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Historicizing Secular-Religious Demarcations
This volume aims to revitalize the exchange between sociological differentiation theory and the sociology of religion, which previously held center stage among the sociological classics. It brings together contributions from different disciplines, as well as various forms of regional and historical expertise, which are indispensable in forming a globally oriented sociological perspective today. Secularization is understood as a process of boundary demarcation, that is, as the enactment of semantic, practical, and institutional distinctions between religion and other spheres of activity and knowledge. These distinctions may emerge from within the religious field itself, or may be absorbed int...
Exploring Islam beyond Orientalism and Occidentalism
Islamic religion has become an object of political discourse in ways that also affects academic reflection; against this background this volume aims to provide a theoretically and empirically founded assessment of where social sciences currently stand with regard to Islam. For this purpose, the volume continues to develop the sociological knowledge of Islam that began in the 1980s. Given the Orientalism inherent in sociology, the volume focuses on Muslim knowledge systems and institutions, as well as the practice of Muslim religiosity in various social contexts stretching from Algeria and Morocco to Turkey.
Imprisoned Religion
This book explores the profound transformations that prisons and offender rehabilitation programmes in Eastern Germany have undergone with respect to religion. Drawing on participant observation and interviews of inmates, ex-prisoners, chaplains and prison visitors, this book connects the institutional to individual: focusing on the religious changes individuals experience when they are imprisoned and released. Including comparative studies from Italy and Switzerland, Becci reveals that despite diverse local, historical, denominational, political and social contexts the transformation patterns of individuals' relationship to religion, and their use of religious resources, are strongly shaped by the total character of prisons. Becci also explores the difficulties faced by released people in keeping their religious life alive under the harsh conditions of social stigma in a highly secular outside society.
Blurred Boundaries and Deceptive Dichotomies in Pre-Modern Texts and Images
This collection of essays focuses on the way blurred boundaries are represented in pre-modern texts and visual art and how they were received and perceived by their audiences: readers, listeners, and viewers. According to the current understanding that opposing cognitive categories that are so common in modern thinking do not apply to pre-modern mentalities, we argue that individuals in medieval and pre-modern societies did not necessarily consider sacred and secular, male and female, real and fictional, and opposing emotions as absolute dichotomies. The contributors to the present collection examine a wide range of cultural artifacts – literary texts, wall paintings, sculptures, jewelry, ...
Religion and the Secular in Eastern Germany, 1945 to the Present
The most common explanations view either the socialist past or larger scale processes of modernization to be the cause of eastern German secularization. The volume attempts to discover historically variable reconfigurations of religion and the secular at the local level.
Religion in Secular Archives
Russian archives contain a wealth of information on religiosity during the Soviet era, but most of it is written from the hostile perspective of officials and scholars charged with promoting atheism. Based on archival research in locations as diverse as the multi-religious Volga region, Moscow, and Texas, this book argues that much can be learned about Soviet religiosity by a focus not just on what documents say but also on what their originators did.
Religious Indifference
This book provides a conceptually and empirically rich introduction to religious indifference on the basis of original anthropological, historical and sociological research. Religious indifference is a central category for understanding contemporary societies, and a controversial one. For some scholars, a growing religious indifference indicates a dramatic decline in religiosity and epitomizes the endpoint of secularization processes. Others view it as an indicator of moral apathy and philosophical nihilism, whilst yet others see it as paving the way for new forms of political tolerance and solidarity. This volume describes and analyses the symbolic power of religious indifference and the co...
Art and the Challenge of Markets Volume 1
Art and the Challenge of Markets Volumes 1 & 2 examine the politics of art and culture in light of the profound changes that have taken place in the world order since the 1980s and 1990s. The contributors explore how in these two decades, the neoliberal or market-based model of capitalism started to spread from the economic realm to other areas of society. As a result, many aspects of contemporary Western societies increasingly function in the same way as the private enterprise sector under traditional market capitalism. The first volume of this two-volume collection considers a broad range of national cultural policies from European and North American countries, and examines the strengtheni...
The Oxford Handbook of Secularism
As recent headlines reveal, conflicts and debates around the world increasingly involve secularism. National borders and traditional religions cannot keep people in tidy boxes as political struggles, doctrinal divergences, and demographic trends are sweeping across regions and entire continents. And secularity is increasing in society, with a growing number of people in many regions having no religious affiliation or lacking interest in religion. Simultaneously, there is a resurgence of religious participation in the politics of many countries. How might these diverse phenomena be better understood? Long-reigning theories about the pace of secularization and ideal church-state relations are ...
