"500 copies of the book have been printed from type on Dutch Hand Made paper for private distribution. No copies are for sale."-t.p. verso. ; Rubricated. Red marginal headings. "Printed for the committee by R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, at The Lakeside Press."-[p. 46]. ; Mode of access: Internet.
Cet article est une étude de l'évolution de l'institutionnalisation de la religion en République populaire de Chine de 1979 à 2009, et de ses effets sur la structuration du champ religieux chinois. Un discours normatif sur la religion est constitué par un réseau de dirigeants du Parti, de cadres, d'universitaires et de chefs religieux. Les institutions religieuses officielles sont devenues des hybrides de culture religieuse avec l'habitus institutionnel des unités de travail ( danwei) dans l'économie socialiste de marché. En même temps, une grande diversité de pratiques religieuses ont trouvé une légitimité sous le couvert de catégories laïques telles que la santé, la science, la culture, le tourisme, ou le patrimoine. Les autorités des affaires religieuses commencent à reconnaître l'existence de cette sphère religieuse en expansion, et d'accorder une légitimité discursive aux catégories jadis stigmatisées ou ignorées de la religion populaire et des nouvelles religions. Mais elles hésitent toujours à proposer un changement explicite de politique. ; postprint
In: Shofar: a quarterly interdisciplinary journal of Jewish studies ; official journal of the Midwest and Western Jewish Studies Associations, Band 31, Heft 2, S. 31-54
Throughout the twentieth century, the treatment of religion in the social sciences had been heavily shaped by the premises of modernization theory. This theory was responsible for the development of two concepts—the secularization thesis and the traditional school of civil society—which deny any space for religious content and actors in the public and political spheres. Both concepts rely on the exceptional experience of the west and share deterministic, static and essentially pessimistic assumptions regarding the ability of religion and the state to mutually coexist in democratic settings. In view of the above Israel's treatment of religion stands out. Israel challenged the premises of the secularization thesis and instead granted a significant official role to religious contents and actors in the state. Contrary to common beliefs, this research demonstrates that Israel's policy resulted in mainly positive consequences and contributed to the stabilization of its democratic regime. Furthermore, Israel's inclusive policy on religion proved successful in containing and isolating mounting religious challenges to the state in recent decades and in securing the stability of the democratic regime. Israel's account reveals two important lessons about the nature of the state-religion relationship. First, it offers a dynamic and mutually constitutive perception of the relationship between the state and religion. Second, it advocates development of a case-sensitive approach toward religion, depending on specific social, historical, and cultural attributes. These lessons might prove highly relevant for post Arab spring societies in transition.
Religion is a dominant force in the lives of many Americans. It animates, challenges, directs and shapes, as well, the legal, political, and scientific agendas of the new Age of Biotechnology. In a very real way, religion, biomedical technology and law are - epistemologically - different. Yet, they are equal vectors of force in defining reality and approaching an understanding of it. Indeed, all three share a synergetic relationship, for they seek to understand and improve the human condition. This book strikes a rich balance between thorough analysis (in the body), anchored in sound references to religion, law and medical scientific analysis, and a strong scholarly direction in the end notes. It presents new insights into the decision-making processes of the new Age of Biotechnology and shows how religion, law and medical science interact in shaping, directing and informing the political processes. This volume will be of interest to both scholars and practitioners in the fields of religion and theology, philosophy, ethics, (family) law, science, medicine, political science and public policy, and gender studies. It will serve as a reference source and can be used in graduate and undergraduate courses in law, medicine and religion. ; https://scholarship.law.edu/fac_books/1030/thumbnail.jpg
In recent years, various European and UN documents have been advancing the idea of `open, transparent and regular' dialogue between religion and democracy. Is this the naïve (or, at worst, hypocritical) rhetoric of the `Good European'? This article will discuss this issue starting from the debate between Habermas and Rawls on the role of religion in the public sphere. My approach presupposes a passage from deliberation to democratic rhetoric, the correlative abandonment of some of the tenets of Habermas's secularism, as well as a greater concern with the question of the power asymmetries underpinning discursive exchanges.
Peut-on considérer que la Religion de l'Humanité, issue du positivisme d'Auguste Comte, constitue un précédent historique pour le convivialisme ? Ce point sera examiné à partir d'un texte bilan de Frédéric Harrison, directeur du positivisme anglais. Sentiment d'appartenance à l'Humanité, droit au développement individuel, questionnement de la notion de droit, du rôle du capital, de la propriété individuelle, nécessité d'une régulation morale par l'opinion publique, Frédéric Harrison définit la Religion de l'Humanité comme « une religion sociale et un socialisme religieux », une religion permettant d'organiser l'humanité sans Dieu et sans roi, un socialisme qui se préoccupe de « changer le mode d'user du capital, et non pas de changer les personnes qui détiennent le capital ».
El libro Poder, Religión y Secularidad (2023) de Polo Santillán & Mora Zavala (Eds.), es un importante esfuerzo por actualizar los razonamientos y el conocimiento sobre la religión en un contexto global de hiperconexión, revitalización confesional y enmascarado nihilismo. Esta obra se compone de cuatro partes que abordan temas candentes del momento: secularidad, laicidad, modernidad, nihilismo, filosofía, política y su relación con la religión. Cada capítulo contiene artículos que desarrollan estos conceptos y temas desde novedosas perspectivas teóricas y filosóficas.
This piece replies to a recently published article in the European Journal for Philosophy of Religion by J. L. Schellenberg and Paul Draper. They contend that the field of African philosophy of religion needs renewal, and they make several recommendations on how to achieve this. I agree with their recommendations, but I argue they have omitted a crucial problem and solution to renew the field; namely, a fundamental problem of the field is that it systemically excludes non-Western philosophies and scholars and, therefore, the field needs to be decolonised.
According to Corey Brettschneider, we can protect freedom of religion and promote equality, by distinguishing religious groups' claims to freedom of expression and association from their claims to financial and verbal support from the state. I am very sympathetic to this position, which fits well with my own views of democratic rights and duties, and with the importance of recognizing the scope for political choice which democratic politics offers to governments and to citizens.1 This room for political choice, I believe, is necessary if people are to have any chance of reconciling the conflicting moral and political obligations they are likely to face, however idealized our conception of democracy or morality. Granted that no amount of personal and political choice will ever guarantee that we do not encounter tragic choices, and painfully conflicting moral demands, it is an important feature of democracy – or so I believe – that its rights reflect the importance of mitigating these conflicts so that people are able, as a rule, to act as they ought, so that they do not experience their moral sentiments, beliefs and capacities simply as grounds for recrimination, alienation and despair. I therefore believe that democracies have good reason not to force the consciences of the undemocratic and the intolerant, where it is possible to accommodate such people without threatening the rights of others.However, the fact that I share many of Brettschneider's intuitions and beliefs does not mean that I share them all. In particular, I find his conception of democracy unduly narrow, and unduly based on a rather idealized conception of the American constitution which is unlikely to appeal to those whose conceptions of democracy are more republican, more socialist, more pragmatic and more international than his. This article relates those worries to Brettschneider's distinction between coercion and persuasion and his claims about how we should draw the public/private distinction in the case of religion.
According to Corey Brettschneider, we can protect freedom of religion and promote equality, by distinguishing religious groups' claims to freedom of expression and association from their claims to financial and verbal support from the state. I am very sympathetic to this position, which fits well with my own views of democratic rights and duties, and with the importance of recognizing the scope for political choice which democratic politics offers to governments and to citizens.1 This room for political choice, I believe, is necessary if people are to have any chance of reconciling the conflicting moral and political obligations they are likely to face, however idealized our conception of democracy or morality. Granted that no amount of personal and political choice will ever guarantee that we do not encounter tragic choices, and painfully conflicting moral demands, it is an important feature of democracy – or so I believe – that its rights reflect the importance of mitigating these conflicts so that people are able, as a rule, to act as they ought, so that they do not experience their moral sentiments, beliefs and capacities simply as grounds for recrimination, alienation and despair. I therefore believe that democracies have good reason not to force the consciences of the undemocratic and the intolerant, where it is possible to accommodate such people without threatening the rights of others.However, the fact that I share many of Brettschneider's intuitions and beliefs does not mean that I share them all. In particular, I find his conception of democracy unduly narrow, and unduly based on a rather idealized conception of the American constitution which is unlikely to appeal to those whose conceptions of democracy are more republican, more socialist, more pragmatic and more international than his. This article relates those worries to Brettschneider's distinction between coercion and persuasion and his claims about how we should draw the public/private distinction in the case of religion.
Why are religious civil wars so difficult to resolve peacefully? This dissertation argues that states, not just insurgents, drive the intractability of religious conflicts. More specifically, it draws on insights from social psychology, along with religious and strategic studies, to develop and test a novel theoretical framework for why and when government officials refuse to compromise with opposition movements that mobilize along religious lines. The argument posits that Western political and military elites share a secular strategic culture that heightens the correspondence between religious insurgents' behavior and motives. This cognitive bias leads decision makers to infer that religious guerrillas fight to radically alter the status quo, rather than protest unfavorable conditions, such as poverty or territorial occupation. It is most influential when religious demands represent a central incompatibility in the conflict and counterinsurgents face an unfamiliar faith tradition. Ultimately, government officials discount the efficacy of a negotiated settlement because they conclude their opponents will stop at nothing to achieve their objective. It is not that religious insurgents are necessarily unwilling to make concessions; it is that they cannot credibly do so.These claims are tested with comparative evidence from British counterinsurgency campaigns during the early postwar period with an emphasis on Mandatory Palestine, Cyprus, and Kenya. The dissertation draws on original data collected from more than a half dozen archives in Great Britain, Cyprus, and Israel. This includes documents from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and housed at The National Archives of the United Kingdom that have only been available to the public since 2013. For each case, process tracing is employed to show as explicitly as possible the link between British decision-makers general beliefs about religion and their strategic preferences over the course of the conflict. The dissertation's argument and findings challenge the influential notion that dissidents' spiritual beliefs alone drive civil wars to endure longer and remain resistant to bargained solutions. In addition, they promise to augment the study of religious conflict by establishing a research agenda on the role of state forces in such engagements.
Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association In Spirit of Rebellion, Jarod Roll documents an alternative tradition of American protest by linking working-class political movements to grassroots religious revivals. He reveals how ordinary rural citizens in the south used available resources and their shared faith to defend their agrarian livelihoods amid the political and economic upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century. On the frontier of the New Cotton South in Missouri's Bootheel, the relationships between black and white farmers were complicated by racial tensions and bitter competition. Despite these divisions, workers found common ground as dissidents fighting for economic security, decent housing, and basic health, ultimately drawing on the democratic potential of evangelical religion to wage working-class revolts against commodity agriculture and the political forces that buoyed it. Roll convincingly shows how the moral clarity and spiritual vigor these working people found in the burgeoning Pentecostal revivals gave them the courage and fortitude to develop an expansive agenda of workers' rights by tapping into the powers of existing organizations such as the Socialist Party, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the NAACP, and the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union.