The Religious Dimensions of Shared Spaces


Book Description

Space sharing by groups is widespread in the United States, from commercial partnerships, to government and private sector joint use agreements, to the use of public facilities and commons. All space-sharing arrangements are similar in most respects, so what difference does it make when religious groups are involved?




Affective Trajectories


Book Description

The contributors to Affective Trajectories examine the mutual and highly complex entwinements between religion and affect in urban Africa in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on ethnographic research throughout the continent and in African diasporic communities abroad, they trace the myriad ways religious ideas, practices, and materialities interact with affect to configure life in urban spaces. Whether examining the affective force of the built urban environment or how religious practices contribute to new forms of attachment, identification, and place-making, they illustrate the force of affect as it is shaped by temporality and spatiality in the religious lives of individuals and communities. Among other topics, they explore Masowe Apostolic Christianity in relation to experiences of displacement in Harare, Zimbabwe; Muslim identity, belonging, and the global ummah in Ghana; crime, emotions, and conversion to neo-Pentecostalism in Cape Town; and spiritual cleansing in a Congolese branch of a Japanese religious movement. In so doing, the contributors demonstrate how the social and material living conditions of African cities generate diverse affective forms of religious experiences in ways that foster both localized and transnational paths of emotional knowledge. Contributors. Astrid Bochow, Marian Burchardt, Rafael Cazarin, Hansjörg Dilger, Alessandro Gusman, Murtala Ibrahim, Peter Lambertz, Isabelle L. Lange, Isabel Mukonyora, Benedikt Pontzen, Hanspeter Reihling, Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon




The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations


Book Description

The historical interplay of Hinduism as an ancient Indian religion and Christianity as a religion associated (in India, at least) with foreign power and colonialism, continues to animate Hindu–Christian relations today. On the one hand, The Routledge Handbook of Hindu–Christian Relations describes a rich history of amicable, productive, even sometimes syncretic Hindu–Christian encounters. On the other, this handbook equally attends to historical and contemporary moments of tension, conflict, and violence between Hindus and Christians. Comprising thirty-nine chapters by a team of international contributors, this handbook is divided into seven parts: Theoretical and methodological considerations Historical interactions Contemporary exchanges Sites of bodily and material interactions Significant figures Comparative theologies Responses The handbook explores: how the study of Hindu–Christian relations has been and ought to be done, the history of Hindu–Christian relations through key interactions, ethnographic reflections on current dynamics of Hindu–Christian exchange, important key thinkers, and topics in comparative theology, ultimately providing a framework for further debates in the area. The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations is essential reading for students and researchers in Hindu–Christian studies, Hindu traditions, Asian religions, and studies in Christianity. This handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as anthropology, political science, theology, and history.




Religion and Human Security


Book Description

This volume of essays explores the long-unstudied relationship between religion and human security throughout the world. The 1950s marked the beginning of a period of extraordinary religious revival, during which religious political-parties and non-governmental organizations gained power around the globe. Until now, there has been little systematic study of the impact that this phenomenon has had on human welfare, except of a relationship between religious revival to violence. The authors of these essays show that religion can have positive as well as negative effects on human wellbeing. They address a number of crucial questions about the relationship between religion and human security: Under what circumstances do religiously motivated actors tend to advance human welfare, and under what circumstances do they tend to threaten it? Are members of some religious groups more likely to engage in welfare-enhancing behavior than in others? Do certain state policies tend to promote security-enhancing behavior among religious groups while other policies tend to promote security-threatening ones? In cases where religious actors are harming the welfare of a population, what responses could eliminate that threat without replacing it with another? Religion and Human Security shows that many states tend to underestimate the power of religious organizations as purveyors of human security. Governments overlook both the importance of human security to their populations and the religious groups who could act as allies in securing the welfare of their people. This volume offers a rich variety of theoretical perspectives on the nuanced relationship between religion and human security. Through case studies ranging from Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan, to the United States, Northern Ireland, and Zimbabwe, it provides important suggestions to policy makers of how to begin factoring the influence of religion into their evaluation of a population's human security and into programs designed to improve human security around the globe.




Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean


Book Description

“Will spark debate . . . and hopefully further research into points of contact between the monotheistic religions, and others.” —The Levantine Review While devotional practices are usually viewed as mechanisms for reinforcing religious boundaries, in the multicultural, multiconfessional world of the Eastern Mediterranean, shared shrines sustain intercommunal and interreligious contact among groups. Heterodox, marginal, and largely ignored by central authorities, these practices persist despite aggressive, homogenizing nationalist movements. This volume challenges much of the received wisdom concerning the three major monotheistic religions and the “clash of civilizations,” as contributors examine intertwined religious traditions along the shores of the Near East from North Africa to the Balkans.




The Politics of Religion in South and Southeast Asia


Book Description

The notion of a ‘politics of religion’ refers to the increasing role that religion plays in the politics of the contemporary world. This book presents comparative country case studies on the politics of religion in South and South Asia, including India, Pakistan and Indonesia. The politics of religion calls into question the relevance of modernist notions of secularism and democracy, with the emphasis instead on going back to indigenous roots in search of authentic ideologies and models of state and nation building. Within the context of the individual countries, chapters focus on the consequences that politics of religion has on inclusive nation-building, democracy and the rights of individuals, minorities and women. The book makes a contribution to both the theoretical and conceptual literature on the politics of religion as well as shed light on the implications and ramifications of the politics of religion on contemporary South Asian and South East Asian countries. It is of interest to students and scholars of South and South East Asian Studies, as well as Comparative Politics.




The Religious Dimension of Intercultural Education


Book Description

This book explores the religious dimension in intercultural education and states that religion plays a key role in value conflicts and worldview differences in schools in pluralistic societies. Religion is considered having a double role, both as the reason for deep differences in mental mapping and worldviews and as a contributor to intercultural understanding and dialogue. The book discusses the role religion has in education both at an institutional level, in the whole school society, and in Religious Education as a specific school subject. Underlying Western worldviews in subject curricula and subject didactics need to be revealed and contested to increase the benefit of education for all students. It argues for the need of a contextual understanding to help teaching and learning address religious diversity in schools.




Location, Space and Place in Religious Education


Book Description

People form attachments to their home, their neighbourhood and environment, to the region and nation to which they belong. They express feelings about space and place, especially so in 'globalized times'. In religious studies, in theology, and in education, there is a growing interest in spatial theories either as constructed within national borders, or within international and transnational spaces. The 'spatial turn' has become an acknowledged term in interdisciplinary discourses. Although every practice of religious education is situated and contextually dependent, religious education (RE) research until now has not systematically paid attention to this fundamental insight. This volume is devoted specifically to clarifying the close relationship between RE practice and spatial and situational conditions. After clarifying the main concepts in Part 1, Part 2 includes chapters related to classroom studies, while Part 3 focuses on studies about teachers of religious education. Part 4 contains studies beyond the classroom, such as school chapels, churches, and 'inner space'. All contributions to this volume were developed in the context of the European Network for Religious Education through Contextual Approaches (ENRECA) which has focused recently on the central issue of space and place.




The Routledge Companion to the American Landscape


Book Description

The Routledge Companion to the American Landscape provides a comprehensive overview of the American landscape in a way fit for the twenty-first century, not only in its topical and regional scope but also in its methodological and disciplinary diversity. Critically surveying the contemporary scholarship on the American landscape, this companion brings together scholars from the social sciences and humanities who focus their work on understanding the polyphonic evolution of the United States’ landscape. It simultaneously assesses the development of the US landscape as well as the scholarly thought that has driven innovation and continued research about that landscape. Four broad sections focus on key areas of scholarship: environmental landscapes, social, cultural, and popular identities in the landscape, political landscapes, and urban/economic landscapes. A special essay, "American Landscapes Under Siege" and accompanying short case studies call attention to the legacies and realities of race in the American landscape, bridging the discussion of social and political landscapes. This companion offers an invaluable and up-to-date guide for scholars and graduate students to current thinking across the range of disciplines which converge in the study of place, including Geography, Cultural Studies, and History as well as the interdisciplinary fields of American Studies, Environmental Studies, and Planning.




Intersections between Jewish Studies and Habsburg Studies


Book Description

In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the often used binaries are misleading and conceal the complex and sometimes even paradoxical conditions that shaped Jewish life in the region before the Shoah. The very complexity of Habsburg Central Europe both in synchronic and diachronic perspective precludes any singular historical narrative of “Habsburg Jewry,” and it is not the intention of this volume to offer an overview of “Habsburg Jewish history.” The selected articles in this volume illustrate instead how important it is to reevaluate categories, deconstruct historical narratives, and reconceptualize implemented approaches in specific geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts in order to gain a better understanding of the complex and pluricultural history of the Habsburg Empire and the region as a whole.