This collection examines the impact of East Asian religion and culture on the public sphere, defined as an idealized discursive arena that mediates the official and private spheres. Contending that the actors and agents on the fringes of society were instrumental in shaping the public sphere in traditional and modern East Asia, it considers how these outliers contribute to religious, intellectual, and cultural dialog in the public sphere. Jurgen Habermas conceptualized the public sphere as the discursive arena which grew within Western European bourgeoisie society, arguably overlooking topics such as gender, minorities, and non-European civilizations, as well as the extent to which agency in the public sphere is effective in non-Western societies and how practitioners on the outskirts of mainstream society can participate. This volume responds to and builds upon this dialogue by addressing how religious, intellectual, and cultural agency in the public sphere shapes East Asian cultures, particularly the activities of those found on the peripheries of historic and modern societies.

This book analyses the diverse ways in which women have been represented in the Puranic traditions in ancient India - the virtuous wife, mother, daughter, widow, and prostitute - against the socio-religious milieu around CE 300-1000. Puranas (lit. ancient narratives) are brahmanical texts that largely fall under the category of socio-religious literature which were more broad-based and inclusive, unlike the Smrtis, which were accessible mainly to the upper sections of society. In locating, identifying, and commenting on the multiplicity of the images and depictions of women's roles in Puranic traditions, the author highlights their lives and experiences over time, both within and outside the traditional confines of the domestic sphere. With a focus on five Mahapuranas that deal extensively with the social matrix Visnu, Markandeya Matsya, Agni, and Bhagavata Puranas, the book explores the question of gender and agency in early India and shows how such identities were recast, invented, shaped, constructed, replicated, stereotyped, and sometimes reversed through narratives. Further, it traces social consequences and contemporary relevance of such representations in marriage, adultery, ritual, devotion, worship, fasts, and pilgrimage. This volume will be of interest to researchers and scholars in women and gender studies, ancient Indian history, religion, sociology, literature, and South Asian studies, as also the informed general reader.

Focusing on migration and mobility, this edited collection examines the religious landscape of Brazil as populated and shaped by transnational flows and domestic migratory movements. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives on migration and religion, this book argues that Brazil's diverse religious landscape must be understood within a dynamic global context. From southern to northern Europe, through Africa, Japan and the Middle East, to a host of Latin American countries, Brazilian society has been influenced by immigrant communities accompanied by a range of beliefs and rituals drawn from established 'world' religions as well as alternative religio-spiritual movements. Consequently, the formation and profile of 'homegrown' religious communities such as Santo Daime, the Dawn Valley and Umbanda can only be fully understood against the broader backdrop of migration. Contributors draw on the case of Brazil to develop frameworks for understanding the interface of religion and migration, asking questions that include: How do the processes and forces of re-territorialization play out among post-migratory communities? In what ways are the post-transitional dynamics of migration enacted and reframed by different generations of migrants? How are the religious symbols and ritual practices of particular worldviews and traditions appropriated and re-interpreted by migrant communities? What role does religion play in facilitating or impeding post-migratory settlement? Religion, Migration and Mobility engages these questions by drawing on a range of different traditions and research methods. As such, this book will be of keen interest to scholars working across the fields of religious studies, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon Church, is quickly becoming a global religion with more than 12 million members worldwide. In Japan, the number of official members has more than doubled since 1980. Yet this impressive growth has not been accompanied by research on Japanese Mormons. What attracts Japanese people, most of whom have little experience with Christianity, to an American faith? How are their lives as Japanese people affected by the Mormon Church? Based on research in a small congregation in northern Japan and in-depth interviews with foreign missionaries, Japanese Saints is the first book to provide an in-depth, qualitative examination of what it is like to be a Japanese Mormon. Hoffmann pays particular attention to how members joined the LDS Church, how it has affected relationships with family and friends, and what membership in the Church entails.

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 collective process of getting rid of narrow-minded dogmas and concepts'. The book is based on a simple yet challenging premise: Science has not gone far enough in the scientific process of going from a collective mind tied up in dogmatic teachings to a truly free mind that, seemingly, freed itself from bondage and restrictions. The book shows that science, and with it our whole Western culture, has to incorporate spirituality if it is to realize this goal of enlightenment. If that is done, and it can only be done by many individuals actually practicing spirituality, this will also lead to the individual type of enlightenment.

This book examines the religious lives of young adults growing up in inter-religious families in India. It explores complex questions of identity, social background, and religion in twenty-first-century India. The volume studies the religious commitments of young adults, analyses the identity formation process for a critical age group, and discusses the interpersonal dynamics within inter-religious families. Drawing on real life stories of mixed heritage - Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Jain, Buddhist, and Parsi - this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of psychology, education, sociology and social anthropology, religious studies, politics, and other interdisciplinary studies.

This book examines the lived reality of 'everyday multiculturalism', and the ways that young people make sense of the diverse world around them. Currently we know very little about how multiculturalism shapes our lives, our interactions and our identity. This is especially pertinent for young people. How do young people from largely white, disadvantaged backgrounds interpret multiculturalism? How do they engage with people from 'different' minority ethnic and faith communities? How do they negotiate the challenges that arise within ever-diversifying environments? Drawing on empirical research, Stevie-Jade Hardy uncovers the fears and tensions that both undermine, and are caused by, doing multiculturalism. In doing so, she shines a light on the 'hidden' phenomenon of youth hate crime perpetration. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of criminology, sociology and cultural studies, as well as to professionals and policy-makers working in the fields of diversity and hate crime.

This book contributes to the current knowledge and research on conflict and cross-cultural dialogue, emphasizing how respect, tolerance and dialogue may be quite effective tools for bridging the diverse cultures and, consequently, for solving many of the conflicts of today's world, characterized by a dynamic interchange of populations with very diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. For this purpose, we rely on reputed scholars from ten different countries, and from different cultures and fields of expertise, which allows for diverse contributions from a valuable interdisciplinary perspective. The first section of the book deals with the correlation between cultural differences and conflict, while also showing how such conflicts can be prevented and, should they arise, managed and solved. The second section addresses a different, more specific issue: how cultural expression means and tools for cultural communication may lead to conflict whereas they may help to avoid it as well. Finally, the third section analyzes how legal and justice systems deal with cross-cultural conflicts as well as with situations which may lead to cross-cultural conflicts, thus assessing to which extent such systems contribute to avoid and/or solve such kind of conflicts.

Drawing from a study of courtship media and ethnographic work at purity retreats and home-school conventions across the Midwest, this is the first inquiry into modern Christian courtship, an alternative to dating that asks young people to avoid both romance and sex until they are ready to be married. Bridging sociological and historical studies of American Christianity with youth and girlhood studies literatures, Elizabeth Shively finds that the courtship system is designed to shore up the patriarchal nuclear family structure at the center of conservative Christianity and ensure predictability in the face of emerging adulthood: single young women work to embody ideals of "luminous femininity" and model themselves after archetypes such as the "Proverbs 31 woman," the "stay-at-home-daughter," and the "mission-minded girl," and courting couples strive to "guard their hearts" against premature emotional intimacy. Nonetheless, participants report that courtship, like other relationships, inevitably carries an element of risk, and it ultimately fails to offer a substantial challenge to the to the sexist realities of youth dating culture.

This book outlines a Pentecostal theology of praxis while also providing a concrete example of how such a theology is fleshed out. By investigating various elements of Pentecostal and Liberation theologies and highlighting various similarities and differences between the two camps, John Mark Robeck constructs a framework through which a Pentecostal theology of praxis might be observed. Taking a step further, he offers a case study of three Pentecostal churches in El Salvador as an example of how such a theology is lived out. Robeck examines the lives of the pastors of these congregations, the engagement of these congregations in activities of social engagement that serve to bring about various forms of liberation, as well as the participation of the congregations and their communities in transformative actions which serve to bring about real change.

In the post-Soviet period morality became a debatable concept, open to a multitude of expressions and performances. From Russian Orthodoxy to Islam, from shamanism to Protestantism, religions of various kinds provided some of the first possible alternative moral discourses and practices after the end of the Soviet system. This influence remains strong today. Within the Russian context, religion and morality intersect in such social domains as the relief of social suffering, the interpretation of history, the construction and reconstruction of traditions, individual and social health, and business practices. The influence of religion is also apparent in the way in which the Russian Orthodox Church increasingly acts as the moral voice of the government. The wide-ranging topics in this ethnographically based volume show the broad religious influence on both discursive and everyday moralities. The contributorsa reveal that although religion is a significant aspect of the various assemblages of morality, much like in other parts of the world, religion in postsocialist Russia cannot be separated from the political or economic or transnational institutional aspects of morality."

This volume explores key issues in the modern tensions between state and religions by exploring a number of case studies from around the world.

Centering on public discourse and its fundamental lapses, this book takes a unique look at key barriers to social and political advancement in the information age. Public discourse is replete with confident, easy to manage claims, intuitions, and other shortcuts; outstanding of these is trivialization, the trend to distill multifaceted dilemmas to binary choices, neglect the big picture, gloss over alternatives, or filter reality through a lens of convenience-leaving little room for nuance and hence debate. Far from superficial, such lapses are symptoms of deeper, intrinsically connected shortcomings inviting further attention. Focusing primarily on industrialized democracies, the authors take their readers on a transdisciplinary journey into the world of trivialization, engaging as they do so the intricate issues borne of a modern environment both enabled and constrained by technology. Ultimately, the authors elaborate upon the emerging counterweights to conventional worldviews and the paradigmatic alternatives that promise to help open new avenues for progress.

Ten Outstanding Books in Mission Studies, World Christianity and Intercultural Theology for 2019 - International Bulletin of Mission Research (IBMR) Noted theologian Samuel Escobar offers a magisterial survey and study of Christology in Latin America. Starting with the first Spanish influence and moving through popular religiosity and liberationist themes in Catholic and Protestant thought of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, In Search of Christ in Latin America culminates in an important description of the work of the Latin American Theological Fraternity (FTL). Escobar chronologically traces the journey of Latin American Christology and describes the milestones along the way toward a rich understanding of the spiritual reality and powerful message of Jesus. IVP Academic is pleased to release this important work, originally published in Spanish as En busca de Cristo en America Latina, for the first time in English. Offers theological, historical, and cultural analysis of Latin American understandings of Christ Discusses the sixteenth-century Spanish Christ, popular religiosity, and developed theological reflection Covers the full spectrum of theological traditions in Latin America Examines the figure of Jesus Christ in the context of Latin American culture of the twentieth century Places liberation theology within its social and revolutionary context

Throughout the history of the Christian church, two narratives have constantly clashed: the imperial logic of Babel that builds towers and borders to seize control, versus the logic of Pentecost that empowers "glocal" missionaries of the kingdom life. To what extent are Westernized Christians today ready for the church of the Pentecost narrative? Are they equipped to do ministry in different cultural modes and to handle disruption and perplexity? What are Christians to make of the Holy Spirit's occasional encounters with cultures and religions of the Americas before the European conquest? Oscar Garcia-Johnson explores a new grammar for the study of theology and mission in global Christianity, especially in Latin America and the Latinx "third spaces" in North America. With an interdisciplinary, "transoccidental," and narrative approach, Spirit Outside the Gate offers a constructive theology of mission for the church in global contexts. Building on the familiar missiological metaphor of "outside the gate" established by Orlando Costas, Garcia-Johnson moves to recover important elements in ancestral traditions of the Americas, with an eye to discerning pneumatological continuity between the pre-Columbian and post-Columbian communities. He calls for a "rerouting of theology"-a realization that theology cannot make its home in Christendom but is a global creation that must come home to a church without borders. In this volume Garcia-Johnson considers pneumatological insights into de/postcolonial studies traces independent epistemic contributions of the American Global South shows how American indigenous, Afro-Latinx, and immigrant communities provide resources for a decolonial pneumatology describes four transformations the American church must undergo to break free from colonial, modernist, and monocultural structures Spirit Outside the Gate opens a path for a pneumatological missiology that can help the church act as a witness to the gospel message in a postmodern, postcolonial, and post-Christendom world. Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

James Leatt was nine when the Nationalist Party came to power, and eleven when he saw a documentary of the Allied forces liberating Nazi death camps. For most of his life the shadows of apartheid and the Holocaust have dogged his beliefs about faith, the meaning of life and the moral challenges humankind faces.

Conjectures is a philosophical reflection on his life and times as he grapples with the realities of parish work in black communities, teaching ethics in a business school under apartheid, managing a university in the dying days of the Nationalist regime, and eventually working in higher education in post-apartheid South Africa.

Weaving strands of his personal life with the questions of theodicy and modernity as well as drawing upon the Western philosophical tradition and the wisdom of East Asian traditions such as Taoism and Buddhism, he comes to terms with a disenchanted reality which has no need for supernatural or magical thought and practice.

He has learned to live with questions. If you no longer believe in God and a sacred text, what are your sources of meaning? What kind of moral GPS allows you to find your way? Is what might be called a secular spirituality even possible?

Conjectures traces the author’s search for a secular way of being that is meaningful, mindful and reverent.

Faith-based organisations (FBOs) have long been recognised as having an advantage in delivering programs and interventions amongst communities of the same faith. However, many FBOs today work across a variety of contexts, including with local partners and communities of different faiths. Likewise, secular NGOs and donors are increasingly partnering with faith-based organisations to work in highly-religious communities. Development Across Faith Boundaries explores the dynamics of activities by local or international FBOs that cross faith boundaries, whether with their partners, donors or recipient communities. The book investigates the dynamics of cross-faith partnerships in a range of development contexts, from India, Cambodia and Myanmar, to Melanesia, Bosnia, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. The book demonstrates how far FBOs extend their activities beyond their own faith communities and how far NGOs partner with religious actors. It also considers the impacts of these cross-faith partnerships, including their work on conflict and sectarian or ethnic tension in the relevant communities. This book is an invaluable guide for graduates, researchers and students with an interest in development and religious studies, as well as practitioners within the aid sector.

There is a growing interest in studies that document the relationship between science and medicine - as ideas, practices, technologies and outcomes - across cultural, national, geographic terrain. Tibetan medicine is not only known as a scholarly medical tradition among other Asian medical systems, with many centuries of technological, clinical, and pharmacological innovation; it also survives today as a complex medical resource across many Asian nations - from India and Bhutan to Mongolia, Tibet (TAR) and China, Buryatia - as well as in Western Europe and the Americas. The contributions to this volume explore, in equal measure, the impacts of western science and biomedicine on Tibetan grounds - i.e., among Tibetans across China, the Himalaya and exile communities as well as in relation to globalized Tibetan medicine - and the ways that local practices change how such "science" gets done, and how this continually hybridized medical knowledge is transmitted and put into practice. As such, this volume contributes to explorations into the bi-directional flows of medical knowledge and practice.

This innovative edited collection brings together leading international academics to explore the use of various non-prescription and prescription substances for the purpose of perceived body image enhancement. While studies on drug misuse to date have examined drug use in the context of sporting performance, addiction, and body image for particular groups such as bodybuilders, there has been little research that explores the wider use (and misuse) of legal and illegal drugs for body image development and weight loss. With medical sociology and social psychology at its core, this important volume shows the complex reasons behind the misuse of various medications, how these are connected to contemporary body image and appearance concerns, and why the known health risks and possibly harmful side effects do not act as deterrents.

This multidisciplinary collection of essays provides a critical and comprehensive understanding of how knowledge has been made, moved and used, by whom and for what purpose. To explain how new knowledge emerges, this volume offers a two-fold conceptual move: challenging both the premise of insurmountable differences between confined, autarkic cultures and the linear, nation-centered approach to the spread of immutable stocks of knowledge. Rather, the conceptual focus of the book is on the circulation, amalgamation and reconfiguration of locally shaped bodies of knowledge on a broader, global scale. The authors emphasize that the histories of interaction have been made less transparent through the study of cultural representations thus distorting the view of how knowledge is actually produced. Leading scholars from a range of fields, including history, philosophy, social anthropology and comparative culture research, have contributed chapters which cover the period from the early modern age to the present day and investigate settings in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Their particular focus is on areas that have largely been neglected until now. In this work, readers from many disciplines will find new approaches to writing the global history of knowledge-making, especially historians, scholars of the history and philosophy of science, and those in culture studies.

In this Palgrave Pivot, Duane Rousselle aims to disrupt the hold that pragmatist ideology has had over American sociology by demonstrating that the social bond has always been founded upon a fundamental and primordial bankruptcy. Using the Lacanian theory of "capitalist discourse," Rousselle demonstrates that most of early American sociology suffered from an inadequate account of the "symbolic" within the mental and social lives of the individual subject. The psychoanalytic aspect of the social bond remained theoretically undeveloped in the American context. Instead it is the "image," a product of the imaginary, which takes charge over any symbolic function. This intervention into pragmatic sociology seeks to recover the tradition of "grand theory" by bringing psychoanalytical and sociological discourse into fruitful communication with one another.

Around 1800 roughly three per cent of the human population lived in urban areas; by 2030 this number is expected to have gone up to some seventy per cent. This poses problems for traditional religions that are all rooted in rural, small-scale societies. The authors in this volume question what the possible appeal of these old religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam could be in the new urban environment and, conversely, what impact global urbanization will have on learning and on the performance and nature of ritual. Anthropologists, historians and political scientists have come together in this volume to analyse attempts made by churches and informal groups to adapt to these changes and, at the same time, to explore new ways to study religions in a largely urbanized environment.

Rik Pinxten is Professor and Senior Researcher in Anthropology and Head of Department of Comparative Sciences of Culture at Ghent University, Belgium. His current research focus is on identity as a central mechanism in cultural and religious learning processes. He has published widely on the anthropology of knowledge and the comparative study of religion.

Lisa Dikomitis is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Hull York Medical School where she works on a project researching social responses to health inequalities. She has published widely about Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees and is the author of Cyprus and Its Places of Desire. Cultures of Displacement Among Greek and Turkish Cypriot Refugees (IB Tauris, 2012).

Community development is most effective and efficient when it is situated and led at the local level and considers the social behaviours, needs and worldviews of local communities. With more than eight out of ten people globally self-reporting religious belief, Religion and Development in the Asia-Pacific: Sacred places as development spaces argues that the role and impact of religions on community development needs to be better understood. It also calls for greater attention to be given to the role of sacred places as sites for development activities, and for a deeper appreciation of the way in which sacred stories and teachings inspire people to work for the benefit of others in particular locations. The book considers theories of 'place' as a component of successful development interventions and expands this analysis to consider the specific role that sacred places - buildings and social networks - have in planning, implementing and promoting sustainable development. A series of case studies examine various sacred places as sites for development activities. These case studies include Christian churches and disaster relief in Vanuatu; Muslim shrines and welfare provision in Pakistan; a women's Buddhist monastery in Thailand advancing gender equity; a Jewish aid organisation providing language training to Muslim Women in Australia; and Hawaiian sacred sites located within a holistic retreat centre committed to ecological sustainability. Religion and Development in the Asia-Pacific demonstrates the important role that sacred spaces can play in development interventions, covering diverse major world religions, interfaith and spiritual contexts, and as such will be of considerable interest for postgraduate students and researchers in development studies, religious studies, sociology of religion and geography.

'Nagaland for Christ' and 'Jesus Saves' are familiar slogans prominently displayed on public transport and celebratory banners in Nagaland, north-east India. They express an idealization of Christian homogeneity that belies the underlying tensions and negotiations between Christian and non-Christian Naga. This religious division is intertwined with that of healing beliefs and practices, both animistic and biomedical. This study focuses on the particular experiences of the Angami Naga, one of the many Naga peoples. Like other Naga, they are citizens of the state of India but extend ethnolinguistically into Tibeto-Burman south-east Asia. This ambiguity and how it affects their Christianity, global involvement, indigenous cultural assertiveness and nationalist struggle is explored. Not simply describing continuity through change, this study reveals the alternating Christian and non-Christian streams of discourse, one masking the other but at different times and in different guises.

Catholicism has had an important place in Macau since the earliest days of Portuguese colonization in the sixteenth century. This book, based on extensive original research including in-depth interviews, examines in detail the everyday life of Catholics in Macau at present. It outlines the tremendous societal pressures which Macau is currently undergoing - sovereignty handover and its consequences, the growth of casinos and tourism and the transformation of a serene and somewhat obscure colony into a vibrantly developing city. It shows how, although the formal structures of Catholicism no longer share in rule by the colonial power, and although formal religious observance is declining, nevertheless the personal piety and ethical religious outlook of individual Catholics continue to be strong, and have a huge, and possibly increasing, impact on public life through the application of personal religious ethics to issues of human rights and social justice and in the fields of education and social services.