Resurgence Of Religion Research Articles

La libertad de expresión en el mercado de las ideas

The article presents a historical and critical reflection of the theoretical and cultural premises of the key principle of liberalism, freedom of expression, its developments and the current challenges that challenge it. From the exposition of the three main elements (a belief in the sacredness of the vocation of the press and of communication in general as a vehicle for public enlightenment, a stoic and humanist vision of the human mind and the duties of the citizen, and a philosophy of history according to which the error will eventually lead to truth and evil will produce good), the author exposes the problems he considers decisive in the near future: forgetting classical antiquity and the elegant notion of the citizen-soldier (linked to the decadence of the culture of the printing press); loss of confidence in moral progress; the globalization; the transformation of media infrastructure and communication; the resurgence of religion.

Secularism, Religion and the 20th/21st Century Novel

AbstractAs many commentators within and beyond the academy decry the “resurgence of religion,” literary scholars have been reconsidering familiar narratives about religion and literature. Literary studies has a complex relation with secularization theses, narratives that tie the ostensible decline of religion in the modern age with the rise of modern literature, particularly the novel. Increasingly, however, scholars are stepping away from such rise‐and‐fall narratives and asking how literature—both literary texts and literary modes of reading—might contribute to shifting our understanding of secularism. Focusing on different methodological approaches scholars take to their study of the novel's relation to secularism, this article contrasts literary studies that take secularization theses as their point of departure with those that investigate the practices and sensibilities underlying and enabling contemporary secularism.

Discursos religiosos e sociedade democrática

O artigo investiga a pertinência dos discursos religiosos para a construção da sociedade democrática. A contemporaneidade filosófica tem observado que as religiões podem contribuir para a realização do objetivo de fraternidade e solidariedade entre os cidadãos com distintas orientações axiológicas. A teoria do discurso de Jürgen Habermas analisa que as sociedades contemporâneas estão vivenciando o processo de pós-secularização e o ressurgimento das religiões na esfera pública. O filósofo alemão considera que as instituições religiosas têm o conteúdo normativo e a legitimidade que está ausente nas instituições políticas e nos atores políticos. As religiões mundiais se caracterizam pelas ações sociais e o incentivo à solidariedade aos seus fiéis. No nível pós-metafísico de fundamentação da forma política, os discursos religiosos podem motivar os cidadãos para a atitude comunicativa e o entendimento sobre as normas sociais que deverão reger a sociedade justa e inclusiva. Nesse sentido, a experiência de auto-esclarecimento das religiões sobre as suas doutrinas e princípios de fé poderá colaborar para o entendimento entre os cidadãos religiosos e não-religiosos. Por fim, a análise da experiência católica de autorreflexão sobre suas doutrinas e o relacionamento com as diversas religiões se tornou o exemplo de diálogo para as entidades religiosas no mundo secular.

The Globalization of Religious Freedom: Evolution, Debates and Issues

The paper explores the globalization of religious freedom as a universal human rights in the 21st century. It discusses the evolution of international religious freedom and depicts the importance of such freedom globally. It emphasizes a broad spectrum of international issues and challenges pertaining to religious freedom. The paper finally contends that the international religious freedom is becoming more important issue in a study of the resurgence of religion in international affairs as it relates to the conflict and understanding of the contemporary global society.

The Slava Celebration: A Private and a Public Matter

A family celebration named slava or krsna slava (celebration/glorification or christened celebration) is a unique custom within the tradition of the Serbian Orthodox Church, where each family annually celebrates its patron saint. Besides Christmas, slava represents one of the most important celebrations in the life of each family. Though its roots reach as far back as the medieval times, slava and its role in the family tradition were neglected and marginalized during the communist period of the Serbian history. With the revitalization of religion and especially the reaffirmation of the Serbian Orthodox Church at the end of the last century, slava regained its significance and recognition, and even exceeded the private family sphere. It is nowadays often used as an indicator of one’s nationality and status with little real connection to its authentic religious meaning and purpose. Additionally, this originally family custom has now become a celebration day for many public institutions, companies, and professional associations. This paper aims to present slava’s distinctive structure and features, as well as explore ways in which the transformation is related to the revitalization of religion and growing nationalism in transitional Serbian society.

European churches and the European parliament elections. The case of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland

ABSTRACTThe article examines the advocacy of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, how it positioned itself in relation to the 2014 EU Parliament elections, the aims for which it strove and the strategies it employed to achieve these aims. The article’s theoretical framework relies on exchange and resource dependency theories. The empirical approach is qualitative analysis of written documents, observations and interviews. The results reveal that the EU signifies a new dimension for religion in the public domain at both the EU and national levels. A change towards a more proactive public role for the national church in Finland can be detected. In this process transnational ecumenical contacts play an important role. Beneficial exchanges for both the church and politicians are behind the resurgence of religion in the public domain. The results indicate that the public role of religion depends on the balance of power, real or imagined, between political and religious agents.

Craft, magic and the re-enchantment of the world

This essay challenges the prevailing view of progressive rationality and disenchantment as set out in Max Weber's social theory and reproduced in organizational neo-institutionalism. We observe that rationality and disenchantment cannot exist in the absence of magic, mystery and enchantment. We argue that the contemporary celebration of rationality and disenchantment is a modernist discourse that has marginalized equally compelling instances of re-enchantment. Drawing from the popular press and management research we identify five themes of re-enchantment in the world; the rise of populism, the return of tribalism, the resurgence of religion, the re-enchantment of science and the return to craft. We use these phenomena to elaborate four alternative constructs – authenticity, reflexivity, mimesis and incantation - that counterbalance the over rationalized and paralyzing concepts in neo-institutionalism – legitimacy, embeddedness, isomorphism and diffusion.

The Mandate of Heaven on earth: religious and secular conflict in China

Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, there has been a resurgence of religion in China. Mainstream sociologists of religion have used this as evidence to refute the theory of secularization. Rather than having a longer historical overview, their refutation of the theory of secularization is based on a linear conception of it and they use 1979 as their baseline. While secularization has occurred in China, the pattern that it has followed has not been linear. To see this, this article goes back further and examines the historical reference points: the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Chinese Revolution/Civil War of 1911–1949 and the Cultural Revolution. In China, when secularization occurred, it was forced; it resulted not only in religious revival (the House Church Movement and Falun Gong) but also in the establishment of a secular religion (the Cult of Mao). This pattern of secularization is dialectical; it resembles a spiral and is the consequence of an ongoing conflict between secular movement and religious countermovement.

GLOBALIZATION AND NEW FORMS OF RELIGIOSITY (AN ISLAMIC PERSPECTIVE)

This paper focuses on the relationship between globalization, on the one hand, and religion and its institutions, on the other. Modernity and globalization are exerting major influences on religion, in some extent diminishing the role of its traditional institutions. However, this does not signify a weakening of religion itself, because globalization has driven the emergence of new forms of religiosity – a phenomenon known as revitalization of religions. Indeed, one of the most prominent political concerns of our time is religious fundamentalism, which is assumed to be a response to globalization. Ironically, fundamentalism is a by-product of globalization and the global society, as well as an instrument of globalization. The article discusses primarily the correlation between religion, its institutions and globalization, and tries to demonstrate that new forms of religion are going global and creating new boundaries, breaching the old frontiers of nation, culture and ethnicity. The paper provides a general description of the different approaches to the relationship between religion and globalization and considers, in particular, the problem of Muslim fundamentalism in its various manifestations. The article demonstrates that the key role in expressing new forms of religiosity is played by transnational religious movements and could be explained by the phenomenon of “deculturalization” of religion, meaning that it is not attached to a particular culture or nation. The proliferation of fundamental Islam (not only amongst Muslims, but also amongst people of other confessions) may, therefore, be explained by the fact that it has no territorial boundaries: it is an abstract identity, which may appeal to everyone. The paper ends with the conclusions on this issue.

A Jamesonian theory of theological practice: A critical response to the work of Roland Boer

In a conjuncture marked by the “resurgence of religion,” the problem of historical materialism’s relation to religious ideologies has acquired a new urgency. The work of Roland Boer, recently awarded the Deutscher Prize for his magnum opus on Marxism and Theology poses this question from a surprising perspective. While his main claim is that religious influences in Marxist theory represent a sort of theological unconscious in historical materialism, at the same time Boer also advances an original Marxist interpretation of the Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity. This line of research, which extends from his dissertation on Jameson and Jeroboam through to his most recent work on The Sacred Economy, proposes that theology is a reflective representation of the social totality. In this article, I criticize Boer’s valorization of theology as a practical discourse that is postideological but non-theoretical, and conclude by indicating an alternative.

If ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’ People Are Not Religious What Difference Do They Make?

Modernity's project of secularisation may be challenged by the resurgence of religion in the public sphere (indicated most dramatically by religiously motivated conflicts but also in more everyday contexts). The rising profile of spirituality in healthcare and business training programmes may offer other challenges. Classically, spirituality has been differentiated from religion along seemingly Cartesian lines: the former being the fully interiorised and privatised form of putatively communal and institutionalised religion. This paper questions whether this division works. Taking a relational or personalist approach to the topic, it considers what interactions and commitments are helpfully labelled and theorised as spirituality. It seeks to make sense of the difference the ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR) phenomenon makes to scholarly debates about ways of re-assembling human and larger-than-human acts in the everyday world. The paper is based on a keynote presentation given at the Annual Conference of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality in May 2016 which addressed the question ‘Can spirituality transform our world?’.

Interaction between Pentecostals and local authorities in Russia: challenging secularity from below

ABSTRACTCertain researchers have maintained that the resurgence of religion in the Russian Federation is part of a process of desecularisation ‘from above’, following years of forced secularisation. This article postulates that, despite their status as members of what is considered a nontraditional religion, foreign to the Russian soil, Russian Pentecostal churches are actively engaged in a challenge to secularity but ‘from below’. I explore this hypothesis through the examination of three Pentecostal modes of action: social partnership, political partnership and global networking. Based on a qualitative, empirical study, this paper finds that the Pentecostal movement has forged close ties on a local and regional level with public authorities and that, through necessity and mutually overlapping interests, a certain cooperation and even complicity has developed between these local authorities and the organisations linked to the churches, thus facilitating the integration of specifically Pentecostal discourse into certain public structures. The study further shows that local and regional authorities have adopted globalised social work praxes territorialised by Pentecostals in an attempt to associate the current authoritarian regime with perceived forms of global modernity. At the same time I argue that the participation of the Pentecostal movement in a process of desecularisation is not an intentional outcome projected by the Russian regime but rather the consequence of economic and social urgency against a backdrop of a policy of New Public Management. I conclude that, due to the constantly shifting and often-arbitrary legal framework in which Pentecostals must operate in Russia today, the partnerships cultivated by the Pentecostal movement may prove to be unsustainable in the long term.

A Critical Contribution to the “Security-Religion” Nexus: Going Beyond the Analytical

This review essay explores the security–religion nexus by evaluating two books contributing to the “restorative turn” in International Relations (IR) theory and practice. While Securing the Sacred and Religion in the Military Worldwide “bring religion back” into the realm of international politics and security, I argue that the analytical purpose of the books is problematic, given that both studies imply a normative logic to the security–religion nexus. This is difficult for two reasons. First, it rests on an assumption about the resurgence of religion in the world and the conduct of research. Second, it furthers a powerful discourse in which religion has a rightful place in an orderly society. I therefore provide a critical contribution to the security–religion nexus by urging scholars of religion and security to embrace their underlying normative positions.

Can We Still Sing the Lyrics “Come Holy Spirit”?

Australian Pentecostals, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, are speaking new tongues in their worship practices, forming new poetic languages of singing and conversation relevant for spatially dislocated twenty-first-century life. Using Nimi Wariboko’s three-city model offered in Charismatic City and the Public Resurgence of Religion, this article assesses Australian pentecostal worship practice in light of his “Charismatic City.” The article suggests that this emergent, poetic language of Spirit empowerment situates the worshipper in a rhizomatic network that flows with pentecostal energies, forming a new commons or space that is the basis of its global civil society. It presents two local case studies from Hillsong Church’s pneumatological song repertoire (1996–2006), and yarning conversation rituals at Ganggalah Church led by Aboriginal Australian pastors. These new languages identify and attune participants to the Spirit’s work in the world, particularly useful for urban cities and cyberspace.

Studying Religion—Diverse Perspectives

This review article focuses on three volumes that represent varying academic disciplines, and thus different perspectives. Each is fairly representatives of fresh ways of thinking and engaging in what is understood to be the current resurgence of religion and religiosity. Nonetheless, the tenor of the works reviewed varies considerably from conventional theorizing to critical analysis, poetic form, and theological reflection.

In pursuit of the postsecular

This article explores the various uses or – according to some authors, such as the sociologist James Beckford – misuses of the term ‘postsecular’. The variations in its use are indeed so broad that the question is justified whether the terminology as such has much analytical value. The prominence of the ‘postsecular’ in present-day debates in my view primarily indicates the inability among scholars, intellectuals and religious interest groups to come to grips with what – for some at least – is an unexpected presence and resurgence of religion in the public domains of presumably secular societies. The work of the cultural anthropologist Talal Asad shows that the secular does not preclude the religious. All kinds of religious arguments, organizations, and agents are very much present in modern ‘secular’ societies. From this perspective, the emergence of the ‘postsecular’ refers to very real phenomena, most importantly the intertwinement of the secular and the religious. For instance, religious actors do not accept the barriers of secular society and claim a role for religion in public and secular arenas. This insight could be one of the most important driving forces behind the popularity of the term ‘postsecular’ in recent years.

Varieties of Secularization Theories and Their Indispensable Core

In the social sciences, a new discourse on religion in modern societies has established itself. It is no longer the master narrative that religion is waning in significance that dominates the perspectives in the social sciences. The new key words are “deprivatization of the religious” (José Casanova), “return of the gods” (Friedrich Wilhelm Graf), “re-enchantment of the world” (Ulrich Beck)—or, quite simply, desecularization (Peter L. Berger). Insights of the sociological classics into the strained relationship between religion and modernity are regarded as no longer valid. Instead of speaking of the decline of religion in modern societies, of a strict contrast between modernity and tradition, scholars nowadays emphasize the blurring boundaries between tradition and modernity and the resurgence of religion in modern societies. Obviously, the logic of reversal governs this new way of thinking: Criticizing the secularization theory has become a new master narrative itself and often has a great deal to do with scaremongering. That's why what is required first is as precise a reconstruction as possible of what secularization theory is actually saying. The article in its first part provides a reconstruction of the propositional content of secularization theory. The second step will then be to elaborate the various meanings of the concept of secularization. The third part finally deals with the criticisms of secularization theory and discusses the extent to which they are justified or not.

The Politics of Religious Repetition

Otherwise diverse genealogical critiques of the discursive category “religion” share a concern to highlight the complicity of this category in colonial and neo-imperial projects, which are effected through the depoliticizing of non-Western subject populations. I argue that countering such depoliticization is more difficult than it may appear, and that some such critiques fall into a form of transcendental historicism that, in fact, further depoliticizes the subjects of colonialism and neo-imperialism. I develop this point through a specific consideration of two such studies, suggesting that their failure owes to their adoption of a mimetic understanding of cultural identity. As an alternative, I theorize the global “resurgence of religion” in terms of Jacques Derrida’s notion of “religion without religion,” arguing that such phenomena represent non-identical, as opposed to mimetic, repetitions of religion which disrupt colonial and neo-imperial legacies. This alternative theorization overcomes the depoliticization inherent in genealogically historicist approaches.

The Resurgence of Religion in America’s Prisons

This article discusses the growing prominence of “faith-based” programs in American corrections and the historical context of penal regime change during periods of economic crisis. The article traces areas of overlap and divergence in recent discussions of penal reform in the U.S. The article suggests a new American penitentiary movement is emerging, noting central tenets of faith-based programs have salience for both conservatives and liberals: on the one hand, faith-based programs are largely paid for by church congregations and volunteers, which appeals to conservatives’ desire to shrink government and get taxpayers out of the business of community building; on the other, faith-based programs demonstrate a recommitment to having at least some level of programming in prisons, which satisfies the left’s view that community building and social capital ultimately lower recidivism. The paper documents several prominent faith-based correctional programs while articulating an agenda for research.

Introduction: Salafism, the Social, and the Global Resurgence of Religion

This introductory article frames the special issue’s examination of social aspects of Salafism in terms of Roel Meijer’s observations on Salafism’s capacity to empower and change identities, and in terms of the wider contexts of the resurgence of Islam and of the global resurgence of religion. It argues that while the study of doctrinal aspects of Salafism is important, the study of the social aspects is more neglected, and that this is where the special issue makes an important contribution.