IN ONE OF MY BOOKS I HAVE ARGUED THAT 'MODERNIZATION' is a process whereby a society becomes increasingly aware of itself, its identity and aspirations, and seeks to make concrete its awareness in terms of seeking equivalence with other nations. The argument of this essay is that while the process of change in India has general characteristics common to other societies, it can never be the same in totality because the initial conditions are so different.
This article presents a symposium on the "indirect effects" of the European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence on the place of religion in the educational sphere. The symposium showcases empirical research providing critical insight into how the Court's decisions may influence related domestic debates, raise public consciousness, and change how social actors perceive their rights and articulate their right claims in the area of religion and education. The research underpinning this symposium represents a clear departure from existing scholarship in this domain: it examines the impact of the Court not from the top-down (Court impact on states and their legislative frameworks) but from grassroots level upwards, in seeking to understand whether, how and to what extent Court decisions influence grassroots level actors' conceptions of their rights in the domain of religion and education and their efforts to secure new rights vis-à-vis their states.
My work attempts to identify the reasons behind the dialogue between theology and science, pointing out the difficulties of such a dialogue and the framework that appear under the conditions of the possibility of this dialogue. According to the author, the truths of science and the truths of theology belong to different dimensions and cannot collide if the specificity of the knowledge domains is observed. Science has as its object what we call physical world, whereas theology has as its object the metaphysical world, the world of values and of the meanings of existence in relation with transcendence. The arguments we bring lead to the idea of this dialogue being possible under the conditions of observing epistemic competences and suggest as possible spaces for a fruitful dialogue the issues related to existential starting points, sufferance, isolation, death, lack of sense, as well as the issue of the ethics of scientific research, of political science, of educational policy and of development policies.
Webers religionssoziologische Studien konzentrieren sich auf die Frage der Genese des modernen Kapitalismus, können jedoch zur Klärung der Relevanz der Religionen für die heutige wirtschaftliche Entwicklung nur wenig beitragen. Der Aufsatz kommentiert die neueren Versuche, einer Antwort auf die bei Weber offen gebliebenen Fragen näher zu kommen. Sieht man von a-priori-Konstruktionen kultur- oder auch interessentheoretischer Provenienz ab, findet sich auch in den neueren Ansätzen der von Weber aufgewiesene zirkuläre Zusammenhang zwischen Ideen und Interessen wieder, freilich mit deutlich stärkerer Betonung der Interessen. Es wäre jedoch verkürzt, so die These des Beitrags, dieses Ergebnis als Bestätigung der Weber'schen Säkularisierungs- und Entzauberungsthesen zu deuten. Im Kern ist es vielmehr auf die Transformation der Wirtschaft selbst in eine Instanz zurückzuführen, die "Werte" reklamiert, "Visionen" verkündet und ihrerseits religiöse Züge anzunehmen scheint. Diese Einschätzung wird durch eine an Marx und Polanyi anschließende Deutung des Kapitalismus als eines Systems entgrenzter Märkte vertieft. Die Entgrenzung der Märkte lässt ein historisch neues Potenzial gesellschaftlicher Unsicherheiten entstehen, das nach sinnhafter Bewältigung verlangt und religionsähnliche Symbolismen entstehen lässt, wenngleich die Analogie zwischen Kapitalismus und Religion auch ihre Grenzen hat.
The subject-matter of African politics has always presented a special challenge and a special problem to political scientists, namely to develop a theory which would make sense of a vast, inchoate, and unfamiliar body of material. This problem has become particularly acute in the last year or two. The rapid deterioration of African political parties, a series of military coups, recurrent crises of national unity, and heightened tendencies towards anomic and violent behaviour have not only cast doubt on previous assumptions as to the nature of African political life but have also led to a heightened mood of theoretical uncertainty among political scientists.
Despite the remarkable scholarly attention to populism and populist parties, the relation between populism and religion remains understudied. Using evidence from two long-term ruling populist parties – Turkey's Justice and Development Party and Macedonia's Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation-Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity – this study focuses on how and why religion can be an instrument for populist politics at three levels: (i) discursive, (ii) public policy and (iii) institutionalised alliances with religious authorities. The study highlights that religion comes into play at these three levels once populists attain comfortable electoral margins but encounter mounting political and economic challenges that can potentially weaken their grip on power. Ruling populists co-opt and monopolise the majority religion in the name of 'the people's will' as they increasingly undermine democratic legitimacy but they need to justify their systematic crackdown on dissent, the system of checks and balances, the rule of law and minorities. The empirical findings of the study also demonstrate the dual function of religion for populists: its catch-all potential to create cross-class and cross-ethnicity popular support, and its instrumentality to discredit dissent as 'religiously unfit' while constructing an antagonism of 'the people' versus 'the elites'.
Matuaism developed into a full-grown organized religion in the beginning of twentieth century, and a popular religion in contemporary time. Its genesis and development has sparked many questions and concerns for the simple reason that, a large section of Namasudra people got organized under a leadership of two anti-caste leaders of Bengal, namely Harichand Thakur and Guruchand Thakur, and invented a new religion for the so-called untouchables of Bengal. The present article is an attempt to historicize the nascent journey of Matuaism from second half of nineteenth century till present time, and to critically evaluate its religious doctrine that primarily dismantles Brahminical hegemony as enunciated and canonized in the Rig Veda and other religious texts. Drawing within the framework of anti-caste movements, the present article evaluates Matuaism as a resistant religion to Brahminical hegemony on the one hand, and justifies its theology as a praxis solely devoted to public welfare and utilitarianism on the other. The so-called untouchables of Bengal who did not have any social identity and respect, invented their own religion and secured their social and cultural identity through authentic representation of their religious culture.
