Religion and Society

This book offers an exploration of Arab/Israeli peace partnerships: unlikely friendships created among people who have long been divided by bitter resentments, deep suspicions, and violent sorrows. The book shows how the careful examination of their inner spiritual lives has enabled Jewish and Arab individuals to form peace partnerships, and that these partnerships may someday lead to peaceful coexistence. The peacemakers in this book have no formal experience in conflict resolution or diplomacy. Instead, through trial and error, they have devised their own methods of reaching out across enemy lines. The obstacles they face are unimaginable, the pressure from both sides to desist is constant, and the guilt-ridden thoughts of betrayal are pervasive and intense. Peace partners have found themselves deserted by their closest friends, family members, and neighbors. This book tells their stories—stories not of saints, but of singular people who overcame seemingly unbeatable odds in their dedication to work toward peace with their estranged neighbors. The book provides insightful analysis of the lessons to be learned from these peacebuilders, outlining the characteristics that make them successful. It argues that lasting conflict and misery between enemies is the result of an emotional, cognitive, and ethical failure to self-examine, and that the true transformation of a troubled society is brought about by the spiritual introspection of extraordinary, determined individuals.

This book offers new insights into the rise of Black Israelite religions in America, faiths ranging from Judaism to Islam to Rastafarianism, all of which believe that the ancient Hebrew Israelites were Black and that contemporary African Americans are their descendants. The book traces the influence of Israelite practices and philosophies in the Holiness Christianity movement of the 1890s and the emergence of the Pentecostal Movement in 1906. An examination of Black interactions with white Jews during slavery supports the contention that the original impetus for Christian Israelite movements was not a desire to practice Judaism but rather a studied attempt to recreate the early Christian church, following the strictures of the Hebrew Scriptures. A second wave of Black Israelite synagogues arose during the Great Migration of African Americans and West Indians to Northern cities. One of the most fascinating of the Black Israelite pioneers was Arnold Josiah Ford, a Barbadian musician who moved to Harlem, joined Marcus Garvey's Black nationalist movement, started his own synagogue, and led African Americans to resettle in Ethiopia in 1930. The effort failed, but the Black Israelite theology had captured the imagination of settlers who returned to Jamaica and transmitted it to Leonard Howell, one of the founders of Rastafarianism and himself a member of Harlem's religious subculture. After Ford's resettlement effort, the Black Israelite movement was carried forward in the U.S. by several Harlem rabbis, including Wentworth Arthur Matthew, another West Indian rabbi, who creatively combined elements of Judaism, Pentecostalism, Freemasonry, the British Anglo-Israelite movement, Afro-Caribbean faiths, and occult kabbalah. This book provides a vivid portrait of Black Israelites, showing them as part of the creative ferment of spirituality, art, and commerce that characterized African American life in the era of the Harlem Renaissance.

This book describes how early Confucians coped with situations where their rituals failed to achieve their intended aims. In contrast to most contemporary interpreters of Confucianism, the book demonstrates that early Confucian texts can be read as arguments for ambiguity in ritual failure. If, as discussed in one text, Confucius builds a tomb for his parents unlike the tombs of antiquity, and rains fall causing the tomb to collapse, it is not immediately clear whether this failure was the result of random misfortune or the result of Confucius straying from the ritual script by building a tomb incongruent with those of antiquity. The Liji (Record of Ritual)—one of the most significant, yet least studied, texts of Confucianism—poses many of these situations and suggests that the line between preventable and unpreventable failures of ritual is not always clear. Ritual performance, in this view, is a performance of risk. It entails rendering oneself vulnerable to the agency of others; and resigning oneself to the need to vary from the successful rituals of past, thereby moving into untested and uncertain territory. This book challenges some common assumptions of contemporary interpreters of Confucian ethics, in particular the assumption that a cultivated ritual agent is able to recognize which failures are within his sphere of control to prevent and thereby render his happiness invulnerable to ritual failure.

What is the status of religious freedom in the world today? What barriers does it face? What are the realistic prospects for improvement, and why does this matter? This book addresses these critical questions by assembling in one volume some of the best forward thinking and empirical research on religious liberty, international legal trends, and societal dynamics. Chapters explore the status, value, and challenges of religious liberty around the world—with illustrations from a wide range of historical situations, contemporary contexts, and constitutional regimes. With a thematic focus on the nature of religious markets and statecraft, the book surveys conditions in different regions, from the Muslim arc to Asia to Eastern Europe. It probes dynamics in both established and emerging democracies. It features up-to-date treatments of such pivotal nations as China, Russia, and Turkey. It illuminates new threats to conscience and religious autonomy in the cradle of liberty, the United States, and in kin countries of the English speaking world. Finally, it demonstrates the vital contribution of religious freedom to inter-religious harmony, thriving societies, and global security, and applies these findings to the momentous issue of advancing freedom and democracy in Islamic cultures.

How do people practice religion in their everyday lives? How do our daily encounters with people who hold different religious beliefs shape the way we understand our own moral and spiritual selves? This book takes a highly original approach to answering these questions. For more than a year the author of this book worked in New York City as a volunteer for a nonprofit, nonreligious organization called God's Love We Deliver, helping to prepare home-cooked meals for people with AIDS. Paying close attention to what was said and not said, the author traces how the volunteers gave voice to their moral positions and religious values. This book also examines how they invested their conversations, and mundane activities such as cooking, with personal meaning that in turn affected how they saw their own spiritual lives.

On Palm Sunday 1964, at Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis, a group of black and white students began a “kneel-in” to protest the church's policy of segregation, a protest that would continue in one form or another for more than a year and eventually force the church to open its doors to black worshippers. This book tells the story of this dramatic yet little studied tactic, which was the strategy of choice for bringing attention to segregationist policies in Southern churches. “Kneel-ins” involved surprise visits to targeted churches, usually during Easter season, and often resulted in physical standoffs with resistant church people. The spectacle of kneeling worshippers barred from entering churches made for a powerful image that invited both local and national media attention. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including extensive interviews with the students who led non-violent protests against church segregation and church people who witnessed these protests, the book tells the story of the Memphis kneel-ins and their legacy, including ongoing efforts at truth-telling and reconciliation on the part the churches that were the targets of kneel-in protests during the 1960s.

This book contends that the influence of biblical criticism in America was more widespread than previously thought. It proves this point by uncovering the hidden history of the radical historical Jesus, a construct created and sustained by freethinkers, feminists, socialists, and anarchists during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. This exploration provides a new narrative revealing that Cyrenus Osborne Ward, Caroline Bartlett, George Herron, Bouck White, and other radical religionists had an impact on the history of religion in America rivaling that of recognized religious intellectuals such as Shailer Mathews, Charles Briggs, Francis Peabody, and Walter Rauschenbusch. The methods and approaches utilized by radical religionists were different than those employed by elite liberal divines, however, and part of a larger struggle over the relationship between religion and civilization. There were numerous reasons for this conflict, but the primary one was that radicals used Ernest Renan’s The Life of Jesus to create an imaginative brand of biblical criticism that struck a balance between the demands of reason and the doctrines of religion. Thus, while radical religionists like Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Eugene Debs were secular-minded thinkers who sought to purge Christianity of its supernatural dimensions, they believed the religious imagination that enabled modern-day radicals to make common cause with an ancient peasant from Galilee was something wonderful.

This book provides a detailed ethnography of alternative pilgrimages to Catholic shrines in contemporary France that are dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene or house black Madonna statues. Based on more than three years of fieldwork it describes the way in which pilgrims with a Christian background from Italy, Spain, Britain and the United States interpret Catholic figures, symbols and sites according to spiritual theories and practices derived from the transnational Neopagan movement. The book pays particular attention to the life stories of the pilgrims, the crafted rituals they perform and the spiritual-esoteric literature they draw upon. Among other questions, the book examines how rituals, as for menstruation and menopause, are invented; what effects they have and what they can tell us about rituals in general; why this kind of spirituality is increasingly attractive for Westerners and is related to The Da Vinci Code; and how anthropological literature has influenced the pilgrims. Among these pilgrims spirituality is lived and negotiated in interaction with each other and with their readings. Jungian psychology, Goddess mythology and “indigenous” traditions flow together into a corpus of theories and practices centered upon the worship of divinities such as the Goddess and Mother Earth and the sacralization of the reproductive cycle. The pilgrims’ rituals present a critique of the Roman Catholic Church and the medical establishment, as well as of contemporary discourses on gender.

Religious traditions provide the stories and rituals that define the core values of church members. Yet modern life in America can make those customs seem undesirable, even impractical. As a result, many congregations refashion church traditions so they may remain powerful and salient. How do these transformations occur? How do clergy and worshipers negotiate which aspects should be preserved or discarded? Focusing on the innovations of several mainline Protestant churches in the San Francisco Bay Area, this book provides new understandings of the transformation of spiritual traditions. It argues that these particular congregations typify a new type of Lutheranism—one that combines the evangelical approaches that are embodied in the growing legion of megachurches with American society's emphasis on pragmatism and consumerism. Here it provides vivid descriptions of congregations as they sacrifice hymns in favor of rock music and scrap traditional white robes and stoles for Hawaiian shirts, while also making readers aware of the long history of similar attempts to Americanize the Lutheran tradition. This is an examination of a religion in flux—one that speaks to the growing popularity of evangelicalism in America.

The focus of the volume is the historical background and meaning of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution, from the seventeenth century to the present. The text does not emphasize modern jurisprudence or current court decisions or current law, but the historical meaning of terms and concepts such as “religious freedom,” “separation of church and state,” “original intent,” “federalism,” “establishment of religion,” and “disestablishment.” The individual chapters approach their subjects from a variety of ideological and historical perspectives. Several chapters include discussions of the role of the 1947 Supreme Court decision Everson v. Board of Education in launching the modern debate about the historical meaning of the Establishment Clause. Among the historical issues emphasized in the chapters are the seventeenth-century examples of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York. The roles and opinions of many figures from the founding period are particularly scrutinized, including James Madison (and his “Memorial and Remonstrance”), Thomas Jefferson (and his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom”), and George Washington (and his “Farewell Address”). Several authors examine nineteenth-century discussions of church state controversies, the separation of church and state, school-funding controversies, and the 1876 Blaine amendment debates.