Religion and Society

This book examines the new religious pluralism and the challenges it poses for democratic societies on both sides of the Atlantic. What are the contours of this new religious pluralism? What are its implications for the theory and practice of democracy? Does increasing religious pluralism erode the cultural and social foundations of democracy? To what extent do different religious communities embrace similar — or at least compatible — ethical and political commitments? By seeking answers to these questions, this book offers a revealing look at the future of religion in democratic societies. The book offers a structured conversation about the social and political implications of the new religious pluralism.

This book offers a fascinating portrayal of Santa Muerte, a skeleton saint whose cult has attracted millions of devotees over the past decade. Although condemned by mainstream churches, this folk saint's supernatural powers appeal to millions of Latin Americans and immigrants in the U.S. Devotees believe the Bony Lady (as she is affectionately called) to be the fastest and most effective miracle worker, and as such, her statuettes and paraphernalia now outsell those of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Saint Judetwo other giants of Mexican religiosity. In particular, the book shows Santa Muerte has become the patron saint of drug traffickers, playing an important role as protector of peddlers of crystal meth and marijuana; DEA agents and Mexican police often find her altars in the safe houses of drug smugglers. Yet Saint Death plays other important roles: she is a supernatural healer, love doctor, money-maker, lawyer, and angel of death. She has become without doubt one of the most popular and powerful saints on both the Mexican and American religious landscapes.

Attention to embodiment and the religious significance of bodies is one of the most significant shifts in contemporary theology. In the midst of this, however, experiences of disability have received little attention. This book explores possibilities for theological engagement with disability, focusing on three primary alternatives: challenging existing theological models to engage with the disabled body, considering possibilities for a disability liberation theology, and exploring new theological options based on an understanding of the unsurprisingness of human limits. The overarching perspective of this book is that limits are an unavoidable aspect of being human. In addition, since most of us also experience limits that take the form of disability at some point in our lives; could be described as disability is more “normal” than non-disability. If we take such experiences seriously and refuse to reduce them to mere instances of suffering or randomness, we discover insights that are lost when we take a perfect or generic body as our starting point for theological reflections. While possible applications of this insight are vast, this work focuses on two areas of particular interest: theological anthropology and metaphors for God. This project challenges theology to consider the undeniable diversity of human embodiment. It also enriches previous disability work by providing an alternative to the dominant medical and minority models, both of which fail to acknowledge the full diversity of disability experiences. Most notably, this project offers new images and possibilities for theological construction that attend appropriately and creatively to diversity in human embodiment.

The book describes the Christian movement from New Testament times and the Gentile mission to developments in the Roman Empire. It expounds Christianity's eastward expansion and seminal interaction with Islam whose resistance encouraged Europe to embark on its maritime expansion to the East and the New World. Christianity followed Europe into the non‐Christian world, and became identified with the rising mercantilism and colonial empires. Missions gained—and lost—momentum by association with the slave trade and with related systems of native exploitation, acquiring range and imperial protection, for example, but also by provoking local resistance. Conversely, the first mass conversion of New World Africans provided impetus for the missionary drive into Africa and Asia, culminating in the 20th-century post‐Western awakening. Nineteenth-century colonial empires masked the true potential of Christianity's indigenous appeal, though the adoption of vernacular Bible translation appealed to reserves of local initiative and persisted vigorously into the post‐colonial phase. The book follows the theme to post‐Maoist China and in developments in the global Pentecostal/Charismatic movement. All these manifestations paint the picture of World Christianity as a critical dynamic force in the 21st century.

This book argues that public schools and universities leave the vast majority of students religiously illiterate. Such education is not religiously neutral, a matter of constitutional importance; indeed, it borders on secular indoctrination when measured against the requirements of a good liberal education and the demands of critical thinking. The book also argues that religious perspectives must be included in courses that address morality and those Big Questions that a good education cannot ignore. It outlines a variety of civic reasons for studying religion, and argues that the Establishment Clause doesn't just permit, but requires, taking religion seriously. While acknowledging the difficulty of taking religion seriously in schools and universities, the book makes a cogent case for requiring both high school and undergraduate students to take a year long course in religious studies, and for discussing religion in any course that deals with religiously controversial material. The final chapters address how religion might best be addressed in history, literature, economics, and (perhaps most controversially) science courses. The book also discusses Bible courses, and the relevance of religion to moral education and ethics courses. While the book's position will be taken by some as radical, it argues that he is advocating a “middle way” in our culture wars. Public schools and universities can neither promote religion nor ignore it.

Pauli Murray (1910–85) was a poet, lawyer, activist, and priest, as well as a significant figure in the civil rights and women's movements. Throughout her careers and activism, Murray espoused faith in an American democracy that is partially present and yet to come. In the 1940s Murray was in the vanguard of black activists to use nonviolent direct action. A decade before the Montgomery bus boycott, Murray organized sit-ins of segregated restaurants in Washington D.C. and was arrested for sitting in the front section of a bus in Virginia. Murray pioneered the category Jane Crow to describe discrimination she experienced as a result of racism and sexism. She used Jane Crow in the 1960s to expand equal protection provisions for African American women. A co-founder of the National Organization of Women, Murray insisted on the interrelation of all human rights. Her professional and personal relationships included major figures in the ongoing struggle for civil rights for all Americans, including Thurgood Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt. In seminary in the 1970s, Murray developed a black feminist critique of emerging black male and white feminist theologies. After becoming the first African American woman Episcopal priest in 1977, Murray emphasized the particularity of African American women's experiences, while proclaiming a universal message of salvation. This book examines Murray's substantial body of published writings as well personal letters, journals, and unpublished manuscripts. The book traces the development of Murray's thought over fifty years, ranging from her theologically rich democratic criticism of the 1930s to her democratically inflected sermons of the 1980s.

This book describes how early Confucians coped with situations where their rituals failed to achieve their intended aims. In contrast to most contemporary interpreters of Confucianism, the book demonstrates that early Confucian texts can be read as arguments for ambiguity in ritual failure. If, as discussed in one text, Confucius builds a tomb for his parents unlike the tombs of antiquity, and rains fall causing the tomb to collapse, it is not immediately clear whether this failure was the result of random misfortune or the result of Confucius straying from the ritual script by building a tomb incongruent with those of antiquity. The Liji (Record of Ritual)—one of the most significant, yet least studied, texts of Confucianism—poses many of these situations and suggests that the line between preventable and unpreventable failures of ritual is not always clear. Ritual performance, in this view, is a performance of risk. It entails rendering oneself vulnerable to the agency of others; and resigning oneself to the need to vary from the successful rituals of past, thereby moving into untested and uncertain territory. This book challenges some common assumptions of contemporary interpreters of Confucian ethics, in particular the assumption that a cultivated ritual agent is able to recognize which failures are within his sphere of control to prevent and thereby render his happiness invulnerable to ritual failure.

This is a study of the Bengali Kartābhajā sect and its place in the broader movement of Tantrism, which is an Indian religious movement, notorious for its alleged use of shocking sexual language and rituals. The author looks closely at the relationship between the rise of the Kartābhajās, who flourished at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the changing economic context of colonial Bengal. Made up of the poor lower classes labouring in the marketplaces and factories of Calcutta (India), the Kartābhajās represent “the underworld of the imperial city.” It is shown that their esoteric poetry and songs are saturated with the language of the marketplace and the bazaar, which becomes for them the key metaphor used to communicate secret knowledge and mystical teachings. Not only do they employ the imagery in the market of moneylending and brokering, but also name their sect after the British East India Company, giving themselves the ironic title of the “Poor Company.” The case of the Kartābhajās opens many new insights not merely into the specific case of one Bengali cult, but also into much larger cross‐cultural and theoretical issues, including the changing role of the lower class, marginalized groups under the changing conditions of colonialism, the changing role of Tantric traditions during the period of British rule, and the topic of secrecy as a cross‐cultural category in the study of religion. The book is arranged in three parts: I. The Secret Marketplace: Historical Origins and Socioeconomic Contexts; II. The Power of Secrecy: Esoteric Discourse and Practice; and III. The Liability of Secrecy: Secrecy as a Source of Scandal and Slander, Elitism, and Exploitation.

This book looks at how churches attempt to realize Dr. King's dream of racial integration. Recognizing that race is central to the organization of American life, the book situates race theory at the heart of understanding the cultural and social dynamics of racially integrated congregations and how they attract and retain members. The book, focusing on black–white interracial churches, argues that for these organizations to sustain a racially diverse congregation they must primarily appeal to whites. African‐Americans will need to affirm whites' religious and cultural predilections to retain white membership and bear the brunt of the sacrifices required to make racial integration work. In the end, interracial churches end up reproducing the racial structures they purport to oppose. The compelling stories that unfold in this book expose the tenuous nature of interracial churches and the barriers they need to overcome to realize the dream.