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Beheading the Saint analyzes the genesis and transformation of national identity in Québec from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, with specific attention to the secularization of French Canadianness during the 1960s’ Quiet Revolution. Zubrzycki does so by tracing the symbolic career of St. John the Baptist, the national patron saint, in processions, parades and protests, which, she argues, contributed to the articulation of a new, secular Quebecois identity. She extends her analysis of nationalism, religion and secularism in Québec by examining recent debates on immigration, the reasonable accommodation of religious minorities’ practices, and the place of religious symbols in the public sphere.

Days of Awe examines the stories of the American-Jewish Palestine solidarity movement and Jewish critics of the occupation. Atalia Omer demonstrates that critical resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestinians enables American Jews to reimagine Jewishness from feminist, gender non-conformist, non-white and other Jewish margins. Through the search for solidarity with Palestinians these activists interrogate privilege, grapple with their complicity, and participate in a broader social movement that intersects multiple sites of struggle for liberation. The book illuminates how narratives about identity and conflict can provide sites for resistance and peacebuilding that enable reimagining religious tradition. It examines the multidirectional interrelations between innovation in religious identity and tradition and social protest. Based on extensive participant observation fieldwork and interviews, the book captures how reimagining identity from the grassroots and the margins involves feedback loops between the experiences of ethical outrage and unlearning ideological formations, neither of which is instinctive but rather reflect complex sociological mechanisms and processes often not examined in scholarship on religion and social change. These sociological processes generative of moral shocks also necessitate engaging with and innovating with tradition, histories, memories, and embodied experiences such as those of Mizrahi, Sephardi and Jews of Color. Days of Awe, therefore, employs the resources of religious studies in conversation with social movement theory to develop a more sociologically robust analysis of religion and change.

American Christians value the feeling of emptiness and seek to cultivate it, believing that the more profoundly they experience emptiness the greater their longing for God and the nearer they draw to their goal of feeling spiritually filled by God. Emptiness must precede fullness. Americans practice bodily disciplines as a way of representing, prompting, and intensifying their feelings of emptiness. They cognize and cultivate the feeling of emptiness through fasting, bloodletting, silence, labor, and other activities undertaken as forms of self-denial. Americans feel the emptiness of time and space. They conceive of the geographic space of America as empty, and in their making of place they play with complex representations of emptiness and fullness. Americans imagine the emptiness of earthly time in contrast to the fullness of eternity, often complicating that understanding by asserting that empty, earthly time is empty precisely because it is filled with corruption. They are keenly aware of the dangers of empty words, empty doctrines, and empty beliefs, and are on constant guard against them. The energetic pursuit of the feeling of emptiness, the radical denial of self, places individuals and groups in challenging circumstances as they attempt to create and maintain identities. Americans build Christian ingroup identity by asserting what they are not, by pushing off from other groups whom they identify as competitors in the religious marketplace. Disestablishment fosters such competition among groups by providing a social setting in which numerous foils can be identified and group identity constructed via negativa.

Americans occupying Japan at the close of World War II claimed to be bringing religious freedom to a country where it did not exist. They described Japan’s 1889 constitutional guarantee of religious freedom as false, and they claimed to be implanting “real religious freedom” in its stead. But in making such claims, the occupiers overlooked inconvenient historical facts. This book shows that Japanese people were involved in a robust debate about religious liberty for decades before the occupation began, and it demonstrates that the American occupiers were far less certain about how to define and protect religious freedom than their triumphalist rhetoric suggested. Moreover, whereas post-occupation histories have assumed that the occupiers introduced the human right of religious freedom to Japan, Faking Liberties argues that the inherently transnational circumstances of military occupation prompted a new conception of religious-freedom-as-human-right: timeless, universal, and innate. During the Occupation, the occupiers and their Japanese counterparts collaboratively constructed a new technical vocabulary about “good” and “bad” religion. Categories they developed such as "new religions" and "State Shintō" still dictate how academics, journalists, and policy makers today imagine who deserves religious freedom, which political practices infringe on religious liberty, and who bears responsibility for doing anything about it.

How do people practice religion in their everyday lives? How do our daily encounters with people who hold different religious beliefs shape the way we understand our own moral and spiritual selves? This book takes a highly original approach to answering these questions. For more than a year the author of this book worked in New York City as a volunteer for a nonprofit, nonreligious organization called God's Love We Deliver, helping to prepare home-cooked meals for people with AIDS. Paying close attention to what was said and not said, the author traces how the volunteers gave voice to their moral positions and religious values. This book also examines how they invested their conversations, and mundane activities such as cooking, with personal meaning that in turn affected how they saw their own spiritual lives.

Holy Nation reconstructs the transnational religious community forged by the Society of Friends during the Age of Revolution. It utilizes the public and private writings of 76 ministers (40 male and 36 female) who crossed the Atlantic Ocean from 1750–1820 in order to reinforce religious ties across national borders. It argues that these Quakers envisioned themselves as the ancient Hebraic nation of Zion in order to articulate an identity not only separate from but in opposition to the nation-state during this critical period. This positionality, however, represented a triple threat to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century governments. First, Friends' primary political identity was invested not in the nation or the empire but rather in a loose, transatlantic alliance of Society members, undermining the idea of a cohesive citizenry. Second, Quakers were united in their opposition to the practices used by those in power to secure and exert their authority, challenging exclusionary definitions of citizenship. Finally, Friends' activism underscored the distance between the promise of democracy and the practices that violated it, highlighting the oppressive power of the state. In these three ways, the Friends' holy nation challenges the common supposition that religion and nationalism were mutually constitutive during this period, highlighting instead the role of religion in questioning the form and character of the nation-state. Holy Nation thus intervenes in religious and Atlantic World historiography, demonstrating how religious identity subverted the project of nation-building by offering concrete alternative definitions of nation and citizen at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Western society has never been more interested in interiority. Indeed, it seems more and more people are deliberately looking inward—toward the mind, the body, or both. Inward focuses on one increasingly popular channel for the introverted gaze: vipassana meditation, a Buddhist meditation of mindfulness that was revitalized and adapted for a secular audience. Based on a rich ethnographic account, Inward unravels the social dynamics that lie at the heart of meditation practice while simultaneously supplying a sociological framework for the study of the place of the human body in the enduring process of self-awareness. The book tracks the westward diffusion of meditation, enters the silent meditation retreats where people experience solitude in the presence of others, and follows practitioners’ interactions at work and home, as well as their relations with their significant others. It uncovers the multiple ways practitioners use the meditative focus on the inner-lining of embodied experience as a way to transcend the shocks and splits to the self that occur as they move between social relations and identities. At the close of this ethnographic journey, the reader will see how through communities, routines, and rituals, individuals turn their attention inward without stepping out of society, experience solitude without being isolated, and negotiate the tensions engendered by contemporary social life.

Secularization has changed how Americans see their cultural landscape. This book explains why by examining the language and lived experience of legal conflict over sacred space since the 1970s. From high-profile fights over wilderness areas to small-town spats over schoolhouse nativity scenes, battles across the religious-secular divide have produced a new geography of religion, one in which the very idea of sacred space is continually both called into question and restrictively defined. In this climate of religious ambivalence, law has played an ever-greater role in shaping how Americans experience and imagine their material environment, especially in the public realm. Public space has not only become a constitutional battleground; it has become engine for producing forms of secular legal consciousness that are strangely new and yet deeply rooted in Protestant culture. Through case studies in a diverse range of cultural and geographic settings, this book shows how increasing religious diversity, the rise of the Christian Right, environmental politics, and the growth of seeker spirituality have helped drive this trend. For the activists, legal experts, and ordinary citizens profiled in this book, secularity is both an intellectual abstraction and an embodied condition, engrained in the intimate politics of religious belonging.

Religious traditions provide the stories and rituals that define the core values of church members. Yet modern life in America can make those customs seem undesirable, even impractical. As a result, many congregations refashion church traditions so they may remain powerful and salient. How do these transformations occur? How do clergy and worshipers negotiate which aspects should be preserved or discarded? Focusing on the innovations of several mainline Protestant churches in the San Francisco Bay Area, this book provides new understandings of the transformation of spiritual traditions. It argues that these particular congregations typify a new type of Lutheranism—one that combines the evangelical approaches that are embodied in the growing legion of megachurches with American society's emphasis on pragmatism and consumerism. Here it provides vivid descriptions of congregations as they sacrifice hymns in favor of rock music and scrap traditional white robes and stoles for Hawaiian shirts, while also making readers aware of the long history of similar attempts to Americanize the Lutheran tradition. This is an examination of a religion in flux—one that speaks to the growing popularity of evangelicalism in America.

This book describes the convergence of shifts in law, psychology, and religious practice that explains the increasing ubiquity of chaplains across the domains of contemporary life—in hospitals, prisons, the military, as well as in airports, schools, workplaces, and emergency preparedness. The chaplain, it is argued, has become the necessary religious expert who negotiates and bridges the sacred/secular divide through her/his distinctive practice of a ministry of presence. US First Amendment law, as well as popular notions of the shape of religious freedom in a diverse religious society, have enabled the flourishing of the chaplain through a jurisprudence that distinguishes spirituality as a universal attribute of the human, from constitutionally prohibited government religious activity that is establishmentarian, sectarian, or divisive. Private/public regulatory regimes, including accreditation, credentialing, employment discrimination law, and agency regulation, have conspired to universalize and standardize the practice of a ministry of spiritual care by chaplains.

In a remarkably short span of time, religious freedom has taken center stage in public and policy debates worldwide. Longstanding legal guarantees of religious freedom built into laws and constitutions over the last few centuries are being mobilized while comparable guarantees are introduced into new types of legal instruments, constitutions, and legislation. In legal and public policy circles, religious freedom is presented as the key to emancipating individuals and communities from violence, poverty, and oppression. What exactly is being promoted through the discourse of religious freedom, and what is not? What is being protected under these various legal instruments? What forms of politics are enabled by these activities? How might we describe the cultural and epistemological assumptions that underlie this frenzy? And, what is its longer and contentious history? This volume seeks to understand the various conceptions of religious freedom at play in the world today, their different social and political contexts, and their varied histories. The volume emerged out of the Politics of Religious Freedom research project, a three-year effort funded by the Luce Foundation to study the discourses of religious freedom in South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States; later expanded to include research on sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil. It is divided into four sections, Religion, History, Law/Politics, and Freedom, each with a brief preface by one of the editors.

Since the 2000 presidential election, debate over the role of religion in public life has followed a narrow course as pundits and politicians alike have focused on the influence wielded by conservative Christians. But what about more mainstream Christians? This book examines the political activities of Methodists and mainline churches in its investigation of a generation of denominational strife among church officials, lobbyists, and activists. The result is an account that upends common stereotypes while asking questions about the contested relationship between church and state. Documenting a wide range of reactions to two radically different events—the invasion of Iraq and the creation of the faith-based initiatives program—the book charts the new terrain of religious and moral argument under President George Bush's administration from Pat Robertson to Jim Wallis. It then turns to the case of the United Methodist Church, of which President Bush is a member, to uncover the twentieth-century history of their political advocacy, culminating in current threats to split the Church between liberal peace-and-justice activists and crusaders for evangelical renewal. The book balances the firsthand drama of this internal account with a meditative exploration of the wider social impact that mainline churches have had in a time of diverging fortunes and diminished dreams of progress. An analysis of how churches keep moral issues alive in politics, it delves deep into mainline Protestant efforts to enlarge civic conscience and cast clearer light on the commonweal, offering an overview of public religion in America.

In 1999, the Reverend Jerry Falwell outed Tinky-Winky, the purple character from TV's Teletubbies. Events such as this reinforced in many quarters the common idea that evangelicals are reactionary, out of touch, and just plain paranoid. But reducing evangelicals to such caricatures does not help us understand their true spiritual and political agendas and the means they use to advance them. This book moves beyond sensationalism to consider how the evangelical movement has effectively targeted Americans—as both converts and consumers—since the 1970s. Thousands of products promoting the Christian faith are sold to millions of consumers each year through the Web, mail order catalogs, and even national chains such as Kmart and Wal-Mart. The author explores the vast industries of film, video, magazines, and kitsch that evangelicals use to spread their message. Focusing on the center of conservative evangelical culture—the white, middle-class Americans who can afford to buy “Christian lifestyle” products—she examines the industrial history of evangelist media, the curious subtleties of the products themselves, and their success in the religious and secular marketplace. To garner a wider audience, evangelicals have had to carefully temper their message, but in so doing, they have painted themselves into a corner. In the postwar years, evangelical media wore the message of salvation on its sleeve, but as the evangelical media industry has grown, many of its most popular products have been those with heavily diluted Christian messages.

The book draws on evidence from the Hebrew Bible to English deism, and from the Aztecs to ancient India, to develop a theory of polity that finds a place and a purpose for those aspects of religion that are often marginalized and dismissed as irrational by Enlightenment liberalism and utilitarianism. Developing a close analogy between two elemental domains of society, Sovereignty and the Sacred offers a new theory of religion while suggesting alternative ways of organizing our political and economic life. By rethinking the transcendent foundations and liberating potential of both religion and politics, Yelle points to more hopeful and ethical modes of collective life based on egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. Deliberately countering the narrowness of currently dominant economic, political, and legal theories, he demonstrates the potential of a revived history of religions to contribute to a rethinking of the foundations of our political and social order.

Ever since the reelection of President Bush, Conservative Christians have been stereotyped in the popular media: Bible-thumping militants and anti-intellectual zealots determined to impose their convictions on such matters as evolution, school prayer, pornography, abortion, and homosexuality on the rest of us. But Conservative Christians are not as fanatical or intractable as many people think, nor are they necessarily the monolithic voting block or political base that kept Bush in power. This book conveys the complexity, variety, and sensibilities of Conservative Christians, dispelling the myths that have long shrouded them in prejudice and political bias. For starters, the authors reveal that class and income have trumped moral issues for these Americans more often than we realize: a dramatic majority of working-class and lower-class Conservative Christians backed liberals such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton during their runs for president. And when it comes to abortion, most Conservative Christians are not consistently pro-life in the absolute fashion usually assumed: they are still more likely to oppose the practice than other Americans, but 86 percent of them are willing to tolerate it to protect the health of the mother or when the woman has been raped, and 22 percent of them are even pro-choice.