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Religions
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Nationalisms and Religious Identities
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Nationalisms and Religious Identities

A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444). This special issue belongs to the section "Religions and Health/Psychology/Social Sciences".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 August 2023) | Viewed by 9332

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Slavica Jakelić

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
The Humanities Christ College, The Honors College of Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN 46383-6493, USA
Interests: religion and nationalism; religious and secular humanisms; theories of modernity; interreligious conflict and dialogue
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Since the 1990s, categories such as “religious nationalism” and “religious ethnonationalism” have been established as commonplace in the studies of religio-national connections as sources of exclusion and conflict. This Special Issue will focus on the relationship between nationalisms and religious identities to complicate the usual approaches to religious and national identification and their connections. We are interested in probing the religio-national phenomenology with regard to gender race, and class. We invite contributions that challenge the binary accounts of nationalisms and religious identities, including contributions that engage in the postcolonial and decolonial frames of analysis and critique. We seek scholars who examine transnational politics and universal aspects of religious identities as these challenge the nation-state configurations of national identities and boundaries of citizenship. We invite sociological and historical, as well as theoretical and normative scholarly engagements with the relationship between nationalisms and religious identities.

Dr. Slavica Jakelić
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • nationalisms and religious identities
  • gender, race, and class
  • citizenship
  • transnational politics
  • postcolonial and decolonial critiques

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Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

14 pages, 281 KiB  
Article
Nationalism in the Judicialization and Culturalization of Religion: The Case of Religious Education in Greece
by Effie Fokas
Religions 2024, 15(8), 952; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15080952 - 6 Aug 2024
Viewed by 1018
Abstract
Religious education (RE) is frequently a topic of intense political debate and a focal point of party politics in the Greek context. This article presents the latest chapter in political contestation over the teaching of religion in Greek public schools, one which entails [...] Read more.
Religious education (RE) is frequently a topic of intense political debate and a focal point of party politics in the Greek context. This article presents the latest chapter in political contestation over the teaching of religion in Greek public schools, one which entails a new dimension—that of intense judicialization. Since 2015, the issue of religious education in Greek public schools has been the subject of multiple court cases addressed by the Greek high court, the Council of State, with one case addressed by and one case pending before the European Court of Human Rights. Beyond teasing out links between Greek Orthodoxy and nationalism underpinning each of these cases, this article also seeks to locate this example of judicialization of politics and religion in a broader theoretical context. It engages with another phenomenon at play in the Greek case as in many other cases globally, the culturalization of religion. Through the example of the Greek legal battles over religious education, we see how the judicialization of a particular political question on religion (policy on RE) rests on a culturalization of religion, which, in the legal domain, entails a rebranding of ‘religion’ as ‘culture’ so as to protect ‘religion’ from limitations placed on it by expectations of liberal state neutrality. The inherent difficulties in defining religion and culture, both individually and in relation to one another, are fundamental to both the theoretical and the practical, socio-legal challenges arising from such developments. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Nationalisms and Religious Identities)
13 pages, 287 KiB  
Article
The Theology of the Ethnocultural Empathic Turn: Towards the Balkan Theology of Political Liberation
by Branko Sekulić
Religions 2024, 15(2), 191; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15020191 - 4 Feb 2024
Viewed by 1541
Abstract
The theology of the ethnocultural empathic turn, on the general level, encompasses ethnocultural empathy, which, as a branch of social psychology, strives for a thorough understanding of the life context of those ethnically and culturally different from ourselves. In the context of [...] Read more.
The theology of the ethnocultural empathic turn, on the general level, encompasses ethnocultural empathy, which, as a branch of social psychology, strives for a thorough understanding of the life context of those ethnically and culturally different from ourselves. In the context of Christian theology, this turn also embraces the turn reflected in Mt 15:21–28 (Mk 7:24–30), in which Jesus expands his missionary work from the locally based “House of Israel” into the global realm to include the entire “inhabited world”. In this essay, the theological discourse of ethnocultural empathic turn is embedded within a specific sociopolitical context, which brings us to the Balkans, i.e., the post-Yugoslav framework, where we discuss the legacy of Bishop Srećko Badurina and layperson Franjo Starčević. During the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation, they vigorously resisted the dominant ethnonationalist-religious persuasions of the Croatian Catholic and Serbian Orthodox communities. They stood up for those who faced elimination due to the policy of ethnic cleansing. Today, both can serve as the foundation for the establishment of the theology in question, aiming at the development of the first post-Yugoslav contextual theology based on the political theology and the theology of liberation, capable of tackling the phenomenon of ethnoreligiosity as one of the most pressing problems plaguing this region. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Nationalisms and Religious Identities)
13 pages, 272 KiB  
Article
“Good Militias” for Trump: Race, Religion, and Legitimacy in the Modern Militia Movement
by Damon T. Berry
Religions 2023, 14(12), 1465; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14121465 - 27 Nov 2023
Viewed by 2184
Abstract
Since the mid-1990s, the popular perception of the militia movement in the United States has associated it with racism and far-right expressions of Christianity. There are good reasons for this assessment, though the movement is more complex than such generalizations suggest. In this [...] Read more.
Since the mid-1990s, the popular perception of the militia movement in the United States has associated it with racism and far-right expressions of Christianity. There are good reasons for this assessment, though the movement is more complex than such generalizations suggest. In this article, I describe how Oath Keepers mobilized the image of a “good militia” seeking broader legitimacy and how their efforts have often been damaged by troubling and even criminal elements in their organization, which included militant efforts to keep Trump in power by attempting to subvert the 2020 election. I further argue that public revelations of the group’s racialized discourses and activities, allegations of domestic abuse against its founder, and the recent convictions related to 6 January, including seditious conspiracy, further challenge this effort at legitimization and have thrown the organization into disarray. Moreover, I argue though broader legitimacy may be now out of reach for this fragmented and isolated organization, they may yet find legitimacy among Christian nationalists who have come to conclude that political violence is potentially necessary to save America. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Nationalisms and Religious Identities)
15 pages, 335 KiB  
Article
Towards an ‘Interfaith Nationalism’? Christians and Their Relations to Muslims in the History Textbooks of the Syrian Arab Republic
by Panos Kourgiotis
Religions 2023, 14(11), 1356; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14111356 - 26 Oct 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3492
Abstract
This study examines how Christian–Muslim relations are presented in Syrian history textbooks and deployed by the embattled regime of Bashar al-Asad in its quest for legitimacy both at home and abroad since the eruption of the war that displaced half the country’s population. [...] Read more.
This study examines how Christian–Muslim relations are presented in Syrian history textbooks and deployed by the embattled regime of Bashar al-Asad in its quest for legitimacy both at home and abroad since the eruption of the war that displaced half the country’s population. To that end, Critical Discourse Analysis is applied to selected texts from the school curricula stressing the harmonious coexistence between the country’s only two officially recognized faiths (Islam and Christianity), in addition to the Syrian Christians’ commitment to national unity from time immemorial, as nationalist discourses retrospectively assert. The historical narratives in question are juxtaposed with the ideological inconsistencies of the Arab nationalist Ba’th party that has ruled Syria since 1963 vis-à-vis religious sects and minorities, while being discussed against the backdrop of the recent geopolitical developments. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Nationalisms and Religious Identities)
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