Construction Of Religion Research Articles

Religion after Critique

Abstract In the last few decades, religion and its terms have shown to be implicated in projects of colonial modernity. While this critique of religion is now generally accepted, the term continues to be used in the field with little regard to its history and its colonial construction. This essay aims to bring greater attention to the continuing relevance of religion in contemporary society as articulated in postcolonial scholarship. It proposes closer attention to the critique of religion in the work of David Chidester, Talal Asad and Charles Long. Two distinct dimensions of religion are identified in their work. The first is a construction of religion in colonial modernity, while the second suggests ways of studying religions in light of this construction. I show in this essay that their work points to multiple complementary ways of studying religions in the contemporary. Their work suggests that the field of religious studies cannot ignore its discursive history and construction.

De-coloniality and Trans-Modernity: Religion in African and Western Management

Part of the distinction between African and Western management theories lies in the positioning of religion. This analysis leads from the premise that reality is the outcome of a struggle between diverse interpretations of religions. Throughout history religions, as systems of meaning, construct centers and margins (Asad, 1983; Wijsen, 2017). The actuality of management sciences demonstrates a discipline in which power relations around the interpretations of management and religions are revealed. In this domain, the African Ubuntu management style has been marginalized by a Western colonial(de-)construction of religion. The central question here is: what is the role of religion in a de-colonial relationship between African and Western management? The paper seeks to argue that religion is a variable of trans-modern management, a connection which is needed for the de-coloniality of African and Western modern management concepts.

‘Religion is the Opium of the People’: An FDA Analysis on the Construction of Religion by Young Greek Adults

This study examines the discourses constructed around religion in Greek society, focusing on the transition from conservative religious beliefs prevailing in micro societies to a more accepting discourse at the macro societal level. The research employs a qualitative approach, specifically utilizing Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) on 7 interviews of young Greek adults, to explore the evolving landscape in Greece and the power dynamics of religion influenced by education, social interaction, and relevant discourses, resulting in a diminished influence of religion over time. The findings reveal the presence of tolerance towards religious diversity, challenging the traditional conservative discourse, which is characterized by strict adherence to Orthodox religious practices and resistance to religious pluralism, while also highlighting the declining power of religion. The study demonstrates how individuals aligning with the acceptive discourse value their own religious beliefs while fostering co-existence with individuals of different religious groups, without being heavily influenced by the church. Notably, younger generations, shaped by an era emphasizing social interaction, exhibit a stronger alignment with this discourse. By illuminating the shaping of identities and orienting actions within these discourses, this research contributes to the understanding of religion in Greek society. It underscores the significance of religion as a subject warranting ongoing scholarly attention and highlights the need for future research to explore the complexities of religious beliefs and discourses across the country using varied methodological approaches. Keywords: Greek society, Greek Orthodox church, discourse analysis, conservative beliefs, religious tolerance, social interaction, power dynamics

Theopsych: A Psychological Science Primer for Theologians

Theopsych: A Psychological Science Primer for Theologians

Interrogating the Sacred: Radical Religious Revisionism, Agnosticism and Atheism in the Modern Arab World

Abstract The article analyzes the thought of modern Arab Muslim and Christian critics of religion (believing radical and left liberal revisionists, agnostics, and atheists) who have challenged prevailing religious repertoires of both Islamists and their liberal opponents. Topics include: traditional Orientalist understandings of the fragile role of reason in Arab societies; the construction of religion in the modern West and non-West; the influences that account for the emergence and nature of Arab critiques, their similarities and differences, and the various responses that they have engendered; the degree to which the critiques have paralleled those of the modern West, and their influence on modern Arab thought; the variety of genres, including the novel, short story, poetry, fable, drama, Qur’anic exegesis, scientific theory, philosophy, metaphysics, and historical studies, in which these critiques have appeared.

The Correlation among Religion and Work in the Philosophy of German Idealism

The philosophy that built by German Idealism is obtained and never neglected religion, this is not about the religious dogmas or the fantasy and legendary nature of religion, but it is about the spirit and the crux of religion. Nevertheless, there is always struggled to deprive it from fantasies and rebuilt by philosophical ideas. These ideal philosophers are asserted to reconstruct the stories and imaginary schemes of religion into philosophical and rational thinking. There is a change in the result of this process which is religion is retreated and the metaphysics is slightly appeared. In other word, this change is directed from revelation to metaphysical views.
 In the light of this, the German Idealism is taking two different ways toward religion: the negative direction; which is involved to the critical studies of the basis and construction of religion, and the positive direction; this direction is returned to religion, but this return is happened after reconstruct religion by the critical and rational process. The relation between religion and ethics is one of the subjects that represent this division toward religion. For instance, if we read Kant, Fichte and Schelling, regardless some details and differences between them, and regardless the stages of developing their philosophies, in the general, their philosophy not tried too much to approve the existence of God in the rational way, and they asserted that it is impossible to approve God’s existence in the rational way. That is why in the basic moral is independent and ties to ration not religion.
 The ethical values are absolute, they legitimate themselves by themselves, and they are not legitimated by the transcendental power out of them. The bad is bad, and the good is good, that is why morality became the first foundation for religion, and the true religion is the one is compatible with rational morality. Even, morality is not complete by itself, because it needs motivations and goals, these motivations and goals are not existing inside the morality itself, just God can provide these motivations and goals to make morality complete. God can make human be a moral creature, in return, God reaches human to the endless happiness. To gain this endless happiness which is not available in this life, it requires soul immortality. Form this point, the God and soul immortality which is not approved by ration, the morality make them a logical and obligation necessity.

A Multidimensional Construct of Religiosity Among Baby Boomers and Trajectories of Social Attitudes

Although a number of studies have examined relationships between religiosity and social attitudes, less is known about how these relationships change over the life course using a multidimensional construct of religiosity among Baby Boomers. A multidimensional construct of religion allowed us to take a more person-centered approach to religiosity, whereby we examine the association between Baby Boomers with different types of religiosity and the trajectories of their political and gender role attitudes over a period of transition from early to later adulthood. We selected 798 young-adult Baby Boomers from the 1971 wave (mean age: 19 years) of the Longitudinal Study of Generations (LOSG) and tracked their political and gender role attitudes through until the 2016 wave (mean age: 64 years). Using latent class analysis, we identified four latent religious typologies: strongly religious, weakly religious, liberally religious, and privately religious. We found that Baby Boomers in the strongly religious class reported the most conservative political and gender role attitudes among the four classes over this period of transition. Baby Boomers in the privately religious class were conservative in their political and gender role attitudes than those in the weakly religious class. The liberally religious group generally reported the second most conservative political attitudes among the four identified groups, but reported the least conservative gender role attitudes of the four groups. Findings suggest that early religiosity may serve as a significant predictor affecting political and gender role attitudes throughout the adult life course.

The heathen, the plague, and the model minority: Perpetual self-assessment of Asian Americans as a panoptic mechanism

Incidents of racism against Asians have been rising since the COVID-19 pandemic turned global in early 2020. Employing Foucault’s concept of panopticism and Kathryn Lofton’s insights on the function of religion to demarcate group boundaries, this article argues that American religion constructs Asian American stereotypes to limit the discursive space within which Asian Americans may negotiate their identities. These discursive limitations have, in turn, buttressed white supremacy. This article examines how some Asians and Asian Americans respond to anti-Asian sentiments during the pandemic by performing a close reading of an op-ed by prominent Asian American politician Andrew Yang in The Washington Post. This reading reveals that Yang’s colorblind solution upholds whiteness as the American gnosis and limits the discursive space in which Asian Americans may negotiate their identities. This article also discusses how the myth of America as a white Christian country withstands challenges from minority groups contesting its dominance.

Nishida's Resistance to Western Constructions of Religion

Nishida's Resistance to Western Constructions of Religion

From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan. By Julie McBrien. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. xv + 232 pp. $28.95 paper

From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan. By Julie McBrien. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. xv + 232 pp. $28.95 paper

Review of Julie McBrien, From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan.

Review of Julie McBrien, From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan.

“A Higher and Purer Shape”: Kaufmann Kohler's Jewish Orientalism and the Construction of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America

AbstractThis article uses the case of Kaufmann Kohler (1843–1926), an intellectual and institutional leader of American Reform Judaism, to explore the relationship between Orientalism and the category of religion in nineteenth-century America. Recent scholarship has shown that the lived religion of nineteenth-century American Jews departs significantly from the ideological hopes of Jewish elites. Connecting the emerging portrait of nineteenth-century Jewish laity with elite arguments for American Judaism, I reconsider Kohler's thought as a theological project out of step with his socioreligious milieu. Kohler is renowned for his theorizing of Judaism as a universal, ethical religion. As scholars have demonstrated repeatedly, defining Judaism as a “religion” was an important feature of Reform thought. What these accounts have insufficiently theorized, however, is the political context that ties the categorization of religion to the history of Orientalism that organized so many late nineteenth-century discussions of religion, Jewish and not. Drawing on work by Tracy Fessenden, John Modern, and Tisa Wenger, I show that Kohler's universal, cosmopolitan religion is a Jewish version of the Protestant secular. Like these Protestant modernists, Kohler defines Reform Judaism as a religion that supersedes an atavistic tribalism bound to materiality and ritual law. Being Jewish, for Kohler, means being civilized; reforming the soul of Judaism goes together with civilizing Jewish bodies and creating a Judaism that could civilize the world in an era in which religion and imperialism were overlapping interpretive projects with racial and gendered entanglements.

Locating Religion and Secularity in East Asia Through Global Processes: Early Modern Jesuit Religious Encounters

The central premise of this paper is that in order to understand the social construction of religion and secularity in East Asia today we need to take a long durée historical approach, which takes into account the colonial encounters between the Christian West and East Asia during three different and distinct phases of globalization. While most of the recent scholarly work on the globalization of the categories of religion and secularity focuses on the second Western hegemonic phase of globalization, this essay focuses on the early modern phase of globalization before Western hegemony.

Sexual and Religious Regimes of the Self in Dutch Discourses about Homosexuality: A Queer Theological Analysis and Alternative

Abstract This article discusses two major ways in which sexual and religious identities are conceptualized in Dutch public discourses about homosexuality. In a secular discourse that stresses that LGBTs should be able to ‘be themselves’, certain religious identities are often ignored, subordinated or attacked, while the self that needs to be realized is rendered primarily a sexual self. A conservative Protestant (counter-)discourse on ‘being in Christ’ subordinates (homo)sexual identity to Christian identity—or even rejects it. To move beyond such (Late) Modern oppositional constructions of religion and homosexuality in terms of (religious/sexual) “identity”, this article explores the (queer) Catholic concept of sacramental characters—as an anti-identity—and suggests that it has the potential to unsettle some of the deadlocks in public discourses about homosexuality and sexual diversity.

From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan, written by Julie McBrien

From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan, written by Julie McBrien

Religion in the Press: The Construction of Religion in the Korean News Media

This article concerns the configuration of religion in the media sector of modern Korea. With the globalization of the modern world, mass media have increasingly become a differentiated field of communication through which to process various understandings of the religious or the spiritual in any given society. This article focuses on how religion is presented in the news media such as newspapers and broadcasters in contemporary South Korea. Since the 1990s, the media industry in Korean society has rapidly turned into an autonomous profession as the nation-state has made great progress toward democracy and social reformation. In this new social context, a majority of media workers have internalized the standards of liberal or even progressive journalism. Reflecting on the socio-political shift, media professionals have actively produced information and assessments about different religious groups, many of which are concerned with cultural, anti-social, and sensational dimensions of religion. The author studies the underlying trends and logic in the media's articulation of religion, which are selectively intertwined with the secular and religious constellation of Korean society.

Pathologia religiosa: Medicine and the Anti-religious Movement in the Early Soviet Union

The interwar secularist-religious clashes across Europe were often perceived as a conflict between religious and scientific worldviews. The interactions and tensions between religion and science are analysed in this article through an examination of the impact of medicine on the secularist project of Russian communism. According to Marx, the religious consciousness was tantamount to the ‘sigh of the oppressed creature’. Soviet physicians diagnosed the believer as a sufferer, as someone plagued by chronic ‘religious feelings’. Small wonder then that a fixed association between religiosity and morbidity could arise. Under these premises Soviet physicians felt predestined to do direct battle with every form of ecclesiastically determined phenomenon as a health risk factor or manifestation of disease. By using various sources of specialist medical and atheist discourse, this contribution seeks to conceptually understand this confluence of health and atheist propaganda, secularization, and healing in terms of a ‘medicalization of religious faith’ in the early Soviet Union. It will address the various fields of discourse within the Soviet pathologia religiosa, that is, constructions of religion and religiosity as pathological phenomena particularly within psychiatry.

The construction of religion as a ‘public problem’: The emergence of Islam in the public space during Tunisia’s transition to democracy (2011–14)

The object of the present study is to analyze how, over the transition period of 2011–14, Islam became a ‘public problem’, to understand how it came to pervade the public space. I will investigate the place of religion in the public space both before and after the 2011 elections, and to do so will start with a few ‘affairs’ and controversies surrounding Islam and its place in the new Constitution as well as in the broader framework of Tunisian society.

The History of the Academic Study of Religion in Universities, Centers, and Institutes in India

India is home to more than 800 million Hindus and has a massive higher education system that is overseen by the University Grants Commission (ugc). Despite this, there are hardly any departments of religion or Hinduism in India, but the ugc, even though it has a secular mission, funds universities with explicit religious affiliations. This article traces the reasons for these paradoxes and discusses the apparent lacuna of religious studies departments by looking at the genealogy of the study of religion in India. It initially looks at the contested terrain of nineteenth-century educational institutions. The work of British missionaries, Orientalists, and government officials form the imperial context to understand Charles Wood’s momentousDespatch(1854), which, on the one hand, argues for secular institutions but, on the other, tries to accommodate the work of the Orientalists and the missionaries. Wood recommends a system in which government subsidies, secular education, and universities with overt religious profiles become interlocked, but the formal study of religion is bypassed. Finally, I reconsider what the “dearth” of religious studies and the “absence” of Hinduism departments reveal about the construction of religion in India itself. The lack of conceptual correspondence between “religion” and “Hinduism” as taught in Western academic contexts does not preclude the formal study of religion in India. Instead, the study of religion is conducted within particularized frameworks germane to the Indic context, using a network of unique institutes. Reflection on these distinctively Indian epistemological frameworks push new ways of thinking about religious education and the construction of religion as an object of study in South Asia.

Contingency in the Age of Religion: The Hajj and Religion-Making in Colonial and Postcolonial India

InUnion of India v. Bhikan(2012), the Indian Supreme Court ruled that government hajj subsidies violated the Indian Constitution’s secular principles. What is notable about this decision is that the Supreme Court based the ruling on its own interpretation of the Qur’an, privileging direct access to scripture over historically established practices surrounding the pilgrimage in discerning what “Islam says” about the state’s proper role in the hajj. Archival and legal research shows thatUnion of India v. Bhikanis merely the latest moment in over a century of colonial and postcolonial debates about pilgrimage management. This article employs the theoretical and methodological insights of Jonathan Z. Smith and Talal Asad to explore this history and its effects, using the matter of hajj administration to identify the concrete implications of different methods of “religion-making,” or the construction of religion as an object for consideration and regulation, in the public sphere.