far (and in what ways) media and time are intertwined from a diverse set of theoretical and empirical angles. It builds from theoretical discussions concerning the question of mediation and the normative framing of time (especially acceleration) and works its way through questions of time for/of one's own, resisting temporalities, polychronicity, in-between-time, simultaneity and other time concepts. It further examines specific time frames, imaginations of a media future and the past, questions of online journalism and multitasking or liveness. Bringing together authors from diverse backgrounds, this collection presents a rich combination of milestone articles, new empirical research, enriching theoretical work and interviews with leading researchers to bridge sociology, media studies, and science and technology studies in one of the first book-length publications on the emerging field of media and time.