Suchergebnisse

One famous target of Progressive Era attempts to rein in monopolistic big business was the eastern Sugar Trust. Less known is how federal regulators also tried to break monopoly control over beet sugar in the West by going after the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, a business supported and controlled by the Latter-day Saints church and run by Mormon authorities. As sugar beet agriculture boomed, the Mormon church's involvement led directly to monopolistic practices by Utah-Idaho Sugar and to federal investigations. Church leaders encouraged members, a majority population in much of the intermountain West, to patronize the company exclusively, as suppliers and consumers. As early as 1890, Mormon church president Wilford Woodruff had called missionaries to raise money for the fledgling company and asserted divine inspiration for church support. Utah-Idaho bridged the cooperative, theocratic, self-sufficient economic model of nineteenth-century Mormonism and the integration of the Mormon West into the national market economy. Religion, Politics, and Sugar shows, through the example of an important western business, how national commercial, political, and legal forces in the early twentieth century came west and, more specifically, how they affected the important role the Mormon church played in economic affairs in the region. ; https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1043/thumbnail.jpg

AbstractThe right to religious liberty as for instance set out in the European Convention of Human Rights protects acts of religious observance. Such protection can clash with other considerations, including laws aimed at protecting other state interests. Religious freedom therefore requires an account of when the right should lead to exemptions from other laws and when the right can legitimately be limited. Alan Patten has proposed a Fair Opportunity view of the normative logic of religious liberty. But Patten's view faces several problems. The normative work in his view is mainly done by added accounts of reasonable claims and of justifiability. So, the Fair Opportunity view in itself does not provide a normative criterion. Defenses of the Fair Opportunity view must therefore turn on the theoretical preferability of its structural features. But the Fair Opportunity view has the wrong form to capture the right to freedom of religion. The form of the right to freedom of religion is due to how its point is to address how states limit the liberty of citizens. Given a practice dependent approach, which assigns importance to the point and purpose of the right to freedom of religion, Patten's theory is thus problematic.

It is just over half my lifetime since I gave my London School of Economics inaugural lecture. Forty-one years later, it is a surprising honour and a daunting responsibility to give the Ernest Gellner Memorial lecture, and the more daunting because my intellectual troops are thinly spread on several fronts not all of them my natural terrain. I look at three major contemporary transformations: the ethno-religious revolutions of 1989, the global upsurge of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism and the Islamist revival as presented in the so-called Arab Spring. I ask whether nationalism is still the main game in town, especially in view of transnational expressions of religion, even in 1989, but more obviously in transnational Evangelicalism and Islamism, and in the personal and global imaginations of young people with access to the internet. I also keep in play a complicated dialectic between the individualised and pluralistic and the collective and exclusive derived more immediately from the time of the Reformation but ultimately from the changes of the Axial Age and its attendant problematic. Adapted from the source document.

This article aims to explore some issues about laicity and religious freedom, the concordat signed between the Brazilian State and the Vatican, and the controversies arising from the proposal of the General Law of Religions. At the same time, it affirms the existence of multiple and divergent senses of laicity, allows observation of different agents in the search for marking, setting, updating, correcting and regulating its application by the State. Catholic and Evangelical activism has generated a lot of contradictory effects. There is a resurgence of religious disputes with consequences in the public sphere, especially in the political arena.Keywords: Concordat, General Law of Religions, Religious Freedom, laicité. ; Este artigo tem o objetivo de aprofundar algumas questões acerca da laicidade e da liberdade religiosa, a concordata firmada entre o Estado Brasileiro e o Vaticano e as controvérsias decorrentes da proposta da Lei Geral das Religiões. Ao mesmo tempo em que afirma a existência de múltiplos e divergentes sentidos da laicidade, permite observar os diferentes agentes na busca por demarcar, definir, atualizar, corrigir e regular sua aplicação pelo Estado. O ativismo católico e evangélico tem gerado efeitos bastante contraditórios. Há um recrudescimento das disputas religiosas com desdobramentos na esfera pública, especialmente na arena política.Palavras-chave: Concordata, Lei Geral das Religiões, liberdade religiosa, laicidade.

AbstractThis essay argues that Locke'sReasonableness of Christianityprovides a morally robust argument for religious pluralism—one which avoids the pitfalls of relativism and official neutrality by elucidating the need for a civil religion of toleration. The work thus contains Locke's friendly critique of his more radical Enlightenment contemporaries who had openly debunked the Bible. This critique is friendly, I argue, because Locke ultimately agrees with Spinoza and Hobbes about revelation, miracles, and religion's psychological causes. While Locke joined these thinkers in a common project to make Christianity less sacrificial and friendlier to enlightened selfishness, his analysis also reveals the need to retain some of its self-abnegating spirit in liberalism's service. But Locke has difficulty accounting for that spirit itself, and this problem in one of liberalism's original theorists may help explain the dissatisfactions and anxieties troubling tolerant societies today.

The aim of this article is to seek an understanding of why there seems to be policy reluctance in acknowledging the potential of practice and academic theology in governance and policy development in South Africa. This study examines these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective. The provocative thesis in this paper is that religion and theology belong in the public sphere. The approach in this paper is to use an informed knowledge of public policy and issues, to engage the implications of what is at stake, and subject this to sharp analytical evaluation and theological critique. Drawing from institutionalism and policy studies, the article examines the change potential of religion and theology within a constitutional democracy, the point of departure being the acknowledgement of a critical distinction between public policy discourse and public discourse. The article takes a premise that although it may have been best left alone by many social and political scientists, religion remains – despite the popularity of the secularism theorists – resilient as part of people's value systems and social identity.

Religion's role was prominent in the foreign relations of Byzantium and Iran. The religious element prevails throughout the entire struggle with Persia. The two empires were not just rivals on the battlefield. Along with the real war an ideological war was conducted between them, as both tried to convert people to their own religion. Zoroastrian Magi and Christian bishops became rivals in a war of propaganda where all means were used. When Constantine became Christian he created a golden opportunity to unite a wholeheartedly universalist religion and its abundance of scriptural authority and missionary impetus, with empire's forces of political, military and economic expansion in order to create a genuine world empire. Constantine the Great was the first to use religion as a weapon to assimilate people to the Roman Empire. The dream of global domination could become a reality through the spread of Christianity. During the Sasanian era Iran was Zoroastrianized in great extent. The doctrine of Zarthustra became the privileged religion and developed into a supporting pillar of Sasanian kingship. Persecutions of Christians in Iran followed Constantine's the Great proclamation of being the leader of all Christians in the oikoumeni. Church historians accused the Zoroastrian priests called Magi in the West as responsible for tortures and death penalties against the Christians of Iran, while Martyrologies illustrated them as having diabolical forces and immoral practices in their private lives. On the contrary secular Byzantine historians praised them as simple priests and holy men who lived in peace following their own customs. Roman propaganda, through history writing, presented the shahs Yazdegerd I, Xusrō I, and Xusrō II as having converted to Christianity or at least as Christian sympathizers. The impossibility of Persian subjects existing under the rule of any Roman prelate, had decreed the independence of the Persian Church. It was a common belief that Christian Orthodoxy was loyalty to the Roman Emperor, not to Christ, and heresy was not the display of a special variety of unchristian spirit, but an offence against the Roman State order. Christians of Persia were soon obliged to follow the customs of their own country. The King of Kings would always have the last voice, and frequently the first also in the choice of Catholicos. Byzantine historians often proceed to a religious mythmaking to justify the emperors' policy towards the Persian rulers. During the sixth and seventh centuries religion propaganda was used in extent by both countries. In Byzantium during Heraclius' reign we can trace a tendency to interpret events in terms of biblical prototypes.