Suchergebnisse

This article scrutinizes the Finnish religious insults and the related legal practice during the 21st century. It examines how the Office of the Prosecutor General, the courts, as well as the defendants construct the category of religion – i.e. that, which is a target of a special protection – and how the discourses on ethnicity and race play a part in that process. It is found, that ways in which the defendants construct the targeted groups with terms considered to be about religion, ethnicity or race affects the ways the officials construct these groups. This includes the practical abolishment of the formal category of religion, found in the letter of law, in favour of the popular one. Furthermore, it is argued, that while being part of the established religion discourse improves the chances for benefitting from the religious insult legislation, the said law, applied quite inconsistently, is found to be relatively ineffective avenue for groups seeking justice amid speech or actions considered to be religiously offending. More generally, the article demonstrates that the discursive study of religion can benefit from a perspective where empirically nearby categories (such as ethnicity and race) are incorporated into the analysis.

A collection of essays demonstrating the ways diverse religious rituals, symbols, ethics and ideologies perform as primary planks in the construction of the public realm, with particular focus on peripheral nations and politicized spiritualities of resist.

Godwired offers an engaging exploration of religious practice in the digital age. It considers how virtual experiences, like stories, games and rituals, are forms of world-building or "cosmos construction" that serve as a means of making sense of our own world. Such creative and interactive activity is, arguably, patently religious. This book examines: the nature of sacred space in virtual contexts; technology as a vehicle for sacred texts; who we are when we go online; what rituals have in common with games and how they work online; what happens to community when people worship online; how religious "worlds" and virtual "worlds" nurture similar desires. Rachel Wagner suggests that whilst our engagement with virtual reality can be viewed as a form of religious activity, today's virtual religion marks a radical departure from traditional religious practice -- it is ephemeral, transient, rapid, disposable, hyper-individualized, hybrid, and in an ongoing state of flux. - Publisher

The continuing, albeit heightened, relevance of faith-related disruptions in domestic and international discourses are a function of politics and geopolitics and is not, on empirical evidence, suggestive of heightened piety. Would this induce that religion is not politics, that religiosity is not religion, and that global order is to be premised on global interests and not on exclusively national ones? Are we prepared, conceptually and organizationally, to undertake it even if it involves as it must going beyond the traditional paradigm of faith and of national interest? Or, could the alternative be a modern-day version of Milton's Pandemonium, the high capital of Satan and his peers, built by little demons?