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Indian women rarely observed as independent identity due to its caste hierachization. Thus a woman identity along with an identity of being lower caste simultaneously makes her a victim of a rigidly imbibed patriarchy and the caste system in our society. Lots of conversion had taken place to transform the life of human beings. But the investigative studies done on these kinds of religious conversions mostly focused on men and gave less importance on its impact on women identity. Among these conversions, Dr. Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism had succeeded to a great extent in providing a new respectable identity to many. Yet the status of Buddhist women, among the Buddhist community, remained the most unexamined part of this conversion. Thus, this paper tries to examine whether the Buddhist identity succeeded to provide a sense of self respect and equal status to Buddhist women or what extent the Buddhist identity stood able to replace their stigmatized identity in public sphere by investigating the narrative provided by the Buddhist women about their own identity.

The article investigates David Grossman's To the End of the Land as an intervention into debates on the presence of myth in Israeli society. Do resonances of the Bible in Modern Hebrew perpetuate biblical narratives as constitutive to Israeli collective memory? Do literary references to the Bible dictate the rootedness of Hebrew speakers to the Land? Grossman's novel discerns the implications of these questions for the political agency of individuals. It does so through the striking adaptation of a motif much frequented in Israeli literature: the Binding of Isaac. The prominent biblical myth is transformed in the novel through a set of interplays: the unusual enactment of the Akedah scene by a matriarch; original exegeses of biblical names; and the merging of several biblical narratives into the novel's structure. The protagonists reveal their "awareness" of these interplays, when they reflect on the correspondence of their "lives" with various biblical narratives – whose divergence from one another enable them to negotiate the overdetermination of myth in political discourse. The article argues that the novel's reflective stance on the role of myth in Israeli society is codependent on the philosophy of language that it develops. To the End of the Land features language acquisition, linguistic interferences with Israel's main vernacular by other languages, word play and semiotic collapse. Through the presentation of linguistic utterances as contingent, associative, subjective and ever-changing, the identification with biblical narratives is rendered volatile. To the End of the Land questions the limits of Israeli literature in redefining the valence of the language in which it is written as well as the ability of literary texts to reshape major conditions for their own reception: collective memory and national motifs.

AbstractOf the 45 Muslim majority countries in the world, 42 have signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. While this does indeed signal a motive to improve women's rights, there is wide disparity in terms of which countries expand rights and which do not. Social science literature suggests that in addition to economic factors like wealth and oil resources, or political factors like the quality of democracy in the country, Islamic culture may be at odds with the Western conception of women's rights. We posit that Muslim countries are unique in this regard due to religious pressures that often conflict with conventional measures of human rights. Using data from the Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Dataset and the Religion and State Project, we find that Muslim countries that restrict the influence of fundamentalist religion in the government and population improve women's economic and social rights.

This article argues that a much anticipated liberalization of doctrine of matters of sexuality will not take place under Pope Francis. Though the pope has brought a more tolerant manner and tone in his discourse on homosexuality, the underlying foundation remains frozen, amid reiterated essentializations of gender that derive from archaic Catholic constructions of natural law. The article reviews Catholic doctrine on sexuality, particularly since the Church's 1975 instruction on sexual ethics. Thinking with the "indecent theology" proposals of Argentine-Scottish theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, the author compares prior expressions of doctrine with those found in key magisterial writings of Pope Francis. He concludes that the more open spirit and tone in the Pope's public pronouncements are not matched by any significant shift in his teaching on sexuality, compared to his predecessors.

AbstractSince Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), federal and state religious freedom restoration acts now extend the right to free exercise of religion to businesses. But what does it mean for businesses to have such a right? In this paper, I identify three implications of these new rights: they shift the burden for fulfilling the right to private citizens, and they conflict with businesses' both commercial and democratic obligations. To illustrate how they become problematic, I draw on the case of In re Wathen (2015) where the owners of a bed and breakfast cited their business's religion as their reason for refusing to host a wedding reception for a same-sex couple, even though state law specifically prohibited commercial businesses from discriminating based on sexual orientation.

This article reviews the economic policy of Turkey's ruling Justice & Development Party. We'll see, that, contrary to the Islamic tenets, which it is bound to espouse, the Party has been making the country ever more dependent on the external sources of finance. On the one hand, the inflow of the foreign capital has fostered the rapid economic growth. But on the other hand, Turkey already is and obviously, will continue to be hostage to increased dependence on the inflow/outflow of funds from the outside.

"Throughout human history, religion and politics have entertained the most intimate of connections as systems of authority regulating individuals and society. While the two have come apart through the process of secularization, secularism is challenged today by the return of public religion. This cogent analysis unravels the nature of the connection, disconnection, and attempted reconnection between religion and politics in the West.In a comparison of Western Europe and North America, Christianity and Islam, Joppke advances far-reaching theoretical, historical, and comparative-political arguments. With respect to theory, it is argued that only a "substantive" concept of religion, as pertaining to the existence of supra-human powers, opens up the possibility of a historical-comparative perspective on religion. At the level of history, secularization is shown to be the distinct outcome of Latin Christianity itself. And at the level of comparative politics, the Christian Right in America which has attacked the "wall of separation" between religion and state and Islam in Europe with the controversial insistence on sharia law and other "illiberal" claims from some quarters are taken to be counterpart incarnations of public religion and challenges to the secular state.This clearly argued, sweeping book will provide an invaluable framework for approaching an array of critical issues at the intersection of religion, law and politics for advanced students and researchers across the social sciences and legal studies, as well as for the interested public"--

The Popular Insurrection in Nicaragua is examined against the backdrop of the grass-roots mobilization and protest that built up between 1968 and 1978. Particular attention is given to the linkages between grass-roots religious change and political mobilization. It is argued that the democratization of religious experience in the decade following the 1968 meeting of the Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellín greatly facilitated the participation of the poor in the Nicaraguan Revolution, but that it also sowed the seeds of intrachurch conflict after the Triumph of the Revolution. Post-Triumph conflict between church and state and between the church hierarchy and the so-called popular church are then examined, with a view to showing that the major religious issue in revolutionary Nicaragua is not Marxism versus the church, but democratization in the church and in the political order.