Suchergebnisse

My dissertation, Mexican Religion on Trial: Race, Religion and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, presents three critical junctures in United States history (between the nineteenth century and the present) to explore political and legal discourses surrounding Mexican Catholicism after the Mexican-American war. This research employs historical, archival, and ethnographic methods. My analysis of numerous legal case studies, law enforcement training manuals, oral histories, ethnographic methods, and archival documents reveal processes by which Mexican Catholic practices and performances become signifiers of illegality and criminality, used as evidence against the inclusion and extension of national and cultural citizenship. While the surveillance of Mexicans communities reflects increased anxiety and suspicion about immigrant communities and their religions in the 9/11 period, this history positions contemporary legal debates on Mexican religion within a larger history of anti-Mexican and anti-Catholic attitudes in the Southwest.

Aim of the study is to describe the phenomenon of post-religion as a specific spiritual sphere of the Post-modernity. Methodology. In the introduction analyzed a variety of methodological approaches, opening his inadequacy applied to the spiritual sphere of Post-modernity: «classic» religious studies, religious studies of traditional spiritual movements and the post-modern religious studies, partly produced Traditionalist school, could - according to the author's hypothesis - become a methodological basis for the most complete analysis of post-religion. Scientific novelty. In the main part of the article crystallized the authorized concept of post-religion, its relation with traditional and religious spiritual realms. Post-religion is positioned as the top of secularism enshrined in the departure from the straight and aggressive secularism of the Modernity, but without recourse to Tradition. Post-religion a simulation spirituality, skillfully imitating the outer areas of traditional spirituality and creates a planar religiosity, radically preventing attached to the vertical line of Traditions. In this regard, are the main artificially selected parameters of post-religion: deconstruction, splitting, virtualization, and collage. Deconstruction is a transformation of spirituality in semiotic set for egocentric selectivity of modern believer. Post-religion's splitting is deprivation of spirituality center, destruction of sacral Center and the transformation of spirituality in the plane on which the intellectual and sensual wandering post-believer from one semiotic island to another. Virtualization is a displacement field of spiritual tension in a completely virtual area, isolated from the natural conditions of existence and created as his replacement, network discussion sites and galleries. Collage is an arbitrary combination of different semiotic pieces of Tradition with the aim of creating a believable picture of tradition; it is collage leads to archaic forms of modern spirituality. Findings. Thus, based on the above study phenomenological illustrations, can declare one can argue that Post-modernity is much wider than the decadent direction of the culture is a radical shift of spirituality, the top of desacralization.

1. Religion and the legal regulation of homosexual sex -- 2. The boundaries of the family : religion and same-sex parenting -- 3. Religious exceptions from sexual orientation equality -- 4. The secular and the sacred : civil partnership and same-sex marriage -- 5. Homophobic hate speech and freedom of religious expression -- 6. Religion, homosexuality and state education.

The task confronting the person who seeks to survey the current state of the literature dealing with Islam as a religion is both enormous and complex. Since Muslims have traditionally considered themselves to be a religious commonwealth whose very identity is fixed by a shared religious commitment, it follows that virtually every writing on any subject whatsoever having to do with Muslims might be considered to fall within the field of religion. Even if one restricts his attention, as we propose to do here, to a more narrow view of religion, the task is still formidable. Muslims have been no less prolific than other major religious communities in producing dissident opinions from within their own fold. The history of Islamic sects, each with its own peculiar thought system and religious practice, is a field of study in itself and one that might well challenge the most energetic scholar. Far from being monolithic, as many of the scholarly cliches about Islam presuppose (e.g. Islam is a religion of Law, Islam is a religion of the Book, etc.), the religious experience of Muslims is diverse and multiform, defying the most sophisticated attempts to reduce it to order and system. No informed approach to the religiousness of Muslims can deal solely with a narrowly marked out "normative Islam". The deviations from the norm are also part of the reality of historic Islamic experience and cannot be set aside in favor of what one may prefer as religiously or conceptually pure. It quickly becomes clear to the perceptive inquirer that the meaning of Islam is an historical phenomenon cannot be stated in terms of a unified doctrinal system, a universally accepted set of rites, or common institutions.

Religious life in communist countries, concentrating on Confucianism in China and religious revival in the Soviet Union; 3 articles.