The authors select sermons by Martin Luther King Jr. and Jeremiah Wright to as a framework to examine the meaning of God in America as part of the formational religio-political narrative of the country.

The authors select sermons by Martin Luther King Jr. and Jeremiah Wright to as a framework to examine the meaning of God in America as part of the formational religio-political narrative of the country.

It is increasingly clear that histories of secularization are not simply dispassionate descriptions of the decline of religious belief and practice in the West. Rather, such narratives often seek to celebrate secularization, promote some version of it, lament it, or otherwise oppose it in favour of a programme of desecularization or resacralization. The aim of this book is to identify some of the major genres of the history of secularization and to explore their historical contexts, normative commitments, and tendential purposes. The contributors to the volume offer different perspectives on these questions, not least because a number of them are themselves participants in the cultural-political programs described above. The primary purpose of this book, however, is the identification of such programs rather than their promotion. Overall, the collection seeks to bring analytical clarity to ongoing debates about secularization and help explain the co-existence of apparently conflicting stories about the origins of Western modernity. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Intellectual History Review journal.

This handbook articulates how sociology can re-engage its roots as the scientific study of human moral systems, actions, and interpretation. This second volume builds on the successful original volume published in 2010, which contributed to the initiation of a new section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), thus growing the field. This volume takes sociology back to its roots over a century ago, when morality was a central topic of work and governance. It engages scholars from across subfields in sociology, representing each section of the ASA, who each contribute a chapter on how their subfield connects to research on morality. This reference work appeals to broader readership than was envisaged for the first volume, as the relationship between sociology as a discipline and its origins in questions of morality is further renewed. The volume editors focus on three areas: the current state of the sociology of morality across a range of sociological subfields; taking a new look at some of the issues discussed in the first handbook, which are now relevant in sometimes completely new contexts; and reflecting on where the sociology of morality should go next. This is a must-read reference for students and scholars interested in topics of morality, ethics, altruism, religion, and spirituality from across the social science.

Comics, manga and anime can offer an interesting perspective from which to explore representations of the law in popular culture. This book offers a better understanding of the juridical subtexts of such cultural artefacts by bringing together scholars in legal theory and comparative and international law. While the contributions in the first part of the volume unpack the relationships between normative systems (law and morality above all) in graphic narratives by Marvel (Daredevil) and DC heroes (Batman), the second part of the volume looks at the role played by law and lawyers in different legal systems through case studies such as She Hulk. Finally, the last part focusses on the role of international law in the comic (multi)universe and in Japanese animation movies such as Porco rosso). This collection extends research into comics beyond Anglo-American culture, which is still hegemonic in this literature, and makes it possible to read the legal phenomena dealt with in the pop culture products analysed through a lens other than that of Anglo-American law.

This book examines material and multi-sensorial expressions of Shiʿi Islam in diverse, and understudied demographic and geographic contexts.It engages with conceptual debates and makes several propositions that push the frontiers of scholarship on Islamic and Religious Studies, Material Religion, Heritage Studies, and Anthropology and Sociology of Religion.The contributions presented in this volume demonstrate how material things and less thing-like materialities make the praesentia and potentia of the Sacred tangible, how they cultivate intimate relations between human and more-than-human beings, and how they act as links and gateways to the Elsewhere and Otherworldly. The volume posits that materialities of religion are integral to processes of heritagization shaped by competing social and political actors involved in the construction and canonization of religious—in this case, Shiʿi—heritage.

Social Construction, Communication, and Christianity uses the theory of social construction and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to examine the current divide between religious and secular narratives in the United States. Sumser analyzes how Americans apply religious and secular reasoning to contemporary social problems, and explains the resurgence of religious worldviews and the simultaneous growth of an assertive form of atheism in America. This book is recommended for scholars of communication studies, religious studies, sociology, philosophy, and history.

Most scholars link the origin of politics to the formation of human societies, but in this innovative work, Tilo Schabert takes it even further back: to our very births. Drawing on mythical, philosophical, religious, and political thought from around the globe—including America, Europe, the Middle East, and China—The Second Birth proposes a transhistorical and transcultural theory of politics rooted in political cosmology. With impressive erudition, Schabert explores the physical fundamentals of political life, unveiling a profound new insight: our bodies actually teach us politics. Schabert traces different figurations of power inherent to our singular existence, things such as numbers, time, thought, and desire, showing how they render our lives political ones—and, thus, how politics exists in us individually, long before it plays a role in the establishment of societies and institutions. Through these figurations of power, Schabert argues, we learn how to institute our own government within the political forces that already surround us—to create our own world within the one into which we have been born. In a stunning vision of human agency, this book ultimately sketches a political cosmos in which we are all builders, in which we can be at once political and free.

PART 1: EXAMINING TEXTS 1. Social Drama in the Psalms of Individual Lament 2. Kingship in the Book of Psalms 3. Abusing the Bible: The Case of Deuteronomy 15 4. Do not Fear What They Fear: A Post-9/11 Reflection(Isaiah 8:11-15) 5. The Expropriated and the Expropriators in Nehemiah 5 6. How Do Extrabiblical Sociopolitical Data Illuminate Obscure Biblical Texts? The Case of Ecclesiastes 5:8-9 [Heb. 5:7-8] 7. On the Alleged Wisdom of Kings: An Application of Adorno's Immanent Criticism to Ecclesiastes PART 2: ENGAGING PRACTICES 8. Framing Biblical Interpretation at New York Theological Seminary: A Student Self Inventory on Biblical Hermeneutics 9. Theological Education as a Theory-Praxis Loop: Situating the Book of Joshua in a Cultural, Social Ethical, and Theological Matrix 10. The Bible as Nurturer of Passive and Active Worldviews 11. Biblical Scholarship in Public Discourse 12. On Framing Elections: The Stories We Tell Ourselves 13. Values and Economic Structures

The book provides an extensive analysis of extremism, extremist narratives and counter-narratives and their role in consolidating exclusive religious, cultural and social identities in Pakistan. Focusing on the construction and institutionalization of extremist tendencies, the book studies the process of the adoption of the narrow interpretation of religion and society, which subsequently was equated with national identity. It looks at the efforts of counter-extremism narratives, which tend to focus on violent extremism while overlooking non-violent manifestations. The author highlights that the main issue with counter-narratives is the difficulty in presenting extremism and its narratives as a threat since they have been normalized with the state being part of facilitating and building them. A valuable and much-required contribution to the existing literature on extremism and narrative building in Pakistan, this book would help students, academics and policymakers in identifying the limitations of counter-narratives in Pakistan, while providing them with a detailed overview of extremism and extremist narratives. It will also be of interest to researchers studying Security Studies and Asian Politics, especially in the context of South Asia.