This book argues that relationships between religion and development in faith-based development work are constructed through repeated processes of negotiation. Rather than being a neat and tidy relationship, faith-based development work is complex and multifaceted: an ongoing series of negotiations between theological interpretations and theories of human development; between identities as professional practitioners and as believers; between different religious traditions at local, regional and international levels; and between institutional structures and individual agency. In particular, the book draws on a deep ethnographic study of Christian faith-based development work in the Bolivian Andes. The case study highlights the importance of seeing theological interpretations as being firmly embedded in local religious and cultural systems involved in a constant process of identity construction. Overall, the book argues that religion should not be seen as homogeneous, or either 'good' or 'bad' for development; instead, we must recognise that institutional faith-based identities are constructed in many ways, formal, theological and interpersonal, and any tensions between ‘religious’ and ‘development’ goals must be worked through in an ongoing recognition of that complexity. This book will be of interest to researchers working in development studies and religious studies, as well as to practitioners and policymakers with an interest in faith-based development work.

This book explores how and if the mandate for children to worship in schools can be justified within the context of declining church attendance and increasing nonreligious identification in British society. Shillitoe asks what place compulsory worship has in an increasingly diverse and plural society, and what the answer means for the relationship between religion, the secular, and education more broadly. Through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork from across three schools in southwest England, the book reveals how examining the significance of children’s experiences expands our understanding of both collective worship in schooling and religion in social life more broadly and demonstrates that adult-centric anxieties and assumptions in this area do not always reflect the experiences of children.

What kinds of process of negotiation are involved in teaching and studying Islam in a modern liberal context? How can the common aims attached to liberal religious education in contemporary European multicultural societies be pursued in single-faith education? This book contributes to the search for legitimate and successful forms of religious education by presenting results from a case study examining Islamic education in Finnish schools. Finnish Islamic education, in which students study their own religion with aims drawn from the liberal educational paradigm, offers a space for negotiating liberal educational values in an Islamic framework and negotiating Islam in its many contexts. The findings demonstrate the possibilities as well as challenges in educating for autonomy, tolerance and citizenship through religion. The book also gives insights into students' negotiations on diversity and tolerance that are important for all involved in any form of multicultural education. These negotiations bring out distinct challenges in dealing with interreligious, intrareligious and cultural differences, and demonstrate how different understandings of tolerance in different ideological frameworks can cause confusion among students. The results lead to a discussion of the educational needs of Muslim students in contemporary Western societies and the competencies their teachers need.

Negotiating religious diversity, as well as negotiating different forms and degrees of commitment to religious belief and identity, constitutes a major challenge for all societies. Recent developments such as the ‘de-secularisation’ of the world, the transformation and globalisation of religion and the attacks of September 11 have made religious claims and religious actors much more visible in the public sphere. This volume provides multiple perspectives on the processes through which religious communities create or defend their place in a given society, both in history and in our world today. Offering a critical, cross-disciplinary investigation into processes of negotiating religion and religious diversity, the contributors present new insights on the meaning and substance of negotiation itself. This volume draws on diverse historical, sociological, geographic, legal and political theoretical approaches to take a close look at the religious and political agents involved in such processes as well as the political, social and cultural context in which they take place. Its focus on the European experiences that have shaped not only the history of ‘negotiating religion’ in this region but also around the world, provides new perspectives for critical inquiries into the way in which contemporary societies engage with religion. This study will be of interest to academics, lawyers and scholars in law and religion, sociology, politics and religious history.

This book examines the religious lives of young adults growing up in inter-religious families in India. It explores complex questions of identity, social background, and religion in twenty-first-century India. The volume studies the religious commitments of young adults, analyses the identity formation process for a critical age group, and discusses the interpersonal dynamics within inter-religious families. Drawing on real life stories of mixed heritage – Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Jain, Buddhist, and Parsi – this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of psychology, education, sociology and social anthropology, religious studies, politics, and other interdisciplinary studies.

Negotiating Development in Muslim Societies explores the negotiation processes of global development concepts such as poverty alleviation, human rights, and gender equality. It focuses on three countries which that are undergoing different Islamisation processes: Senegal, Sudan, and Malaysia. While much has been written about the hegemonic production and discursive struggle of development concepts globally, this book analyzes the negotiation of these development concepts locally and translocally. Lachenmann and Dannecker present empirically grounded research to show that, although women are instrumentalized in different ways for the formation of an Islamic identity of a nation or group, they are at the same time important actors and agents in the processes of negotiating the meaning of development, restructuring of the public sphere, and transforming the societal gender order.

Diversity is a buzzword of our times and yet the extent of religious diversity in Western societies is generally misconceived. This ground-breaking research draws attention to the journey of one migrant religious institution in an era of religious superdiversity. Based on a sociolinguistic ethnography in a Tamil Saivite temple in Australia, the book explores the challenges for the institution in maintaining its linguistic and cultural identity in a new context. The temple is faced with catering for devotees of diverse ethnicities, languages, and religious interpretations; not to mention divergent views between different generations of migrants who share ethnicity and language. At the same time, core members of the temple seek to continue religious and cultural practices according to the traditions of their homelands in Sri Lanka, a country where their identity and language has been under threat. The study offers a rich picture of changing language practices in a diasporic religious institution. Perera inspects language ideology considerations in the design of institutional language policy and how such policy manifests in language use in the temple spaces. This includes the temple’s Sunday school where heritage language and religion interplay in second-generation migrant adolescents’ identifications and discourse.

Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories examines the ways in which religion and community development are closely intertwined in a rural part of contemporary Latin America. Using historical, documentary, and ethnographic data collected over more than a decade as an aid worker and as a researcher in central Ecuador, Jill DeTemple examines the forces that have led to this entanglement of religion and development and the ways in which rural Ecuadorians, as well as development and religious personnel, negotiate these complicated relationships. Technical innovations have been connected to religious change since the time of the Inca conquest, and Ecuadorians have created defensive strategies for managing such connections. Although most analyses of development either tend to ignore the genuinely religious roots of development or conflate development with religion itself, these strategies are part of a larger negotiation of progress and its meaning in twenty-first-century Ecuador. DeTemple focuses on three development agencies—a liberationist Catholic women's group, a municipal unit dedicated to agriculture, and evangelical Protestant missionaries engaged in education and medical work—to demonstrate that in some instances Ecuadorians encourage a hybridity of religion and development, while in other cases they break up such hybridities into their component parts, often to the consternation of those with whom religious and development discourse originate. This management of hybrids reveals Ecuadorians as agents who produce and reform modernities in ways often unrecognized by development scholars, aid workers, or missionaries, and also reveals that an appreciation of religious belief is essential to a full understanding of diverse aspects of daily life.

"What is development? Who defines that one community/ country is "developed", while another community/ country is "under-developed"? What is the relationship between religion and development? Does religion contribute to development or underdevelopment in Africa? These and related questions elicit quite charged reactions in African studies, development studies, political science and related fields. Africa's own history, including the memory of marginalisation, slavery and exploitation by global powers ensures that virtually every discussion on development is characterised by a lot of emotions and conflicting views. In this volume scholars from various African countries and many different religions and denominations contribute to this debate."--

This collection adds to a burgeoning literature concerned with the roles played by religions in development. The authors do not assume that religion and religious organisations can be ‘used’ to achieve development objectives, or that religiously inspired development work is more holistic, transformative and authentic. Instead, they subject such assumptions to critical and (as far as possible) objective scrutiny, focusing on how adherents of several religious traditions and a variety of organisations affiliated with different religions perceive the idea of development and attempt to contribute to its objectives. Geographically, chapters in the volume encompass Africa, South Asia and the Asia-Pacific. Four of the papers have an international focus: providing a preliminary framework for analysing the role of religion in development, considering the roles played by faith-inspired organisations in two regions (the Asia Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa) and analysing transnational Muslim NGOs. The individual case studies focus on nine countries (India, Kenya, Pakistan, Nigeria, Tanzania, Sudan, Malawi, Sri Lanka, South Africa), consider four religions (Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism), and can be grouped under four themes: they consider religion, wellbeing and inequality; the roles of religious NGOs in development; whether and how religious organisations influence, respond to or resist social change; and whether religious service providers reach the poor. Finally, practice notes show how three religious development organisations try to put their principles into practice. This book was published as a special double issue of Development in Practice.