By emphasizing that individual religious freedom depends for its realization on complex social embeddings, the concept of institutional religious freedom provides an important corrective to conventional, individualistic approaches to religious freedo...
The idea of institutional religious freedom has become increasingly controversial, especially in the United States, and pressure for such freedom has been growing. The notion that institutions, including commercial ones, can have religious freedom ri...
Should the freedom of churches and other religious institutions come down to little more than a grudging recognition that “what happens in the church, stays in the church”? In this article, I provide a more robust definition of what I call institutio...
Understanding the restrictions placed on religious institutions and associations, or the freedoms that they are denied, is essential for understanding the limits placed on individual religious freedoms and human rights more generally. This study uses...
There is no doubt that India is far from perfect when it comes to religious freedom. Indeed, India’s religious freedom problems have become an increasing focus of scholarly and policy attention. However, almost all of this attention is directed at on...
The study of religious freedom has not received sufficient empirical attention from sociologists of religion, despite significant theoretical discussion of the governance of religious freedom. This article suggests empirical findings about the views...
This article examines whether support for religious freedom among university students in Croatia and Italy forms distinct profiles and which factors are associated with profile membership. Drawing on questionnaire data from university students in Cro...
In this paper, I explore how India’s complex regime of control and management of religious institutions and communities—ironically, particularly Hindu institutions—influences the capacity of these institutions to promote various dimensions of human f...
The purpose of this research is to examine how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members have responded to anti-Jewish theological tropes, especially in the post-Holocaust era. The thesis of this research is that, while the Chur...
Western religious liberty advocates tend to focus on restrictions placed on minority religious communities, particularly when advocating abroad, that is, outside of the country in which they reside. In all contemporary democracies, however, adherents...
This article examines how religious freedom is enacted and redefined through everyday practices in pluralistic urban settings. Moving beyond the classical notion of negative liberty as non-interference, it explores the social conditions that enable o...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments established important restrictions on religious freedom. Due to a restrictive interpretation of the right to religious freedom, religion was placed in the category of “non-essential activity” and was, th...
The findings and recommendations emanating from the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2012–2017) have advised religious organisations that they need to undertake significant changes to legal, govern...
When coronavirus began to descend upon the United States, religious freedom advocates across the country sounded the alarm that citizens’ religious practices and institutions were under threat. Although some of the most extreme arguments championed b...
“Religious freedom” has many different meanings, and its social perceptions vary depending on different factors, including different understandings of the role of religion in society. In this paper, we contribute to the analysis of the in...
Interest in political secularism is growing, due to its proven relevant role in affecting people’s political behaviours and attitudes toward human rights. However, until now, only a few studies have analysed its influence on religious freedom a...
The protection of personal data and religious freedom represent two fundamental rights that can be potentially in conflict in the European Union legal framework. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze Articles 91 and 17 of the General Dat...
This paper explores the relationship between human rights and social analysis within the main historical and theoretical perspectives adopted by social sciences. In particular, religious freedom will be analysed as one of the central issues in the re...
This paper examines whether international human rights organizations (HROs) influence the protection of religious freedom, and whether the effect is different on the protection of religious rights for institutions versus individuals. This study not o...
The government’s measures against COVID-19 have raised, in virtually all contemporary democracies, important issues regarding the proportionality of limitations on fundamental rights, including freedom of religion or belief. This paper analyses some...
Religious freedom, the management of religious diversity, and interreligious dialogue are emerging and closely interconnected phenomena. In the context of increasing religious pluralism, policymakers, religious institutions, and other civil society a...
Indigenous Peoples in Latin America face a dual challenge of social vulnerability and violations of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB). Representing 8% of the region’s population yet disproportionately affected by poverty, displacement, and h...
The paper explores religious diversity and pluralism in the religioscape of mainland China with three examples. While religious diversity is de facto practice, “religious pluralism” is not socially recognised, culturally legitimised, or discursively...
This article examines the intersection of religious freedom and minority protection within the Asian context. It argues that, to the extent that a focus on minority protection draws greater attention to the collective and communitarian dimensions of...
How are the institutional features of religious organizations formed? In seeking to explain religious change and development, an increasing number of sociologists of religion emphasize the importance of organizational features. However, few scholars...
One of the most devastating practices to be normalised in modern times is gender-based violence. Women and girls in South Africa can no longer enjoy the freedom that was promised by the country’s Freedom Charter during the dawn of democracy. Ra...
Religion can influence the realization of happiness in older adults. However, the relationship between religious belief and happiness of older adults and its mechanisms are not very clear. Using 5177 individuals aged ≥ 60 years in China for empiri...
This article critically examines the Islamic Religious Community (IRC) in North Macedonia, focusing on its significant role in influencing religious practices, socio-political dynamics, and interfaith relations within the country. Since its inception...
Colombia’s Comprehensive Public Policy on Religious Freedom and Worship (PPRF), adopted in 2018, made the country the first in Latin America to allocate public funds and a dedicated administrative structure to the promotion and protection of re...
During the COVID-19 crisis, the Korean government’s restrictions on religious freedom have caused several reactions. These can be divided into two categories: first, as several Christian groups have become the center of controversy over exacerb...
This paper investigates the development of interreligious dialogue in Brescia, a prosperous Northern Italian city with approximately 200,000 inhabitants. Despite similarities to other cities in the region, Brescia exhibits an unusually vibrant &ldquo...
In their two hundred years of existence, the Chilean armed forces have had a close relationship with the Catholic faith, especially with a local version of the Virgin Mary (Virgen del Carmen), who is held as the patroness of the military. After its g...
The majority of the social and political forces that spearheaded and actively participated in the 2011 and 2013 waves of uprisings catapulted the demands to reestablish ‘citizenship’ as one of the main foundations of a new social contract aiming at r...
This paper explores the Naha Confucius Temple case, resolved by the Supreme Court in February 2021, in light of postwar decisions on Articles 20 and 89 of the Japanese constitution. Religion is a contested category in Japanese legislation, appearing...
This article explores the possibility of a spiritual Islam in the West as a viable alternative to traditionalist and political Islam. It looks at the capabilities and limitations of two French Muslim voices, Abdennour Bidar and Éric Geoffroy,...
This paper explores the nature of Coptic struggles for religious equality in Egypt in the period between 2013 and 2021. The key research question informing this paper is: in a context where the space for civic action to demand rights for equality and...
When designing, implementing and assessing public policies, and, in particular, those affecting the public management of religious diversity, it is increasingly common to include ethnographic approaches from the field of social anthropology and the b...
International human rights law on minorities sets forth a complex system of provisions affecting religious groups; still, the question of defining religious minorities remains largely unsettled. While assessing the legal framework of protection estab...
In its declaration of principles, the 1987 Philippine Constitution provides for the separation of Church and State. While the principle honors distinctions between temporal and spiritual functions, both Church and State maintain a unique and cooperat...
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has unsettled societies and economies of people and countries all over the world. Malawi is no exception. As such, the COVID-19 pandemic is more than just a health crisis. Countries have responded by i...
The article analyses the conscience clause in the medical professions as a manifestation of a broader process of regulating the presence of religion in professional practice. Its point of departure is the Polish cooperative model of state–relig...
European cities increasingly use digital platforms, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to allocate welfare, regulate mobility, plan public space and support security. This article examines how these systems reshape migrants’ effec...
This article examines the vastly expanded mobility of displaced Karen villagers in the evangelical humanitarian movement, the Free Burma Rangers. This builds on ethnographic fieldwork on humanitarian cultures in the Thai-Burmese borderlands conducted...
After the communist regime seized power in Albania in 1944, the vilification, humiliation, persecution and execution of clergy of all faiths, including Muslim, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, were conducted publicly. Religious estates were natio...
In this article, we present the results of our research, which aims to comprehend how the relationship between religion and the use of drugs operates in various contexts, but especially in the context of a prohibitionist paradigm. On the one hand, th...
The training of Imams and Muslim religious leaders has received much interest in the post-9/11 era, resulting in a vast amount of research and publications on the topic. The present work explores this literature with the aim of analysing key debates...
This paper examines the separation of church and state in the Philippines during the early American colonial period, contextualizing it within the process of American overseas expansion and considering it as one of the projects of imperial hegemony c...
The Basque conflict was one of the last ethnonationalist violent struggles in Western Europe, until the self-dissolution in 2018 of ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna, Basque Country and Freedom). The role played by some sectors of the Roman Catholic Church...
In the United States, religious exemptions to health-driven mandates enjoy, and should enjoy, protected status in medical ethics and healthcare law. Religious exemptions are defined as seriously professed exceptions to state or federal laws, which ap...
This paper explores the complexities arising from the intersection of religious freedom and the principles of gender equality and non-discrimination, a pressing issue within the modern European landscape. It investigates these challenges by examining...
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