This book explores the diversity and dynamism of Islam in Southeast Asia through the concept of adab, or beautiful behavior. Amid the complexity of Islamic civilization, adab provides Muslims with a shared sense of sacred history, identity, and morality. In the context of Islamic ethics, adab defines the rules of personal and public etiquette: good manners, proper conduct, civility and humaneness. Featuring the interdisciplinary research of nine prominent scholars of Islam, the book offers new perspectives on adab's multiple meanings and myriad applications for Muslim communities in Malaysia and Indonesia. The chapters examine a wide range of texts, spotlighting the writings of prominent Muslim thinkers, and contexts, focusing on the everyday experiences of lay Muslims. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and methodological lenses, the essays reveal how beautiful behavior impacts local institutions, cultural practices, and religious imaginations via politics and law, spirituality and piety, ethics and experience. With its careful textual analysis, detailed case studies, and attention to historical continuities and disjunctures, Piety, Politics and Everyday Ethics in Southeast Asian Islam is essential reading for students and scholars interested in global Islam and the lived, local dynamics of Muslim Southeast Asia.

Piety, Politics, and Pluralism skillfully confronts the question: Is liberal democracy hostile to religion or is it compatible with the rights of believers? Prominent scholars analyze the controversy about religious freedom by examining two areas at the intersection of religion and politics in contemporary American society: the Supreme Court's 1990 decision in Oregon v. Smith and the events of the 2000 presidential campaign. Their essays remind us that in an increasingly pluralistic society, Americans must work continually to reconcile religious commitment and political obligation. Piety, Politics, and Pluralism is a groundbreaking work that will be indispensable to students of religion and politics, American politics, and constitutional law.

Detailed investigation of the religious gild, showing its importance to all aspects of medieval life.

In Politics and Piety: The Protestant 'Awakening' in Prussia, 1816-1856, David L. Ellis analyzes the connections between political conservatism and Prussia’s neo-Pietist religious revival, especially in Brandenburg and Pomerania, in the years surrounding the revolution of 1848. Awakened conservatives waged a cultural struggle against political and religious liberalism, impacting the state church, the outcome of the revolution, and Prussia’s controversial neutrality in the Crimean War. Awakened leaders, in their effort to recover and adapt a pre-Napoleonic order, ironically modernized conservatism with individualistic rhetoric, widely circulated newspapers, and political organization.

Historians have painted a picture of nineteenth-century Baptists huddled in clapboard meetinghouses preaching sermons and singing hymns, seemingly unaware of the wider world. According to this view, Baptists were "so heavenly-minded, they were of no earthly good." Overlooked are the illustrative stories of Baptists fighting poverty, promoting abolition, petitioning Congress, and debating tax policy. Politics and Piety is a careful look at antebellum Baptist life. It is seen in figures such as John Broadus, whose first sermon promoted temperance, David Barrow, who formed an anti-slavery association in Kentucky, and in a Savannah church that started a ministry to the homeless. Not only did Baptists promote piety for the good of their churches, but they did so for the betterment of society at large. Though they aimed to change America one soul at a time, that is only part of the story. They also engaged the political arena, forcefully and directly. Simply put, Baptists were social reformers. Relying on the ideas of rank-and-file Baptists found in the minutes of local churches and associations, as well as the popular, parochial newspapers of the day, Politics and Piety uncovers a theologically minded and controversial movement to improve the nation. Understanding where these Baptists united and divided is a key to unlocking the differences in evangelical political engagement today.

"Investigates how different approaches to religious interpretation influence Indonesian women's engagement with global Islam and feminism. It also explores the consequences of a more public Islam for women's participation in the public sphere. The book is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork between 2002 and 2010 with four different groups of women activists in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. The groups include a secular feminist NGO (Solidaritas Perempuan), a Muslim women's rights NGO (Rahima), the women's group of one of the country's largest Muslim organizations (Fatayat N.U.), and women in a conservative Muslim political party (the Prosperous Justice Party). The women in these have all been deeply influenced by the ongoing Islamic revival. In addition, they are part of the urban middle class. The women of Rahima and Fatayat N.U. are influenced by global feminism and Islamic discourses. They use Islam to express feminist and liberal ideals of equality and rights, and they strive to integrate these frameworks in their own lives. In contrast, women in the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) reject feminism as Western and secular and are more influenced by global Islamic discourses. Although some scholars argue that pious Islam and liberal ideals are incompatible, these activists embrace modernity and sometimes speak in terms of individual agency, empowerment, and rights. The women of Solidaritas Perempuan maintain a balance between their secular activism and personal religiosity. The overall conclusion of Mobilizing Piety is that the Islamic revival has not stymied but has in fact helped to empower many Indonesian women, especially by allowing them to participate in national debates about moral and religious issues"--

From the urbanization of the Gilded Age to the upheavals of the Haight-Ashbury era, this encyclopedic work by Glenn Miller takes readers on a sweeping journey through the landscape of American theological education, highlighting such landmarks as Princeton, Andover, and Chicago, and such fault lines as denominationalism, science, and dispensationalism. The first such exhaustive treatment of this time period in religious education, Piety and Profession is a valuable tool for unearthing the key trends from the Civil War well into the twentieth century. All those involved in theological education will be well served by this study of how the changing world changed educational patterns.

For English Catholics, the years from 1850 to 1900 were stirring times. Emerging from a long period of social obscurity, they became confident that a 'Second Spring' would bring them to a position of moral authority and influence in Victorian England. Their leaders - Manning and Newman - were figures of the first rank. Their numbers - boosted by Irish immigration - seemed to herald genuine political strength. In this lively and well-written study, Dr Quinn examines that confidence and finds it misplaced. He shows how Catholics frequently misread the political signs. Attaching themselves sometimes to the Liberals, sometimes to the Toris, they tended to forget that both parties, in their different ways, found it easier to cultivate anti-Catholicism. At certain times - when the Catholic hierarchy was restored, when the Syllabus of Errors was promulgated, when Gladstone denounced 'Vaticanism' - this anti-Catholicism was virulent. In calmer days, Catholics were usually regarded with sullen suspicion. Seeking to examine Catholic political strength, Dr Quinn investigates the careers of leading Catholics such as the Marquis of Ripon and the Duke of Norfolk. He also traces the attitudes of the party leaders, Gladstone and Disraeli especially, to their Catholic followers. He shows how for some lesser Catholics, denomination was regarded as a reason for personal preferment. Finally, he demonstrates how, at constituency level, Catholicism was never the electoral force that many claimed it to be.

This book examines socio-economic relationships and cultural changes in contemporary rural China, focusing on the experience of a typical Chinese village the working-age population of which has been hollowed out by outbound labor migration. The volume sheds light on the inherent complexity of peasants’ material, economic, and emotional dependency on the countryside, and how these relationships shape their experience of migration and the personal transformation that comes with it. Simplistic binaries such as “traditional” and “modern” are left to one side in favour of a multifaceted approach to understanding the interactions among people, institutions, and the natural environment. The book will appeal to academics of sociology and anthropology and general readers interested in China’s rural society.