In this book, Julia Berger examines internal meaning-making structures and processes driving NGO behavior, identifying constructs from within a religious tradition that forge new ways of pursuing social change. She evaluates the operation of a distinct rationality, arguing that action is guided not simply by beliefs and values, but also by a combination of elements so intrinsic as to constitute an “organizational DNA.” These hidden structures and rationalities manifest themselves in new modes of engagement and agency; they help us to see the pivotal role of religion in shaping notions of peace, progress, and modernity. To demonstrate the operation and salience of such a rationality, Berger draws on the example of the worldwide Baha'i community. Emerging in 19th century Iran, the community's theological engagement with questions of justice, the unity of humankind, and the emerging global order, constitute one of the most distinct and compelling, yet least-researched examples of religious engagement with the pressing questions of our time. Analyzing events spanning a 75-year period from 1945-2020, this book provides a unique historical and contemporary perspective on the evolving role of religion and civil society in the modern world.

The Sathya Sai global civil religious movement incorporates Hindu and Muslim practices, Buddhist, Christian, and Zoroastrian influences, and "New Age"-style rituals and beliefs. Shri Sathya Sai Baba, its charismatic and controversial leader, attracts several million adherents from various national, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. In a dynamic account of the Sathya Sai movement's explosive growth, Winged Faith argues for a rethinking of globalization and the politics of identity in a religiously plural world. This study considers a new kind of cosmopolitanism located in an alternate understanding of difference and contestation. It considers how acts of "sacred spectating" and illusion, "moral stakeholding" and the problems of community are debated and experienced. A thrilling study of a transcultural and transurban phenomenon that questions narratives of self and being, circuits of sacred mobility, and the politics of affect, Winged Faith suggests new methods for discussing religion in a globalizing world and introduces readers to an easily critiqued yet not fully understood community.

Introduction -- 1. Discerning organizational rationale -- 2. Forging a global polity: the Bahá'âi International Community on the world stage -- 3. Rationale and engagement: the United Nations through a new lens (1945-1970) -- 4. A question of authority: articulating and actuating the rationale (1970-1986) -- 5. Beyond peace: the greater trajectory of social development (1986-2008) -- 6. Rationale and coherence: seeking alignment between means and ends (2008-2015) -- 7. A counter-rationality: expanded notions of religious polity in the modern world.

Deploying a distinctive disaggregative approach to the study of 'religion', this volume shows that spiritual movements with extensive counterfactual beliefs have been much more creative than one might expect. Specifically, Wayne Hudson explores the creativity of six spiritual movements: the Bahá'ís, a Persian movement; Soka Gakkai, a Japanese movement; Ananda Marga and the Brahma Kumaris, two reformed Hindu movements; and two controversial American churches, The Church Universal and Triumphant and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most of these movements have counterintuitive features that have led Western scholars making Enlightenment assumptions to dismiss them as irrational and/or inconsequential. However, this book reveals that these movements have responded to modernity in ways that are creative and practical, resulting in a wide range of social, educational and cultural initiatives. Building on research surrounding the ways in which spiritual movements engage in cultural productions, this book takes the international research in a new direction by exploring the utopian intentionality such cultural productions reveal.

This book focuses, for the first time ever, on the protection roles of human rights NGOs since the establishment of the United Nations and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It also looks at how NGOs are responding to future challenges such as artificial Intelligence, robots in armed conflicts, digital threats, and the protection of human rights in outer space. Written by leading NGO human rights practitioners from different parts of the world, it sheds light on the multiple roles of the leading pillar of the global human rights movement, the Non-Governmental Organizations.

This book provides a constructive criticism of the emerging practice of conscious capitalism from the perspective of world religions and spiritualities. Conscious capitalism, to many of its adherents, represents an evolutionary step forward beyond the dominant neo-liberal paradigm, where it often appears that just about everything is for sale. Is conscious capitalism consistent with the values inherent in religious and spiritual world-views and does it provide a better fit for bringing out the best that business has to offer? This book answers these questions and many more. An appealing read for researchers in business ethics as well as any reader critical of the excrescences of capitalism.

The authors argue that resorting to rules and categories cannot adequately address the pervasive problems of ambiguity, difference, and boundaries - that is to say, the challenge of pluralism in our world. They show that alternative, more particularistic modes of dealing with ambiguity through ritual and shared experience may attune more closely with contemporary problems of living with difference.

This text offers a critical view of approaches to the treatment of different religions in contemporary education, in order to devise approaches to teaching and learning and to formulate policies and procedures that are fair and just to all.

This book examines Islam’s relationship to democratization in the Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives. It explores how and why an electoral democracy based in a constitution that has many liberal features but also Islam-based limitations, especially lack of religious freedom, emerged in the country by 2009. In doing so, the book interrogates a major approach to Muslim politics that assumes reformist interpretations of Islam are a positive, and even a necessary, force for liberalization and democratization in Muslim-majority contexts. This book shows reformist Islam did play certain positive roles in democratization in the Maldives. However, the book suggests reformist Islam may not be an invariably uncontroversial force in the space of politics. It argues that modern nation building in the Maldives shaped by political actors with reformist Islamic orientations, since around the 1930s, has also completely transformed Islam as a modern institutional and discursive political religion. These transformations of Islam as a modern political religion have existed as path-dependent constraints on the depth of democratization, ensuring religion-based limitations and intensifying controversy over religion vis-à-vis the state and individual rights. An original empirical contribution towards a better understanding of Islam and politics in the Maldives, this book will be of interest to academics and students working on democracy, and Islam in particular, and in the fields of political science and area studies, especially South Asian politics.

This introductory volume in the Building a Moral Economy series invites readers into a new vision for the future of economic life together. Ethicist Cynthia Moe-Lobeda crafts a compelling case for a new moral economy: its vital importance, the pivotal role religious networks can play, and the varied forms of action needed. Building a Moral Economy: Pathways for People of Courage is grounded in the stories of real people, with real struggles, triumphs, and creative energy. Moe-Lobeda invites readers to imagine an equitable, ecological, and democratic economy for themselves and their descendants and provides wise guidance for living into that vision. Readers will re-see economies as webs of relationship and will root economic life in the great love story--the story of God's astounding love for all creation, and God's call to align our lives with that love. Readers will encounter the work of economic transformation as a sacred journey--a journey of healing diseased relationships with Earth, with self, with neighbors far and near, and with the Sacred Source whom many call God. Moe-Lobeda conveys this as a journey of freedom to live as beings in community--human community, planetary community, and community with God. Moe-Lobeda's accessible prose explicitly faces the paradox of enormous moral challenges such as climate change held together with infinite hope. Welcoming readers into the vibrant global movement to build life-giving forms of economic life, she seeks to develop a sense of empowered agency. Are we the disinterested individuals motivated by material self-interest that neoclassical economics declared us to be, or are humans called to "think with" others, past, present, and future, seeking communion with all creation? Moe-Lobeda argues that our lives and Earth's well-being depend on choosing the latter path. The work is urgent; the time to embark on these pathways of restorative justice is now.