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This article explores the Islamic home-film movement in Kerala, India, a video film movement by amateur filmmakers of the Muslim Community. These films circulate in VCD and DVD format in retail outlets in both Kerala and the Gulf Council Countries (GCC). These films are important for their supporting group, Jamaat-e-islami, one of the most powerful Islamist groups in the South Asian countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as they try to gain hegemony among Kerala's Sunni Muslims through an alternative Islamic public culture. Home-films now circulate beyond their original audience of Muslim women in Kerala, among Keralite migrants in the Arab Gulf, who organize public screenings in social gatherings and labour camps. Indeed, the large-scale migration of labor to the GCC has led to a re-imagination of the moral geography of Kerala Muslim households to account for changing gender norms and family structures. The films, concerned with social reform among the Muslim Community of Kerala, also refract the experience of migration to the GCC, particularly in narrating an emotional landscape characterized by precarious conditions of labour, racialised hierarchy and the kafala (the specific employment system in many GCCs, that is a combination of a contract and patronage) through specific tropes of precarity and philosophy of risk in these films.

In recent decades two major approaches sought to explain the intersection of Mizrahi ethnicity and citizenship in Israel. Since the early 1990s, Yoav Peled's Multiple Citizenship paradigm has become dominant in explaining the differential, hierarchical and fragmented incorporation regime. Accordingly, affiliation to Jewish religion was part of an ethno-national discourse of citizenship which confined Mizrahim (Jews emanating from Muslim countries) to be trapped between the hegemonic Ashkenazim (Jews of European descent) and the Palestinian citizens. Recently, a counter explanation was offered, based on the interpretive repertoires that shape the political behavior of Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. Contrary to the liberal presuppositions of the Multiple Citizenship paradigm, this explanation places greater emphasis on cultural rather than material factors shaping political behaviours and even broader worldviews, while identifying each ethnic group with opposing cultural repertoires. By proposing the idea of "ethnic thinking" this article focuses on the entanglements of religiosity in Mizrahi politics in two case studies – the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow (the Keshet) and New Mizrahim. Rejecting the tendency to identify Mizrahim as predisposed to traditionalism, this article challenges both approaches that arguably fail to account for the performative aspects of Mizrahi citizenship.

"Examining the developments in the political and religious landscape of Western Europe between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, Power and Faith explores the origins of dominant nation Sates and religious institutions in the West emerged out of the fractured and fragmented post-Carolingian world. As a foundational text for those new to the period, the book offers a clear chronological framework for understanding and analysing the emerging polities of Western Europe and an examination of the influence of the Papacy and the Crusades across Christian life and culture. Mixed with careful consideration of major social and economic themes including urbanisation, rural revolution, and the role of women in politics, religion, and society, the book gives a uniquely comprehensive overview of political and religious developments in Western Europe during a neglected yet fundamentally significant period. The book is divided into six parts, part one sets out the scope and aims of the book and discusses the sources used. Parts two and six provide overviews of the political and religious states of affairs in Europe at the start and end of the period respectively. Framed by these sections, the book is divided into three chronologically-ordered parts each containing three chapters, the first offers a brief account of the main historiography of the period concerned, the second provides a thorough account and analysis of the main political developments across Europe during it and the third explores the main religious changes. Power and Faith is an essential introductory guide for students and researchers interested in politics, religion, and society in Western Europe during the middle ages"--

Japan is widely regarded as having a unique culture and a strong national identity. Paradoxically, however, many basic elements of Japanese culture are not originally Japanese. Since the beginning of its history, Japan has been one of the world s major importers of foreign cultures. Its culture was thoroughly "hybrid" long before that word became fashionable in contemporary global studies. But this does not mean that Japan s culture lacks originality. The Japanese have always made strikingly original contributions, even improvements, to whatever they imported. Even more significantly, the "hybridity" of their culture produced ongoing tensions that served as a kind of creative dynamo for Japanese writers, artists, and intellectuals. This book explores the fundamental creative tension between the native and the foreign in many areas of Japanese culture, from politics and religion to art and literature - a tension also often interpreted as between tradition and modernity

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution states in part "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." In an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut, Thomas Jefferson reiterated the intention of the First Amendment's Establishment and Free-Exercise clauses – that the religious freedoms sought in the American experience required "a high wall of separation between church and state."2 Only by extricating religion from government, and government from religion, could American citizens truly enjoy both their faith and democracy. Not until the twentieth century, though, were the Establishment and Free-Exercise clauses seriously tested. Religion, the Supreme Court, and American politics collided in the second half of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1940's, the Court began to address previously unquestioned traditions of prayer in the public schools and modern concerns regarding religious faiths and the workplace. The real challenge for the Court, though, resulted from the confrontation of religious liberties and civil rights, specifically those granted to redress long standing racial prejudices in American history. It was this juxtaposition that had the most serious ramifications for modern politics and debates regarding Constitutional religious rights.

Supported by newspaper, collected letters and other documents, this article explores the relationships between politics and religion, taking into account the proposal of "politicized religion" contextually bound to the times of Gabriel García Moreno in Ecuador. It seeks to deepen understanding concerning the use of spirituality, representations and religious institutions for purposes of strengthening the State and its legitimacy of power. At the same time, it goes beyond the limits of this plane in order to advance the construction of a model of a Catholic nation based on an opposition to impiety. ; Apoyado en fuentes hemerográficas, epistolarios y otros documentos, este artículo explora las relaciones entre política y religión, bajo la propuesta de "religión politizada" en el contexto del Ecuador garciano. Busca adentrarse en el uso de la espiritualidad, las representaciones y las instituciones religiosas para los propósitos de afianzamiento del Estado y la legitimación del poder. A la vez, trasciende este plano para avanzar en la construcción de un modelo de nación católica basado en una oposición a la impiedad.

Brazil has experienced a great deal of political instability and a strengthening of conservatism since the last presidential election and which, during the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, suffered one of its most critical moments. The objective of this communication is to analyse the important role played by religious actors during this process and to demonstrate how the political alliances established between Pentecostals and Charismatic Catholics in the National Congress has made possible a series of political initiatives aimed at dismantling the expansion of human rights and policies of the Workers Party governments. With an anti-Communist spirit and a conservative vision of sexual morality and gender relations, these political groups have in recent years approached the social movement Schools without Party (Escola sem partido) and today represent an enormous challenge to Brazilian democracy.