Negotiating the boundaries of the secular and of the religious is a core aspect of modern experience. In mid-nineteenth-century Germany, secularism emerged to oppose church establishment, ...conservative orthodoxy, and national division between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Yet, as historian Todd H. Weir argues in this provocative book, early secularism was not the opposite of religion. It developed in the rationalist dissent of Free Religion and, even as secularism took more atheistic forms in Freethought and Monism, it was subject to the forces of the confessional system it sought to dismantle. Similar to its religious competitors, it elaborated a clear worldview, sustained social milieus, and was integrated into the political system. Secularism was, in many ways, Germany's fourth confession. While challenging assumptions about the causes and course of the Kulturkampf and modern antisemitism, this study casts new light on the history of popular science, radical politics, and social reform.
The Alevis in Turkey Shankland, David
2003, 20031208, 2003-09-01, 2003-12-08, 20070101
eBook
This is the only volume dedicated to the Alevis available in English and based on sustained fieldwork in Turkey. The Alevis now have an increasingly high profile for those interested in the diverse ...cultures of contemporary Turkey, and in the role of Islam in the modern world. As a heterodox Islamic group, the Alevis have no established doctrine. This book reveals that as the Alevi move from rural to urban sites, they grow increasingly secular, and their religious life becomes more a guiding moral culture than a religious message to be followed literally. But the study shows that there is nothing inherently secular-proof within Islam, and that belief depends upon a range of contexts.
Introduction 1. Setting the Scene: Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey 2. The Alevis and their Place in the Republic: An Overview 3. An Alevi Community 4. Religion, Ritual and Belief among Alevis 5. Social Change and the Alevi Communities 6. The Alevi, the State, and the Future 7. Theoretical and Comparative Reflections Appendices: Primary Material on the Alevis
David Shankland lectures in the Dept of Social Anthropology at the Univeristy of Wales, Lampeter, and was formerly Assistant and Acting Director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, Turkey. For many years a specialist on Turkey, he has published widely on the subject.
In contemporary Turkey-a democratic, secular, and predominantly Muslim nation-the religious healer is a controversial figure. Attracting widespread condemnation, religious healers are derided as ...exploiters of the sick and vulnerable, discredited forms of Islamic and medical authority, and superstitious relics of a pre-modern era. Yet all sorts of people, and not just the desperately ill, continue to seek them out. After years of research with healers and their patients in working-class neighborhoods of urban Turkey, anthropologist Christopher Dole concludes that the religious healer should be regarded not as an exception to Turkey's secular modern development but as one of its defining figures.Healing Secular Lifedemonstrates that religious healing and secularism in fact have a set of common stakes in the ordering of lives and the remaking of worlds.
Linking the history of medical reforms and scientific literacy campaigns to contemporary efforts of Qur'anic healers to treat people afflicted by spirits and living saints through whom deceased political leaders speak,Healing Secular Lifeapproaches stories of healing and being healed as settings for examining the everyday social intimacies of secular political rule. This ethnography of loss, care, and politics reveals not only that the authority of the religious healer is deeply embedded within the history of secular modern reform in Turkey but also that personal narratives of suffering and affliction are inseparable from the story of a nation seeking to recover from the violence of its own secular past.
Current studies on religion in Brazil are marked by the dispute over secularism and the boundaries between the religious and the political. This paper shows how the literature on secularization and ...laicidade followed the social relevance of religions to adjust the focus on the subjects under research to the point that throughout the 20th century, studies were mainly dedicated to analyzing the position of the Catholic Church vis‐à‐vis the national secular state; the growth of the Pentecostals since the mid‐1990s, led to a shift in the literature dedicated to their new relevance in public life and their dispute over laicidade. I argue that this social transformation broadened the scope of the investigation to the particularities of their presence in the public sphere and the production of Pentecostal political‐esthetic sensibilities, in contrast to the previous Catholic secularity pattern. This scenario of transformation with increased religious pluralism and conflict of public religions has enabled an understanding of the particularity of the experience of secularity in Brazil and allows us to rethink some of the previous global theoretical assumptions about secularization.
According to my study, “political secularism” means the separation of political power from religious institutions, while “social secularism” is a theory and endeavor to eliminate religiosity from not ...only public but also private life, considering it an obsolete way of thinking. I examine four case studies based on my ethnological fieldwork in Hunza (in the Pakistani-controlled Kashmir), the Middle Ural (Russia), Transylvania (Romania), and Sápmi (northern Scandinavia). I outline and compare ethnic minorities (Hunzakuts, Tatars, Szeklers, Samis) according to their historical background, contemporary social environment, relation to the majority, their political endeavors, and the role of religion(s) among them. Based on my fieldwork notes, interviews, and sociological data, I analyze the similarities and differences of ethnic complexity, terminological confusions, problems of “lived religion,” and the impact of social and political secularism. Since their religiosity differs from the majorities’ ones, I found that secularism has a complex role and reception. Political secularism is essential for defending these minorities from assimilation, but most of these minorities reject social secularism since religion is part of their multifunctional ethnic discourse space. Religiosity is part of their survival strategy. Notwithstanding, ethnic minorities’ religious institutions participate in political activity and propagate their claims for self-governance.
Although religion faces many challenges, such as clashing with modernity and becoming the object of criticism, religion has a thousand lives. One Indonesian novel created by Achdiat Karta Mihardja ...entitled Atheis (1990) pictured this religious phenomenon. Therefore, this article discusses Islam, secularism, and humanism in the Novel. This is qualitative research with the literary approach that combines the comparative literature theory of American schools and sociology focused on the sociology of modernity and religion. This research finds the novel as a criticism and reconstruction of Islam that is compatible with secularism and humanism in general, though in certain parts they are different. Further, the author of this novel reveals a good and proper Islam based on the text, first, it is concerned not only with the afterlife but also the present and here-ness real life. Thus, he criticizes the Islamic pattern which believes in superstition. Second, the Islamic form according to humanism and moderat feminism as the core of Islam is a public benefit and blessing for the universe. This research concluded that the novel's criticism is in line with the criticism in the scientific sociological Islamic literature.
Ali Mirsepassi's book presents a powerful challenge to the dominant media and scholarly construction of radical Islamist politics, and their anti-Western ideology, as a purely Islamic phenomenon ...derived from insular, traditional and monolithic religious 'foundations'. It argues that the discourse of political Islam has strong connections to important and disturbing currents in Western philosophy and modern Western intellectual trends. The work demonstrates this by establishing links between important contemporary Iranian intellectuals and the central influence of Martin Heidegger's philosophy. We are also introduced to new democratic narratives of modernity linked to diverse intellectual trends in the West and in non-Western societies, notably in India, where the ideas of John Dewey have influenced important democratic social movements. As the first book to make such connections, it promises to be an important contribution to the field and will do much to overturn some pervasive assumptions about the dichotomy between East and West.
Fine della secolarizzazione? Cambi, Franco
Studi sulla Formazione,
07/2018, Letnik:
21, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Secondo molti studiosi è in corso un "risveglio del sacro", un "ritorno di Dio", una crescita del religioso. I fondamentalismi sono letti come segnali di questa prospettiva in marcia Le loro stesse ...chiusure si fanno bisogno di identità e tutela di coesione comunitaria. La loro "fede" viene letta come un fattore-chiave dell'oggi e come orma della "fine della secolarizzazione" e tramonto della laicità.
La vie contemplative paraît à première vue incompatible avec celle en société. La pratique de la clôture au sein des communautés contemplatives n'empêche pourtant pas que des liens se nouent entre ...les monastères et les sociétés locales. Ce sont ces liens qu'analyse cet article depuis l'arrivée des moniales contemplatives à Diabo à l'est du Burkina Faso au début des années 1960 jusqu'à aujourd'hui. Deux phénomènes sont particulièrement étudiés : l'évolution du régime claustral dans l'utopie monastique et l'exercice d'une fonction médiatrice au travers de formes d'investissement dans la société laïque par les moniales.
