This book presents a crisis of religion and belief literacy to which education at every level is challenged to respond.
As understanding different religions, beliefs and influences becomes increasingly important, it fills a gap for a resource in bringing together the debates around religious literacy, from theoretical approaches to teaching and policy.
This timely publication provides a clear pathway for engaging well with religion and belief diversity in public and shared settings.
This edited collection provides interdisciplinary, global, and multi-religious perspectives on the relationship between women’s identities, religion, and social change in the contemporary world. The book discusses the experiences and positions of women, and particular groups of women, to understand patterns of religiosity and religious change. It also addresses the current and future challenges posed by women’s changes to religion in different parts of the world and among different religious traditions and practices.
The contributors address a diverse range of themes and issues including the attitudes of different religions to gender equality; how women construct their identity through religious activity; whether women have opportunity to influence religious doctrine; and the impact of migration on the religious lives of both women and men.
This edited collection harnesses a diversity of interpretivist perspectives to provide a panoramic view of the production, experiences, contexts, and meanings of religion.
Scholars from the US, South Asia and Europe explore religious phenomena using ethnographic, comparative historical, psychosocial, and critical theoretical approaches. Each chapter addresses foundational themes in the study of religion – from identity, discourse and power to ritual, emotion, and embodiment. Authors examine dynamic intersections of race, gender, history, and the present within the religious traditions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism, as well as among the non-religious.
Cutting boldly across religious traditions and paradigms, the book investigates areas of harmony and contradiction across different interpretive lenses to achieve a richer understanding of the meanings of religion.
Using welfare as a prism, Religion and Welfare in Europe explores regional conceptions and variations in welfare and religion across Europe.
Methodological approaches to research and practice draw thematic comparisons on these issues using case studies focused on gendered and minority perspectives as they relate to the varied provision of social welfare in selected European countries.
Contributors offer comparative insights on majority-minority relations concerning practices, patterns and mechanisms of social welfare provision, explaining how these lead to conflict, cohesion or – as is so often the case – the grey area in between.
The book will be of interest not only to religion and social policy researchers, but to welfare practitioners and policy advisors with a particular interest in the interaction between religion, social welfare, minorities and gender.
What social factors contribute to the tragic state of health care in Africa?
Focusing on East African societies, this book is the first to investigate what role religion plays in health care in African cultures. Taking into account the geopolitical and economic environments of the region, the authors examine the roles played by individual and group beliefs, government policies, and pressure from the Millennium Development Goals in affecting health outcomes.
Informed by existing related studies, and on-the-ground interviews with individuals and organizations in Uganda, Mozambique and Ethiopia, this interdisciplinary book will form an invaluable resource for scholars seeking to better understand the links between society, multi-level state instruments, and health care in East Africa.
The need to reimagine religion and belief is precipitated by their greater visibility in public life. Meanwhile, social policy responses often see them from a problem-based, rather than an asset-based, approach. However, with growing diversity of religion and belief in every sector comes the potential for new dialogues across previously impermeable policy and disciplinary silos.
This volume brings together leading international authors to critically consider these challenges within legal and policy frameworks, including security and cohesion, welfare, law, health and social care, inequality, cohesion, extremism, migration and abuse. It challenges policy makers to re-imagine religion and belief as an integral part of public life that contains resources, practices, forms of knowledge and experience that are essential to a coherent policy approach to diversity, enhanced democracy and participation.
Introduction Religion and belief are not simply the preserve of RE in schools, though they may be most obvious there. They also appear in the requirement of the act of daily worship, as well as in the right to withdraw – a right belonging only to this sphere and to sex education, apparently two areas in need of more than usually sensitive handling. However, religion and belief are implied, and have implications, throughout the whole life of schools. The muddle spills over throughout. A number of spaces complement, supplement, overlap with and even colonise
This original book makes a timely and potentially controversial contribution both to the teaching of social policy and the wider debates surrounding it in Britain today. It offers a critical and theoretically sensitive overview of the role of religious values, actors and institutions in the development of state and non-state social welfare provision in Britain, combining historical discussion of the relationship between religion and social policy in Britain with a comparative theoretical discussion that covers continental Europe and North America.
Grounded in new empirical research on religious welfare organisations from the nine major faiths in the UK, the book brings together all of these perspectives to argue for an analytical shift in the definition of wellbeing through a new concept called ‘ways of being’. This reflects the moral, ideational and cultural underpinnings of social welfare. Written in a readable style, the book will appeal to students and tutors of social policy, as well as policy-makers seeking to inform themselves about the key issues surrounding faith-based welfare in modern Britain.
79 SIX studying religion in sub-saharan africa Maria Frahm-Arp introduction In Sub-Saharan Africa the high rate of HIV/AIDS infection, unemployment, economic instability and dynamic religious changes from the rise of African independent churches to the current popularity of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity and Catholicism1 are startling, concerning and intriguing. In order to understand these, little consideration is normally given to the religious world-view of the people in this area and the place of religion within the sociopolitical shifts that
9 ONE political religion: secularity and the study of religion in global civil society John D’Arcy May introduction The former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, himself a committed Christian, remarked in the late 1970s: “You can’t run a country by the Sermon on the Mount.” Yet, referring to the fraught situation in the Middle East, with its continual demonisation of the enemy and endless tit-for-tat killings, my German colleague Heinz-Günther Stobbe observed around the same time: “The Sermon on the Mount is the most realistic text in the New Testament
