Bien que la Colombie ait longtemps été dominée par une culture catholique conservatrice, elle expérimente aujourd’hui une transformation rapide de son univers religieux. Ce processus est caractérisé ...par l’entrée en scène d’une multitude de nouvelles organisations religieuses. La présente étude vise à comprendre à la fois les causes de ce processus, et ses effets dans d’autres champs sociaux, notamment les champs politique et culturel. Cette recherche a été guidée par de nombreuses questions : Quelles ont pu être les causes du processus de pluralisation religieuse, et quels sont les facteurs - économiques, politiques, démographiques, culturels - qui lui sont associés ? Comment se manifeste la pluralisation religieuse dans les contextes ruraux, urbains et indigènes ? Quel a été l’impact de la pluralisation religieuse dans les champs culturel et politique ? La présente thèse cherche à établir la sécularisation et la modernisation de la société colombienne comme les principales causes de la pluralisation religieuse. Cette pluralisation suit les affinités et les inerties culturelles : la plupart des fidèles qui désertent l’Église catholique émigrent vers des mouvements religieux similaires ou analogues, principalement au bénéfice du mouvement pentecôtiste. La pluralisation religieuse favorise la montée en puissance d’entrepreneurs religieux indépendants de type charismatique. Les leaders religieux qui réussissent le mieux voient dans le capital religieux accumulé un capital rentable dans d’autres champs sociaux, en particulier le champ politique. Ainsi, la pluralisation religieuse a ouvert les portes du pouvoir politique à de nouveaux acteurs sociaux.
While Colombia has traditionally been dominated by a conservative Catholic culture, its religious milieu has gone through a rapid transformation characterised by the growth of many new religious organisations. This study will aim to more deeply understand the causes of this transformation and its effects in other social fields, notably in the political and cultural field. A large multitude of questions have shaped the research: Which causes have contributed and driven this religious pluralisation and which factors —political, economic demographic or cultural— are associated with it? How has this religious pluralisation manifested itself in rural, urban and indigenous contexts? What has been the impact of the religious pluralisation in the cultural and political fields?The present thesis will outline the ways in which the processes of secularisation and modernisation on Columbian society are the principle causes of this religious pluralisation and how this pluralisation involves different cultural affinities and forms of cultural inertia. Furthermore, most of the believers who abandon the Catholic Church integrate themselves within similar or related religious movements preferring above all the Pentecostal movement. Moreover, this pluralisation leads to an increased promotion of religious entrepreneurs of an independent and charismatic nature. The best performing religious leaders identify in their accumulated religious reputation a form of capital profitable in other social fields, particularly the political field. Consequently, religious pluralism has opened the doors of political power of new social actors.
In early 20 th -century Damascus, a group of religious scholars who called themselves mutadayyinūn (the "very pious") and who claimed to represent an Islamic "orthodoxy" launched a journal, ...al-Haqâ'iq, to expose the crimes of the mutafarnijūn (the "overly Frankified") and to agitate for a return to "true Islam". According to the mutadayyinūn, the mutafarnijūn were introducing into the Ottoman Empire practices borrowed from the West and were thus abetting a Western conspiracy against the empire and Islam. Among the practices the mutadayyinūn found particularly irksome were those that threatened "traditional" and "scripturally-dictated" customs relating to gender, such as veiling and the seclusion of women. What becomes clear through an analysis of the debate, the reasons for its prominence on the pages of al-Haqā'iq, and the method and style of argumentation adopted by the mutadayyinūn y however, is that despite their claim to be the upholders of tradition, the mutadayyinūn relied on the same epistemic assumptions as those they castigated. Thus, unbeknownst to them, they were engaged in the process of inventing a religio-political synthesis coherent with contemporary social and political structures and institutions. The traces of this religio-political synthesis, later adopted or reinvented by others, remains embedded within the structures and institutions of the contemporary Syrian state.
Abstract This paper sets out to explore the conceptual requirements and semantic dimensions for the reconstruction of the links between anti-ageing and religious narratives of old age. Three ...arguments are presented from the existing literature; anti-ageing is interpreted first as a surrogate religious narrative, second as spiritual materialism and third as a residual effect of the Protestant Ethic. These arguments are explored in three ethnographic case studies presenting the religious anti-ageing narratives of, respectively, a user, a lobbyist and an entrepreneur from the German-speaking anti-ageing movement. While none of the cases clearly supports one of the established arguments, they do point to a powerful amalgamation of scientific and religious narratives, representative of an upsurge in materialistic values in religious interpretations of ageing and religiously legitimated calls for a new, self-controlling ethic in anti-ageing, one which seems to foster the individualisation of the risks of ageing in line with the commodification of the ageing body.
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Whereas most of Western Europe experienced a separation between the political and religious spheres in the past decades, in Greece and the Republic of Ireland the process of secularisation ...has been inhibited due to close association between religion and national identity. This paper examines these countries in a comparative perspective and argues that the process of secularisation in Ireland has been explicitly linked to a shift in national identity, a development which has not taken place in Greece. The relationship between religion and national identity is contingent on two factors: internally, the degree in which a church obstructs the modernisation process and, externally, the level of threat perceptions.
This article analyses the process of secularisation in Spain, primarily based on three interrelated social logics, the first two as result of historical processes and the third with a more recent ...point of departure: a) the logic of the secularisation of consciences; b) the logic of the secularisation of society and the State; and c) the logic that could be called the breaking up of cultural homogeneity, which started with the flow of transnational immigration that Spain began to receive very close to the end of the 20th century. For this, the author divides the process into three different waves of secularisation that go from the 19th century to the present day, and he demonstrates its evolution with statistics.
There is a common assumption that ‘Islam’ has an inherent opposition be-tween the sacred and the secular which obstructs the secularisation process witnessed in western societies. This study argues ...that Weber’s notion of Protestant religion as a driving force in the rationalisation of society might be an indicator of how political Islam in itself in the end might lead to a dif-ferentiation between the religious and the secular sphere; an individualisa-tion and a secularisation of the Islamic message and thereby to a privatisation of religion. The political experience of the Muslim Brother-hood in Jordan is analysed in view of western theories of secularisation, particularly Steve Bruce’s study on secularisation in British society. As Islamists work within the democratic system there seems to be a transfor-mation from being a radical organisation towards becoming ‘just another comfortable denomination’, as expressed in Bruce’s claim that ‘the sectar-ian project’ is ‘largely self-defeating’.
Universities have traditionally been thought of as “secular enclaves” (Bryant, 2006: 2) that have the capacity to liberalise or even eradicate personal religious beliefs. Despite this assumption, ...religious activity on university campuses shows no sign of declining, due in part to the failings of the secularisation thesis and the rise of religious pluralism. In the media more recently, there have been frequent references to religious organisations on campus, in particular to clashes between Christian societies and Student Unions, and between Islamic and atheist societies. The management of religion on university campuses has also become a political issue with the Prime Minister David Cameron intervening on recent guidelines (proposed by Universities U.K.) advising that external religious speakers be allowed to segregate student audiences based on gender. As a direct result of Cameron’s intervention the advisory comment was removed. In light of the above, the aim of this thesis is to explore how Christian, Jewish and Muslim students navigate the terrain of the university and whether such an environment is challenging or conducive to their faith in terms of degree content, interactions with peers and involvement in relevant societies and/or chaplaincies. This thesis also explores student reactions to the New Atheism, a label attributed to a group of provocative authors – Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens – all of whom are united in their belief that religion is irrational, false and evil. Often described as the chief proponent of the New Atheism, Richard Dawkins has also recently shown his support for UCL’s atheist society in their disagreement with the Student Union over the uploading of a satirical religious cartoon to their Facebook page. The research which forms the basis of this thesis was carried out between 2011-2013 and features the use of qualitative semi-structured interviews and the presentation of New Atheist extracts from Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris. Over 30 participants were included in the project with a minimum of 10 students from each (Islamic, Christian and Jewish) faith group. The multi-faith angle of this project offers a unique insight into how different faith groups navigate the university, with some common issues emerging across all faith groups as well as faith-specific issues. Sociological research in this area has tended to focus on Christian students and this has meant that certain concerns (such as dietary provisions and prayer space) have tended to be overlooked by researchers. The findings of this research project are multi-layered and complex. Religious students differed in terms of their expectations of higher education institutions: some students viewed the university in purely educational terms (and as having no religious function), while others saw the university as a place for both educational and spiritual development and where personal faith could be integrated with their academic studies and social life. The experience of religious students in using chaplaincies and societies was also mixed, with some students reporting fears of being “judged” by other members of the same faith group. There also appeared to be intra-religious tension across all faith groups but this was more prevalent among the Christian and Islamic societies due to denominational differences. Inter-religious (as opposed to intra-religious) tension emerged particularly in the students’ responses to the New Atheism. Rather than seeing New Atheist literature as a direct challenge to their own faith, the participants recognised that “other” religious believers might be guilty of the New Atheist’s accusations – therefore highlighting a surprising degree of convergence between religious participants and New Atheist arguments.
This essay sets out to argue that postsecular spirituality is about the quest for hypergoods within today's mass populist- and consumerist-oriented world. It shows that people who consider themselves ...to be spiritual not only have many values in their lives, but rank some values higher than others, with some being ranked as being of supreme importance, the so-called hypergoods. Such ethics has an interpersonal character, and in Christian circles this reopens the issue of biblical hermeneutics, especially the phenomenon of conflicting interpretations. Against the background of the various options of being religious in the secular age, the essay focuses on Charles Taylor's view of the discovery of spirituality in a posttheistic world and his emphasis on the love of God and the ethics of justice as hypergoods.
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