The Cold War was in many ways a religious war. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and other American leaders believed that human rights and freedom were endowed by God, that God had called the United ...States to defend liberty, and that Soviet communism was evil because of its atheism and enmity to religion. Along with security and economic concerns, these religious convictions helped determine both how the United States defined the enemy and how it fought the conflict. Meanwhile, American Protestant churches failed to seize the moment. Internal differences over theology and politics, and resistance to cooperation with Catholics and Jews, hindered Protestant leaders domestically and internationally. Frustrated by these internecine disputes, Truman and Eisenhower attempted to construct a new civil religion to mobilize domestic support for Cold War measures, determine the strategic boundaries of containment, unite all religious faiths against communism, and to undermine the authority of communist governments abroad.
John Hedley Brooke offers an introduction and critical guide to one of the most fascinating and enduring issues in the development of the modern world: the relationship between scientific thought and ...religious belief. It is common knowledge that in western societies there have been periods of crisis when new science has threatened established authority. The trial of Galileo in 1633 and the uproar caused by Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) are two of the most famous examples. Taking account of recent scholarship in the history of science, Brooke takes a fresh look at these and similar episodes, showing that science and religion have been mutually relevant in so rich a variety of ways that no simple generalizations are possible.
This book delves into the extent of government involvement in religion between 1990 and 2002 using both quantitative and qualitative methodology. The study is based on the Religion and State dataset, ...which includes 175 governments across the globe, all of which are addressed individually in this book. The forms of involvement examined in this study include whether the government has an official religion, whether some religions are given preferential treatment, religious discrimination against minority religion, government regulation of the majority religion, and religious legislation. The study shows that government involvement in religion is ubiquitous, that it increased significantly during this period, and that only a minority of states, including a minority of democracies, have separation of religion and state. These findings contradict the predictions of religion's reduced public significance found in modernization and secularization theory. The findings also demonstrate that state religious monopolies are linked to reduced religious participation.
Why do secular states pursue different policies toward religion? This book provides a generalizable argument about the impact of ideological struggles on the public policy making process, as well as ...a state-religion regimes index of 197 countries. More specifically, it analyzes why American state policies are largely tolerant of religion, whereas French and Turkish policies generally prohibit its public visibility, as seen in their bans on Muslim headscarves. In the United States, the dominant ideology is 'passive secularism', which requires the state to play a passive role, by allowing public visibility of religion. Dominant ideology in France and Turkey is 'assertive secularism', which demands that the state play an assertive role in excluding religion from the public sphere. Passive and assertive secularism became dominant in these cases through certain historical processes, particularly the presence or absence of an ancien régime based on the marriage between monarchy and hegemonic religion during state-building periods.
Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb ...Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories.
This book brings together leading international scholars with the aim of exploring ritual perspectives in the study of contemporary religions. It combines significant theoretical and methodological ...reflections and applies it to four main fields relevant to the study of contemporary religions: indigeneity; new spiritualities and ecology; lived religion (with Islam and Africa as case studies); and finally, religion and embodiment. The structure and content of the book takes its point of departure from the research topics and collegial network of the internationally acclaimed scholar of ritual studies, Professor Anne-Christine Hornborg. The book is dedicated to her.
Steve Bruce explores Scotland's transformation from the largely devout Presbyterian country of 1900, with the church as a major social force, to the diverse, more secular society of today, when less ...than 10 per cent of Scots attend church. He bases his study on a career's worth of historical, ethnographic and statistical research, to provide both a coherent description of Scotland's current religious complexion and a considered explanation of the forces that shaped it. Scottish Gods is both a fascinating summary of over a century of religious and cultural change, and a searing analysis of the state of religion in Scotland today by one of our leading social historians.
Contributing to the growing interest in early modern women and religion, this essay collection advances scholarship by introducing readers to recently recovered or little-studied texts and by ...offering new paradigms for the analysis of women's religious literary activities. Contributors underscore the fact that women had complex, multi-dimensional relationships to the religio-political order, acting as activists for specific causes but also departing from confessional norms in creative ways and engaging in intra-as well as extra-confessional conflict. The volume thus includes essays that reflect on the complex dynamics of religious culture itself and that illuminate the importance of women's engagement with Catholicism throughout the period. The collection also highlights the vitality of neglected intertextual genres such as prayers, meditations, and translations, and it focuses attention on diverse forms of textual production such as literary writing, patronage, epistolary exchanges, public reading, and epitaphs. Collectively, English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500-1625 offers a comprehensive treatment of the historical, literary, and methodological issues preoccupying scholars of women and religious writing.
This volume explores how religious and spiritual actors engage for environmental protection and fight against climate change. Climate change and sustainability are increasingly prominent topics among ...religious and spiritual groups. Different faith traditions have developed ""green"" theologies, launched environmental protection projects and issued public statements on climate change. Against this background, academic scholarship has raised optimistic claims about the strong potentials of religions to address environmental challenges. Taking a critical stance with regard to these claims, the chapters in this volume show that religious environmentalism is an embattled terrain. Tensions are an inherent part of religious environmentalism. These do not necessarily manifest themselves in open clashes between different parties but in different actions, views, theologies, ambivalences, misunderstandings, and sometimes mistrust. Keeping below the surface, these tensions can create effective barriers for religious environmentalism. The chapters examine how tensions are manifested and dealt with through a range of empirical case studies in various world regions. Covering different religious and spiritual traditions, they reflect on intradenominational, interdenominational, interreligious, and religious-societal tensions. Thereby, this volume sheds new light on the problems that religions face when they seek to take an active role in today’s societal challenges. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
