Regulating Difference: Religious Diversity and Nationhood in the Secular West, by Marian Burchardt (Rutgers University Press, 2020)

About This Book

Transnational migration has contributed to the rise of religious diversity and has led to profound changes in the religious make-up of society across the Western world. As a result, societies and nation-states have faced the challenge of crafting ways to bring new religious communities into existing institutions and the legal frameworks. Regulating Difference explores how the state regulates religious diversity and examines the processes whereby religious diversity and expression becomes part of administrative landscapes of nation-states and people’s everyday lives. Arguing that concepts of nationhood are key to understanding the governance of religious diversity, Regulating Difference employs a transatlantic comparison of the Spanish region of Catalonia and the Canadian province of Quebec to show how processes of nation-building, religious heritage-making and the mobilization of divergent interpretations of secularism are co-implicated in shaping religious diversity. It argues that religious diversity has become central for governing national and urban spaces.

About the Author

Marian Burchardt is a professor of sociology at the University of Leipzig. Author of Faith in the Time of AIDS: Religion, Biopolitics and Modernity in South Africa, he is a senior research partner of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and associate member of the Humanities Center of Advanced Studies “Multiple Secularities”.

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

We are delighted to announce the publication of our book – Global Trajectories of Brazilian Religion – Lusospheres (Bloomsbury, 2019)

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/global-trajectories-of-brazilian-religion-9781350072077/

In this edited volume we show how Brazil is imagined and re-created as an authentic, spiritual, and sensual place that functions as the center for various global religions. To understand the new cross-fertilizations between religion, life-style, tourism and migration, we introduce the notion of ‘Lusospheres’, a term that refers to the historical Portuguese colonial reach, yet signals the contemporary modes of cultural interaction in a different geo-political age.

Here is the link to the Introductory Chapter:  https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/5d89ed94fa4f8c0001d35d5c

Please write the authors to get a flyer for a 35% discount.

With all good wishes,

Martijn Oosterbaan — m.oosterbaan@uu.nl
Linda van de Kamp  — L.J.vandeKamp@uva.nl
Joana Bahia — joana.bahia@gmail.com

Whether the recently settled religious minorities, Muslims, in particular, can be accommodated as religious groups in European countries has become a central political question and threatens to create long-term fault lines. In this collection of essays Tariq Modood argues that to grasp the nature of the problem we have to see how Muslims have become a target of a cultural racism, Islamophobia. Yet, the problem is not just one of anti-racism but of an understanding of multicultural citizenship, of how minority identities, including those formed by race, ethnicity and religion, can be incorporated into national identities so all can have a sense of belonging together. This means that the tendency amongst some to exclude religious identities from public institutions and the re-making of national identities has to be challenged. Modood suggests that this can be done in a principled yet pragmatic way by drawing on Western Europe’s moderate political secularism and eschewing forms of secularism that offer religious groups a second-class citizenship.

Rowman & Littlefield, 2019

30% Off with Discount Code

Routledge Focus, 2019, 82 pages

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1 From a single style to multiple styles
• 2 Spiritual revolution: Multiplication of forms
• 3 The fourth secularisation
• 4 Sense of religion in the secular age

Description

• This book examines recent forms of secularisation to demonstrate that we are now witnessing a “fourth secularisation”: the autonomy of lifestyles. After introducing two initial secularising movements, from mythos to Logos and from Logos to Christianity, the book sets out how from Max Weber onwards a third movement emerged that practised the autonomy of science. More recently, daily life radicalises Weber’s secularisation and its scope has spread out to include autonomy of individual practices, which has given rise to this fourth iteration.
• The book outlines these first three forms of secularisation and then analyses the fourth secularisation in depth, identifying its three main dimensions: the de-institutionalisation of the religious lifestyle; the individualisation of faith; and the development of new social forms in the religious field. These areas of religious practice are shown to be multiplying partly as a result of the general aestheticization of society. Individuals, therefore, aspire to personal styles of life with regard to beliefs and the choice of their own religious practices.
• This book will be of great use to scholars of religious studies, secularisation and the sociology of religion.

https://www.routledge.com/The-Fourth-Secularisation-Autonomy-of-Individual-Lifestyles-1stEdition/Berzano/p/book/9780367260682

1st Edition
Edited by Justin Beaumont

https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Han…/…/9781138234147

The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity offers an internationally significant and comprehensive interdisciplinary collection which provides a series of critical reviews of the current state of the art and future trends in philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual terms. The volume likewise presents a range of empirical knowledges and engagements with postsecularity. A critical yet sympathetic dialogue across disciplinary divides in an international context ensures that the volume covers a wide and interrelated intellectual and geographical scope.

The editor’s introduction with Klaus Eder offers a robust foundation for the volume, setting out the central aims and objectives, the rationale for the contributions, and an outline of the structure. Thorny issues of normativity and empirical challenges are highlighted for the reader. The handbook comprises four interrelated sections. Part I: Philosophical meditations discusses postsecularity from philosophical standpoints, and Part II: Theological perspectives presents contributions from a variety of theological viewpoints. Part III: Theory, space, social relations contains pieces from geography, planning, sociology, and religious studies that delve into theoretically informed empirical implications of postsecularity. Part IV: Political and social engagement offers chapters that emphasize the political and social implications of the debate. In the Afterword, Eduardo Mendieta joins the editor toreflect on the notion of reflexive secularization across the volume as a whole, alluding to new lines of inquiry.

The handbook is an invaluable guide for graduate and advanced undergraduate teaching, and a key reference for students and scholars of human geography, sociology, political science, applied philosophy, urban and public theology, planning, and urban studies.

‘This is an exceptionally strong collection examining one of the defining issues of our era. Readers will find it both broadens and deepens their thinking about changing roles of religion and secularism in contemporary society.’ – Craig Calhoun, Professor of Social Sciences, Arizona State University, USA

‘It is increasingly clear that what comes after postmodernity is not really the vaguely defined neo-modern, which is little more than a wave of nostalgia, but rather the post-secular, which is also a more genuine post-modern. It manifests itself variously as the challenge of other non-secular cultures, of the pre-modern and alternatively modern west, of the extra-human and the unavoidably metaphysical. This fine collection well represents this variety in both its disparity and its aspects of unity.’ – John Milbank, Emeritus Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics, University of Nottingham, UK

Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce three recently published books on Swaminarayan Hinduism:

An Introduction to Swaminarayan Hinduism (3^rdedition) by Raymond Brady Williams (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

<https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/religion/buddhism-and-eastern-religions/introduction-swaminarayan-hinduism-3rd-edition?format=PB&isbn=9781108431514>

An Introduction to Swaminarayan Hindu Theology by Sadhu Paramtattvadas (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

< https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/religion/buddhism-and-eastern-religions/introduction-swaminarayan-hindu-theology?format=PB>

Swaminarayan Hinduism: Tradition, Adaptation and Identity edited by Raymond Brady Williams and Yogi Trivedi (Oxford University Press, 2016)

< https://global.oup.com/academic/product/swaminarayan-hinduism-9780199463749?q=Swaminarayan%20hinduism&lang=en&cc=us>

Raymond Brady Williams

LaFollette Distinguished Professor in the Humanities emeritus

Wabash College

Glocal Religions
Victor Roudometof (Ed.)

Pages: 152
Published: October 2018

The globalization of the world’s religions leads to a variety of fusions whereby local elements blend with global religions, leading to hybrid local-global or glocal religious forms. Glocal forms of religion provide a hitherto insufficiently explored research agenda with the potential of further growth in the future. This volume introduces the basic tenets of this research agenda and offers examples from around the globe. In the volume’s individual chapters, authors explore a diverse tapestry of such forms that cover cases from the Caribbean, Japan, Finland, Eastern Europe, US, Korea, Southeast Asia and Central America. Glocal forms of religious expression exist across diverse religious traditions. In this volume, religious traditions specifically explored include Buddhism, Hinduism, folk or traditional religions, Eastern Orthodox Christianity & Protestantism. The study of glocal religions involves a trans-disciplinary group of scholars and researchers. In this volume, contributions come from the fields of sociology, archaeology, anthropology, history and religious studies. This collection is an indispensable reader for scholars and students who wish to explore the dynamics of glocal religion in their part of the world

(This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Glocal Religions that was published in Religions)

Download PDF

ISBN 978-3-03897-316-4 (Pbk); ISBN 978-3-03897-317-1 (PDF)
https://doi.org/10.3390/books978-3-03897-317-1 (registering DOI)
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