New issue of Politics and Religion Journal(PRJ)is online

New issue of Politics and Religion Journal(PRJ)is online.
Please do put this infrmation at site of ISSR
http://www.politicsandreligionjournal.com/index.php?=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=6&Itemid=3&lang=en          
New Issue
Volume VII (No. 1) – Spring 2013.

Table of contents
The word of guest editor

TOPIC OF THIS ISSUE
POLITICS AND RELIGION IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA

C.N. Venugopal
Polity, religion and Secularism in India: A Study of Interrelationships
Anantna Kumar Giri
The  Politics of Religion and the Complex Spirituality of Religious Encounters and Co – Realizations: The Multiverse of Hindu Engagement with Christianity in India
Paramjit S. Judge
Community within Community: Politics of Exclusion in the Construction of Sikh Identity
Ashish Saxena and Vijaylaxmi Saxena
Religious Landscape, Low Caste Hindus and the Identity Politics: Configuration of Socio – Religious Space for Weaker Sections in Jammu City, J&K (India)
Ajay I Choudhary
Buddhist Identity: A Case Study of Buddhist Women’s Narratives in Nagpur City
Ramanuj Ganguly
Social Dynamics in a Religious Milieu: The Sevayats of the Jagannath Temple at Puri
Susan Visvanathan
Sacred rivers: Energy Resources and People’s Power

ANALYSES
Jerold Waltman
Church Autonomy, Sexual Orientation, and Employment Policy in Britain: A legislative History of the Employment Provisions of the Equality Act 2010
Marko Nikolić and Duško Dimitrijević
”Macedonian Orthodox Church (MOC)” in Former Yugoslav State
 
REVIEWS, CRITICAL VIEWS AND POLEMICS
Sunčica Mitrović
The Problems of Politology of Religion

Incorporating Faith: Religion and Immigrant Incorporation in the West

The following special issue of International Migration may be of interest to readers:

International Migration Special Issue:
Incorporating Faith: Religion and Immigrant Incorporation in the West
June 2013 (Volume 51, Issue 3)

Guest editor: Phillip Connor

Articles include:
God Can Wait – New Migrants in Germany Between Early Adaptation and Religious ReorganizationClaudia Diehl and Matthias Koenig
God Bless Our Children? The Role of Generation, Discrimination and Religious Context for Migrants in Europe Koen Van der Bracht, Bart Van de Putte and Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe
Intergenerational Change in Religious Salience Among Immigrant Families in Four European Countries
Konstanze Jacob and Frank Kalter
Piety in a Secular Society: Migration, Religiosity, and Islam in Britain
Valerie A. Lewis and Ridhi Kashyap
Intermarriage Attitudes Among Minority and Majority Groups in Western Europe: The Role of Attachment to the Religious In-Group
Sarah Carol
Religious Dimensions of Contexts of Reception: Comparing Two New England Cities
Wendy Cadge, Peggy Levitt, Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky and Casey Clevenger
Religion as A Context of Reception: The Case of Haitian Immigrants in Miami, Montreal and Paris
Margarita A. Mooney

Currents of faith, places of history, 3 PhD Scholarships, 1 Postdoc position

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS – 3 PhD Scholarships, 1 Postdoc position

Joint Research Programme: Currents of faith, places of history: religious diasporas, connections, moral circumscriptions and world-making in the Atlantic space

Starting date: October 1st, 2013

Duration: 3 years (36 months), fulltime for PhD-projects, part-time for postdoc-project

The JRP Currents of faith, places of history: religious diasporas, connections, moral circumscriptions and world-making in the Atlantic space, coordinated by Ruy Blanes (ICS Lisbon, Univ. Bergen) with Birgit Meyer (Utrecht U.), David Berliner (Univ. Libre de Bruxelles) and Ramon Sarró (Univ. Oxford), is an international HERA-funded Joint Research Project that brings together a multidisciplinary team of scholars. The central foci of this program are the interconnections between religion, mobility, place and heritage in the Atlantic space. We aim to rethink theories of Atlantic history by exploring three dimensions of ‘religious diasporas’: connections, moral circumscriptions and world-making.

Based on a partnership between universities in Portugal, Belgium, Netherlands, Norway and the UK, the program brings together a team of senior and junior scholars. Combining problems and methodologies sprung from social anthropology, history and religious studies, we seek to synthesize an empirical ethnographic methodology with a historical-comparative approach so as to explore ‘meaningful histories’ in their cultural and religious manifestations.

The CURRENTS JRP is offering 3 PhD positions for students interested in conducting field research and writing PhD theses on the topics under focus. Next to this, it offers one postdoc position. PhD-project 1 will be located at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal, under the research theme Encounters, Historical Acknowledgements and Moral Landscapes Across the Atlantic (chaired by Ruy Blanes). More specifically, s/he will conduct research on “grassroots prophetism, political interventions and territorial heritagizations in contemporary South America”. For more information, contact Ruy Blanes (ruy.blanes@gmail.com).

PhD-project 2 will be located at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Oxford, UK, under the research theme A King in the Atlantic: Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces in the Making of a Kongo Heritage. S/he will conduct research on how the historical connections between the Kindgom of Kongo and the South American continent, which started with the Atlantic slave trade, are remembered and recreated in today’s Brazil, a country today discovering and reassessing its African heritage. For more information, contact Ramon Sarró (ramon.sarro@anthro.ox.ac.uk) or visit
http://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/prospective-students/funding/ahrc/#c9787.

PhD-project 3 will be located at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, under the research theme Slave Trade Transatlantic Heritagescapes. Reconnections and World- Making in Guinea-Conakry and the Mexican Gulf. More specifically, s/he will conduct research on “Heritagized religious traditions in the Mexican Gulf / Caribbean”. For more information, contact David Berliner (David.Berliner@ulb.ac.be).

The postdoc-project (part-time) will be located at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, under the research theme Atlantic spirits. Religion, Heritage, and the Making of the Atlantic World through Winti and Candomblé (chaired by Birgit Meyer). The research project will focus on “Candomblé in Brazil”.
For more information, contact Birgit Meyer (b.meyer@uu.nl).

The 3 PhD students and the postdoc will conduct field research in different locations. They will be based in their respective host institution, and will be supervised by the project’s Principal Investigator in that institution. They will be expected, however, to actively engage in JRP meetings, intellectual exchanges, and academic events bringing the entire international team together. Applicants should therefore be enthusiastic, well motivated and able to work independently and as part of a collaborative research team.

Applicants are expected to hold a very good MA, MSc, or MPhil degree in anthropology or a cognate field by the start of the three-year project.  The post-doc will have completed a PhD dissertation in anthropology, religious studies or a cognate field by the start of the three-year project. Fieldwork experience and familiarity with ethnographic research methods will be highly valued.
Relevant research experience in one of the contexts or topics of the Joint Research Project will be particularly advantageous.

Informal enquiries about the overall Joint Research Project should be addressed to ruy.blanes@gmail.com. Please contact each chair for specific instructions on applications.

Applicants interested in either of these four positions will need to send the respective chair a personal statement indicating why they think they are particularly well prepared to undertake this research, a short research proposal, letters of recommendation (two or three, depending on the University they are applying for) and a sample of written work.
Furthermore they will need to satisfy the criteria for acceptance to the PhD programmes of each of the universities involved. They will need to complete the respective application forms available on the links provided by each chair upon initial contact.

Deadline: Friday 21 June 2013 (noon).

Shortlisted candidates may be invited for an interview.

RSRC Public Lecture

Dear All,
The Religion and Society Research Centre
<http://www.uws.edu.au/religion_and_society>
at the University of Western Sydney invites you to attend a Public Lecture:

‘Global Religion and the end of Secularization’

Speaker: Emeritus Professor Roland Robertson, University of Pittsburgh, USA and University of Aberdeen, UK

Date: Friday 7 June, 2013
Time: 1:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Venue: Bankstown Campus<http://www.uws.edu.au/campuses_structure/cas/campuses/bankstown>, Building 3 Room 55, Sydney, Australia

Please RSVP to e.garcia@uws.edu.au by 4 June.
Abstract In spite of or perhaps in part because of a wave of Western atheism – what some have called religious atheism – there appears to be a great wave of religiosity across much of the contemporary world. This is to be seen in various parts of Asian, Eurasia , the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. US American religiosity seems to be as strong as ever, in spite of the leading new atheists being themselves American or Anglo-American. These are, of course, very broad generalizations. Nonetheless, it is these that will form the context and the background for my presentation. Both the inter-societal and the intra-societal aspects of the global religious revival will be given attention. There will also be some consideration of extra-terrestrial factors.

Roland Robertson is Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh, USA and Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Global Society, University of Aberdeen, UK. He is also Distinguished Guest Professor of Cultural Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China and he has held visiting positions in many countries. He is the author of many publications, his most influential ones being The Sociological Interpretation of Religion, Meaning and Change, and Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (revised edition forthcoming). His major areas of specialization are cultural sociology, the sociology of religion, sociological theory, and global sociology. His present work deals with, inter alia, cosmology, antisemitism, dimensions and processes of civilization, the controversy over Southern theory, the cosmopolitanism debate, and the contemporary significance of glocality. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Religions in Digital Games – Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet

Dear Colleagues,

The editors of “Online – Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet” (http://www.online.uni-hd.de/) are pleased to announce the relaunch of the journal. It will come up with a new design as well as improved navigation and search functions. By establishing a peer-review system, we will renew our mission of publishing articles of a high academic standard from a multitude of disciplines.
We herewith invite researchers of all disciplines to hand in articles on their research dealing with religions on the internet. We are currently planning to publish 2 issues a year, one of which will be a special issue addressing a certain topic. The next issue to be published in December 2013 will broach the issues of “Religion in Digital Games” (for further information see Call for Papers below).
The journal is always keen to collect high quality scholarship on issues relating to religions on the Internet and welcomes submissions pertaining to all aspects of theses matters anytime to be published in a future issue! Submissions and queries should be send to the following address:
online.religion@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de.

Best regards,
Simone Heidbrink (in behalf of the editorial team)
****************************************************************************

Call for Papers
Religions in Digital Games
Multi-perspective and Interdisciplinary Approaches

Special issue of “Online – Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet”
(http://www.online.uni-hd.de/), due for publication in December 2013!

Over the past few years, the scientific analysis of digital games and their cultural and social impact has become a growing field of research in various scientific disciplines. Sadly, the issue of religion as an (explicit or implicit) factor in the construction and reception of game worlds, rules and mechanics has been vastly underrepresented in most studies on the field. This negligence seems rather unjustified given the vast presence of e.g. religious symbols, narratives and player actions in popular games like The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim , Bioshock: Infinite and many others.

The special issue on “Religion in Digital Games” seeks to contribute to filling this gap in games research through a multi-perspective and interdisciplinary approach. We herewith invite scholars from Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Social Studies, Media Studies, Game Studies, Educational Studies, Economics, Theology and other related disciplines to hand in proposals for possible articles which deal with all kind of religious aspects in the context of digital games, i.e. computer games, console games, mobile games.

The articles could (among others) broach the issue of
* game aesthetics
* gaming culture
* reception and recipient research
* ludology
* narratology
* content analysis

In order to present a broad insight into the aspects of religion in digital games, we invite theoretical, methodical and empirical studies referring to these or related topics. We are looking forward to receive the title and a short abstract (max. 250 words) of the planned article until June 30th 2013. The language of the Journal is English, for proposals in other languages please contact the editors beforehand.

Further important dates and deadlines are:
July 15th Notification on the acceptance of your proposal by the editors.
September 30th Submission deadline for full article.
October 15th Deadline for comments, requests of revisions by the editors (if necessary).
November 15th Submission deadline for revised articles.
December 1st Publication of the Online Journal.

Please send your abstract and / or further inquiries to the following e-mail address:
online.religion@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de.
— online – Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet
http://www.online.uni-hd.de/
Institute for Religious Studies
University of Heidelberg
Akademiestraß 4-8 D – 69117 Heidelbergphone ++49-(0)6221-547482

Call for Paper: Everyday life practices of Muslims in Europe

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Call for Paper
Everyday Life Practices of Muslims in Europe: Consumption and Aesthetics

Where: KU Leuven, Leuven-Belgium
Date: 28-29 November 2013

Organiser: KU Leuven Gülen Chair for Intercultural Studies (GCIS)
Keynote Speakers:
Emma Tarlo, Goldsmith, University of London
Ali Mangera, MYAA Mangera Yvars Architects (to be confirmed)

Key words: Muslims in Europe, Consumption, Everyday life practices, leisure time, Aesthetics, Muslims Artists, Architecture, Muslim Self, Body, Memory

Muslims have a longer and deeper socio-economic and cultural experience in Europe and this presence requires a deeper understanding of the ways Muslims have become a part of Europe. In this vein, everyday practices (reading, talking, walking, dwelling, cooking, eating, clothing, consuming, shopping) are considered significant because they are not the “obscure background of social activity”, rather, they are the “investigation of ways in which users operate” (de Certeau). The socio-religious practices are obscure and not familiar with a non-Muslim, and the everyday practices are necessary to discover and penetrate this deeper experience of Muslims. The practices concern a mode of operation, a logic of doing, a way of being and a meaning. They do not link only to the question of personal choice and liberties. The content of the practice is to “make explicit the system of operational combination… to bring to light the models of action characteristic of users…” (de Certeau). The everyday practices create free areas through hobbies, games, art, clothes to the users in which one can see an essential formation of the self. We would need to discuss the increased sense that Muslims have of their distinctive-similar spatial locations that serve a free area or refuge to realize him or herself.

This conference sets out to understand the everyday practices of Muslims living in Europe. The diverse and various (non)-religious daily life practices indicate the non-defined boundaries of Muslims whose practices can be a part of the stigmatised-open spaces in public discourses. Examining the relationship between Islam and liberal democratic values, it is important to note what kind of practices and daily life experiences are exercised in private-public areas, which also determine the views and public perception of Muslims. The identification of Muslims with one or another practice is not a simply neutral matter; this entails also an attachment to liberal, communitarian and civil meanings. Regardless of the daily life activities, these perceptions of Muslims face the challenge that Muslims are not a fixed group, but they share the same practices that others have and do. Food and eating practices, consumer way of life, marriage, salutations; these banal practices of everyday life are central to discover the subjectivity of Muslims, or in other terms, a sense of the self, a way of embodiment. These daily practices are inextricably linked to the problematic of subjectivity. The meaning, discourses, argumentations and reasoning behind the daily life practices are detailed experiences of the self. This workshop seeks to explain the daily life choices and preferences in the context of subjectivity and self, looking at the questions concerning the religious-cultural-ethnic constructions of practices in which different perceptions are mediated on Muslims. The daily life practices and habits are not simply a matter of realising the self, taking enjoyment. They are in articulation with manifold cultural-religious-social meanings and discourses which serve to mark boundaries, to share some common values, to distinguish rituals, to strengthen social ties, and to symbolize a distinctive group awareness. Each of these functions and constructions concretise a kind of belief in everyday life, support a choice, and contribute to the construction of a self. However, the daily life practices and rituals have received little serious scholarly attention because of their “normal” nature and their link with ordinary subjects rather than with polemical and controversial issues such as integration, citizenship, security and sharia. Devoting attention to daily life practices needs to disrupt and disturb these debates about Muslims in Europe.

A particular focus will be on the impact of daily life on two areas and aspects: consumption and artistic performances.

Muslim consumerism and leisure time
Many such debates dealt with the integration and the compatibility of Muslims with western values indicating how Muslims should be. At the level of consumerism, there is little attention through the lens of religious rituals and everyday practices in Europe. Muslims’ relation with eating, leisure times, clothing, fashion, shopping etc. are interesting topics to look closely the transformative processes in public and private life. At these micro levels of analyses, the consumption practices offer a valuable route to understand relations between memory, body, space, culture, ethnicity, and gender among Muslims living in Europe. The on-going processes of transnationalism put in forward these daily practices as means of change and assume the creation of new religious combinations, hyphenated performances as seen in Muslim fashion. The daily life practices reveal the conceptualization of individuality, modernity and indicate how these (in)differences are produced between Muslims and non-Muslims. The complex socio-economic, religious and cultural elements that are involved in the construction of Muslim self through consumerism surface the question of modesty, secularism, and bodily prescriptions, public-private borders. Do the daily consumerist practices unsettle some of the established normativity in social codes in Europe or continuity with the local-existing culture? Around this question, this part of conference will look at a possible way of convergences between Muslims and non-Muslims to point the social-cultural mobility.

Artistic performances
Arts and religion are nowadays in controversial turns. Often debates about how art approaches a religious matter illustrate some social phenomena and crises linked with sacred-profane relations. Controversies between religion and art become a sort of parameter to re-think what contemporary Muslims in Europe do, know and believe. Examining artistic performances of Islamic patterns and visual expression of faith provides new elements on how Muslim cultures are translated and concretized in European public life. Certain kind of artistic creativities, including popular culture, traditional art, painting, cinema, theatre, hip-hop, new sufi groups, architecture; this theme of the conference would like to align the circulation of daily life practices with the artistic expressions of Muslims in Europe according to the title of this conference. How can an artistic expression of Islam be analysed in terms of everyday practices? In which way artistic productions transcend the existing boundaries creating new forms of practices and introducing these new daily practices in public spaces? What are the new socio-cultural and political contexts of artistic practices? How these contexts influence on Muslim aesthetics? Is there a kind of Muslim aesthetics? This theme of conference will not be only an analysis of the production of ‘Islamic art’, including the architectural side. The aim is to cover the performative and architectural expressions of Islam, the emerging of new styles, and of compositions from Muslims in Europe. The circulation of these new styles, expressions between performers and the public encompass new theoretical debates on boundaries, space, and body, transculturality.

Authors are invited to send abstracts (maximum 500 words) of their papers on themes of their own choice, which include at least one of these two aspects that the conference wants to treat.

ProgrammeA detailed schedule will follow in due course.
Tuition Fees and Scholarships
There is no tuition fee for participants in the conference programme. However, presenters and participants are expected to pay the costs of their travel and accommodation. The organizers have a reduced prize from ‘Irish College’ hotel in Leuven. The GCIS covers the meals and transportation in Belgium during the conference.

Outcome
Within six months of the event, a book will be produced and published by the GCIS with Leuven University Press, comprising some or all of the papers presented at the Workshop. The papers will be arranged and introduced, and to the extent appropriate, edited, by scholar(s) to be appointed by the Editorial Board. Copyright of the papers accepted to the Workshop will be vested in the GCIS, and printed in the conference proceedings book.

Selection Criteria
The workshop will accept up to 20 participants, each of whom must meet the following requirements:
– have a professional and/or research background in related topics of the conference;
– be able to attend the entire programme.
Since the Workshop expects to address a broad range of topics while the number of participants has to be limited, writers submitting abstracts are requested to bear in mind the need to ensure that their language is technical only where it is absolutely necessary and the language should be intelligible to non-specialists and specialists in disciplines other than their own; and present clear, coherent arguments in a rational way and in accordance with the usual standards and format for publishable work.

Timetable

1. Abstracts (300–500 words maximum) and CVs (maximum 1 page) to be received by 1stJune 2013.
2. Abstracts to be short-listed by the Editorial Board and papers invited by 7th June 2013.
3. Papers (3,000 words minimum – 5,500 words maximum, excluding bibliography) to be received by 1st September 2013.
4. Papers reviewed by the Editorial Board and classed as: Accepted – No Recommendations; Accepted – See Recommendations; Conditional Acceptance – See Recommendations; Not Accepted, by 30th September 2013.
5. Final papers to be received by 1st November 2013.

Conference Editorial Board
Johan Leman, KU Leuven
Erkan Toguslu, KU Leuven
Saliha Özdemir, KU Leuven
Conference Co-ordinator ErkanToguslu
VenueKU Leuven University

The international workshop will be entirely conducted in English and will be hosted by KU Leuven.
Papers and abstract should be sent to SalihaÖzdemir saliha.ozdemir@soc.kuleuven.be
For more information plz contact:Erkan Toguslu and Saliha Özdemir KU Leuven Gülen Chair for Intercultural Studies

New book: Claiming Society for God: Religious Movements and Social Welfare in Egypt, Israel, Italy, and the United States

Nancy Davis and Robert Robinson’s
Claiming Society for God:

Religious Movements and Social Welfare in Egypt, Israel, Italy, and the United States
(Indiana University Press, 2012)
has been awarded the gold medal in the Religion category of the Independent Publishers Book Awards, which recognize books by university and independent presses. The book also won the Scholarly Achievement Award of the North Central Sociological Association. The book focuses on common strategies used by religiously orthodox (what some would call “fundamentalist”) movements around the world. Rather than using armed struggle or terrorism, as much of post-9/11 thinking suggests, these movements use a patient, under-the-radar strategy of taking over civil society. Claiming Society for God tells the stories of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Sephardi Torah Guardians or Shas in Israel, Comunione e Liberazione in Italy, and the Salvation Army in the United States, showing how these movements, grounded in a communitarian theology, are building massive grassroots networks of religiously based social service agencies, hospitals and clinics, rotating credit societies, schools, charitable organizations, worship centers, and businesses. These networks are already being called states within states, surrogate states, or parallel societies, and in Egypt have now brought the Muslim Brotherhood to control of parliament and the presidency. This bottom-up, entrepreneurial strategy is aimed at nothing less than making religion the cornerstone of society.

Show More<http://www.amazon.com/dp/product/0253002389>

The Facebook page for the book, which includes news stories on orthodox movements and study questions for the book is at http://www.facebook.com/ClaimingSocietyForGod.

New book: Islam and Society: Sociological Explorations

Islam and Society: Sociological Explorations
Riaz Hassan
Paperback $59.99

Sociological Explorations
The central focus of this volume is to explore and highlight the nexus between the ideology of Islam and social and cultural milieus with the aim of reconceptualising the sacred as a socially constructed reality and not a transcendental supernatural phenomenon. From this perspective, human agency and society become the main focus for shaping, perpetuating and institutionalising religious beliefs, ideas and practices, opening up space for empirical and sociological analyses of religious phenomena. The seven essays in this volume seek to explore and examine some of the key debates in contemporary sociology of Islam. The topics explored are: social factors in the origins of Islam; social theory and Muslim society; Islam and politics in South Asia; Muslim piety; anti-Semitism; the social foundations of Muhammad’s prophetic mission, with a special reference to Arab historical memory and the role of his first wife Khadija bint Khuwaylid; and the barriers to social inclusion of Australian Muslims in Australian society.

About the author
Professor Riaz Hassan has published extensively on Muslim societies in an academic career that has spanned more than 40 years.
Publisher Melbourne University Press
See more at: https://www.mup.com.au/items/9780522862560#sthash.TGZeQ1zG.dpuf