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Scholars have devoted considerable attention to understanding how individuals' political and economic attitudes shape their views toward government policies designed to alleviate growing income inequality in the United States. However, much less attention has been paid to the question of how religion shapes Americans' attitudes toward income inequality and redistributive policies. Using data drawn from the 2013 Economic Values Survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), we explore the role that religion—including religious affiliation, the degree and nature of religiosity, the nexus of politics and religion, and interpretations of biblical text—plays in structuring individuals' attitudes toward government redistribution policies. We find that religious affiliation and participation do not meaningfully shape attitudes toward redistributive policies; however, identification with the "religious right" and specific interpretations of scripture do influence how Americans think about redistribution. These findings provide evidence that standard treatments of religion focusing primarily on affiliation and religiosity may have somewhat limited explanatory power with regard to attitudes about issues that fall outside of the standard "culture wars" framework, at least relative to the explanatory power of more specific expressions of religious belief.

1. Religion and identity : theoretical considerations -- 2. Bosnian, Croatian, and Slovenian Catholicisms in contemporary Europe -- 3. Bosnian, Croatian, and Slovenian Catholicisms : narratives, legacies, and collective identities -- 4. Collectivistic Christianities in the European context.

"Development and Religion" published on by Oxford University Press.

In the first half of the 17th century, three major Buddhist governments that combined a twofold religious and political structure under a Buddhist ruler were established in the Tibetan cultural area (hereafter: Joint Twofold System of Governance).1 In 1625/26,2 Bhutan was united under the rule of a charismatic Tibetan Buddhist master, Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyel (1594– ca. 1651; hereafter: Zhabdrung); Tibet and Sikkim followed, both in 1642 – although with significant differences in their respective institutionalisation. The Bhutanese government as a constitutional monarchy with a Buddhist king is the only one among the three still in existence today. Bhutan's transformation into a modern society along the lines of this Joint Twofold System of Governance under the conditions of non-colonialisation but with crucial and intense encounters of its societal elites with Western and Asian forms of modernity and secularity represents, therefore, a unique case in point.

Post-Soviet Azerbaijan has been moving through a process of Islamic revival for more than two decades. This revival in itself has not been a homogenous process, having its ups and downs, changing dynamics and multi-dimensional characteristics. Radicalization, sectarianism and state-civil society-religious relations are the issues at stake. A recent trend of more control over faith-based activism with ongoing marginalization along sectarian lines is a problem that must be addressed.

Religion and Hip Hop brings together the category of religion, Hip Hop cultural modalities and the demographic of youth. Bringing postmodern theory and critical approaches in the study of religion to bear on Hip Hop cultural practices, this book examines how scholars in religious and theological studies have deployed and approached religion when analyzing Hip Hop data. Using existing empirical studies on youth and religion to the cultural criticism of the Humanities, Religion and Hip Hop argues that common among existing scholarship is a thin interrogation of the category.

This book explores the interrelation of literacy and religion as practiced by Western Christians in, first, historical contexts and, second, in one contemporary church setting. Using both a case study and a Foucauldian theoretical framework, the book provides a sustained analysis of the reciprocal discursive construction of literacy, religiosity and identity in one Seventh-day Adventist Church community of Northern Australia. Critical linguistic and discourse analytic theory is used to disclose processes of theological (church), familial (home) and educational (school) normalisation of community members into regulated ways of hearing and speaking, reading and writing, being and believing. Detailed analyses of spoken and written texts taken from institutional and local community settings show how textual religion is an exemplary technology of the self, a politics constituted by canonical texts, interpretive norms, textual practices, ritualised events and sociopolitical protocols that, ultimately, are turned in upon the self. The purpose of these analyses is to show how, across denominational difference in belief (tradition) and practice, particular versions of self and society are constructed through economies of truth from text that constrain what can and cannot be articulated and enacted by believers.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard's radical protestant philosophy of the individual, in which his leap of faith acts to the exclusion of a general conception of ethics, has become a model often quoted in contemporary philosophies of the political subject. Here, all constraints of the system are ignored and an "event of truth" without rational foundation is adopted in its place, leading to maxims describing how one should acts which seem totalitarian. The volume examines how far Kierkegaard's anti-institutional practice of conceived idea pioneers a modernity defined as an argument, indeed as an experience, of the impossibility of rationally comprehending a system of thinking. Since religious and aesthetic experience functions as an experience if of this impossibility to conclude, the coherence of the aesthetic and the religious, and the resulting political dimension of this coherence, has to be questioned. This book demonstrates on the one hand Kierkegaard's singular position in this problematic and to reveal a possible Protestant basis of his thinking, and on the other, to clarify where aspects of the aesthetic and the religious which cannot be rationalised, intersect with the totalitarian

"The conquest of Egypt by Islamic armies under the command of Amr ibn al-As in the seventh century transformed medieval Egyptian society. Seeking to uncover the broader cultural changes of the period by drawing on a wide array of literary and documentary sources, Maged Mikhail stresses the cultural and institutional developments that punctuated the histories of Christians and Muslims in the province under early Islamic rule. From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt traces how the largely agrarian Egyptian society responded to the influx of Arabic and Islam, the means by which the Coptic Church constructed its sectarian identity, the Islamisation of the administrative classes and how these factors converged to create a new medieval society. The result is a fascinating and essential study for scholars of Byzantine and early Islamic Egypt."--Page 4 of cover