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This article reviews geographical research on religion in the 1990s, and highlights work from neighbouring disciplines where relevant. Contrary to views that the field is incoherent, I suggest that much of the literature pays attention to several key themes, particularly, the politics and poetics of religious place, identity and community. I illustrate the key issues, arguments and conceptualizations in these areas, and suggest various ways forward. These 'new' geographies emphasize different sites of religious practice beyond the 'officially sacred'; different sensuous sacred geographies; different religions in different historical and place-specific contexts; different geographical scales of analysis; different constitutions of population and their experience of and effect on religious place, identity and community; different dialectics (sociospatial, public-private, politics-poetics); and different moralities.

AbstractIn recent years, the paradigm of multiple modernities has spurred a growing interest in theoretical, empirical and comparative studies. Among these, the relationships between religious traditions and social dynamics have received particular attention. Counter to evolutionary accounts of modernisation processes, Eisenstadt studied the persisting and evolving links between religion, politics and modernity in different national and civilisational settings. Indeed, the collective incidence of culture, of religion and of tradition was placed at the very heart of Eisenstadt's thought – hence the many 'cultural programs of modernity'. It is the originality of this understanding of societies in modernity that we wish to underline and help explain by his interest for small nations and the religio‐political. I first advocate Eisenstadt's version of multiple modernities, highlighting the paradigm's specific knowledge interest. Secondly, we turn our attention to the often ignored importance of 'Jewish civilisation' in Eisenstadt's thought. In so doing, we underline Israel's 'smallness' and its characteristics as a 'small nation'. Lastly, we stress the elective affinity between multiple modernities and small nations in the study of politics and religion. As is the case for small nations, religion constitutes the 'other half of modernity', too rarely genuinely considered in (large nation) modernists' accounts.

The prospects of establishing religious progressive social reform movements are contemplated. Several dangerous developments in political-religious relations are highlighted: the emergence of theocratic groups & governments in various Western & Middle Eastern countries; state repression of particular religious groups in various East & South Asian nations; the integration of evangelicalism & fundamentalism within the US; & the increase of conflict amongst different Islamic groups. Nevertheless, some positive trends within these regions are noted including the manifestation of Christian communities throughout certain areas of the People's Republic of China & the growth of Catholicism within developing societies. The thought of Antonio Gramsci & Ernst Bloch is subsequently reviewed to ascertain a progressive strategy for comprehending the politics-religion nexus within different socio-political contexts. Examples of religious-social movement coalitions in the US, eg, the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, are cited to illustrate the possibility of creating a religious progressive approach to realizing social reform. J. W. Parker

This paper discusses how, in contemporary China, politico-religious narratives that reiterate the country's Confucian tradition serve to create a sense of belonging and sharedness in a community, and provide a way to interpret this community and the contemporary Chinese nation as having a divine mission. As these Chinese foundational myths combine elements of Confucianism with patriotism and nationalism, they can be interpreted as a constitutive element of a "civil religion with Chinese characteristics", and as providing arguments for a "religious" legitimation of the CCP as organization that has to lead the nation on this mission.

International audience ; The invisible politics of religion in southern European territories: preliminary considerations With this issue of Religion, State & Society, we inaugurate a planned series of special sections focusing on the analysis of the political involvement of religious associations and organisations at the local level. Without pre-empting the more substantial conclusion that we plan for the last of the special sections, in this short introduction we aim to state brieflythe main issues that will be covered by the selected articles.

AbstractCivil religion, or the connection of the nation‐state, its history, destiny, and people, to understandings of transcendence or divinity, is in crisis both as a theoretical concept and as a politico‐cultural phenomenon. The crisis has been brought about by the weakened capacity of the nation‐state to generate collective identity and a version of 'charismatic' authority. We argue that this has resulted in a shift from the widely accepted conceptualization of civil religion as a unifying force in societies to a more exclusionary force that Williams (2103) calls "tribal civil religion" That, in its own way, undermines the nation‐state. In this paper, we examine the history and various understandings of the concept of civil religion, develop an argument that the assault on the nation‐state has meant the rise of increasingly exclusive and exclusionist expressions of civil religion, and present possible suggestions for sites where 'unitive' civil religion may still be found.

With increased competition from the Protestant denominations, the Catholic Church finds itself precariously placed in Latin America in recent years. In light of the steady decline in the number of Catholics and Catholic priests in the region, many have predicted the Church's gradual irrelevance in politics. But as this study argues, that is not exactly the case. Although the growth in Protestant populations continues unabated in Latin America, the Catholic Church has increased its involvement in educational and social welfare activities. This seems to be a long-terms strategy, and is particularly true in countries where it faces the most intense competition from other religions.

This work intends to analyze the historical intersections between political parties and churches in Argentina, focusing on Catholic and evangelical interventions, since these are the religious organizations with the most presence, interests and connections in this space. Our analysis will be based on a binary classification: the term direct intersections refers to the decision by religious agents to form their own party structures, while indirect intersections is the denomination for those practices through which churches exert their influence on political parties without getting involved in the electoral arena. After establishing the degree of effectiveness of these different strategies, we will discuss their impact in the context of the consolidation of democracy in present-day Argentina. Methodologically, the analysis relies on a comprehensive and critical review of the scientific production about religion and politics in the country being studied.

This article offers an analyze of the relation between the state and the Roman Catholic Church in Croatia in the end of 20th and in the beginning of 21st century and shows how political pluralism and democracy have created conditions for a new, greater and more important role of religion in Croatian society and politics. On the first democratic elections held in spring 1990 important role of the Roman Catholic Church in Croatia was emphasized as well as its influence onto newly formed political parties and their voters alike. The approach which is in particular adopted in this article is a comparative study of position of the Roman Catholic Church in Croatia in two periods, straight after the first democratic elections, i.e. during 1990s and in more recent years, i.e. in the first decade of 21st century.