Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere PDF Download

Author: Birgit Meyer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253111722
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
"... one of those rare edited volumes that advances social thought as it provides substantive religious and media ethnography that is good to think with." -- Dale Eickelman, Dartmouth College Increasingly, Pentecostal, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and indigenous movements all over the world make use of a great variety of modern mass media, both print and electronic. Through religious booklets, radio broadcasts, cassette tapes, television talk-shows, soap operas, and documentary film these movements address multiple publics and offer alternative forms of belonging, often in competition with the postcolonial nation-state. How have new practices of religious mediation transformed the public sphere? How has the adoption of new media impinged on religious experiences and notions of religious authority? Has neo-liberalism engendered a blurring of the boundaries between religion and entertainment? The vivid essays in this interdisciplinary volume combine rich empirical detail with theoretical reflection, offering new perspectives on a variety of media, genres, and religions.

Author: James Walters
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351609289
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Religion and the Public Sphere: New Conversations explores the changing contribution of religion to public life today. Bringing together a diverse group of preeminent scholars on religion, each chapter explores an aspect of religion in the public realm, from law, liberalism, the environment and security to the public participation of religious minorities and immigration. This book engages with religion in new ways, going beyond religious literacy or debates around radicalisation, to look at how religion can contribute to public discourse. Religion, this book will show, can help inform the most important debates of our time.

Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023152725X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere represents a rare opportunity to experience a diverse group of preeminent philosophers confronting one pervasive contemporary concern: what role does or should religion play in our public lives? Reflecting on her recent work concerning state violence in Israel-Palestine, Judith Butler explores the potential of religious perspectives for renewing cultural and political criticism, while Jürgen Habermas, best known for his seminal conception of the public sphere, thinks through the ambiguous legacy of the concept of "the political" in contemporary theory. Charles Taylor argues for a radical redefinition of secularism, and Cornel West defends civil disobedience and emancipatory theology. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen detail the immense contribution of these philosophers to contemporary social and political theory, and an afterword by Craig Calhoun places these attempts to reconceive the significance of both religion and the secular in the context of contemporary national and international politics.

Author: Inger Furseth
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319556789
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
This book is an empirical comparative study of the complexity of religion in the public spheres of the five Nordic countries. The result of a five-year collaborative research project, the work examines how increasingly religiously diverse Nordic societies regulate, debate, and negotiate religion in the state, the polity, the media, and civil society. The project finds that there are seemingly contradictory religious trends at different social levels: a growing secularization at the individual level, and a deprivatization of religion in politics, the media, and civil society. It offers a critique of the current theories of secularization and the return of religion, introducing religious complexity as an alternative concept to understand these paradoxes. This book is for scholars, students, and readers with an interest in understanding the public role of religion in the West.

Author: Jeff Haynes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136661719
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This book seeks to argue that religious actors play a crucial role in the complex processes of entering or re-entering the public spheres of state, political, and civil society. Seeking to ameliorate the analytical lacuna and concentrating on both the meso and micro levels of religious public involvement, the contributors explain how representatives from religious and political institutions act and interact in a variety of ways for various purposes. Analysing empirical examples from both Europe and beyond, and including a variety of religions, including multi-faith platforms, the volume examines selected religious actors’ objectives, means and strategies and effects in order to address the following questions: • What are selected religious actors’ public and/or political activities and objectives? • In what ways and with what results do selected religious actors operate in various public spheres? • What are the consequences of religious actors’ political involvement, and which factors condition the degree to which they are successful? Whilst focusing mainly on Europe, the book also utilizes examples from Egypt, Turkey and the USA to provide a valuable and unique comparative focus. The contributors demonstrate that various religious actors, whether functioning as interest groups or social movements, and almost irrespective of the religious tradition to which they belong and the culture from which they emanate, do not necessarily differ markedly in terms of strategies. This important study will be of great interest to all scholars of International Politics, Religion, and Public Policy.

Author: Fredrik Engelstad
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110546337
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The main focus of the book is institutional change in the Scandinavian model, with special emphasis on Norway. There are many reasons to pay closer attention to the Norwegian case when it comes to analyses of changes in the public sphere. In the country’s political history, the arts and the media played a particular role in the processes towards sovereignty at the beginning of the 20th century. On a par with the other Scandinavian countries, Norway is in the forefront in the world in the distribution and uses of Internet technology. As an extreme case, the most corporatist society within the family of the “Nordic Model”, it offers an opportunity both for intriguing case studies and for challenging and refining existing theory on processes of institutional change in media policy and cultural policy. It supplements two recent, important books on political economy in Scandinavia: Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity (Kathleen Thelen, 2014), and The Political Construction of Business Interests (Cathie Jo Martin and Duane Swank, 2013). There are further reasons to pay particular attention to the Scandinavian, and more specifically the Norwegian cases: (i) They are to varying degrees neo-corporatist societies, characterized by ongoing bargaining over social and political reform processes. From a theoretical perspective this invites reflections which, to some extent, are at odds with the dominant conceptions of institutional change. Neither models of path dependency nor models of aggregate, incremental change focus on the continuous social bargaining over institutional change. (ii) Despite recent processes of liberalization, common to the Western world as a whole, corporatism implies a close connection between state, public sphere, cultural life, and religion. This also means that institutions are closely bundled, in an even stronger way than assumed for example in the Varieties of Capitalism literature. Furthermore, we only have scarce insight in the way the different spheres of corporatism are connected and interact. In the proposed edited volume we have collected historical-institutional case studies from a broad set of social fields (a detailed outline of contents and contributors is attached): • Critical assessments of Jürgen Habermas’ theory of the public sphere • Can the public sphere be considered an institution? • The central position of the public sphere in social and political change in Norway • Digital transformations and effects of the growing PR industry on the public sphere • Institutionalization of social media in local politics and voluntary organizations • Legitimation work in the public sphere • freedom of expression and warning in the workplace • “Return of religion” to the public sphere, and its effects

Author: Maria Rovisco
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317812212
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Although emerging scholarship in the social sciences suggests that religion can be a potential catalyst of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship, few attempts have been made to bring to the fore new theoretical positions and empirical analyses of how cosmopolitanism -- as a philosophical notion, a practice and identity outlook -- can also shape and inform concrete religious affiliations. Key questions concerning the significance of cosmopolitan ideas and practices – in relation to particular religious experiences and discourses -- remain to be explored, both theoretically and empirically. This book takes as its starting point the emergence of cosmopolitanism -- as a major interdisciplinary field -- as a springboard for generating a productive dialogue among scholars working within a variety of intellectual disciplines and methodological traditions. The chapter contributions offer a serious attempt to critically engage both the limitations and possibilities of cosmopolitanism as an analytical and critical tool to understand a changing religious landscape in a globalizing world, namely, the so-called ‘new religious diversity’, religious conflict, and issues of migration, multiculturalism and transnationalism vis-à-vis the public exercise of religion. The contributors’ work is situated in a range of world sites in Africa, India, North America, Latin America, and Europe. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of globalization, religion and politics, and the sociology of religion.

Author: Niamh Reilly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135014256
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The re-emergence of religion as a significant cultural, social and political, force is not gender neutral. Tensions between claims for women’s equality and the rights of sexual minorities on one side and the claims of religions on the other side are well-documented across all major religions and regions. It is also well recognized in feminist scholarship that gender identities and ethno-religious identities work together in complex ways that are often exploited by dominant groups. Hence, a more comprehensive understanding of the changing role and influence of religion in the public sphere more widely requires complex, multidisciplinary and comparative gender analyses. Most recent discussion on these matters, however, especially in Europe, has focused primarily on the perceived subordinate status of Muslim women. These debates are a reminder of the deep interrelation of questions of gender, identity, human rights and religious freedom more generally. The relatively narrow (albeit important) purview of such discussions so far, however, underscores the need to extend the horizon of enquiry vis-à-vis religion, gender and the public sphere beyond the binary of ‘Islam versus the West’. Religion, Gender and the Public Sphere moves gender from the periphery to the centre of contemporary debates about the role of religion in public and political life. It offers a timely, multidisciplinary collection of gender-focused essays that address an array of challenges arising from the changing role and influence of religious organisations, identities, actors and values in the public sphere in contemporary multicultural and democratic societies.

Author: Dale F. Eickelman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253342522
Category : Communication
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This second edition of a collection of essays reports on how new media-fax machines, satellite television and the Internet - and the new uses of older media-cassettes, pulp fiction, the cinema, the telephone and the press - shape belief, authority and community in the Muslim world. The chapters in this work, including new chapters dealing specifically with events after September 11, 2001, concern Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, the Arabian Peninsula, and Muslim communities in the United States and elsewhere. The book suggests new ways of looking at the social organization of communications and the shifting links among media of various kinds in local and transnational contexts. The extent to which today's new media have transcended local and state frontiers and have reshaped understanding of gender, authority, social justice, identities and politics in Muslim societies emerges from this work.

Author: Jostein Gripsrud
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739141996
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The notion of 'the public sphere' has become increasingly central to theories and studies of democracy, media, and culture over the last few decades. It has also gained political importance in the context of the European Union's efforts to strengthen democracy, integration, and identity. The Idea of the Public Sphere offers a wide-ranging, accessible, and easy-to-use introduction to one of the most influential ideas in modern social and political thought, tracing its development from the origins of modern democracy in the Eighteenth Century to present day debates. This book brings key texts by the leading contributors in the field together in a single volume. It explores current topics such as the role of religion in public affairs, the implications of the internet for organizing public deliberation, and the transnationalisation of public issues.