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This book explores emergent subjectivities of Indian Muslim youth, as they unfold within a rapidly globalizing Indian economy and society saturated with communication technologies of satellite television, mobile telephones, Internet, W.2 applications, and social networking platforms like Facebook. It is an ethnographic investigation into the way revolutionary changes in communication technologies, affecting media’s reach and content, as well as, audience’s access to and their modes of engagement with media within contexts of neoliberal globalization, are inflecting the self-consciousness and identity of minority Muslim youth population. The research examines the lives of Muslim youth, who reside in a historically and spatially segregated Muslim enclave of Jamia Nagar in New Delhi, and who like other Indian Muslims, have been excluded from mainstream Indian society, to understand how their marginalized and localized existence is being redefined by the vortex of global flows created by neoliberal mediated globalization. The book analyzes the interconnections between everyday lives and larger global developments and investigates how Muslim youth’s consciousness has become today rife with new desires for integration into mainstream Indian society that oppose their historic isolation and exclusion.

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective, social intellectual practice. Engaging black studies, queer theory, sound studies, literary theory, theological studies, continental philosophy, and visual studies, Blackpentecostal Breath analyses the ways otherwise modes of existence are disruptions of marginalization and violence. The immediate objects of study Blackpentecostal Breath engages are the aesthetic practices—whooping, shouting, noise-making and speaking in tongues—found in Blackpentecostalism, a multiracial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect that has one strand of its modern genesis in 1906, Los Angeles, California. Blackpentecostal Breath argues that the aesthetic practices of Blackpentecostalism constitute a performative critique of normative theology and philosophy that precede the twentieth-century moment. These performances constitute an atheological-aphilosophical project, produced against the desires and aspirations for the liberal subject of modern theological-philosophical thought. In contradistinction to the desire for subjectivity, Blackpentecostal Breath theorizes the extra-subjective mode of being together that is the condition of emergence for otherwise worlds of possibility. These choreographic, sonic, and visual aesthetic practices and sensual experiences are not only important objects of study for those interested in alternative modes of social organization, but they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture.

The reach of the Catholic Church is arguably greater than that of any other religion, extending across diverse political, ethnic, class, and cultural boundaries. But what is it about Catholicism that resonates so profoundly with followers who live under disparate conditions? What is it, for instance, that binds parishioners in America with those in Mexico? For the author of this book, what unites Catholics is a sense of being Catholic—a social imagination that motivates them to promote justice and build a better world. In this book, he gives readers a feeling for what it means to be Catholic and put one's faith into action. Tracing the practices of a group of parishioners in Oakland, California, and another in Guadalajara, Mexico, the author reveals parallels—and contrasts—in the ways these ordinary Catholics receive and act on a church doctrine that emphasizes social justice. Whether they are building a supermarket for the low-income elderly or waging protests to promote school reform, these parishioners provide important insights into the construction of the Catholic social imagination. Throughout, the author also offers important new cultural and sociological interpretations of Catholic doctrine on issues such as poverty, civil and human rights, political participation, and the natural law.

This book explores the practice of Christianity among the Yakoba in the small region of Kerala. It uses the categories of time, space, architecture, and the body as a means of identifying the ways in which Hindu, Christian, and Syrian strands have been woven together to form a rich cultural tapestry in the region. The Yakoba, on which this study is based, are divided into two distinct groups—the Orthodox Syrians and the Jacobite Syrians. The author relates their on-going quarrel over ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the ways in which this quarrel affects Syrian Christian life and experience as a whole. She argues that people’s interpretations of Christianity are a very powerful mode of cultural expression and societal flexibility.

Christians under Covers shifts how scholars and popular media typically talk about religious conservatives and sexuality. Moving attention away from debates over homosexuality, premarital sex, and other sexual sins, this virtual ethnography examines the online world of Christian sex advice—blogs, message boards, and online stores that promote the idea that God wants married, heterosexual couples (but only them) to have great sex. The internet allows evangelical website users to reimagine their faith, drawing from existing religious beliefs while also talking about God in sometimes unorthodox ways. By emphasizing their own sense of piety and God’s rules, Burke demonstrates how website users construct a religious logic that fashions boundaries between themselves and ungodly others (like gays and lesbians) while still taking advantage of the sexual spoils that those ungodly others helped incorporate into the broader culture: sexual knowledge, women’s pleasure, even kinky sex. When one of the mantras of evangelical Christian ideology is the “naturalness” of heterosexuality, Burke offers a new perspective on how religion both constructs and undermines heterosexuality’s power.

Why do people participate in controversial symbolic events that drive wedges between groups and occasionally spark violence? This book examines this question through an in-depth case study of Northern Ireland. Protestant organizations perform over 2,500 parades across Northern Ireland each year. Protestants tend to see the parades as festive occasions that celebrate Protestant history and culture. Catholics, however, tend to see them as hateful, intimidating, and triumphalist. As a result, parades have been a major source of conflict in the years since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. This book examines why, given the often negative consequences, people choose to participate in these parades. Drawing on theories from the study of contentious politics and the study of ritual, the book argues that paraders are more interested in the benefits intrinsic to participation in a communal ritual than the external consequences of their action. The book presents analysis of original quantitative and qualitative data to support this argument and to test it against prominent alternative explanations. Interview, survey, and ethnographic data are also used to explore issues central to parade participation, including identity expression, commemoration, tradition, the pleasures of participation, and communicating a message to outside audiences. The book additionally examines a paradox at the center of parading: while most observers see parades as political events, the participants do not. Altogether, the book offers a new perspective on politics and culture in the aftermath of ethnic violence.

Everyday Mysticism is a close look at a school for the study of the self in the deep Israeli desert. The school, which was established in the community of Neot Smadar in 1989, assumes the external form of a kibbutz, but is a contemplative community for individuals who seek to become aware of the devastating effects of mechanical thinking. The author spent several summers working in the community and describes, as a participant, the way that contemplative practice—everyday mysticism—shapes the work environment, the community structure and human relationships. The book also provides detailed examples of the spiritual work that was instituted by the founder of the school, Yossef Safra, whose vision is compared with ancient Buddhist and Hindu philosophers. That spiritual work takes place in conversations and dialogues where participants practice the art of listening as a meditative discipline while also learning to observe in fine detail the working of the conscious mind. These contemplative practices define the nature of community of Neot Smadar as an extended family were everyday mysticism prevails.

Based on primary research, this book explores the controversies, policies and practices of ‘public faith’, questioning perceptions of a fixed divide between religious and secular participants in public life and challenging prevailing concepts of a monolithic ‘neutral’ public realm. It takes an in-depth look at the distinctiveness of faith groups' contribution, but also probes the conflicts and dilemmas that arise, assessing the role and capacity of faith groups within specific public policy contexts, including education, regeneration, housing and community cohesion.

This book adopts a multidisciplinary approach to examine the role of FBOs in overcoming poverty and social exclusion in European cities. At a time of uniquely European controversies and neoliberal globalisation, this volume explores the defining relations of FBOs and contains sectoral studies to explore how FBOs are growing in importance in the provision of social services in the European urban context. This seminal book is an essential reference source for academics studying social policy, sociology, geography, politics, urban studies and theology/religious studies.

Fridays of Rage reveals for the first time Al Jazeera’s surprising rise to that most respected of all Western media positions: the watchdog of democracy. Al Jazeera served as the nursery for the Arab world’s democratic revolutions, promoting Friday as a “day of rage” and popular protest. This book gives readers a glimpse of how Al Jazeera has strategically cast its journalists as martyrs in the struggle for Arab freedom while promoting itself as the mouthpiece and advocate of the Arab public. In addition to heralding a new era of Arab democracy, Al Jazeera has come to have a major influence on Arab perceptions of US involvement in the Arab world, the Arab–Israeli conflict, the rise of global Islamic fundamentalism, and the expansion of the political Far Right. Al Jazeera’s blueprint for “Muslim democracy” was part of a vision announced by the network during its earliest broadcasts. Al Jazeera presented a mirror to an Arab world afraid to examine itself and its democratic deficiencies. But rather than assuming that Al Jazeera is a monolithic force for positive transformation in Arab society, Fridays of Rage examines the potentially dark implications of Al Jazeera’s radical reconceptualization of media as a strategic tool or weapon. As a powerful and rapidly evolving source of global influence, Al Jazeera embodies many paradoxes—the manifestations and effects of which are only now becoming apparent. Fridays of Rage guides readers through this murky territory, where journalists are martyrs, words are weapons, and facts are bullets.

This Omnibus brings together two of distinguished sociologist T.N. Madan's books on the concept of the householder in Hinduism. A common thread running through the Omnibus is the focus on life and society amongst the Hindu Kashmiri Pandit community. It includes his seminal writings on marriage, kinship, family, and the household in Hindu society. Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir is a pioneering and ethnographically rich account of the Indian family, and is considered to be a classic in the field of world anthropology. It is probably the only study of its kind of traditional Pandit life in the Kashmir Valley. Non-renunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu Culture draws attention away from the ideas of caste and renunciation and focuses instead on the ‘householder’ in Hindu society. It explores aspects of auspiciousness, purity, asceticism, eroticism, altruism, and death while focussing on the householder's life in Hindu society. The Omnibus also includes additional essays on the Brahmanic gotra, and the Hindu family and development, along with a short piece on aspects of traditional household culture. It features an autobiographical essay—the author's recollection of growing up in a Pandit home in Srinagar, Kashmir. In the Prologue, T.N. Madan engages with the ‘householder tradition’ across the cultural regions of India, analysing themes of householdership and renunciation in religious philosophy and ethnography.

David K. Seitz maps the affective dimensions of the politics of citizenship at one large LGBT church, focusing on debates on race and gender in religious leadership, activism around police–minority relations, outreach to LGBT Christians transnationally, and advocacy for asylum seekers. Through cultural geography, queer of color critique, psychoanalysis, and affect theory, he stages reparative encounters with citizenship and religion.

Islam is what Muslims do. From this premise, the book elaborates a sociology of Islam in three concise chapters. The book shows that Islam has operated typically not in the form of standard dogmas, but usually as a compass for practical orientations (“lifeworlds”). This more pragmatic character of the faith established it as a relevant factor in three arenas in which common social life acquires meaning: participatory ethics, public philosophies, and global networks. The book argues that all three are poorly understood in recent literature, which tends to focus on one specific problem or another, and then in isolation from global and historical contexts. The book argues that the larger preoccupations of ordinary Muslims—how to live in a global society; how to guide life in the manner of a total philosophy; and how to relate to the world of daily struggles—are unique neither to the present period nor to religious life. But the career of a particular religion—Islam in this case—offers a focused empirical lens through which we may learn something more about the nature of global citizenship; the philosophical needs of ordinary people; and the sorts of ethics that facilitate social participation.

This ethnography provides a theoretically informed account of the educational journeys of students in girls’ madrasas in India. It focuses on the unfolding of young women’s lives as they journey from home to madrasa and beyond. Using a series of ethnographic portraits and bringing together the analytical concepts of community, piety, and aspiration, it highlights the fluidity of the essences of the ideal pious Muslim woman. It illustrates how the madrasa becomes a site where the ideals of Islamic womanhood are negotiated in everyday life. At one level, girls value and adopt practices taught in the madrasa as essential to the practice of piety (amal). At another level, there is a more tactical aspect to cultivating one’s identity as a madrasa-educated Muslim girl. The girls invoke the virtues of safety, modesty, and piety learnt in the madrasa to reconfigure conventional social expectations around marriage, education, and employment. This becomes more apparent in the choices exercised by the girls after leaving the madrasa, highlighted in this book through narratives of madrasa alumni pursuing higher education at a central university in Delhi. The focus on journeys of girls over a period of time, in different contexts, complicates the idealized and coherent notions of piety presented by anthropological literature on women’s participation in Islamic piety projects. Further, the educational stories of girls challenge the media and public representations of madrasas in India, which tend to caricature them as outmoded religious institutions with little relevance to the educational needs of modernizing India. Mapping madrasa students’ personal journeys of becoming educated while leading pious lives allows us to see how these young women are reconfiguring notions of Islamic womanhood.

From the halls of the Ivy League to the C-suite at Fortune 500 companies, this book reveals the people behind the mindfulness movement, and the engine they built to propel mindfulness into public consciousness. Based on over a hundred interviews with meditating scientists, religious leaders, educators, businesspeople, and investors, this book shows how this highly accomplished, affluent group has popularized meditation as a tool for health, happiness, and social reform over the past forty years. Rather than working through temples or using social movement tactics like protest to improve society, they mobilized by building elite networks advocating the benefits of meditation across professions. They built momentum by drawing in successful, affluent people and their prestigious institutions, including Ivy League and flagship research universities, and Fortune 100 companies like Google and General Mills. To broaden meditation’s appeal, they made manifold adaptations along the way. In the end, does mindfulness really make our society better? Or has mindfulness lost its authenticity? This book reveals how elite movements can spread, and how powerful spiritual and self-help movements can transform individuals in their wake. Yet, spreading the dharma came with unintended consequences. With their focus on individual transformation, the mindful elite have fallen short of the movement’s lofty ambitions to bring about broader structural and institutional change. Ultimately, this idealistic myopia unintentionally came to reinforce some of the problems it originally aspired to solve.

In the post 9/11 world, Islam and feminism are widely viewed as incompatible. Sociologist Rachel Rinaldo’s ethnography of Muslim and secular women activists in Jakarta, Indonesia highlights the diverse ways they engage with Islam and feminism and use them in their activism and their daily lives. Mobilizing Piety compares different forms of women’s activism in a globalizing metropolis. Examining a feminist NGO, Muslim women’s organizations, and women in a Muslim political party, Rinaldo demonstrates that the Islamic revival and democratization in Indonesia are helping to shape new kinds of agency for women activists, some of whom are influenced by both Islam and feminism. Rinaldo shows how these new kinds of agency have emerged from the increasing interactions between the fields of Islamic and gender politics in Indonesian public life since the 1990s. As Islam becomes a primary source of meaning in the Indonesian public sphere, Rinaldo shows how some women activists mobilize Islam to argue for women’s empowerment and equality, while others use Islam to advocate a more Islamic nation. Women activists in Indonesia are transforming global discourses of Islam and feminism, embodying new forms of agency and identity, and creating social change. Mobilizing Piety presents a new conceptual framework for studying religion and politics, showing how an examination of interpretation allows for a more nuanced understanding of how religion can underpin very different visions for the future.

This book reflects contemporary concerns about the inadequacies of secularism in the context of religious assertiveness in recent decades. It examines the ideologies of secularism and fundamentalism in the setting of the Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh religious traditions. Each chapter begins with appropriate quotes pertaining to the subject. In a new preface and two appendices, the author recapitulates earlier formulations on the subject and revisits the current debates. The book has been described as ‘an invitation to an enticing intellectual journey that reveals new landscapes’ (Louis Dumont), acclaimed as a ‘tour de force’ (Rajni Kothari), ‘a landmark intervention from the social sciences in public affairs’ (Satish Saberwal), and a ‘major contribution to scholarship and the delineation of the interrelationship of religion and politics’ (Harold Gould).

Since 9/11, interest in Muslims in Europe has increased significantly. There has been much public debate and academic research on Muslims living in larger Western European countries like Britain, France or Germany, but little is known of Muslims in Ireland. This book fills this gap, providing a complete study of this unexplored Muslim presence, from the arrival of the first Muslim resident in Cork in 1784 up to mass immigration to the Republic of Ireland during the “Celtic Tiger” period from the mid-1990s onwards. Muslim immigration and settlement in Ireland is very recent, and poses new challenges to a society that has perceived itself as religiously and culturally homogenous. Ireland is also one of the least secular societies in Europe, providing a different context for Muslims seeking recognition by state and society. This book makes an important contribution to understanding the diversity of Muslim presences across Europe. It combines historical, sociological and ethnographic research methods to provide a rich and multi-faceted study of the Muslim presence in Ireland in its historical and contemporary dimensions. The book further illustrates the central role European networks of the Muslim Brotherhood have played in organising and representing Muslim communities in Europe, with Ireland being a prime example.

It is now a common refrain among liberals that Christian Right pastors and television pundits have hijacked evangelical Christianity for partisan gain. This book challenges this notion, arguing that the hijacking metaphor paints a fundamentally distorted picture of how evangelical churches have become politicized. The book reveals how the powerful coalition between evangelicals and the Republican Party is not merely a creation of political elites who have framed conservative issues in religious language, but is anchored in the lives of local congregations. Drawing on research at evangelical churches near the U.S. border with Canada, this book compares how American and Canadian evangelicals talk about politics in congregational settings. While Canadian evangelicals share the same theology and conservative moral attitudes as their American counterparts, their politics are quite different. On the U.S. side of the border, political conservatism is woven into the very fabric of everyday religious practice. The book shows how subtle partisan cues emerge in small group interactions as members define how “we Christians” should relate to others in the broader civic arena, while liberals are cast in the role of adversaries. It explains how the most explicit partisan cues come not from clergy but rather from lay opinion leaders who help their less politically engaged peers to link evangelical identity to conservative politics. This book demonstrates how deep the ties remain between political conservatism and evangelical Christianity in America.

This original book makes a timely and potentially controversial contribution both to the teaching of social policy and the wider debates surrounding it in Britain today. It offers a critical and theoretically-sensitive overview of the role of religious values, actors and institutions in the development of state and non-state social welfare provision in Britain, combining historical discussion of the relationship between religion and social policy in Britain with a comparative theoretical discussion that covers continental Europe and North America. Grounded in new empirical research on religious welfare organisations from the nine major faiths in the UK, the book brings together all of these perspectives to argue for an analytical shift in the definition of wellbeing through a new concept called ‘ways of being’. This reflects the moral, ideational and cultural underpinnings of social welfare. Written in a readable style, the book will appeal to students and tutors of social policy, as well as policy-makers seeking to inform themselves about the key issues surrounding faith-based welfare in modern Britain.