This volume explores dynamic conversations through history between individuals and communities over questions about religion and state. Divided into two sections, our authors begin with considerations on the separation of religion and state, as well as Roger Williams’ concept of religious freedom. Authors in the first half consider nuanced debates centered on emerging narratives, with particular emphasis on Native America, Early Americans, and experiences in American immigration after Independence. The first half of the volume examines voices in American History as they publicly engage with notions of secular ideology. Discussions then shift as the volume broadens to world perspectives on religion-state relations. Authors consider critical questions of nation, religious identity and transnational narratives. The intent of this volume is to privilege new narratives about religion-state relations. Decentering discussions away from national narratives allows for emerging voices at the individual and community levels. This volume offers readers new openings through which to understand critical but overlooked interactions between individuals and groups of people with the state over questions about religion.

The thirteen essays in this volume offer a challenge to conventional scholarly approaches to the sociology of religion. They urge readers to look beyond congregational settings, beyond the United States, and to religions other than Christianity, and encourage critical engagement with religion's complex social consequences. By expanding conceptual categories, the essays reveal how aspects of the religious have always been part of allegedly non-religious spaces and show how, by attending to these intellectual blindspots, we can understand aspects of identity, modernity, and institutional life that have long been obscured. Religion on the Edge addresses a number of critical questions: What is revealed about the self, pluralism, or modernity when we look outside the U.S. or outside Christian settings? What do we learn about how and where the religious is actually at work and what its role is when we unpack the assumptions about it embedded in the categories we use? Religion on the Edge offers groundbreaking new methodologies and models, bringing to light conceptual lacunae, re-centering what is unsettled by their use, and inviting a significant reordering of long-accepted political and economic hierarchies. The book shows how social scientists across the disciplines can engage with the sociology of religion. By challenging many of its long-standing empirical and analytic tendencies, the contributors to this volume show how their work informs and is informed by debates in other fields and the analytical purchase gained by bringing these many conversations together. Religion on the Edge will be a crucial resource for any scholar seeking to understand our post-modern, post-secular world.

The activities of ISIS since 2014 have brought back to centre stage a series of very old and very troubling questions about the integrity and viability of the Iraqi state. However, most analysts have framed recent events in terms of their immediate past and without the contextual background to explain their evolution. State and Society in Iraq moves beyond a short-sighted analysis to place the complex and contested nature of Iraqi politics within a broader and deeper historical examination. In doing so, the chapters demonstrate that beyond the overwhelming emphasis on failed occupations, cruel tyrants, ethnic separatists and violent religious fanatics, is an Iraqi people who have routinely agitated against the state, advocated for legitimate and accountable government, and called for inter-communal harmony.When, the authors maintain, the Iraqi people are given agency in the complex process of consent, negotiation and resistance that underpin successful state-society relations, the nation can move beyond patterns of oppression and cruelty, of dangerous rhetoric and divisive politics, and towards a cohesive, peaceful and prosperous future - despite the many difficulties and the steep challenges that lie ahead.

By examining the intersection of Islamic law, state law, religion, and culture in the Egyptian nation-building process, Recasting Islamic Law highlights how the sharia, when attached to constitutional commitments, is reshaped into modern Islamic state law. Rachel M. Scott analyzes the complex effects of constitutional commitments to the sharia in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. She argues that the sharia is not dismantled by the modern state when it is applied as modern Islamic state law, but rather recast in its service. In showing the particular forms that the sharia takes when it is applied as modern Islamic state law, Scott pushes back against assumptions that introductions of the sharia into modern state law result in either the revival of medieval Islam or in its complete transformation. Scott engages with premodern law and with the Ottoman legal legacy on topics concerning Egypt's Coptic community, women's rights, personal status law, and the relationship between religious scholars and the Supreme Constitutional Court. Recasting Islamic Law considers modern Islamic state law's discontinuities and its continuities with premodern sharia. Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

This book puts radical theology and political theology into an interdisciplinary conversation with sustained and serious readings of resistance. Using an anthropology of ritual as a common thread, Jordan E. Miller explores the reality of the relationship between political theology, radical theology, and political theory, action, and power without cynicism in a creative, forward-moving way. The first half of the book develops a radical political theology and the second half applies that theory to a series of social movements, including The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Occupy Wall Street, and #BlackLivesMatter, and includes reflections on the events at Standing Rock, ND.

Conflict and instability are built into the very fabric of the Middle East and North African (MENA) state and states system; yet both states and states system have displayed remarkable resilience. How can we explain this? This handbook explores the main debates, theoretical approaches and accumulated empirical research by prominent scholars in the field, providing an essential context for scholars pursuing research on the MENA state and states system. Contributions are grouped into four key themes: • Historical contexts, state-building and politics in MENA • State actors, societal context and popular activism • Trans-state politics: the political economy and identity contexts • The international politics of MENA The 26 chapters examine the evolution of the state and states system, before and after independence, and take the 2011 Arab uprisings as a pivotal moment that intensified trends already embedded in the system, exposing the deep features of state and system—specifically their built-in vulnerability and their ability to survive. This handbook provides comprehensive coverage of the history and role of the state in the MENA region. It offers a key resource for all researchers and students interested in international relations and the Middle East and North Africa.

There has been enormous growth in faculty-led short-term study abroad programs because they offer flexibility and expand opportunities for students and faculty members who wish to study and work abroad but do not have the resources or time to spend a semester or year away. These experiential programs offer unique opportunities for university faculty to teach their disciplines abroad while engaging students in direct, authentic cultural encounters for transformative change.This volume provides a detailed framework and guidance on how to plan and implement a faculty-led study abroad program. Seasoned faculty leaders and administrators describe an overall program development process, comprehensively identify the elements for designing the curriculum, and offer advice and solutions to unique challenges inherent in various types of programs. The contributors cover the logistics for managing program details at home and abroad provide advice on writing a university proposal, creating a budget, the marketing and recruitment of students, handling abroad logistics, and preparing students for the abroad experience – all illustrated by examples drawn from their experiences. Most importantly, readers will come to understand the difference between experiences that are more touristic than scholarly and gain guidance on designing or redesigning their own programs to ensure academically sound, culturally-relevant curricula that complements the international field site.The opening section sets the scene by describing the overall process of designing and delivering faculty-led abroad programs, from conception to implementation. The core of the book is grounded in evidence-based research for designing international curricula and syllabi, and includes five case studies illustrating short term programs focused on interdisciplinary subject matter, field study, global service learning, internship immersion, and language and cultural study. This practical guide concludes with faculty activities critical to a program’s success: marketing and recruiting students; preparing teaching events for before, during, and after the abroad experience; and formulating a plan to leave a small footprint abroad. This book constitutes a handbook for college and university professors who plan to or already conduct short-term study abroad programs as well as administrators and staff of global and international programs.ContributorsBilge Gokhan CelikRobert A. Cole Darla K. DeardorffCandelas Gala Javier Garcia GarridoDale LeavittRoxanne O’ConnellSusan Lee PasquarelliMichele V. PriceAutumn Quezada de Tavarez Victor Savicki Michael ScullyMichael TysonKerri Staroscik WarrenPaul Webb Brian WysorMin Zhou

A new ethics for understanding the social forces that shape moral character. It is easy to be vicious and difficult to be virtuous in today’s world, especially given that many of the social structures that connect and sustain us enable exploitation and disincentivize justice. There are others, though, that encourage virtue. In his book Daniel J. Daly uses the lens of virtue and vice to reimagine from the ground up a Catholic ethics that can better scrutinize the social forces that both affect our moral character and contribute to human well-being or human suffering. Daly’s approach uses both traditional and contemporary sources, drawing on the works of Thomas Aquinas as well as incorporating theories such as critical realist social theory, to illustrate the nature and function of social structures and the factors that transform them. Daly’s ethics focus on the relationship between structure and agency and the different structures that enable and constrain an individual’s pursuit of the virtuous life. His approach defines with unique clarity the virtuous structures that facilitate a love of God, self, neighbor, and creation, and the vicious structures that cultivate hatred, intemperance, and indifference to suffering. In doing so, Daly creates a Catholic ethical framework for responding virtuously to the problems caused by global social systems, from poverty to climate change.

Japan had developed a secular civilization long before going through its modern period, characterized by the officially-sanctioned unification of nationalism and state-worship that reached its apotheosis during World War II, followed by the economic growth-oriented post-war period. While the relationship between religion and state has varied significantly over time, what has been consistently observed throughout Japan’s history is the absence of religions that are socially influential but independent from the state, or the absence of a dualistic relationship between religion and state. The kind of political ethos that should underpin democratic principles such as the rule of law and human rights has remained underdeveloped. This book examines the concept of “reconstructive postmodernism,” a perspective that has emerged from a normative approach to international relations that emphasizes the need to democratize and humanize the secularistic civilizations based on the reconstruction of spirituality and religiosity. Using this concept, this book offers a number of implications of its findings to the case of Japan and for global governance in the post-secular age more broadly.

An account of the neuroscience of religious experiences for those interested in scientific approaches to religion.