Search Results

American religious pluralism—its symbolic expressions, its characteristic tensions and contests—play out nowhere more noticeably than on the landscape. Because exchanges among the nation's faiths are often about sacred space, which is inevitably contested, anyone seeking to comprehend American religious pluralism must turn for insight to geography. Religion generates claims on space and space is limited, religious pluralism necessarily involves multiple, overlapping, competing, and often conflicting claims—a geopolitics of sacred space in which individual and group claimants are required to engage, or at least remain mindful of, other claimants in the society. To understand these geopolitics fully involves constructing spatial analyses at different levels: local, regional, national, even transnational and global. Seeing American religious pluralism through the lens of geography offers important insights as we continue pursuing the spatial equity that is the geographic promise of the First Amendment.

While this chapter still features discussions drawn from the work of Recep Alpyağıl and Şaban Ali Düzgün, overall it takes a broader scope to offer a survey of Turkish theologians’ general responses to Christianity, skepticism, atheism, and religious pluralism. This chapter argues that in the Turkish theological context, these three issues mutually implicate one another, with only some exception. Among various works of Turkish theologians, this chapter engages the figures of Adnan Aslan, Mehmet Bayrakdar, Mahmut Aydın and the late Yaşar Nuri Öztürk.

In reference to religion, the term “pluralism” intends something more than “diversity,” which refers to the simple fact that differences exist. Pluralism, rather, involves understanding the diverse religious groups in society for what they are, appreciating them and respecting them; it is a strategy for managing diversity. Over the course of centuries, religious diversity in America has increased, as has interaction between different religious groups—first among different kinds of Protestants, then with Catholics and ultimately members of non-Christian traditions as well. Concurrently, a rising number of religious groups, even non-Christian ones, have come to be tolerated and accepted as belonging to the religious mainstream. Increasing pluralism may, however, be creating less certitude among believers about the distinctiveness of their own traditions, a condition that, if true, may paradoxically be reducing the diversity for which pluralism purports to be the solution.

In Europe, church and state are still intertwined in ways that secular Christians hardly notice but nonetheless penalise religious minorities. National policies are bewilderingly inconsistent and the continued importance of legal privileges for Christians is most evident in those European countries that have established churches, as churches are commonly recognised by law as the official church of a state or nation and thus given civil authority. Overall, Europeans have followed two different models for organising church—state relations: religious monopolies and state-sponsorship of particular recognised national religions. Religious pluralism is a new social fact with which European states have yet to come to terms and, country by country, they are plunging into national debates about religion and public policy and how to accommodate growing numbers of nonconformist believers.

Following Whitefield’s death and entombment (and some would say enshrinement) in the Old South Presbyterian Church in Newburyport, MA, his followers worked quickly to preserve his memory. They republished many of his writings and sermons. They printed memoirs. They perpetuated a legacy that continued to defy denominational and geographic boundaries. His tomb became a sight of pilgrimage, including ritualized handling of his skull and removal of trophies from his coffin. In many ways, Whitefield became more powerful as a symbol in death than he was in life.

This introduction sets the historical context for examining religious pluralism in America. The “first diversity” consisted primarily of various Protestants gathered in regional denominational configurations, with a few localities essaying radical experiments allowing different degrees of religious freedom. The American Revolutionary Settlement of Religion set up a constitutional framework that affirmed the value of religious liberty, facilitating the multiplication of different churches, but this development coincided with the flourishing of a Protestant nationalism that cast the United States as a “Christian” state whose liberties depended on minimizing the presence of non-Protestant faiths. The twentieth century's dramatic rise in the proportion of Americans adhering to non-Christian faiths (or none at all) played out amid this ongoing tension between the value placed on freedom of worship, which encouraged religious diversity, and ideologically driven concerns about maintaining the nation's historic Protestant identity.

An affective experience of wonder arises in encounters with religious others. In defense of the authority such encounters might hold for Christian life, this chapter gestures toward a Christian theology of religious pluralism that appreciates both the incomprehensibility of otherness and the affect it awakens. Three categories from the classical Indian aesthetic theory guide this aesthetics of religious pluralism: the aesthetic emotion of wonder (adbhuta rasa), the sympathetic spectator (sahṛdaya), and transitory or nurturing emotional states (vyabhicāribhāvas or sañcāribhāvas). Wonder partakes of the ethical ambivalence that attends the aesthetic emotions generally. As a theology of religious pluralism struggles to find language and rationality, it must remain open to the mystery of the other and of the divine.

This essay discusses the law and politics of religious freedom in the recently created state of South Sudan. Christianity often serves as a proxy for national culture and marginalizes indigenous African traditions and Islam. Categorizing the populace according to faith affiliations forecloses and solidifies religious boundaries in a country where boundaries are fluid and the socio-political order is in transition.