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AbstractReligion and sexuality are polysemic categories. While conservative religion often fights against progressive sexual politics in contemporary America, this "usual story" is fractured and destabilized by people navigating the relationship between religion and sexuality as complex social creatures, not pundits or caricatures. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship, I examine salient issues of sexual politics—including abortion and reproductive rights, LGBT rights, and pornography—to show how religious actors have been on both sides of these debates. Because of this polysemic complexity, scholars of religion must not only tend to the dynamic interaction between religion and other categories, we must also recognize and study the diversity within the categories themselves.

This paper reviews the literature on the religion-technology nexus, drawing up a research agenda and offering preliminary empirical insights. Firsts I stress the need to explore the new politics of space as a consequence of technological development, emphasizing questions about the role of religion in effecting a form of religious (neo)imperialism, and uneven access to techno-religious spaces. Second, I highlight the need to examine the politics of identity and community, since cyberspace is not an isotropic surface. Third, I underscore the need to engage with questions about the poetics of religious community as social relations become mediated by technology. Finally, I focus on questions about the poetics of place, particularly the technological mediation of rituals.

German Home Townsis a very forward-looking book. I say that not because it proved so influential—although it certainly had a profound impact on my generation of historians. My point is more prosaic, namely thatGerman Home Townsoccupies a set point in time and social milieu, the inaugural moment of an attenuated phase of stability for a peculiar type of human community in central Europe. That moment, of course, is 1648; the milieu is that of walled and privileged towns—large and differentiated enough for self-sufficiency in most economic functions, but not so large or so differentiated as to generate the degrees of stratification and anonymity that characterized larger commercial or manufacturing cities. In contrast to metropolitan centers, "home towns" embraced all inhabitants in a web of face-to-face relations, at once integrating, enabling, and controlling all inhabitants through guilds and the political systems built around them. Usually, almost all hometown inhabitants were citizens, too—again in contrast to larger cities, with their substrates of noncitizen residents. From the vantage of 1648, and within the stream of early modern German history,German Home Townspeers into a future of confrontation with "movers and doers"—those vanguards of the "general estate," as Walker called them, who trampled idiosyncrasy, leveled difference, and, with some help from Napoleon, replaced both local corporatism and the imperial "incubator" with provincial and national systems of general, liberal delegation.

In this article I deal with transnational Hindu and Muslim movements. I reject the common assertion that migrant communities are conservative in religious and social matters by arguing that 'traditionalism' requires considerable ideological creativity and that this significantly transforms previous practices and discourses. I suggest that religious movements, active among migrants, develop cosmopolitan projects that can be viewed as alternatives to the cosmopolitanism of the European Enlightenment. This raises a number of challenges concerning citizenship, integration and political loyalty for governmentality in the nation‐states in which these cosmopolitan projects are carried out. I suggest that rather than looking at religious migrants as at best conservative and at worst terrorist one should perhaps pay some attention to the creative moments in human responses to new challenges and new environments.

This volume is the first systematic scholarly study that analyses the complex relationship between history and religion. It considers religious groups as both producers of historical narratives and topics of historiography. From different disciplinary perspectives, the authors explore how religions are historicised. In so doing, they address the biases and elisions of current analytical and descriptive frames in the history of religion.

"Sephardic Jews are the Jews who lived in Spain historically and later in the Spanish Diaspora following the Expulsion of 1492. This covers the rich cultural history of Jews in Spain, the religious and cultural life, the communities that developed in the Diaspora from the Ottoman Empire to Morocco and the Americas. Attention is given to the Jews who converted to Christianity and lived as crypto-Jews"--

Integral to the Life Orientation curriculum is democracy and human right. This article contends that considering human rights cannot simply be a theoretical exercise as the implementation thereof affects lived human experience. Currently held narratives of lived experience need to be dialogically explored. Integrally linked to any such exploration is the identity of the explorer. It can be said that individuals are made to varying degrees by systems and networks of power in society, including dominant discourses. However, they also have the capacity, by exercising individual agency, to make themselves according to the way in which they respond to the intersections that shape identity, including ethnicity, culture, class, religion, gender, sexual orientation and so forth. This article seeks to explore teacher identity and, in particular, teacher religious identity, with a view to transformed Religion Education. The argument is made for Life Orientation teachers to negotiate their religious identity from a position of 'religious identity paralysis' or 'religious identity paradox' or even 'religious identity flexibility' to one of 'religious identity transformation'. Both in-service and pre-service teachers participated in the studies informing this article.

Compilation of eight essays

The author constructs economic profiles of Protestants and Catholics based upon an examination of occupational and, to a lesser extent, industrial characteristics. In this task the Hall-Jones scale is used as a guide to classify more than two hundred occupational groupings. The religious composition of certain significant occupations are also examined in more detail in order to illustrate salient differences between the two groups. In particular, major variances between Protestants and Catholics, both at the manual and non-manual level, are highlighted and compared. Previous studies of Northern Ireland have frequently attributed the disunity of the working class to the prevalence of politico-religious antagonisms, giving minimal attention to possible occupational differences. This article provides evidence which might support an additional explanation for the failure of class organisations to bridge the religious divide: prominent occupational differences reinforced the religious cleavage thereby providing an added barrier to reconciliation.

Throughout history, manuscripts have been made and used for religious, artistic, and scientific performances, and this practice continues in most cultures today. By focusing on the role manuscripts have in different kinds of performances, this volume contributes to the evolving field of investigating written artefacts and their functions. The collected essays regard manuscripts as points of intersection where textual, material, and performative aspects converge. The contributors analyse manuscripts in their forms and functions as well as their positioning in the performances for which they were made. These aspects unfold across the volume's three sections, examining how manuscripts are (1) used backstage, for preparing and giving instructions for performances; (2) taken onstage, contributing to the enactment of performances; and (3) performers in their own right, producing an effect on the audience. The diversified, interdisciplinary, and innovative methodologies of the included papers carry great potential to expand the traditional approaches of manuscript studies and find application outside the contributors' respective fields. ; Throughout history, manuscripts have been made and used for religious, artistic, and scientific performances, and this practice continues in most cultures today. By focusing on the role manuscripts have in different kinds of performances, this volume contributes to the evolving field of investigating written artefacts and their functions. The collected essays regard manuscripts as points of intersection where textual, material, and performative aspects converge. The contributors analyse manuscripts in their forms and functions as well as their positioning in the performances for which they were made. These aspects unfold across the volume's three sections, examining how manuscripts are (1) used backstage, for preparing and giving instructions for performances; (2) taken onstage, contributing to the enactment of performances; and (3) performers in their own right, producing an effect on the audience. The diversified, interdisciplinary, and innovative methodologies of the included papers carry great potential to expand the traditional approaches of manuscript studies and find application outside the contributors' respective fields.

'The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism' by Max Weber and 'The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism' by Max Weber are reviewed. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism by Max Weber and The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism by Max Weber are reviewed.