Conntributors to this volume tackle the question of how to define the contours of current religious fundamentalism, examining the private & public postures of fundamentalist rhetoric, the importance of its regional variants, & the damage it can do to regional & national educaton systems.
An in-depth, interdisciplinary exploration of contemporary religion and its issues. Covers materials fully by using self-contained chapters and sections that are relatively independent of each other. It also reflects on the many new developments in religion with several complete chapter rewrites. For anyone interested in Modern Religion.
The anthology Religion and Contemporary Issues: Politics, Ecology, and Women's Rights explores three areas of life in which religion has a profound impact: political policy; ecology; and women's rights. Through the lens of six religions - Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - the carefully curated articles address some of contemporary society's most challenging issues. The articles expose readers to diverse opinions, while original introductions to the issues and the religions help place the articles in context. Students learn about Christian fundamentalism and its relationship to postmodern ecology. They explore Jain devotional literature and how femaleness is constructed within it. They consider the potential transformational effect of devotion in Hinduism. Religion and Contemporary Issues encourages readers to think critically about how the power of religion both shapes and frames important issues. Its cogent presentation makes the material appropriate for lower division religious studies courses. With its careful attention to global women's rights, the book is also well-suited to courses in women's studies.
Religion Today introduces students to key concepts in religious studies through a compelling problem-solving framework. Each chapter opens with a contemporary case study that helps students engage in current religious issues, explore possible solutions to difficult religious problems today, and learn key themes and concepts in religious studies. To enhance student learning, a free Student Study Guide is available for download from Rowman & Littlefield. The Study Guide features chapter summaries, definition quizzes for students to test themselves on key terms, and possible learning activities.
Following in the very successful tradition of Critical Terms for Literary Studies and Critical Terms for Art History, this book attempts to provide a revitalized, self-aware vocabulary with which this bewildering religious diversity can be accurately described and responsibly discussed. Leading scholars working in a variety of traditions demonstrate through their incisive discussions that even our most basic terms for understanding religion are not neutral but carry specific historical and conceptual freight.
Although students and scholars of social problems have often acknowledged the role of religion, no thorough examinations of the relation between the two have emerged. This book fills this gap by providing a definitive work on the impact of religion on social problems, religion as a solution to social problems, and religion as a social problem in itself.
Regulating Religion: Case Studies from Around the Globe presents, through the inclusion of contributions by international scholars, a global examination of how a number of contemporary societies are regulating religious groups. It focuses on legal efforts to exert social control over such groups, especially through court cases, but also with selected major legislative attempts to regulate them. As such, this analysis falls within the broad area of the sociology of social control and more specifically, legal social control, a topic of great interest when studying how contemporary societies attempt to maintain social order. The factual details about social and legal developments in societies where religion has been defined as problematic include Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. This book will be of interest to researchers and students in the sociology of religion, the sociology of law, social policy, and religious studies as well as policy makers.
The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.