Some important law-and-religion stories from around the web:
- A Chinese Catholic bishop affiliated with the underground Church has been abducted from his diocese.
- The Australian census has shown a dramatic increase in the number of people identifying as non-religious compared to the last census.
- Fearing the collapse of the governing coalition, the Israeli cabinet voted to suspend a plan to create a mixed-gender prayer space at the Western Wall that had angered Orthodox Jews.
- Armenian-Syrians have mostly fled from the country’s civil war, and many fear that their community’s presence in Syria will be permanently extinguished.
- French prison officials continue to struggle with the problem of Muslim radicalization occurring within their walls.
- Explosives experts have said that the Islamic State likely destroyed a mosque in Mosul that the radical group had claimed was destroyed in a coalition airstrike.
different languages, religions, and social customs. Chinese law evolved rapidly to accommodate these changes, as reflected in the great compendium Yuan dianzhang (Statutes and Precedents of the Yuan Dynasty). The records of legal cases contained in this seminal text, Bettine Birge shows, paint a portrait of medieval Chinese family life—and the conflicts that arose from it—that is unmatched by any other historical source.
ways in which it is influencing China’s future.
This collection examines the impact of East Asian religion and culture on the public sphere, defined as an idealized discursive arena that mediates the official and private spheres. Contending that the actors and agents on the fringes of society were instrumental in shaping the public sphere in traditional and modern East Asia, it considers how these outliers contribute to religious, intellectual, and cultural dialog in the public sphere. Jürgen Habermas conceptualized the public sphere as the discursive arena which grew within Western European bourgeoisie society, arguably overlooking topics such as gender, minorities, and non-European civilizations, as well as the extent to which agency in the public sphere is effective in non-Western societies and how practitioners on the outskirts of mainstream society can participate. This volume responds to and builds upon this dialogue by addressing how religious, intellectual, and cultural agency in the public sphere shapes East Asian cultures, particularly the activities of those found on the peripheries of historic and modern societies.
This volume focuses on the intersection of religion and media in China, bringing interdisciplinary approaches to bear on the role of religion in the lives of individuals and greater shifts within Chinese society in an increasingly media-saturated environment. With case studies focusing on Mainland China (including Tibet), Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as diasporic Chinese communities outside Asia, contributors consider topics including the historical and ideological roots of media representations of religion, expressions of religious faith online and in social media, state intervention (through both censorship and propaganda), religious institutions’ and communities’ use of various forms of media, and the role of the media in relations between online/offline and local/diaspora communities. Chapters engage with the major religious traditions practiced in contemporary China, namely Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, and new religious movements.
state that limits religious freedom have aroused anxieties about integrating Islam and protecting religious freedom around the world. Focusing on violent movements like the so-called Islamic State and Uygur separatists in China’s Xinjiang Province threatens to drown out the alternatives presented by apolitical and inwardly focused manifestations of transnational Islamic revival popular among groups like the Hui, China’s largest Muslim minority.
contemporary world: Islamic revival and an assertive China, questioning the assumption that Islamic law is incompatible with state law. It finds that both Hui and the Party-State invoke, interpret, and make arguments based on Islamic law, a minjian (unofficial) law in China, to pursue their respective visions of ‘the good’. Based on fieldwork in Linxia, ‘China’s Little Mecca’, this study follows Hui clerics, youthful translators on the ‘New Silk Road’, female educators who reform traditional madrasas, and Party cadres as they reconcile Islamic and socialist laws in the course of the everyday. The first study of Islamic law in China and one of the first ethnographic accounts of law in postsocialist China, China and Islam unsettles unidimensional perceptions of extremist Islam and authoritarian China through Hui minjian practices of law.
jockeyed for cultural dominance in the early Republican era, how Buddhist intellectuals reckoned with science, and how Buddhist media contributed to modern print cultures. It recognizes the political importance of sacred Buddhist relics and the complex processes through which Buddhists both participated in and experienced religious suppression under Communist rule. Today, urban and rural communities alike engage with Buddhist practices to renegotiate class, gender, and kinship relations in post-Mao China.
on ideological production, widespread social unrest, and intrusions by Western imperialist states. The author uncovers the history of civil society activism in China by examining the study societies in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hunan, which were organized around the goal of promoting and defending the Confucian religion. Illustrating a facet of the civil society that emerged in China as a reaction to the influences of Christianity, the modernization of Confucianism, and nationalist state formation, this study extends understanding of the unique and complex processes of Chinese political and cultural modernization in ways that differed from that of Western societies.