Posted on by Jason Mansmann

Burnidge, “A Peaceful Conquest”

In October, the University of Chicago Press will release A Peaceful Conquest: Woodrow Wilson, Religion, and the New World Order by Cara Lea Burnidge (University of Northern Iowa). The publisher’s description follows:A Peaceful Conqueswt

A century after his presidency, Woodrow Wilson remains one of the most compelling and complicated figures ever to occupy the Oval Office. A political outsider, Wilson brought to the presidency a distinctive, strongly held worldview, built on powerful religious traditions that informed his idea of America and its place in the world.

With A Peaceful Conquest, Cara Lea Burnidge presents the most detailed analysis yet of how Wilson’s religious beliefs affected his vision of American foreign policy, with repercussions that lasted into the Cold War and beyond. Framing Wilson’s intellectual development in relationship to the national religious landscape, and paying greater attention to the role of religion than in previous scholarship, Burnidge shows how Wilson’s blend of Southern evangelicalism and social Christianity became a central part of how America saw itself in the world, influencing seemingly secular policy decisions in subtle, lasting ways. Ultimately, Burnidge makes a case for Wilson’s religiosity as one of the key drivers of the emergence of the public conception of America’s unique, indispensable role in international relations.

As the presidential election cycle once again raises questions of America’s place in the world, A Peaceful Conquest offers a fascinating excavation of its little-known roots.

Posted on by Liam Ray

“Religious Dynamics under the Impact of Imperialism and Colonialism” (Bentlage et al, eds.)

In October, Brill Publishers will release “Religious Dynamics under the Impact of Imperialism and Colonialism,” edited by Bjorn Bentlage (Martin-Luther University), Marion Eggert (Ruhr University Bochum), Hans Martin Krämer (Heidelberg University), and Stefan Reichmuth (Ruhr University Bochum). The publisher’s description follows:

This sourcebook offers rare insights into a formative period in the modern history of religions. TBrill_logohroughout the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, when commercial, political and cultural contacts intensified worldwide, politics and religions became ever more entangled. This volume offers a wide range of translated source texts from all over Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, thereby diminishing the difficulty of having to handle the plurality of involved languages and backgrounds. The ways in which the original authors, some prominent and others little known, thought about their own religion, its place in the world and its relation to other religions, allows for much needed insight into the shared and analogous challenges of an age dominated by imperialism and colonialism.

Posted on by Jason Mansmann

Around the Web

Here is a look at some law and religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by Jason Mansmann

“Negotiating Religion” (Guesnet, Laborde, & Lee, eds.)

This month, Routledge releases Negotiating Religion: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives edited by François Guesnet (University College London), Cécile Laborde (University College London), and Lois Lee (University College London). The publisher’s description follows:Negotiating Religion

Negotiating religious diversity, as well as negotiating different forms and degrees of commitment to religious belief and identity, constitutes a major challenge for all societies. Recent developments such as the ‘de-secularisation’ of the world, the transformation and globalisation of religion and the attacks of September 11 have made religious claims and religious actors much more visible in the public sphere. This volume provides multiple perspectives on the processes through which religious communities create or defend their place in a given society, both in history and in our world today.

Offering a critical, cross-disciplinary investigation into processes of negotiating religion and religious diversity, the contributors present new insights on the meaning and substance of negotiation itself. This volume draws on diverse historical, sociological, geographic, legal and political theoretical approaches to take a close look at the religious and political agents involved in such processes as well as the political, social and cultural context in which they take place. Its focus on the European experiences that have shaped not only the history of ‘negotiating religion’ in this region but also around the world, provides new perspectives for critical inquiries into the way in which contemporary societies engage with religion.

This study will be of interest to academics, lawyers and scholars in law and religion, sociology, politics and religious history.

Posted on by Liam Ray

Event at the Newseum: “Community Forum for Christian Leaders”

On September 27, the Newseum’s Religious Freedom Center will host a forum entitled “Community Forum for Christian Leaders.” The Religious Freedom Center’s description of the event follows:

During this election year, our politics have further divided our country. Policies and systems reinforce inequities across communities—in education, the economy, human rights, poor neighborhoods and families. A government of the people, for the people and by the people does not always reflect “liberty and justice for all.”

In this Washington, D.C. Community Forum organized by the Forum for Theological Exploration, we will bring together a diverse, intergenerational group of Christian leaders to discuss these questions and others related to faith and politics. This isn’t just about a conversation—it’s also about igniting and inspiring action.

Register today to participate in a conversation and develop next steps on the impact you can make as a Christian leader. Join FTE and a diverse, intergenerational group of Christian leaders to discuss faith and politics in Washington, D.C. Ask questions, share challenges, exchange ideas, listen to one another’s wisdom and discover how you might be a catalyst for change.

Posted on by Jason Mansmann

“Multireligious Society” (González & D’Amato, eds.)

In October, Routledge will release Multireligious Society: Dealing with Religious Diversity in Theory and Practice edited by Francisco Colom González (Spanish National Research Council) and Gianni D’Amato (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland). The publisher’s description follows: Multireligious Society

With the theory of secularization increasingly contested as a plausible development at a global scale, this book focuses on the changing significance of the religious element within a context of complex diversity. This concept reflects the rationale behind the deep transformations that have taken place in the dynamics of social change, giving way to a recombination of social, political and cultural cleavages that overlap and compete for legitimacy at a national and supranational level. Far from disappearing with modernization, new forms of religious diversity have emerged that continue to demand specific policies from the state, putting pressure on the established practices of religious governance while creating a series of normative dilemmas. European societies have been a testing ground for many of these changes, but for decades Canada has been viewed as a pioneering country in the management of diversity, thus offering some interesting similarities and contrasts with the former. Accordingly, the book deals with the diverging routes that political secularization has followed in Europe and Canada, the patterns of religious governance that can be recognized in each region, and the practices for accommodating the demands of religious minorities concerning their legal regulation, the management of public institutions, and the provision of social services.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Pehl, “The Making of Working-Class Religion”

In September, the University of Illinois Press will release “The Making of Working-Class Religion: Welding solidarity to the sacred in the Motor City,” by Matthew Pehl (Augustana University).  The publisher’s description follows:

Religion has played a protean role in the lives of America’s workers. In this innovative volume, Matthew Pehl focuses on Detroit to examine the religious consciousness 9780252081897_lgconstructed by the city’s working-class Catholics, African American Protestants, and southern-born white evangelicals and Pentecostals between 1910 and 1969.

Pehl embarks on an integrative view of working-class faith that ranges across boundaries of class, race, denomination, and time. As he shows, workers in the 1910s and 1920s practiced beliefs characterized by emotional expressiveness, alliance with supernatural forces, and incorporation of mass culture’s secular diversions into the sacred. That gave way to the more pragmatic class-conscious religion cultures of the New Deal era and, from the late Thirties on, a quilt of secular working-class cultures that coexisted in competitive, though creative, tension. Finally, Pehl shows how the ideology of race eclipsed class in the 1950s and 1960s, and in so doing replaced the class-conscious with the race-conscious in religious cultures throughout the city.

An ambitiously inclusive contribution to a burgeoning field, The Making of Working-Class Religion breaks new ground in the study of solidarity and the sacred in the American heartland.

Posted on by Jason Mansmann

Around the Web this Week

Here is a look at some of this week’s law and religion news around the Web:

Posted on by Jason Mansmann

al-Anani, “Inside the Muslim Brotherhood”

In October, Oxford University Press will release Inside the Muslim Brotherhood: Religion, Identity, and Politics by Khalil al-Anani (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar). The publisher’s description follows:Inside the Muslim Brotherhood.png

Over the past three decades, through rises and falls in power, regime repression and exclusion, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has endured, proving more resilient than any other Islamist movement in the world. In this book Khalil al-Anani explores the factors that have enabled the Brotherhood to survive so long within an ever-changing political landscape.

Inside the Muslim Brotherhood unpacks the principal factors that shape the movement’s identity, organization, and activism. Investigating the processes of socialization, indoctrination, recruitment, identification, networking, and mobilization that characterize the movement, al-Anani argues that the Brotherhood is not merely a political actor seeking power but an identity-maker that aims to change societal values, norms, and morals to line up with its ideology and worldview. The Brotherhood is involved in an intensive process of meaning construction and symbolic production that shapes individuals’ identity and gives sense to their lives. The result is a distinctive code of identity that binds members together, maintains their activism, and guides their behavior in everyday life. Al-Anani attributes the Brotherhood’s longevity to its tight-knit structure coupled with a complex membership system that has helped them resist regime penetration. The book also explores the divisions and differences within the movement and how these affect its strategy and decisions.

The culmination of over a decade of research and interviews with leaders and members of the movement, this book challenges the dominant narratives about Islamists and Islamism as a whole.

 

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

“Religion, State and the United Nations” (Stensvold, ed.)

In August, Routledge will release “Religion, State and the United Nations: Value Politics,” edited by Anne Stensvold (University of Oslo).  The publisher’s description follows:

This volume approaches the UN as a laboratory of religio-political value politics. Over the last two decades religion has acquired increasing influence in international 9781138938656politics, and religious violence and terrorism has attracted much scholarly attention. But there is another parallel development which has gone largely unnoticed, namely the increasing political impact of peaceful religious actors.

With several religious actors in one place and interacting under the same conditions, the UN is as a multi-religious society writ small. The contributors to this book analyse the most influential religious actors at the UN (including The Roman Catholic Church; The Organisation of Islamic Countries; the Russian Orthodox Church). Mapping the peaceful political engagements of religious actors; who they are and how they collaborate with each other – whether on an ad hoc basis or by forming more permanent networks – throwing light at the modus operandi of religious actors at the UN; their strategies and motivations. The chapters are closely interrelated through the shared focus on the UN and common theoretical perspectives, and pursue two intertwined aspects of religious value politics, namely the whys and hows of cross-religious cooperation on the one hand, and the interaction between religious actors and states on the other.

Drawing together a broad range of experts on religious actors, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of Religion and Politics, International Relations and the UN.