The Secular Bias and the Study of Religious Politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-94
Author(s):  
Nader Hashemi

This chapter focuses on the problem of misunderstanding religious politics in the Arab-Islamic world. The goal is to advance an objective historical and comparative framework for interpreting this subject. Two key themes that have been central to John Esposito’s scholarship are examined: the secular bias in modernization theory and the need for a historical and contextual understanding of the many faces of political Islam. To advance this argument, Michael Walzer’s The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions will be utilized, focusing on his discussion of Algeria and political Islam. It is argued that Walzer offers a typical liberal reading of this topic that upon examination is ideologically biased and analytically distorting. Ironically, his earlier writings on religion and politics provide a more useful interpretive framework for understanding the rise of religious politics in our contemporary world.

Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 87-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catharine Coleborne

This article examines the interpretive framework of “mobility” and how it might usefully be extended to the study of the Australasian colonial world of the nineteenth century, suggesting that social institutions reveal glimpses of (im)mobility. As the colonies became destinations for the many thousands of immigrants on the move, different forms of mobility were desired, including migration itself, or loathed, such as the itinerant lifestyles of vagrants. Specifically, the article examines mobility through brief accounts of the curtailed lives of the poor white immigrants of the period. The meanings of mobility were produced by immigrants' insanity, vagrancy, wandering, and their casual movement between, and reliance on, welfare and medical institutions. The regulation of these forms of mobility tells us more about the contemporary paradox of the co-constitution of mobility and stasis, as well as providing a more fluid understanding of mobility as a set of transfers between places and people.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-174
Author(s):  
Ana Sabhana Azmy ◽  
Amri Yusra

This article aims to look at the political views of the Jaringan Islam Liberal (Liberal Islam Network) in Indonesia. As a community that wants to carry out reforms with the spirit of modernization and rationality in religion, seeing it in political and democratic contestation in Indonesia is interesting. So this article questions two things; how does Jaringan Islam Liberal view the relevance of religion and politics? and how does Jaringan Islam Liberal view the implementation of democracy? The method used in this paper is a literature study that seeks to collect data from journal articles, books, and other related reading materials. This article shows that the Jaringan Islam Liberal (Liberal Islam Network) rejects forms of political Islam that try to formally fight for the superiority of Islamic value systems and symbols in the political sphere. They also reject the idea of an Islamic state and the formalization of shari'ah, and sees democracy as a value that must be implemented in a country. This is because it is in accordance with the basic rights that must be owned by individuals, which are known as human rights.


Author(s):  
Cristiano Casalini

One key to the success of Jesuit education has been the tension between the recognizable mark of uniformity that long distinguished the methods, contents, and practices of Jesuit schools and their ability to adapt to different contexts and times. Both of the aspects could be said to have found explicit support in that unique foundational document, the Ratio Studiorum, which retained some sway up until the middle of the twentieth century despite the many variations and complexities that had arisen since early modernity. Soon after the Ratio fell into oblivion, Jesuit schools began to think about what made them distinctively Jesuit. There was a need to clarify the profile of their mission in the contemporary world. This chapter will sketch a history of Jesuit education, focusing on both the permanent and changing traits of its distinctive pedagogy.


1987 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Cohen ◽  
Nachman Ben-Yehuda ◽  
Janet Aviad

The various ‘quests for meaning’ of the ‘decentralized’ contemporary Western youths are interpreted as so many attempts to ‘recenter the world’ around new ‘elective centers’. Rather than being centers of the contemporary world into which the individual is born, such centers are located outside it, and freely chosen by the seekers. Four such elective centers are discussed: (1) traditional religious conversion, (2) the occult, (3) science fiction, and (4) tourism. Each of these elective centers is first briefly described and then analysed in a comparative framework, focused on six principal questions: (a) the social and cultural conditions which engender the contemporary ‘quest for a center’, (b) the nature of elective centers, (c) mechanisms of election and rejection of alternative elective centers, (d) extent of involvement with elective centers, (e) elective centers and the wider social framework, (f) the institution-building potential of the elective centers.


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