Religion, Secularism, and Constitutional Democracy
Religion, Secularism, and Constitutional Democracy

Author: Jean L. Cohen

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-12-22

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0231540736

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Polarization between political religionists and militant secularists on both sides of the Atlantic is on the rise. Critically engaging with traditional secularism and religious accommodationism, this collection introduces a constitutional secularism that robustly meets contemporary challenges. It identifies which connections between religion and the state are compatible with the liberal, republican, and democratic principles of constitutional democracy and assesses the success of their implementation in the birthplace of political secularism: the United States and Western Europe. Approaching this issue from philosophical, legal, historical, political, and sociological perspectives, the contributors wage a thorough defense of their project's theoretical and institutional legitimacy. Their work brings fresh insight to debates over the balance of human rights and religious freedom, the proper definition of a nonestablishment norm, and the relationship between sovereignty and legal pluralism. They discuss the genealogy of and tensions involving international legal rights to religious freedom, religious symbols in public spaces, religious arguments in public debates, the jurisdiction of religious authorities in personal law, and the dilemmas of religious accommodation in national constitutions and public policy when it violates international human rights agreements or liberal-democratic principles. If we profoundly rethink the concepts of religion and secularism, these thinkers argue, a principled adjudication of competing claims becomes possible.

Islam and Democracy in Indonesia
Islam and Democracy in Indonesia

Author: Jeremy Menchik

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-01-11

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1107119146

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This book explains how the leaders of the world's largest Islamic organizations understand tolerance, explicating how politics works in a Muslim-majority democracy.

Religion and Nationalism in Global Perspective
Religion and Nationalism in Global Perspective

Author: J. Christopher Soper

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-11

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1107189438

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Offers a new framework for understanding how religion and nationalism interact across diverse countries and religious traditions.

Secularism and Its Critics
Secularism and Its Critics

Author: Rajeev Bhargava

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 9780195650273

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This book puts together the most important contemporary writings in the debate on secularism. It deals with conceptual, normative and explanatory issues in secularism and addresses urgent questions, including the relevance of secularism to non-Western societies and the question of minority rights.

Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India
Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India

Author: Amrita Basu

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-06-30

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1316300188

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This book is a pioneering study of when and why Hindu Nationalists have engaged in discrimination and violence against minorities in contemporary India. Amrita Basu asks why the incidence and severity of violence differs significantly across Indian states, within states, and through time. Contrary to many predictions, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has neither consistently engaged in anti-minority violence nor been compelled by the centrifugal pressures of democracy to become a centrist party. Rather, the national BJP has alternated between moderation and militancy. Hindu nationalist violence has been conjunctural, determined by relations among its own party, social movement organization, and state governments, and on the character of opposition states, parties and movements. This study accords particular importance to the role of social movements in precipitating anti-minority violence. It calls for a broader understanding of social movements and a greater appreciation of their relationship to political parties.

The European Court of Human Rights and the Freedom of Religion or Belief
The European Court of Human Rights and the Freedom of Religion or Belief

Author: Jeroen Temperman

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-01-04

Total Pages: 630

ISBN-13: 9004346902

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As the tensions involving religion and society increase, the European Court of Human Rights and the Freedom of Religion or Belief is the first systematic analysis of the first twenty-five years of the European Court's religion jurisprudence. The Court is one of the most significant institutions confronting the interactions among states, religious groups, minorities, and dissenters. In the 25 years since its first religion case, Kokkinakis v. Greece, the Court has inserted itself squarely into the international human rights debate regarding the freedom of religion or belief. The authors demonstrate the positive contributions and the significant flaws of the Court's jurisprudence involving religion, society, and secularism.

We God's People
We God's People

Author: Jocelyne Cesari

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-12-16

Total Pages: 765

ISBN-13: 1108604080

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Cesari argues that both religious and national communities are defined by the three Bs: belief, behaviour and belonging. By focusing on the ways in which these three Bs intersect, overlap or clash, she identifies the patterns of the politicization of religion, and vice versa, in any given context. Her approach has four advantages: firstly, it combines an exploration of institutional and ideational changes across time, which are usually separated by disciplinary boundaries. Secondly, it illustrates the heuristic value of combining qualitative and quantitative methods by statistically testing the validity of the patterns identified in the qualitative historical phase of the research. Thirdly, it avoids reducing religion to beliefs by investigating the significance of the institution-ideas connections, and fourthly, it broadens the political approach beyond state-religion relations to take into account actions and ideas conveyed in other arenas such as education, welfare, and culture.

Secularism Or Democracy?
Secularism Or Democracy?

Author: Veit-Michael Bader

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 9053569995

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Policies dealing with religious diversity in liberal democratic states—as well as the established institutions that enforce those policies—are increasingly under pressure. Politics and political theory are caught in a trap between the fully secularized state and neo-corporate regimes of selective cooperation between states and organized religion. This volume proposes an original, comprehensive, and multidisciplinary approach to problems of governing religious diversity—combining moral and political philosophy, constitutional law, history, sociology, and religious anthropology. Drawing on such diverse scholarship, Secularism or Democracy? proposes an associational governance—a moderately libertarian, flexible variety of democratic institutional pluralism—as the plausible third way to overcome the inherent deficiencies of the predominant models.