Suchergebnisse

Santa recibe la influencia del Naturalismo en diferentes aspectos, aunque su claro sentido moralizante la aleja del "canon" zoliano. En este trabajo se pone de relieve la importancia del mensaje didáctico-religioso de la novela, así como la valoración de Gamboa sobre la condición de la mujer en la época y la expresión implícita de sus convicciones políticas en el México de Porfirio Díaz.Abstract Santa bears the influence of Naturalism in different aspects; however, its moralizing content moves it away from the canon established by Zola. This paper highlights the importance of the novel's didactic and religious content, together with Gamboa's discussion on the condition of women, as well as the implicit expression of his political convictions in the México of Porfirio Díaz.

Santa recibe la influencia del Naturalismo en diferentes aspectos, aunque su claro sentido moralizante la aleja del "canon" zoliano. En este trabajo se pone de relieve la importancia del mensaje didáctico-religioso de la novela, así como la valoración de Gamboa sobre la condición de la mujer en la época y la expresión implícita de sus convicciones políticas en el México de Porfirio Díaz.Abstract Santa bears the influence of Naturalism in different aspects; however, its moralizing content moves it away from the canon established by Zola. This paper highlights the importance of the novel's didactic and religious content, together with Gamboa's discussion on the condition of women, as well as the implicit expression of his political convictions in the México of Porfirio Díaz.

Europa, Nährboden der Religionen. Die kritische Haltung in der Erneuerung religiöser Formen.
Die Konzepte und die Rhetorik, die in unserer Zeit die Debatte zu der Frage bestimmen, ob Religion auf dem Vormarsch ist, stammen aus der Zeit vor hundert Jahren. Die Jahrhundertwende zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts ist Zeuge der Entstehung eines globalen Religionsmarktes, eines Bewusstseins für die christlichen Wurzeln Europas, einer Individualisierung religiösen Denkens und Fühlens und einer Säkularisierung des Lebens durch den wissenschaftlichen Denkansatz. Diese Parameter sind noch heute aktuell. Gemessen an diesem Zusammenhang diskutiert der Artikel die allgemeine Religionstheorie des deutsch-amerikanischen Soziologen Martin Riesebrodt. Der Artikel kritisiert diese Theorie und bietet an, die Religionskritik nicht als Gegensatz zur Dynamik der Religionen, sondern als deren aktiver Teilnehmer zu sehen. Die kulturelle Globalisierung macht aus Europa ihren Schauplatz, denn im Laufe seiner Geschichte hat Europa regelmäßig neue Religionen und neuen Formen religiöser Wahrnehmung und Praxis hervorgebracht, welche ebenso oft durch Kritik in Frage gestellt wurden, was diese eben genau aus diesem Grund zur Erneuerung bewegt hat.

Recent debates about the ethics of identity in a global age have dealt with how to prioritize conflicting local and global allegiances. Guided by these concerns, the fiction of Alice Walker develops a distinctive view of how local cultures and global movements can fruitfully interact. This vision depends on concepts from Asian religions, a major influence that critics of Walker have largely overlooked. Walker promotes Hindu and Buddhist meditation in a context of widespread African American skepticism toward Asian religions. According to widespread notions of cultural authenticity, Asian religions cannot nourish an African American connection to ethnic roots. In response to this challenge, Alice Walker's fiction portrays Hindu and Buddhist mystics as African Americans' ancestors, thus positioning these faiths as authentically black. By creatively enfolding Asian religions into her sense of African American heritage, Walker builds a spiritual cosmopolitanism that relies on claims of ancestral affiliation even when these claims are not literal. This strategy is Walker's effort to create a new paradigm of cultural authenticity, one that allows individuals and groups to choose their ancestors. Walker's approach seeks to incorporate disparate global influences while still valorizing the figure of the ancestor. This innovative approach places Walker at the forefront of a growing number of African American artists and intellectuals who promote Asian religions to American minorities. Walker's work vividly dramatizes larger concerns in transnational American Studies: Eastern philosophy's relevance to identity politics, the tensions between universal ideals and cultural specifics, and the ethics of cross-cultural appropriation.

Religion and democracy are not only social institutions but also objects of attitudes. This article focuses on conspiracy thinking and its links with attitudes toward religion and democracy. Due to its contextual character, the study is limited to Poland and the article intends to report the data on the subject from surveys conducted in this country. In terms of conspiracy thinking and attitudes toward religion, the literature review of existing Polish survey data (Study 1) led to the conclusion that not all types of religious life are correlated with conspiracy thinking. Individual spirituality (the centrality of religiosity and the quest orientation of religiosity) matters less in terms of conspiracy thinking than religion understood as a specific element of ideology (Polish Catholic nationalism, religious fundamentalism, or collective narcissism). In terms of attitudes toward democracy (Study 2), the original dataset is coded in a new way (as categorial variables) and then presented. It suggests that, contrary to earlier research, conspiracy thinking does not necessarily lead to the support of anti-democratic attitudes. Alienation as much as radicalization might be a consequence of conspiracy thinking. There is no significant difference in terms of conspiracy thinking between adherents of authoritarian rules and conditional democrats, indifferent democrats, or people with ambivalent opinions on democracy, described in comparative research on political culture as dissatisfied democrats or critical citizens. The lower level of conspiracy thinking has been identified only among consistent democrats.

Why are religious conflicts more violent than non-religious conflicts? Research has argued that religion pushes partisans toward violence. However, existing research suffers from widespread problems of measurement validity and fails to confront the possibility of endogeneity in the relationship between religion and violence. This article develops a more precise measure of the relevance of religion to conflict based on the use of religious rhetoric by political organizations. With this approach in mind, this article disentangles the causal sequence linking religious rhetoric and violence using annually coded data on the rhetoric of 495 organizations worldwide from 1970 through 2012. The analysis finds a strong general correlation between religious rhetoric and violence. However, past use of religious rhetoric does not increase the likelihood that an organization will participate in violence or the overall intensity of conflict. On the contrary, previous participation in violence makes an organization more likely to adopt religious rhetoric for mobilization. Indeed, religious rhetoric becomes more likely as violence increases in intensity and conflict continues for longer periods of time. These findings suggest that violent actors adopt religious rhetoric to solve the logistical challenges associated with violence, including access to mobilizing resources and recruitment and retention of members. This article contributes to the study of religious conflict by providing evidence of endogeneity in the relationship between religion and violence and highlighting the need for temporally sensitive measures of religious mobilization.

AbstractIn this article, we discuss the relation between the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and its jurisprudence and social mobilizations around the place of religion in the society. We focus on the struggles to define the intersection of religion and public education in Romania after the fall of communism. We show that secularist and counter-secularist civil society activists contending for the place of religion in public education in this country have made strategic use of the ECtHR and its case law, both in legal battles and in debates within the national public sphere. We argue that, since references to the ECtHR and its jurisprudence can be used in discursive battles as a form of symbolic "capital", the strategies of mobilizing actors are at times more important than the strict doctrinal content of the ECtHR's judgments for understanding if and how the ECtHR's "shadow" is cast over religion-related mobilizations.

The prevailing view of both the U.S. Supreme Court and liberal theory in America is that liberal principles are neither essentially religious nor essentially secular, but somehow foundationally neutral, or in the words of the Court neutral between "religion and nonreligion." This essay challenges the cogency of this view through a comparative examination of two strong defenders of religious freedom from the American revolutionary era: Thomas Jefferson and Isaac Backus. Jefferson, the Enlightenment rationalist, and Backus, the Calvinist-Baptist, may initially seem tailor-made for this foundational neutrality, but closer examination reveals that religious freedom for them was not only an extension of their radically opposed views on religion but also an instrument for the promotion of those views throughout society. The ambiguity of America's founding principles is best understood, not through the notion of neutrality, but as the product of a yet unsettled struggle between devout religion and secular Enlightenment.

The Religion of the Homeland. The Cult of «Martyrs of Freedom» in Nineteenth-Century Italy In recent years, the historiography of the Risorgimento has been transformed by a new approach that began with the so-called linguistic turn. One particularly stimulating element of such studies are attempts to read the cult of martyrs as a motive for patriotic volunteering, and as one of the tools used by the Risorgimento movement, starting with Mazzini, to convert people to the nationalist cause. This article outlines the development of martyr literature in Italy from the early nineteenth century up to Fascism. The author distinguishes his approach from other scholars to argue that, with the partial exception of Mazzini, those who participated in the construction of patriotic martyr cults were strongly anti-clerical. They attempted to build a civic religion, which consciously drew elements from traditional Christian religion in order to utilise its symbols and liturgies. At the same time, the cults remained firmly fixed within a secular culture.

Since about 1970 between fifteen and twenty-five percent of the populations of various Latin American countries have converted to Protestantism. This 'neo-Reformation' seems to have the power to reshape not only the spiritual experience, but also the social, political, and economic lives of its adherents. Mexico has long been conservative about religion, but even there the role of religion in society is changing. For instance, after a six decade hiatus, the Mexican government has recently allowed the Catholic Church to re-enter the public sphere, while during the past decade the number of Mexican Protestants has doubled and will likely double again by 2010. Thus, in a time of rapid political, economic, and social change, Mexican society is experiencing a religious pluralism unknown in the past. Do different religions result in different politics? The findings suggest that religious variables do influence political attitudes, engagement, and participation in Mexico. ; Funding by Department of Political Science at University of California, Santa Barbara

Parent-child relations in Jordan have traditionally been characterized by a strong emphasis on respecting the authority of the oldest male; thus, fathers are typically dictatorial & expected to command obedience. The effects of modernization on this absolute authority & on the status of children in the Jordanian family are investigated, with focus on the mediating influence of the Muslim religion in helping conserve tradition & resist liberalizing influences. Questionnaire data obtained from a sample of 200 male heads of households in two large urban centers -- Amman & Irbid -- are analyzed to determine if there are any differences regarding attitudes on parent-child relations between younger & older (born before or after 1938) Muslims & Christians. Results clearly indicate that traditional family norms still prevail among Muslims; among Christians, younger men are more open to change with respect to parent-child relations. Results affirm the critical role of religious/cultural belief systems in the modernization process. 2 Tables. K. Hyatt

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.