“True Faith and Allegiance”—Religion and the FBI

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvester A. Johnson ◽  
Steven Weitzman
Keyword(s):  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religion And State

This chapter explains on how the FBI’s relationship with various American religious groups complicates the typical category of religion-and-state issues. It begins with the post-9/11 era then relates the long history of the FBI engaging with religion. The chapter explains how the bureau has practiced skepticism toward religion at times while also seeking an alliance with religion at other times. The chapter argues for the importance of situating the post-9/11 era within a longer history of the FBI’s interaction with America’s religious communities.

scholarly journals Technologies of using the religious factor in Vietnam: features of the political history of the main religious groups from the beginning of the 17 century to the present time

2020 ◽  
pp. 347-369
Author(s):  
Vladimir N. Kolotov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political History ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Factor

This article is devoted to the technologies for creating religious communities, provoking conflicts between different religious groups and using local controlled conflicts for geopolitical purposes. Immersion of political contradictions in the cultural and religious environment allows skillfully concealing the interests of the forces that stand behind the conflicts they provoked.

scholarly journals Earthquake preparedness among religious minority groups: the case of the Jewish ultra-Orthodox society in Israel

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 317-337
Author(s):  
Zvika Orr ◽  
Tehila Erblich ◽  
Shifra Unger ◽  
Osnat Barnea ◽  
Moshe Weinstein ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Minority Groups ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Cultural Groups ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Religious Minority ◽  
Earthquake Preparedness ◽  
Cultural Minority ◽  
History Of ◽  
Low Exposure ◽  
High Level

Abstract. To work effectively, emergency management systems that deal with earthquake threats must consider the needs of religious minority groups. Studies regarding earthquake preparedness among marginalized social–cultural groups can highlight ways to improve it. Recently, some research has focused on the effect of religion on earthquake preparedness. However, very few studies have connected the two and examined earthquake preparedness among religious groups that are also a social–cultural minority in relation to the authorities. This study examines the effects of religious beliefs and customs on earthquake preparedness among the Jewish ultra-Orthodox community in Israel, a significant religious minority with unique social, cultural, and economic characteristics. Data were obtained using mixed methods including a survey, in-depth interviews, and focus groups. Results demonstrated that the majority of the community had a low level of hazard knowledge and a high level of disbelief that a devastating earthquake would occur in their area in the near future. This is despite a long-documented history of earthquakes that devastated the Levant and, in particular, dwelling locations for this community. Low exposure to media, insularity of educational institutions, and suspicion toward state authorities were shown to hinder preparedness, while strong social capital improved it. This research is unique for it studies a religious group that is also a cultural minority, which, therefore, requires special adaptations. Some of the recommended adaptations include receiving support from religious leaders, publishing preparation guidelines in proper settings, working with civilian organizations that are seen as legitimate by the religious communities, and adapting technologies and information to be religiously appropriate. To conclude, this research offers a perspective on the complex reality of hazard preparedness in a religiously diverse country. The conclusions are applicable to other countries and natural hazards.

scholarly journals Expressing friendship in letters: Conventionality and sincerity in the multilingual correspondence of nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen

Multilingua ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-58
Author(s):  
Francesco De Toni
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Cultural Scripts ◽  
Self Disclosure ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Standards ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Era

AbstractThe relationship between the polite and conventional nature of friendly language and the sincerity of the writer’s feelings is a central topic in linguistic and historical research on friendship in epistolary communication. This relationship can be understood in the context of the emotional values and conventionalised emotional practices that characterise the writer’s emotional community.The language of friendship has a significant role in the history of letter writing in religious communities. However, epistolary and emotional practices among religious groups in the modern era remain a rather unexplored filed of research. In this regard, the nineteenth century is of particular interest, as it saw the consolidation of sincerity as a central notion in European standards of letter writing.Bringing together historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, this paper describes the forms and functions of sincerity in the negotiation of friendships between nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen. The article analyses a corpus of letters in Italian and Spanish from the multilingual correspondence of European Benedictine missionaries in Australia between the 1850s and the 1890s. The results of the analysis show that sincerity and emotional self-disclosure, while dependent on the pragmatic conventions of letter writing, belonged to cross-linguistic cultural scripts typical of religious communities.

scholarly journals The Relation of the Majority and Minority of Religious People in Aceh Singkil

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-65
Author(s):  
Arifin Zain ◽  
Syahrin Harahap ◽  
Syahrin Harahap ◽  
Hasan Bakti Nasution ◽  
Hasan Bakti Nasution
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Religious Conflict ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Religious People ◽  
Aceh Province ◽  
History Of

Aceh Singkil is one of the districts in Aceh province that has a history of inter-religious conflict. There have been several conflicts here, including in 1979 and in 2015. The conflict not only caused by disharmony but also caused by casualties and moral and material losses. The main problem in this paper is how relations are established between the majority and minority religious communities in Aceh Singkil. This research is a field research with qualitative analysis and data collection techniques used is in-depth non-structured interviews. The results of the study show that socially, the majority and minority religious groups coexist both in the areas of religion, social and culture and life is helping each other. Presumably conflicts arise due to several factors, including the weak enforcement of rules and the establishment of houses that are not in accordance with existing standards.

scholarly journals For ourselves and for each other – Politics of embodied religious belonging in the novel We Sinners

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-60
Author(s):  
Sandra Wallenius-Korkalo ◽  
Sanna Valkonen
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
American Midwest ◽  
History Of

This article analyses religious belonging in a Christian revivalist community through a reading of Hanna Pylväinen’s novel We Sinners, a fictive history of a Laestadian family in the modern American Midwest. Like many conservative religious groups today, Laestadianism is increasingly affected by secular society’s norms and practices. We claim that the study of everyday religious belonging is essential in order to make sense of the power relations, structures, and dynamics of change within religious groups. The article approaches belonging as a thoroughly embodied state, taking the view that certain kinds of corporeality threaten the cohesion of religious communities while others strengthen it. The politics of belonging in the novel – the practices of inclusion and exclusion – are constructed in, on, and through the regulation of individual bodies. Control over clothing, behaviour, sexuality, movement, and being-in-common produces and governs embodied Laestadian subjectivity, as well as the ways in which belonging is shared.

scholarly journals The Idea of Religious Minorities and Social Cohesion in India’s Constitution: Reflections on the Indian Experience

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 910
Author(s):  
Vikas K. Choudhary
Keyword(s):  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Freedom Of Religion ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Indian Constitution ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
Indian Experience ◽  
Indian Secularism ◽  
Religion And State

India has many religious groups, of which Hindus are a majority, and Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains are minorities. India’s Constitution, adopted in 1950, departed from the existing norms of secularism in Europe and elsewhere, which suggested a strict separation of religion and state. Moreover, freedom of religion is a Fundamental Right guaranteed under the Indian Constitution. With its distinct model of secularism and special provisions for religious minorities, India’s social cohesion arrangement needs special attention. On one hand, the distinct understanding of secularism in the Indian context has led to the advancement of religious pluralism. At the same time, it has invited criticism for selective intervention in the affairs of religious communities from governments in power. The selective intervention has challenged the exclusivity of Indian secularism. This article evaluates the constitutional and theoretical ideas underlying provisions on religious minorities and freedom of religion enshrined in the Indian Constitution. It appraises the idea of religious minorities enshrined in the constitution through a discussion of the process that shaped the idea. The article reflects on the Indian experience of managing the rights of religious minorities and freedom of religion. By analysing a landmark judgement related to freedom of religion and the rights of religious minorities, the article evaluates whether the Indian Constitution advances a model of social cohesion by balancing freedom of religion and the rights of religious minorities or remains ineffective in achieving the same.

FBI and Religion

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Orientation ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interdisciplinary Assessment ◽  
Civic Religion ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

This volume is an interdisciplinary assessment of the relationship between religion and the FBI. We recount the history of the FBI’s engagement with multiple religious communities and with aspects of public or “civic” religion such as morality and respectability. The book presents new research to explain roughly the history of the FBI’s interaction with religion over approximately one century, from the pre-Hoover period to the post-9/11 era. Along the way, the book explores vexed issues that go beyond the particulars of the FBI’s history—the juxtaposition of “religion” and “cult,” the ways in which race can shape the public’s perceptions of religion (and vica versa), the challenges of mediating between a religious orientation and a secular one, and the role and limits of academic scholarship as a way of addressing the differing worldviews of the FBI and some of the religious communities it encounters.

Ethics of Conducting Virtual Ethnography on Visual Platforms

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-178
Author(s):  
Kayla Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Online Community ◽  
Gender Segregation ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Virtual Ethnography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Standard Set ◽  
Potential Risks ◽  
Visually Based ◽  
Diverse Groups

For scholars, the internet provides a space to study diverse groups of people across the world and can be a useful way to bypass physical gender segregation and travel constraints. Despite the potential for new insights into people’s everyday life and increased attention from scholars, there is no standard set of ethics for conducting virtual ethnography on visually based platforms, like YouTube and Instagram. While publicly accessible social media posts are often understood to be a part of the public domain and thus do not require a researcher to obtain a user’s consent before publishing data, caution must be taken when studying members of a vulnerable community, especially those who have a history of surveillance, like African-American Muslims. Using a womanist approach, the author provides recommendations for studying vulnerable religious groups online, based on a case study of a YouTube channel, Muslimah2Muslimah, operated by two African-American Muslim women. The article provides an important contribution to the field of media studies because the author discusses a “dead” online community, where users no longer comment on the videos and do not maintain their own profiles, making obtaining consent difficult and the potential risks of revealing information to an unknown community hard to gauge.

Jewish religious communities in Kuban and Terek regions at the second half of the XIX - the beginning of the XX centuries

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10) ◽  
pp. 165-178
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Norkina
Keyword(s):  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Political Structure ◽  
Small Communities ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
History Of

The article is devoted to the history of the formation and features of the functioning of Jewish religious institutions outside the Pale of Settlement in the second half of the XIXth — early XXth centuries. The study is based on the materials of the Kuban and Terek regions, which had a somewhat different administrative and political structure from most other regions. Historically, the peculiarities of these areas influenced the policy of the authorities in towards the Jews, which influenced the activities of rabbis and synagogues. Despite the fact that the activities of rabbis and synagogues were constantly interrupted due to a number of external circumstances, members of local Jewish societies actively engaged in dialogue with the authorities and sought to revive religious buildings to life. Even small communities of Kuban and Terek tried to support their religious institutions and preserve the traditions of Judaism.

scholarly journals What Stymies Action on Climate Change? Religious Institutions, Marginalization, and Efficacy in Kenya

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Lauren Honig ◽  
Amy Erica Smith ◽  
Jaimie Bleck
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Address Climate Change ◽  
Policy Responses ◽  
Vulnerability To Climate Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
Critical Link

Addressing climate change requires coordinated policy responses that incorporate the needs of the most impacted populations. Yet even communities that are greatly concerned about climate change may remain on the sidelines. We examine what stymies some citizens’ mobilization in Kenya, a country with a long history of environmental activism and high vulnerability to climate change. We foreground efficacy—a belief that one’s actions can create change—as a critical link transforming concern into action. However, that link is often missing for marginalized ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious groups. Analyzing interviews, focus groups, and survey data, we find that Muslims express much lower efficacy to address climate change than other religious groups; the gap cannot be explained by differences in science beliefs, issue concern, ethnicity, or demographics. Instead, we attribute it to understandings of marginalization vis-à-vis the Kenyan state—understandings socialized within the local institutions of Muslim communities affected by state repression.

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