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Religion and Politics in the 21st Century is composed of a number of articles that were presented during the 2012 international conference on ""Religion and Politics in the Globalization Era"" organized by the Centre for Political Analysis in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. With careful attention given to 21st century religious resurgence and its dynamic interactions with political structures and the public sphere, the present volume captures a wide variety of perspectives on contemporary religion and p

This paper empirically examines the impact of religious shrines on development. Compiling a unique database covering the universe of shrines across Pakistani Punjab, we explore whether the presence of holy Muslim shrines helps to explain regional variation in literacy rates. Our results demonstrate that the presence of shrines adversely affects literacy only in regions where shrine-related families have a direct political influence. Shrines in these regions represent the confluence of three resources—religion, land and politics—that together constitute a powerful structural inequality with potentially adverse consequences for development. We also probe the determinants of political selection, and find that shrines considered important in the British colonial assessment were more likely to select into politics in post-partition Punjab. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; CRP2; PSSP ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

Christian Democratic actors and thinkers have been at the forefront of many of the twentieth century's key political battles - from the construction of the international human rights regime, through the process of European integration and the creation of postwar welfare regimes, to Latin American development policies during the Cold War. Yet their core ideas remain largely unknown, especially in the English-speaking world. Combining conceptual and historical approaches, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti traces the development of this ideology in the thought and writings of some of its key intellectual and political exponents, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. In so doing he sheds light on a number of important contemporary issues, from the question of the appropriate place of religion in presumptively 'secular' liberal-democratic regimes, to the normative resources available for building a political response to the recent rise of far-right populism.

Klappentext: From the mid-1970s, the awareness of injustice and apartheid in South Africa increased in the media and in scholarship. From the secular perspective, it was no surprise to find a Christian denomination directly involved in the formulation of the apartheid-doctrine. However, it was far more surprising to fing opposition leaders, even many members of the African National Congress, referring in their strucggle to religious doctrines. South Africa imposed a challenge to all the voices that claimed that the process of democratisation was only possible through secularisation. The contributions to this book represent a spectrum of religious and political perspectives in South Africa in their social context. Some tackle the important question of transformation within religions. Since the period of transition and democracy, the country is witness to a re-ordering and re-classification of values and priorities within society and religious traditions. The contributions also focus on the possible role of religions in fashioning values and identities on a broad national scale. They subject to evaluation multi-culturalism, education, and development under the impact of religious values, ethics and symbols.

AbstractA number of controversial aspects of the relationship between religion and the state are located in public space. Although burqa bans, the Swiss minaret ban, and duties to display crucifixes on public buildings are different in various ways, it is significant that they all take place in this particular type of location. However, when normative political theorists have addressed these issues, they have rarely paid sufficient attention to their spatial location, and, as a result, their analyses are lacking a vital dimension. This article shows what can go wrong when these normative analyses do not refer to an account of public space. It then indicates what part of a suitable account would look like by sketching four of its essential elements, referred to as the definition, distinctiveness, differentiation, and dynamism of public space. It is argued that normative political theorists should draw on aspects of such an account in order to achieve a more sophisticated understanding of issues concerning religion in public spaces, as well as to reach more securely grounded normative conclusions about them.

Ethiopia is an old society often confronted with new ideas and foreign values. As a result, social changes and modernisation were important contentious points especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some wanted change and progress at the expense of indigenous values, specifically cultural and political independence, while others opted for a more cautious approach. Inasmuch as Ethiopia's context was one in which the church and the state were accustomed to seeing themselves as two sides of the same coin, the discourse of modernisation had both a political and religious flavour to it. This article therefore aims to examine the volatile dynamics between religion (especially the Protestant churches of the 'southern peripheries') and the Marxist regime in modernising Ethiopia. Specifically, the article intends to explore how state-church relations transformed social thinking in Ethiopia. I begin by sketching the historical background and proceed to unravel the dilemma of modernisation. In the final part, I discuss how Protestantism contributed to modernising three aspects of social structure: the understanding of the human person, state-church relations and social organisation. ; http://www.hts.org.za ; am2018 ; Science of Religion and Missiology

In the post-9/11 scenario, the rise of the Taliban and their coalition with Al-Qaeda have engendered new discourses about Islam and Pakistan. In this paper, I present a multi-sited ethnography of Bari Imam, a popular Sufi shrine in Pakistan while re-evaluating certain suppositions, claims and theories about popular Islam in the country. Have militarization, Shariatisation, and resurgence movements such as the Taliban been overzealously discussed and presented as the representative imageries of Islam? I also explore the Sufi dynamics of living Islam, which I will suggest continue to shape the lives and practices of the vast majority of Pakistani Muslims. The study suggests that general unfamiliarity of people outside the subcontinent with the Sufi attributes of living Islam, together with their lack of knowledge of the varieties of identification, observance and experience of Islam among Pakistanis, limit not only their understanding of the land of Pakistan, but also their perception of its people and their faith (Islam).