Study Of Religious Diversity Research Articles

Heretic or Traitor? Spinoza’s Excommunication and the Challenge That Judaism Poses to the Study of Religious Diversity

ABSTRACT When political theorists talk about “religious diversity,” they usually intend the multiplicity of “religions” in a given society. Yet we now know that the secular, liberal framing of the problematic presupposes a controversial definition of “religion.” My primary goal, in this paper, is to reorient scholarly discussion around what we might call “the critical religion conception of diversity” – not the multiplicity of “religions,” but the myriad ways that the sacred intersects with national and political identity, some of which resist assimilation to the “religious” paradigm. Toward this end, I relate a story about Spinoza’s Hebrew reception in the interwar period. For Zionist intellectuals, Spinoza symbolized the deformations that “religion” imposed on Judaism’s self-understanding and the constraints that it placed on Jewish intellectual horizons. Studying the Zionist critique of “religion” exposes the limitations of received theoretical frameworks, which cannot address the kinds of diversity that were politically consequential for twentieth-century Jews.

An American Hero: Faith-Based Emergency Health Care in Karen State, Myanmar and Beyond

This article examines the vastly expanded mobility of displaced Karen villagers in the evangelical humanitarian movement, the Free Burma Rangers. This builds on ethnographic fieldwork on humanitarian cultures in the Thai-Burmese borderlands conducted since 2007 with a Thai research team and funded by Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious Diversity. While refugees are too often presented as victims, the article argues that by joining the mission, the Karen freedom fighters become ambassadors of a political ideology and evangelism. Bringing Christianity with them from their displaced homes, displaced Karen meet the evangelical humanitarian organization in the Karen hills or in the Thai refugee camps, train with them, and supply the villagers left behind with emergency health care and religious messages. Sponsored by American evangelical churches, the US military, and resettled Karen communities in the West, the freedom fighters of the Free Burma Rangers mobilize people and resources all over the globe. Recently, they have expanded their operations beyond Myanmar to places as far as Syria, Iraq and South Sudan, thus getting involved in what it presents as a global struggle between good and evil.

Alexander Ross’s Pansebeia (1653), religious compendia and the seventeenth-century study of religious diversity

ABSTRACTRecently, our scholarly understanding of how religion was studied during the seventeenth century has changed. Contributions made by historians of scholarship have provided a more detailed picture through studies of the emerging genre of the history of idolatry. This article, however, looks at another new but overlooked genre in the seventeenth century: the religious catalogue. It does so through an examination of the most popular compendium of the age: the Scottish-born, England-based Alexander Ross’s Pansebeia: Or, A View of All the Religions (1653). Ross’s work contains the first attempt to comprehend and understand religious diversity on an exhaustive scale. Using Pansebeia, we can tell a story of how religious compendia gave the embattled, anxious Christian the information necessary to defend themselves against the threat of religious diversity in the seventeenth century, and which unintentionally contributed to the emergence of the modern concept of “religion” as a distinct sets of theological beliefs and rituals.

What the Community Religion Project can tell us about the study of religious diversity in the UK

The Community Religions Project at the University of Leeds ( http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/crp/ ) has been in existence for over 35 years and provides a unique model for observing development in the way religious diversity and pluralism have been conceptualised and studied in the UK. Many leading scholars of religion in the UK have produced monographs, research papers, or other work in conjunction with the CRP. The increasing engagement with concepts and challenges of religious diversity and pluralism are visible in the greater emphasis on interreligious relations, and religion(s) or ‘faith’ and the state; largely through sociological and policy studies, rather than ethnographic studies of discrete religious communities. Issues concerning religious categories and conflation of religious with national or ethnic identity are notable in early CRP studies, but are now more clearly articulated as a focus for study. The continuing focus on qualitative methods is revealing of prevailing UK models of study of religions, though the move from micro (very local) to macro (UK-wide) studies involves increasing use of secondary and quantitative date. Using the archive of the CRP, this paper will provide an intellectual history of study of religions in the UK which highlights the changing engagement with pluralism and diversity. Using example studies, issues concerning terminology, method and theory will be identified. The move to a focus on interreligious studies and religion and policy will also provide a framework for considering how study of religions in the UK is articulated in response to both academic and non-academic interests and concerns.

The study of religious diversity in the Czech lands—diversity in academic studies of religions

Abstract This article attempts to summarize some of the experiences and methodological insights gained from research on non-traditional religious groups that the author has conducted over the last twenty years, primarily in Czech society. The starting point for these studies is respect for the principle that it is not possible to approach the study of religious pluralism and diversity from a single predetermined conceptual framework-religious diversity requires diverse approaches. However, within the diversity approach there exist some common principles such as respect for the religious beliefs of respondents and the elimination of personal stereotypes and ethnocentrism.

Religious Affiliation and College Student Development: A Literature Review and Synthesis

The study of religious diversity in higher education stands at a critical juncture. Recent research on the topic has provided new understandings of the relationships between college student religion and spirituality, well-being, and institutional religious affiliation. This article presents the most current knowledge in the field and shares the authors' recent research. The most important findings concern the role of religious privilege and marginalization, along with institutional factors such as faculty involvement and a culture of ecumenism, in predicting student growth.

A doubly reflexive ethnographic methodology for the study of religious diversity in education

The fruitful and intensive political, academic, and pedagogical debate on religious education in contexts of diversity seems, to suffer from an ostensible imbalance. On one hand, models, proposals, and programmes destined to face the ‘challenges’ and ‘problems’ generated by religious diversity in the classroom proliferate. On the other, in many countries and school systems there is a scarcity of empirical studies about intercultural and interreligious processes and relations as they occur in the school and extra-school educational spheres. This striking gap between the normative-prescriptive and the descriptive-empirical area is a feature of educational systems, which we are trying to close with comparative projects such as the REDCo project (Religion in Education: A Contribution to Dialogue or a Factor of Conflict Transforming Societies of European Countries, a European FP6 STRP project). In order for the distinctively anthropological attitude not to be limited to a criticism of the often essentialising and reifying conceptual and ideological uses of the concepts of ‘religion’, ‘culture’ and/or ‘identity’ in this domain, I hold that ethnography can contribute to overcoming this gap by empirically analysing the interwoven and often dialectic relationship between the discourses of the pedagogical-intellectual sphere and daily educational praxis. In the following pages, summarising experience gained particularly in the Spanish REDCo project contribution, I analyse, from a methodological point of view, ethnography’s possible contribution to the study of interreligious relations in school contexts. In order to do this, I present and discuss the elements required to develop a conceptual-methodological model that can integrate ‘syntactic’, ‘semantic’, and ‘pragmatic’ dimensions that will articulate this dialectic relationship between ethnic discourses and cultural practices.