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Author: Sonja Luehrmann Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 019046352X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
What can atheists tell us about religious life? Russian archives contain a wealth of information on religiosity during the Soviet era, but most of it is written from the hostile perspective of officials and scholars charged with promoting atheism. Based on archival research in locations as diverse as the multi-religious Volga region, Moscow, and Texas, Sonja Luehrmann argues that we can learn a great deal about Soviet religiosity when we focus not just on what documents say but also on what they did. Especially during the post-war decades (1950s-1970s), the puzzle of religious persistence under socialism challenged atheists to develop new approaches to studying and theorizing religion while also trying to control it. Taking into account the logic of filing systems as well as the content of documents, the book shows how documentary action made religious believers firmly a part of Soviet society while simultaneously casting them as ideologically alien. When juxtaposed with oral, printed, and samizdat sources, the records of institutions such as the Council of Religious Affairs and the Communist Party take on a dialogical quality. In distanced and carefully circumscribed form, they preserve traces of encounters with religious believers. By contrast, collections compiled by western supporters during the Cold War sometimes lack this ideological friction, recruiting Soviet believers into a deceptively simple binary of religion versus communism. Through careful readings and comparisons of different documentary genres and depositories, this book opens up a difficult set of sources to students of religion and secularism.
Author: Sonja Luehrmann Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199943621 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
Russian archives contain a wealth of information on religiosity during the Soviet era, but most of it is written from the hostile perspective of officials and scholars charged with promoting atheism. Based on archival research in locations as diverse as the multi-religious Volga region, Moscow, and Texas, this book argues that much can be learned about Soviet religiosity by a focus not just on what documents say but also on what their originators did.
Author: Sonja Luehrmann Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 019046352X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
What can atheists tell us about religious life? Russian archives contain a wealth of information on religiosity during the Soviet era, but most of it is written from the hostile perspective of officials and scholars charged with promoting atheism. Based on archival research in locations as diverse as the multi-religious Volga region, Moscow, and Texas, Sonja Luehrmann argues that we can learn a great deal about Soviet religiosity when we focus not just on what documents say but also on what they did. Especially during the post-war decades (1950s-1970s), the puzzle of religious persistence under socialism challenged atheists to develop new approaches to studying and theorizing religion while also trying to control it. Taking into account the logic of filing systems as well as the content of documents, the book shows how documentary action made religious believers firmly a part of Soviet society while simultaneously casting them as ideologically alien. When juxtaposed with oral, printed, and samizdat sources, the records of institutions such as the Council of Religious Affairs and the Communist Party take on a dialogical quality. In distanced and carefully circumscribed form, they preserve traces of encounters with religious believers. By contrast, collections compiled by western supporters during the Cold War sometimes lack this ideological friction, recruiting Soviet believers into a deceptively simple binary of religion versus communism. Through careful readings and comparisons of different documentary genres and depositories, this book opens up a difficult set of sources to students of religion and secularism.
Author: John Lardas Modern Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226533255 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 349
Book Description
Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.
Author: Saba Mahmood Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691153280 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 254
Book Description
How secular governance in the Middle East is making life worse—not better—for religious minorities The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region. Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism—political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais—religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country—Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe. A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality.
Author: Charles McCrary Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226817954 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 309
Book Description
"If you read Supreme Court opinions on cases involving First Amendment religion issues, you're likely to encounter the ubiquitous phrase "sincerely held religious belief." The "sincerity test" of religious belief has become a cornerstone of US jurisprudence, determining what counts as legitimate grounds for First Amendment claims in the eyes of the law. In Sincerely Held, Charles McCrary provides an original account of how "sincerely held religious belief" became the primary standard for determining what legally counts as genuine religion. McCrary traces the interlocking histories of sincerity, religion, and secularism in the US, starting in the mid-nineteenth century. He then shows how, in the 1940s, as the courts expanded the concept of religious freedom, they incorporated the notion of sincerity as a key element in determining religious freedom protections. The legal sincerity test was part of a larger trend in which the category "religion" became largely individualized and correlated with "belief." This linking of religion and belief, with all its Protestant underpinnings, is a central concern of critical secularism studies. McCrary contributes to this conversation by revealing the history of how sincerity and sincerely held religious belief developed as technologies of secular governance, constraining the type of subject one has to be in order to receive protections from the state"--
Author: Joseph O. Baker Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1479867411 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
A rapidly growing number of Americans are embracing life outside the bounds of organized religion. Although America has long been viewed as a fervently Christian nation, survey data show that more and more Americans identify as "not religious." American Secularism documents how changes to American society have fueled these shifts in the (non)religious landscape and examines the diverse and dynamic world of secular Americans. Baker and Smith offer a framework for understanding nonreligious belief systems as worldviews in their own right, rather than merely as negations of religion. Drawing on multiple sources of empirical data, this volume explores how people make meaning outside of organized religion, outlines multiple expressions of secular identity, and connects these self-expressions to patterns of family formation, socialization, social class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Further, the authors demonstrate how shifts in secularisms reflect changes in the political meanings of religion in American culture. Ultimately, American Secularism offers a more comprehensive sociological understanding of worldviews beyond traditional religion. -- from back cover.
Author: Charles Taylor Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674986911 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 889
Book Description
The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.
Author: Robert A. Yelle Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022658559X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
Sovereignty and the Sacred challenges contemporary models of polity and economy through a two-step engagement with the history of religions. Beginning with the recognition of the convergence in the history of European political theology between the sacred and the sovereign as creating “states of exception”—that is, moments of rupture in the normative order that, by transcending this order, are capable of re-founding or remaking it—Robert A. Yelle identifies our secular, capitalist system as an attempt to exclude such moments by subordinating them to the calculability of laws and markets. The second step marshals evidence from history and anthropology that helps us to recognize the contribution of such states of exception to ethical life, as a means of release from the legal or economic order. Yelle 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 this 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.
Author: Catherine Wanner Publisher: OUP USA ISBN: 9780199937639 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine is a collection of essays written by a broad cross-section of scholars from around the world that explores the myriad forms religious expression and religious practice took in Soviet society in conjunction with the Soviet government's commitment to secularization.
Author: Ana Siljak Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501778188 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
Religion and Secular Modernity in Russian Christianity, Judaism, and Atheism is a multifaceted account of the engagement between religion and the secular in Russia's Christian, Jewish, and atheist traditions. Ana Siljak brings together an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars to present unique perspectives on the secularization dynamic in Russia and the Soviet Union, telling stories about theologians, sects, churches, poets, and artists. From the Jewish Christian priest Alexander Men, to the cross-dressing poet Zinaida Gippius, to the Soviet promoter of Yiddish theater Solomon Mikhoels, Religion and Secular Modernity in Russian Christianity, Judaism, and Atheism gives a voice to a variety of actors who have grappled with the possibilities of faith and unbelief in an industrialized, modern, and seemingly secular world. Now more than ever, as one narrative of Russia's religious history dominates official Russian accounts, alternative perspectives of the relationship between Russian religion and secularism should be highlighted and emphasized.
Author: Sonja Luehrmann
Author: Sonja Luehrmann
Author: Sonja Luehrmann
Author: John Lardas Modern
Author: Saba Mahmood
Author: Charles McCrary
Author: Joseph O. Baker
Author: Charles Taylor
Author: Robert A. Yelle
Author: Catherine Wanner
Author: Ana Siljak