The Liberal Betrayal of Secularism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shadia B. Drury
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Religious Extremism ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Relationship

This chapter offers a philosophical overview of the historical relationship between liberalism and secularism in the West. It concludes that secularism has been betrayed by the current ascendancy of a multicultural brand of liberalism. The history of religion in the West has made secularism a necessary posture that the state must adopt in the face of the threat that monotheistic religions pose to political order and stability. Secularism and liberalism are natural allies, but they are not identical. This betrayal has some serious ramifications. Not only is it incapable of dealing with the rising tide of religious extremism, it has allowed Islam to assume the mantle of liberator from the clutches of the colonial hegemon.

Illegal Construction in Hanoi and Hanoi's Wards

2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Koh
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
The People ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Boundaries ◽  
Urban Administration ◽  
Ability And Willingness

AbstractIn the drama of negotiation of state boundaries, the role of local administrators as mediators is indispensable. They mediate between state demands for more discipline and societal demands for more liberties. Their ability and willingness to enforce determines the extent of state power. They are a particular type of elites chosen by the state to administer; yet often they have an irrational and morally corrupt relationship with their subjects. The questions that arise then are: When do the local administrators decide to or not to enforce the rules? What considerations do they hold in the face of contradicting demands for their loyalties? This paper seeks answers to the above questions by examining state enforcement of its construction rules in Hanoi after 1975, in which the ward, a level of local administrators in the urban administration landscape, plays an important role in holding up (or letting down) the fences. I will examine the irrationality of the housing regime that led to widespread offences against construction rules, and then show why and how local administrators may or may not enforce rules. This paper comprises two parts. The first part outlines the nature and history of the housing regime in Vietnam and the situation of state provision of housing to the people. These provide the context in which illegal construction arises. Part Two looks at illegal construction in Hanoi chronologically, and focuses on important episodes. The theme that runs through this paper is the role of local administrators in the reality of illegal construction.

scholarly journals Kongen hersker, men regerer ikke - Guvernementalitet, statificering og statspraksis hos Michel Foucault

2018 ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Nicolai Von Eggers ◽  
Mathias Hein Jessen
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
The West ◽  
Historical Investigation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Way Of Thinking

Michel Foucault developed his now (in)famous neologism governmentality in the first of the two lectures he devoted to ’a history of governmentality, Security, Territory, Population (1977-78) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-79). Foucault developed this notion in order to do a historical investigation of ‘the state’ or ‘the political’ which did not assume the entity of the state but treated it as a way of governing, a way of thinking about governing. Recently, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has taken up Foucault’s notion of governmentality in his writing of a history of power in the West, most notably in The Kingdom and the Glory. It is with inspiration from Agamben’s recent use of Foucault that Foucault’s approach to writing the history of the state (as a history of governmental practices and the reflection hereof) is revisited. Foucault (and Agamben) thus offer another way of writing the history of the state and of the political, which focuses on different texts and on reading more familiar texts in a new light, thereby offering a new and notably different view on the emergence of the modern state and politics.

scholarly journals Religious Freedom Not For All: Homeland Approach

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (19) ◽  
pp. 185-188
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Zavaliy
Keyword(s):  
Religious Freedom ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern History ◽  
The West ◽  
Pope Francis ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Way

The modern history of Ukraine shows that the nation seeks to advance on the European path and meet the level of civilization development of the West. In this state of affairs, one can not ignore the rights of citizens, which are a state-building principle for European communities, namely, the primordial rights and freedoms of its citizens. The European face of Ukraine is formed from many components, including the importance of religious relations in the state, within which the freedom of citizens in general is determined. In 2015, Pope Francis recalled that religious freedom is "a fundamental right that forms the way by which we interact socially and personally with people who are around us, whose religious views may differ from ours."

Scarab Amulet-Beads from 1st–2nd Century Children’s Burials at a Necropolis on the Iluraton Plateau, Eastern Crimea

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-59
Author(s):  
M. O. Tarasenko ◽  
Z. V. Khanutina
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
State Museum ◽  
Eastern Crimea ◽  
History Of

We describe a group of Egyptian faience scarabs unearthed from the necropolis on the Iluraton Plateau, Eastern Crimea, by the expedition from the State Museum of the History of Religion (St. Petersburg) in 1987–1990. Artifacts made of so-called Egyptian faience were found in eight of the sixty-two burials—those of g irls aged below 1.5, dating to the 1st to early 2nd centuries AD. The most numerous among the faience items were beads in the form of scarabs. The analysis shows them to fall into three groups in terms of presence and nature of images on the reverse side: those without images (3 spec.), those with abstract images (3 spec.), and those with anthropo-zoomorphic images (2 spec.). In two cases, representations point to specifi c Egyptian workshops. Scarabs in girls’ burials of the Roman period elaborate on the thanatological imagery, which originated among the Scythian-Saka tribes of Eurasia in the mid-1st millennium BC.

The developmental history of solitary and supermax confinement: toward a phenomenology of the state of exception

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Polizzi
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Order ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Political ◽  
Developmental History ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Attitudes And Behaviors ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
History Of

The phenomenology of solitary and supermax confinement reflects what Giorgio Agamben has defined as the state of exception. The state of exception is defined as the blurring of the legal and political order, which constructs a zone of indifference for those forced to endure this situation. This notion of the state of exception can be applied to the zone of indifference created by the Supreme Court, which seems unwilling to outlaw this harmful practice relative to 8th Amendment protections prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment and the political order which is all too inclined to continue use strategy. One of the central aspects of this “ecology of harm”, is the way in which the very structures of this type of confinement, helps to invite and legitimize abusive attitudes and behaviors in penitentiary staff.

Christians, Muslims and the State in Twentieth-Century Egypt and Indonesia

2015 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 412-434
Author(s):  
Brian Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Communal Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
Historical Relationship

Surveys of the historical relationship between Christianity and other faiths often suggest that through a process of theological enlightenment the churches have moved from crusade to cooperation and from diatribe to dialogue. This trajectory is most marked in studies of Christian-Muslim relations, overshadowed as they are by the legacy of the Crusades. Hugh Goddard’sA History of Christian-Muslim Relationsproceeds from a focus on the frequently confrontational inter-communal relations of earlier periods to attempts by Western theologians over the last two centuries to define a more irenic stance towards Islam.1 For liberal-minded Western Christians this is an attractive thesis: who would not wish to assert that we have left bigotry and antagonism behind, and moved on to stances of mutual respect and tolerance? However laudable the concern to promote harmonious intercommunal relations today, dangers arise from trawling the oceans of history in order to catch in our nets only those episodes that will be most morally edifying for the present. What Herbert Butterfield famously labelled ‘the Whig interpretation of history’ is not irrelevant to the history of interreligious relations. In this essay I shall use the experience of Christian communities in twentieth-century Egypt and Indonesia to argue that the determinative influences on Christian-Muslim relations in the modern world have not been the progressive liberalization of stances among academic theologians but rather the changing views taken by governments in Muslim majority states towards both their majority and minority religious communities. Questions of the balance of power, and of the territorial integrity of the state, have affected Christian Muslim relations more deeply than questions of religious truth and concerns for interreligious dialogue.

The Mediaeval Cultural Heritage of the Mid-European Area

1956 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-507
Author(s):  
Francis Dvornik
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The West ◽  
European Area ◽  
National Leaders ◽  
History Of

Interest in Slavic and mid-European studies,* so long neglected, is growing considerably in the United States. Unfortunately it concentrates mostly on modern history. In Slavic studies, too much time is often devoted to the history of Russia since the Revolution, and to the analysis of the new social and political order established in that country under the influence of non-Slavic social ideas which had originated in the West, and especially in Germany (K. Marx and Lasalle) in the nineteenth century. The earlier evolution of Russia, other Slav nations, and their mid-European neighbors, is still undeservedly neglected. It is a mistake. In the Middle Ages, the Slavic nations, the Hungarians, and the Rumanians played a prominent role in the civilizing of Europe. The memories of their glorious past helped the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Serbs, Bulgars, Magyars, Rumanians and also the small Albanian nation to survive the difficult period of oppression by foreign rulers and inspired their national leaders in their fight for independence and freedom.

scholarly journals THE CAUSES OF THE WEST UKRAINIAN PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC (ZUNR) DEFEAT: INVASION, HEROISM, INACTIVITY OR TREASON?

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 198-211
Author(s):  
Bohdan YAKYMOVYCH
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Neutral Position ◽  
The West ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Army Leadership ◽  
History Of

Assessing the Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1921, and the proclaiming of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic (ZUNR) as the second most crucial phenomenon in the history of the Ukrainian people after the establishment of the Cossack State under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi in the 18th century, the author of this study pays special attention to the mistakes of the political and army leadership of the Galicians, which caused the demise of the state in the Galicia-Bukovyna-Zakarpattia region. The author identifies three periods, during which it was possible to send the Polish occupiers away from the territory of the Eastern Galicia. It was the wasted time, disorientation in the Polish domestic contradictions, disarrangement of the rear, failure to enforce the Act of Unification of the ZUNR, and the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR), as well as the developments in the Dnieper region, caused the demise of the ZUNR. The latter found itself face to face with the might of the revived Polish state already in the second quarter of 1919. Just at that time, the Entente, with a neutral position of the United States, supplied the Poles with considerable forces and means throwing the Ukrainians at the paws of Poland, Romania, and White and Red Russia. Keywords West Ukrainian People’s Republic (ZUNR), Lviv, Peremyshl (Przemysl), Dmytro Vitovskyi, Hnat Stefaniv, Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko

scholarly journals Muslim Communities in North America

1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-118
Author(s):  
Omar Altalib
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Immigrant Communities ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Communities

This book, which is a collection of 22 articles by 25 authors, is appropriatefor undergraduate courses on religion in the United States, religiousminorities, immigrant communities, the history of religion, and the sociologyof Islam and Muslims. The first part contains five articles on religiouscommunities, the second part has nine articles on the mosaic of Islamiccommunities in major American metropolitan centers, and the third partconsists of eight articles on ethnic communities in metropolitan settings.Each part should have been a separate book, as this would have made thebook less bulky and more accessible to those who are interested in onlyone of the areas covered.Reading this book makes it clear that there is great need for Muslimscholars to study and analyze their own communities, which have a richhistory and have only been studied recently. Books such as this are animportant contribution to the understanding of Muslims in the West andalso serve to clear up many misconceptions about Muslims, a developmentthat makes interfaith and intercommunity dialogue easier.Part 1 begins with an article on the Shi'ah communities in NorthAmerica by Abdulaziz Sachedina (professor of religious studies, University ...

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