In this study, E. Frances King explores how people first learn to relate to the images and artefacts of religious belief within their domestic environments. As a sense of religious belonging is instilled on a daily basis in the home, it also becomes emotionally linked to family, community, and homeland, resulting in two different genealogies - one to do with faith and one to do with motherland - that become entangled.

In the late nineteenth century, melodramas were spectacular entertainment for Americans. They were also a key forum in which elements of American culture were represented, contested, and inverted. This book focuses specifically on the construction of the Mormon villain as rapist, murderer, and Turk in anti-Mormon melodramas. These melodramas illustrated a particularly religious world-view that dominated American life and promoted the sexually conservative ideals of the cult of true womanhood. They also examined the limits of honorable violence, and suggested the whiteness of national ethnicity. In investigating the relationship between theatre, popular literature, political rhetoric, and religious fervor, Megan Sanborn Jones reveals how anti-Mormon melodramas created a space for audiences to imagine a unified American identity.

In this unique psychological study, John Kotre provides some startling answers to the questions Catholics are now asking about those who abandon the church, those who remain in it, and those who attempt to create a new church within the church. A detailed examination of the borderline between membership and ex-membership in the Catholic Church, as perceived by young adults reared within the Catholic educational system, the book provides an impressive substantive contribution to understanding not only of the modern church, but of organizational change in general.

Kotre, himself a product of the Catholic educational system, positions himself amid the tension and ambiguity between those who consider themselves "in" and those who consider themselves "out" of the Catholic Church. He designed a systematic questionnaire covering four hundred variables about each subject's beliefs, values, perceptions of parents, and reasons for being an insider or an outsider. Using this questionnaire he individually interviewed one hundred graduates of Catholic colleges. The surprising results of this important research show that, in spite of sixteen years of formal Catholic education, the attitudes of both the "ins" and the "outs" are not influenced by their Catholic upbringing so much as by their primary group relationships.

Recent research has shown that adult Americans are leaving their childhood faiths at ever increasing rates and that the Catholic Church is suffering the greatest losses. Kotre's book offers an insightful psychological perspective on this dramatic movement. It is a must-read for professional psychologists and sociologists, theologians, and people interested in the psychology and sociology of religion.

John N. Kotre is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of MichiganuDearborn. He is the author of numerous articles and books including The Story of Everything: A Parable of Creation and Evolution; Make It Count: How to Generate a Legacy That Gives Meaning to Your Life; and White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory. Kotre was the creator of the award-winning PBS series, Seasons of Life.

The Death of Christian Britain examines how the nation s dominant religious culture has been destroyed. Callum Brown challenges the generally held view that secularization was a long and gradual process dating from the industrial revolution. Instead, he argues that it has been a catastrophic and abrupt cultural revolution starting in the 1960s. Using the latest techniques of gender analysis, and by listening to people's voices rather than purely counting heads, the book offers new formulations of religion and secularization.

In this expanded second edition, Brown responds to commentary on his ideas, reviews the latest research, and provides new evidence to back his claims.

The Death of Christian Britain examines how the nation's dominant religious culture has been destroyed. Callum Brown challenges the generally held view that secularization was a long and gradual process dating from the industrial revolution. Instead, he argues that it has been a catastrophic and abrupt cultural revolution starting in the 1960s. Using the latest techniques of gender analysis, and by listening to people's voices rather than purely counting heads, the book offers new formulations of religion and secularization.

In this expanded second edition, Brown responds to commentary on his ideas, reviews the latest research, and provides new evidence to back his claims.

Korean Preaching, Han, and Narrative defines a narrative style of preaching as an alternative to the traditional expository and topical preaching that has dominated the Christian pulpit in Korean culture for more than one hundred years. From a psychological and aesthetic perspective, this book shows how humor in sermons can have a cathartic effect on Korean listeners. Furthermore, the narrative devices of Chunhyangjun suggest an endemic model for Korean Christian narrative preaching to bring the minjung healing from their han and transform their lives through the Gospel.

This is a book on a social theory of religion and culture. A survey of the meanings of the term religion from Columbus to Jonathan Z. Smith sets the pace. Examples are taken from ethnography, the ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman age, and Christendom in order to develop the concepts of imagined world, social formation, mythic grammar, and cultural mentality. What has been learned from the study of other peoples and their religions about the function of myths and rituals is then applied to an analysis of the Christian myth-ritual system and its social logic. The odd combinations of mythic world and ritual presence, monotheism and sovereignty, righteousness and power, all peculiar to Christianity, are analyzed historically and followed into the twenty-first century. This study offers a meditation on the recent public discourse about the Christian nation in light of the current social situation in the United States and ends with an invitation to rethink the role of religions in constructing a polycultural social democracy.

The twenty-first century has seen energy passing between religious and political worldviews, kicking up dust around the identity- and conviction-based fault lines in American society. While many evangelical Christians have developed and deployed a "worldview theory" to describe and locate themselves within the world's ideological strife, Jacob Cook argues this approach has, in effect, compelled those listening to adopt the world's divisive modes of dealing with difference rather than living out a compelling alternative. As a popular framework for theology in recent history, world-viewing has driven its white evangelical adherents to narrate human lives in this world (including their own) in ways that warp Christian identity as a personal, social, and theological reality. Through close studies of key white evangelical leaders who utilized the worldview concept for political engagement and cultural transformation over the last century, Cook reveals why worldview theory is inept for grasping real human complexity and, moreover, how it forms a barrier to genuine life together as creatures in a world only the living God can really "view." In between these studies, he draws from current conversations in psychology, sociology, critical race studies, and other fields to deliver a vigorous critique of the worldview concept and its use as well as its underlying impulse-and to unmask what world-viewing shares with the history and spirit of whiteness. This book is for those wrestling with the relationship between Christianity and whiteness in America, how the dynamics of whiteness have become transparent and, thus, contentions, and where to go from here if one is to follow Jesus.

This book explores the issue of love and its place in the reproduction of gender asymmetry in Nicaragua. The theme is discussed in the context of specific religious and work practices, living arrangements, gender values and norms, and the gender practices and legislation of the Sandinista revolution. The study uses lifeworld phenomenology as its theoretical approach, placing people's own experience center stage. Therefore, a case study of the Esperanza sewing cooperative is presented, built on life stories, interview materials and participant observation with the cooperative women and their husbands. The material and discursive practices and emotional experiences of men and women are examined in this particular socio-cultural setting. How do we account for the highly unequal bargains the women strike with their husbands, accepting large material responsibilities and «time-share love even if they experience this as emotionally hurtful? The study testifies to women's autonomy in family maintenance and religious practices, an autonomy which seems to falter in the fields oflove and sexuality; some of the men and women, however, negotiate subtle changes in gender norms and values.

Modern developments in both science and history challenge us to a far greater degree of empiricism than has been traditionally considered necessary in the study of theology. Any attempt to move in this direction can be significantly helped by Bernard Lonergan's breakthrough discovery of the notion of functional specialties in 1965. The strategy of this book is to make use of this discovery and provide a theological reflection on mission appropriate to the present age. The author begins with an insight available from biblical research but absent from current theologies of mission. This is the general recognition that the texts concerning a universal mission are in fact an instance of retrojection. Building on this through an interpretation of Lonergan's functional specialties of interpretation and history, he unfolds the startling implications for grasping the central creative significance of the 'word of God'. As the argument transfers from one specialty to the next, it moves towards ever-richer empiricism, culminating in the specialty of communications. Here the creativity which will be needed to address faithfully the message of Jesus to our contemporary world in all its complexity becomes apparent.

Ethno-religious violence in Indonesia illustrates in detail how and why previously peaceful religious communities can descend into violent conflict. From 1999 until 2000, the conflict in North Maluku, Indonesia, saw the most intense communal violence of Indonesia's period of democratization. For almost a year, militias waged a brutal religious war which claimed the lives of almost four thousand lives. The conflict culminated in ethnic cleansing along lines of religious identity, with approximately three hundred thousand people fleeing their homes. Based on detailed research, this book provides an in depth picture of all aspects of this devastating and brutal conflict. It also provides numerous examples of how different conflict theories can be applied in the analysis of real situations of tensions and violence, illustrating the mutually reinforcing nature of mass level sentiment and elite agency, and the rational and emotive influences on those involved. This book will be of interest to researchers in Asian Studies, conflict resolution and religious violence.

The idea that religion has to succeed in a «market, selling «salvation goods, has proved to be extremely attractive to scholars in sociology and the study of religion. Max Weber used the term «salvation good to compare different religious traditions. Pierre Bourdieu employed the term in order to analyze «religious economy. And recently, an American group of researchers advocating «rational choice of religion put the theme at the fore-front of current debates. This book - the fruit of an International Congress in Lausanne in April 2005 - brings together leading specialists in the fields of sociology and the study of religion who discuss the terms «salvation goods (or religious goods) and «religious market. The authors test the applicability of these concepts by using specific examples and they either deliberately advocate or criticize Weberian, Bourdieusian or rational-choice perspectives.

Peter D. Beaulieu examines the challenge posed by-and to-modernity and historic Islam as they encounter one another. He compares the Western separation of Church and state with the unitary Islamic State, and explores the proposed cultural and societal principles of the Second Vatican Council as potentially influencing long-term events in both arenas. Beaulieu's research is comprehensive and richly documented, yet offers an accessible triangular inquiry into the mosque, the manger, and modernity. By restoring a place at the table for Trinitarian Christianity alongside the engulfing monotheism of Islam and the alternative skepticism of Western rationalism, this inquiry broadens the pallet of inter-religious and intercultural contact points. Beyond Secularism and Jihad? provides balanced attention to the differences as well as the similarities between Christianity, Islam, and modernity. An emerging theme is natural law, which is universal and intrinsic to all mankind and not confined to competing theologies. Neglected in the West that it helped create, natural law might contribute to the needed "grammar" for dialogue between the citizens in the West and the followers of Islam.

This book explores the first encounter in the mid-fifteenth century between Western Europe and the West African Coast, arguing that it did not produce hostility, but rather a climate of beneficial mutual exchange. It examines West African pre-colonial social history and asserts that around the year 1500 West Africa became a safe haven for those fleeing political or religious persecution in Europe. Among them were mercantile settlers, Tangomaos or Lancados, known to have arrived on the West African Coast after the Portuguese explorers in 1446. They exchanged commodities, culture, religious ideas and practices with West African people. These events raise searching questions on the nature of identity and space. Contents: West Africa: The Portuguese Agenda-West African Kingship - The Beginnings of Westernisation - The Emergence of an Afro-European Merchant Class - Religion, Ritual and Sacrifice: A Portuguese Encounter.

This book provides an innovative contribution to the emerging field of culture and development through the lens of cultural rights, arguing in favour of a fruitful dialogue between human rights, development studies, critical cultural studies, and concerns about the protection and preservation of cultural diversity. It breaks with established approaches by introducing the themes of aesthetics, embodiment, narrative and peace studies into the field of culture and development, and in doing so, proposes both an expanded conception of cultural rights and a holistic vision of development that not only includes these elements in a central way, but which argues that genuine sustainability must include the cultural dimension, including the notion of cultural justice as recognition, protection and respect extended to the many expressions of human imagination in this world.

This book traces how religion could have originated in prehistory and antiquity, out of natural human and prehuman behaviour. Religion is defined here as beliefs, conceptions, practices and roles concerned with the 'supernatural'. A variety of elements of religion can be identified. These include: spirits, ghosts, life after death, heaven, shamans. To try to reduce religion to a single original element is a mistake. There may be no single origin. But the individual elements have separate origins, and these can be traced. The common subjective component of religious elements is the numinous, which is commonly ascribed to external sources identified as 'supernatural' and 'spiritual'. The numinous sense is explained by means of certain neural processes with a focus in the temporal lobes. Probably for the first time, evidence is brought to bear from primatology, palaeoanthropology, ethnography, ancient history and history of religions, as well as theology, neurology and psycho-pharmacology. The field of origins of religion has been neglected by anthropology since the 1930s, but has enjoyed renewed interest from the 1990s. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary book makes an important contribution to the field.

The emergence of religious fundamentalism in a globalized, post-colonial world poses a significant challenge to the "End of History" narratives common in academic and non-academic literature alike. Globalization, Modernity and the Rise of Religious Fundamentalism proposes that we must seek new explanations for this phenomenon that recasts the relationship between globalization, modernity and religion. One model through which this possible is that of a dialectical kaleidoscopic methodology - one that applies a variety of theoretical tools and takes a truly multi-dimensional perspective. Through the overlapping and complementary approaches of systems theory, field theory and network theory, this book redefined the concepts of globalization, modernity and religion itself by challenging the inherent misconceptions of ethnocentric biases. It also provides a thorough historical analysis of religious systems from antiquity to the present to show the integration of modern and archaic elements within the structure of religious fundamentalism. Interdisciplinary in nature, Globalization, Modernity and the Rise of Religious Fundamentalism will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as geopolitics, history of race and ethnicity, postcolonialism, globalization and sociology of religion.

In Marx 's Experiments and Microscopes: Modes of Production, Religion, and the Method of Successive Abstractions, Paul B. Paolucci examines how Marx brought conventional scientific practice together with dialectical reason to produce his unique approach to sociological research. Though scholars often interpret his work through a dialectical framework or as that of an aspirant scientific contender, less common are demonstrations of how Marx brought these two forms of inquiry together in ways as familiar to the conventional scientist as they are to the experienced Marxian scholar. This book discusses Marx 's use of a method of successive abstractions in his study of modes of production and elucidates the application of that method to studies in political economy and the sociology of religion.

Arabic and its Alternatives discusses the complicated relationships between language, religion and communal identities in the Middle East in the period following the First World War. This volume takes its starting point in the non-Arabic and non-Muslim communities, tracing their linguistic and literary practices as part of a number of interlinked processes, including that of religious modernization, of new types of communal identity politics and of socio-political engagement with the emerging nation states and their accompanying nationalisms. These twentieth-century developments are firmly rooted in literary and linguistic practices of the Ottoman period, but take new turns under influence of colonization and decolonization, showing the versatility and resilience as much as the vulnerability of these linguistic and religious minorities in the region. Contributors are Tijmen C. Baarda, Leyla Dakhli, Sasha R. Goldstein-Sabbah, Liora R. Halperin, Robert Isaf, Michiel Leezenberg, Merav Mack, Heleen Murre-van den Berg, Konstantinos Papastathis, Franck Salameh, Cyrus Schayegh, Emmanuel Szurek, Peter Wien.

Across the world cattle remain absolutely essential to civilization's survival as a source of food, clothing, and labor. Human beings eat beef and ice cream, drink milk, wear leather, and love hamburgers and hot dogs. This book describes the history of the domestication and deification of the cow and bull and their intimate relation to humans. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) scares reveal its continued importance in daily life.

Wahhabism is often understood as a radical version of Islam responsible for inspiring and motivating Islamic terrorism. Western Imaginings: The Intellectual Contest to Define Wahhabism is an inquiry into how Wahhabism has been understood and represented by Western intellectuals, particularly those belonging to the neo-conservative and liberal traditions. In contrast to the existing literature that treats Wahhabism as a historical phenomenon or a monolithic theological ideology, a literature often written by authors keen to promote geopolitical interests or with ideological axes to grind, Davis's work considers Wahhabism as a discursive construct crafted and popularized by a Western intellectual elite. This comprehensive study speaks to how and why Western intellectuals have chosen to represent Wahhabism in specific ways, ranging from an analysis of the particular rhetorical techniques employed by these intellectuals to a consideration of the religious and political beliefs that inspire and motivate their decisions. Western Imaginings is aimed at students of political philosophy, intellectual traditions, and sociology; media and policy professionals; and anyone interested in how Islamic doctrines like Wahhabism have been represented in an international context framed by a heightened anxiety about radical Islam.

Since the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the political roles of religious institutions and groups have captured inernational attention. This book examines how religious institutions and organizations in various Asian countries are influencing democratic development and the shaping of government policies. Religious Organizations and Democratization covers Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Japan. The chapters specifically address the engagement of Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, and other religious organizations in the advancement and/or hindrance of democratization in the region. The contributors consider such questions as: Why have some religious organizations played a decisive role in democratic transitions, while others remained politically dormant, and other still acted in conservative alliances to block democratic development? Why did some religious organizations that once were active and instrumental to democratic change lose their political vitality as soon as civil liberties were successfully introduced? And why did other religious organizations, irrespective of their roles in the process of democratic transition, emerge as key political forces in the civil society?

Since the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the political roles of religious institutions and groups have captured inernational attention. This book examines how religious institutions and organizations in various Asian countries are influencing democratic development and the shaping of government policies. Religious Organizations and Democratization covers Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Japan. The chapters specifically address the engagement of Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, and other religious organizations in the advancement and/or hindrance of democratization in the region. The contributors consider such questions as: Why have some religious organizations played a decisive role in democratic transitions, while others remained politically dormant, and other still acted in conservative alliances to block democratic development? Why did some religious organizations that once were active and instrumental to democratic change lose their political vitality as soon as civil liberties were successfully introduced? And why did other religious organizations, irrespective of their roles in the process of democratic transition, emerge as key political forces in the civil society?

This study provides a comprehensive and balanced view of the New Age through formal studies and original research. Equal attention is accorded to practices and institutions illustrating the New Age as a concrete, living enterprise, not merely a philosophy. The book offers a thorough study of major writings by British, American and other commentators, detailed ethnographic testimony, and a broad survey of the New Age phenomenon in all its aspects.