The New Visibility of Religion
The New Visibility of Religion

Author: Graham Ward

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2008-10-09

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1441182047

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Since the late 1980s sociologists have been drawing our attention to an international surge in the public visibility of religion. This has increasingly challenged two central aspects of modern western European culture: first, the assumption that as we became more modern we would become more secularised and religion would disappear; and secondly, that religion and politics should occupy radically differentiated spheres in which private conviction did not exert itself within the public realm. The new visibility of religion is not simply a matter of what Keppel famously called 'The Revenge of God', that is, the resurgence of Christian, Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism. Religion is permeating western culture in many different forms from contemporary continental philosophy, the arts and the media, to the rhetoric of international politicians. This collection of essays brings together a unique collection of voices from theology, aesthetics, social and political science, philosophy and cultural theory in an exploration of four major aspects of this new visibility of religion: the revision of the secularisation thesis, the relationship between religion and violence, the new re-enchantment of reality and the return of metaphysics. The exploration is conducted through essays by and interviews with figures at the forefront of reflecting upon this major cultural shift and its implications. It is distinctively multidisciplinary, examining the phenomenon of the rise of religion in Western Europe from a number of interrelated perspectives.

Transformations of Religiosity
Transformations of Religiosity

Author: Gert Pickel

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-02-04

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 3531933264

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Following the political and economic transformation processes in Eastern Europe the religious landscapes have also changed. While some countries display a revitalization of religion, others are continuously secularizing. The book explores this contrast, including different, empirical based studies on the topic in a wide range of Eastern European countries.

Church Reform and Leadership of Change
Church Reform and Leadership of Change

Author: Harald Askeland

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2016-01-01

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1498223338

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Reforms and processes of change have become an increasingly pervasive characteristic of European Protestant churches in the last fifteen to twenty years. Driven by perceptions of crises, such as declining membership rates, dwindling finances, decreasing participation in church rituals, and less support of traditional church doctrine, but also changes of governance of religion more generally, many churches feel compelled to explore new forms of operations, activities, and organizational structures. What is the inner dynamic and nature of these processes? This book explores this question by applying perspectives from organizational studies and bringing them into dialogue with ecclesiological categories, seeking to provide a richer understanding of the field of processes of change in churches. Among the questions asked are: What are the implications--organizationally and ecclesiologically--of viewing reform as a church practice, and how does this relate to much more comprehensive waves of public sector reforms? How is church leadership configured and exercised, how is democratic leadership related to the authority of ordained ministry, and how does leadership take on new forms in the context of churches? And how do churches incorporate organizational practices of planned change and renewal, such as social entrepreneurship?

Religion in Secular Archives
Religion in Secular Archives

Author: Sonja Luehrmann

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0199943621

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Russian archives contain a wealth of information on religiosity during the Soviet era, but most of it is written from the hostile perspective of officials and scholars charged with promoting atheism. Based on archival research in locations as diverse as the multi-religious Volga region, Moscow, and Texas, this book argues that much can be learned about Soviet religiosity by a focus not just on what documents say but also on what their originators did.

Divided by Faith and Ethnicity
Divided by Faith and Ethnicity

Author: Andrea Althoff

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-08-22

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1614518408

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Two unprecedented, striking developments form part of the reality of many Latin Americans. Recent decades have seen the dramatic rise of a new religious pluralism, namely the spread of Pentecostal Christianity - Catholic and Protestant alike - and the growth of indigenous revitalization movements. This study analyzes these major transitions, asking what roles ethnicity and ethnic identities play in the contemporary process of religious pluralism, such as the growth of the Protestant Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal movements, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and the indigenous Maya movement in Guatemala. This book aims to provide an understanding of the agenda of religious movements, their motivations, and their impact on society. Such a pursuit is urgently needed in Guatemala, a postwar country experiencing acrimonious religious competition and a highly contentious debate on religious pluralism. This volume is relevant to scholars and students of Latin American Studies, Sociology of Religion, Anthropology, Practical Theology, and Political Sciences.

Faith, Hope, Love, and Justice
Faith, Hope, Love, and Justice

Author: Anselm K. Min

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2018-03-28

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1498577121

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Faith, hope, and love, traditionally called theological virtues, are central to Christianity. This book renews faith, hope, and love in the context of the many contemporary challenges in many unique ways. It is an ecumenical collection of papers, equally divided between Catholic and Protestant positions, that seek to radically renew the classical doctrine of faith, hope, and love, and argues for their essential connection to the praxis of justice. It contains eight different approaches, each represented by a distinguished theologian and addressing different aspects of the issues and followed by insightful and critical responses. It does not merely seek to renew the theological virtues but to also reconstruct them in the demanding context of justice and the contemporary world, nor is it simply a treatise on justice but a theoretical and practical reflection on justice as vital expressions of faith in God, hope in God, and love of God. A non-dogmatic and non-ideological approach, it accommodates both conservative and liberal positions, and avoids the separation of the theological virtues from the demands of the contemporary world as well as the separation of justice talk from the theological context of faith, hope, and love. It seeks above all to renew, not merely repeat, the classical doctrine of faith, hope, and love in the contemporary context of the urgency of justice, and to do so ecumenically, comprehensively, and from a variety of perspectives and aspects.

Words
Words

Author: Ernst van den Hemel

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2016-06-15

Total Pages: 614

ISBN-13: 0823255581

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It is said that words are like people: One can encounter them daily yet never come to know their true selves. This volume examines what words are—how they exist—in religious phenomena. Going beyond the common idea that language merely describes states of mind, beliefs, and intentions, the book looks at words in their performative and material specificity. The contributions in the volume develop the insight that our implicit assumptions about what language does guide the way we understand and experience religious phenomena. They also explore the possibility that insights about the particular status of religious utterances may in turn influence the way we think about words in our language.

Fifty Years of Philosophy of Religion
Fifty Years of Philosophy of Religion

Author: Andries F. Sanders

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 661

ISBN-13: 900414823X

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The bibliography lists about 10.000 titles of monographs, collections and articles in the field of the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology that appeared between 1955 and 2005. The majority of them are in the English language but publications in German, Dutch and French are listed as well. Though it is not claimed to be exhaustive, the bibliography offers a fairly representative survey of scholarly work on the main topics of interest. *** Publications have been systematically classified according to eleven main categories: "Introductions, Surveys and Historical Issues" (Part I), "Religious Language" (Part II), "Religious Experience" (Part III), "Religious Epistemology" (Part IV), "Theism" (Part V), "Hermeneutics" (Part VI), "Religion and Science" (Part VII), "Religion and Aesthetics" (Part VIII), "Religion and Morality" (Part IX), "Religious Pluralism" (Part X) and "Feminist Philosophy of Religion" (Part XI). Part III has been subdivided into "Religious Experience" and "Mystical Experience," Part VII into "The Concept of God," (arguments for) "The Existence of God," "The Problem of Evil" and "Atheism," and Part VII into "General and Historical Issues," "Theological Issues" and "(implications of) Modern Physics, Cosmology and Biology," *** The bibliography will particularly be useful to scholars, teachers and students in the philosophy of religion, philosophical theology and systematic theology as well as to those who are interested, professionally or otherwise, in the results of academic scholarship in those fields.

Violence and Meaning
Violence and Meaning

Author: Lode Lauwaert

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-11-23

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 3030271730

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This edited collection explores the problem of violence from the vantage point of meaning. Taking up the ambiguity of the word ‘meaning’, the chapters analyse the manner in which violence affects and in some cases constitutes the meaningful structure of our lifeworld, on individual, social, religious and conceptual levels. The relationship between violence and meaning is multifaceted, and is thus investigated from a variety of different perspectives within the continental tradition of philosophy, including phenomenology, post-structuralism, critical theory and psychoanalysis. Divided into four parts, the volume explores diverging meanings of the concept of violence, as well as transcendent or religious violence- a form of violence that takes place between humanity and the divine world. Going on to investigate instances of immanent and secular violence, which occur at the level of the group, community or society, the book concludes with an exploration of violence and meaning on the individual level: violence at the level of the self, or between particular persons. With its focus on the manifold of relations between violence and meaning, as well as its four part focus on conceptual, transcendent, immanent and individual violence, the book is both multi-directional and multi-layered.