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For six months in 2004, controversy raged in Hamtramck, Michigan, as residents debated a proposed amendment that would exempt the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, from the city's anti-noise ordinance. The call to prayer functioned as a flashpoint in disputes about the integration of Muslims into this historically Polish-Catholic community. No one openly contested Muslims' right to worship in their mosques, but many neighbors framed their resistance around what they regarded as the inappropriate public pronouncement of Islamic presence, an announcement that audibly intruded upon their public space.Throughout U.S. history, complaints about religion as noise have proven useful both for restraining religious dissent and for circumscribing religion's boundaries more generally. At the same time, religious individuals and groups rarely have kept quiet. They have insisted on their right to practice religion out loud, implicitly advancing alternative understandings of religion and its place in the modern world.InReligion Out Loud, Isaac Weiner takes such sonic disputes seriously. Weaving the story of religious noise through multiple historical eras and diverse religious communities, he convincingly demonstrates that religious pluralism has never been solely a matter of competing values, truth claims, or moral doctrines, but of differentstylesof public practice, of fundamentally different ways of using body and space - and that these differences ultimately have expressed very different conceptions of religion itself. Weiner's innovative work encourages scholars to pay much greater attention to the publicly contested sensory cultures of American religious life.In theNorth American ReligionsseriesIsaac Weineris Assistant Professor of Religion and Culture in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University.

How to live in a supposedly faithless world threatened by religious fundamentalism? Terry Eagleton, formidable thinker and renowned cultural critic, investigates in this thought-provoking book the contradictions, difficulties, and significance of the modern search for a replacement for God. Engaging with a phenomenally wide range of ideas, issues, and thinkers from the Enlightenment to today, Eagleton discusses the state of religion before and after 9/11, the ironies surrounding Western capitalism's part in spawning not only secularism but also fundamentalism, and the unsatisfactory surrogates for the Almighty invented in the post-Enlightenment era.The author reflects on the unique capacities of religion, the possibilities of culture and art as modern paths to salvation, the so-called war on terror's impact on atheism, and a host of other topics of concern to those who envision a future in which just and compassionate communities thrive. Lucid, stylish, and entertaining in his usual manner, Eagleton presents a brilliant survey of modern thought that also serves as a timely, urgently needed intervention into our perilous political present.

Created by two of the field's leading experts, this unique introduction to international religious demography outlines the challenges in interpreting data on religious adherence, and presents a contemporary portrait of global religious belief. * Offers the first comprehensive overview of the field of international religious demography – detailing what we know about religious adherents around the world, and how we know it * Examines religious freedom and diversity, including agnostics and atheists, on a global scale, highlighting trends over the past 100 years and projecting estimates for the year 2050 * Outlines the issues and challenges related to definitions, taxonomies, sources, analyses, and other techniques in interpreting data on religious adherence * Considers data from religious communities, censuses, surveys, and scholarly research, along with several in-depth case studies on the global Muslim population, religion in China, and the religious demography of recently created Sudan and South Sudan * Argues against the belief that the twentieth-century was a 'secular' period by putting forward new evidence to the contrary * Provides resources for measuring both qualitatively and quantitatively important data on the world's religious situation in the twenty-first century

The Question of Methodological Naturalism offers ten essays on the role of naturalism in religious studies, ranging from sophisticated intellectual histories and philosophical analyses to trenchant denunciations and ringing endorsements. All have profound implications for the study of religions.

Reframing Pilgrimage argues that sacred travel is just one of the twenty-first century's many forms of cultural mobility. The contributors consider the meanings of pilgrimage in Christian, Mormon, Hindu, Islamic and Sufi traditions, as well as in secular contexts, and they create a new theory of pilgrimage as a form of voluntary displacement. This voluntary displacement helps to constitute cultural meaning in a world constantly 'en route'. Pilgrimage, which works both on global economic and individual levels, is recognised as a highly creative and politically charged force intimately bound up in economic and cultural systems

Religions in Contemporary Africa is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the three main religious traditions on the African continent: African indigenous religions, Christianity and Islam. The book provides a historical overview of these important traditions and focuses on the roles they play in African societies today. It includes social, cultural and political case studies from across the continent on the following topical issues: Witchcraft and modernity Power and politics Conflict and peace Media and popular culture Development Human rights Illness and health Gender and sexuality With suggestions for further reading, discussion questions, illustrations and a list of glossary terms this is the ideal textbook for students in religion, African studies and adjacent fields approaching this subject area for the first time.

Modernity is surrounded by an almost magic aura that casts a spell over people all over the world. To connect with modernity, various ways and means are used, among them magic practices and religious ideas. Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia: Magic and Modernity deals with the magic in and of modernity and asks about its current significance for the dynamics of religion in Southeast Asia. Drawing on recent ethnographic research in this area, the contributors to this wide-ranging volume demonstrate how religious concepts contribute to meeting the challenges of modernity. Against this background, religion and modernity are no longer perceived as in contradiction; rather, it is argued that a revision of the western notion of religion is required to understand the complexity of 'multiple modernities' in a globalised world..Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia: Magic and Modernity is part of the series Global Asia, in close collaboration with the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). 1 The book casts new light on the relation between religion and modernity in Southeast Asia and beyond. 2 The book is completely based on contemporary empirical research in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Indonesia. 3 The book explains why religion became such a driving force in the transformation of Southeast Asian societies.

Historians of religion face complex interpretive issues when examining religious texts, practices, and experiences. Faithful Narratives presents the work of twelve eminent scholars whose research has exemplified compelling strategies for negotiating the difficulties inherent in this increasingly important area of historical inquiry. The chapters range chronologically from Late Antiquity to modern America and thematically from the spirituality of near eastern monks to women's agency in religion, considering familiar religious communities alongside those on the margins and bringing a range of spiritual and religious practices into historical focus. Focusing on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the essays address matters central to the study of religion in history, in particular texts and traditions of authority, interreligious discourse, and religious practice and experience. Some examine mainstream communities and traditions, others explore individuals who crossed religious or confessional boundaries, and still others study the peripheries of what is considered orthodox religious tradition. Encompassing a wide geographical as well as chronological scope, Faithful Narratives illustrates the persistence of central themes and common analytical challenges for historians working in all periods. Contributors: Peter Brown, Princeton University; Nina Caputo, University of Florida; Carlos Eire, Yale University; Susanna Elm, University of California, Berkeley; Anthony Grafton, Princeton University; Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College; Phyllis Mack, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; Kenneth Mills, University of Toronto; David Nirenberg, University of Chicago; Mark A. Noll, University of Notre Dame; David B. Ruderman, University of Pennsylvania; Lamin Sanneh, Yale University; Andrea Sterk, University of Florida; John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame.

Caves have been used in various ways across human society, but despite the persistence within popular culture of the iconic caveman, deep caves were never used primarily as habitation sites for early humans. Rather, in both ancient and contemporary contexts, caves have served primarily as ritual spaces. In Sacred Darkness, contributors use archaeological evidence as well as ethnographic studies of modern ritual practices to envision the cave as place of spiritual and ideological power that emerges as a potent venue for ritual practice. Covering the ritual use of caves in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, Mesoamerica, and the US Southwest and Eastern woodlands, this book brings together case studies by prominent scholars whose research spans from the Paleolithic period to the present day. These contributions demonstrate that cave sites are as fruitful as surface contexts in promoting the understanding of both ancient and modern religious beliefs and practices. This state-of-the-art survey of ritual cave use will be one of the most valuable resources for understanding the role of caves in studies of religion, sacred landscape, or cosmology and a must-read for any archaeologist interested in caves.

Essays considering how global fundamentalism influences our understanding of modern Christianity, Judaism, and Islam Thirty years after the Iranian Revolution and more than a decade since the events of 2001, the time is right to examine what the discourse on fundamentalism has achieved and where it might head from here. In this volume editors Simon A. Wood and David Harrington Watt offer eleven interdisciplinary perspectives framed by the debate between advocates and critics of the concept of fundamentalism that investigate it with regard to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The essays are integrated through engagement with a common selection of texts on fundamentalism and a common set of questions about the utility and disadvantages of the term, its varied application by scholars of particular groups, and the extent to which the term can encompass a cross-cultural set of religious responses to modernity. Although the notion of fundamentalism as a global phenomenon dates from around 1980, the term itself originated in North American Protestantism approximately six decades earlier and acquired pejorative connotations within five years of its invention. Since the early 1990s, however, many scholars have endorsed the view that the notion of fundamentalism—as relying on literalist interpretations of the scriptures, firm commitment to patriarchy, or refusal to confine religious matters to the private sphere—facilitates our understanding of modern religion by enabling us to identify and label structurally analogous developments in different religions. Critics of the term have identified problems with it, above all that the idea of global fundamentalism confuses more than it clarifies and unjustifiably overlooks, downplays, or homogenizes difference more than it identifies a genuine homogeny. The editor's rigorous exploration of both the usefulness and the limitations of the concept make it an excellent counterpoint to the many books that have a great deal to say about the former and very little to say about the latter. It will also serve as an ideal text for religious studies, history, and anthropology courses that explore the complex interface between religion and modernity as well as courses on theory and method in religious studies.