Religious Change Along the Mexican Border, 1852–1876

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-48
Author(s):  
Robert E. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Religious Change

The Politics of the Two Qiblahs and the Emergence of an Alternative Islamic Monotheism

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-91
Author(s):  
Eltigani Abdelgadir Hamid
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Divine Command ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Emotional Attachment

Changing the prayer direction from Makkah to Jerusalem and then back to Makkah was probably one of the first Muslim community’s most contentious incidents. Due to its being highlighted in Q. 2:142-44, it has aroused an unending debate among Muslim exegetes, jurists, and western historians as to why the qiblah was changed. Was it based on a divine command or Muhammad’s independent judgment, a move to dilute the Arabs’ emotional attachment to the Ka‘bah, or a move to win over Madinah’s Jewish community? Might it have been a throwback to the Abrahamic heritage, envisaged by the Prophet as a base for a wider, monolithic Islamic nationalism? This article seeks to closely examine and clarify the “qiblah literature” in an attempt to reveal the Ka‘bah’s role not only as a geographical locale but also as a spiritual magnet, and to find out whether this incident represented a break or a continuation of an earlier strategy of socio-religious change.

Patterns and Determinants of Religious Change in the Modern Period

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detlef Pollack ◽  
Gergely Rosta
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Functional Differentiation ◽  
Market Model ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
State Spending ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Government Regulations ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Determining Factors

Chapter 14 does not design a general theory of religious change, but develops a multiple theoretical perspective including various theoretical elements, which are instrumental for explaining religious changes and which can be combined flexibly. In brief, they are: 1. Functional differentiation as a rule stands in a strained relationship to the integrational capacity of religious communities and churches. If, however, religious identities are linked with non-religious, for example, political, national, or economic interests, religion and church are strengthened. 2. Processes of individualization mostly have an erosive impact on religious ties. 3. In contrast to the assumptions of the market model, religious pluralism does not foster religious vitality, but actually inhibits it. In the case of conflict, though, religious diversity can fuel religious passions. Other determining factors such as government regulations of the religious sector, state spending on the welfare system, social inequality, immigration, and path dependency are also taken into account.

Charismatic, Pentecostal, and Evangelical Movements in Europe, the US, and Brazil

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detlef Pollack ◽  
Gergely Rosta
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Evangelical Protestantism ◽  
Secularization Theory ◽  
Explanatory Factors ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Healing Rituals ◽  
The Us ◽  
Latin American Countries

The growth of Evangelical Protestantism and Pentecostalism is widely regarded as a potent argument against the validity of secularization theory. To explain this growth, Chapter 12 draws on theoretical approaches to analysing new social movements, which allows an expansion of the repertoire of explanations concerning religious change and a testing of alternatives to the models provided by secularization theory. To explain the worldwide growth and relative resilience of the Evangelical and Pentecostal movements, the chapter identifies a number of conditions and explanatory factors: cultural and social confirmation, religious syncretism, social deprivation, and the widespread magical worldview and broadly accepted spiritistic beliefs in Latin American countries that are conducive to the acceptance of Pentecostal experiences and healing rituals.

Between Dechurchification and Religious Persistence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detlef Pollack ◽  
Gergely Rosta
Keyword(s):  
Federal Republic ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Church

The analysis conducted in this chapter of the religious changes undergone by the Federal Republic since its founding considers the religious losses as well as the sometimes astonishing resistance of religious and church entities, but also the observable small religious increases. It addresses the following questions among others: Is it really the case that there has occurred a break in tradition in terms of people’s ties to the church? In which periods was religious change particularly dynamic, and in which periods was it less so? Did this change occur in the Catholic and Protestant churches in parallel? Are there counter-movements when it comes to free churches and small religious communities such as the charismatic churches? How have individualized forms of religiosity developed, especially those of non-church religiosity? The chapter not only describes religious changes in West Germany, but by referring to contextual conditions also explains the main tendencies observable there.

Reading Revelations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Brownlee
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
End Point ◽  
Special Revelation ◽  
Good And Evil

This chapter explores the end-point of typological history, apocalypse. The discussion of the Book of Revelation focuses on the ways in which the ongoing struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism was filtered through an eschatological lens. Post-Reformation interpretation of this book claimed a special revelation, one that understood the historic juncture of religious change as the final battle between good and evil. Within this schema, the narratives and figures of Revelation became a mechanism to delineate Protestantism visually and ideologically from Catholicism. The work of Spenser, Dekker, and Middleton illuminates the extent to which drama and poetry participated in the extrapolation of Revelation’s meaning for the present. Yet these literary interpretations also highlight the intrinsic difficulty of reading Revelation’s apocalypse in relation to the early modern present, namely, the progression of time. These reimaginings of apocalypse question if the final typological uncovering will be perennially delayed.

Black Books and Brownies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Milbank
Keyword(s):  
Historical Change ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Black Book ◽  
James Hogg ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Future

Scottish fiction about the Reformation is concerned with the mechanics of historical change, which are rendered through a series of enchanted books and people discussed in Chapter 8. In the novel, The Monastery, describing the Dissolution and Reformation, Scott gothicizes the Bible as a magic book and the White Lady as its guardian to dramatize the mysterious nature of religious change, the dependence of the future on a Gothic past, and the need for interpretation. In Old Mortality, Scott’s protagonist escapes the frozen dualities of Covenanter and Claverhouse, revealing historical change itself as problematic in Humean terms and requiring a leap of faith. James Hogg contests this presentation of the Covenanters by re-enchanting them as supposed brownies, as mediators of history and nature, and in his Three Perils of Man reprises Scott’s wizard Michael Scott pitted against Roger Bacon and his ‘black book’ the Bible to present the Reformation as an eternal reality.

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