Search Results (16)

An analysis of Albanian Muslims in Italy provides a compelling case study of communities perceived as marginal. Studies of Muslims in Italy tend to focus on the majority and chronologically older groups within the country’s Islamic landscape, particularly those from Asia and Africa. In addition to providing a better understanding of Islam in Italy, a study of the identity and community-building issues of the Albanian community of origin offers many insights into that community’s complexity. Albanians in Italy have a very specific historical and religious heritage; so, analyzing their roots and community-building processes helps us to better understand the development of Islam on the margins of large national organizations and majority groups. This article presents the results of the first national study of Albanian Muslims in Italy. Online interviews and field observations were conducted in 2024 within the Union of Muslim Albanians in Italy (Unione degli Albanesi Musulmani in Italia—UAMI), using the ethnographic method. The Association has fewer members compared with national level organizations. It was founded in 2009 to address specific issues related to the management of Muslim Albanian religious identity. The Association has sought to address the fragmentation of religion and Albanian nationalism, a consequence of a long period of state atheism, and to counter the literalist and radical tendencies in the interpretation of religion that have emerged in Albania since the collapse of the communist regime. In addition to these challenges, the Association has also tackled issues related to the Islamic religion in its local and global dimensions. The analysis of these challenges and the ways to deal with them offers a new framework in the Italian Islamic panorama, despite its marginality. The results of this research point to the emergence of new forms of rooting and belonging characterized by spirituality over orthopraxis. These forms adopt a religious approach open to diversity and pluralism. Full article

This article analyses the spread of unbelief among conservative Egyptian and Syrian Muslims in the post-Arab Spring period. In this period, social media gave an unprecedented visibility to transgressive expressions of fiducial doubt, creating the impression of a ‘wave of atheism’ within the conservative milieu. Based on original sources and interviews, the article argues that what the participants called ‘atheism’ (ilḥād) must not be read from the perspective of preconceived notions of atheism, but examined inductively as an emergent phenomenon of nonreligion in a specific social context, the conservative Muslim and Islamist milieu. Its appearance can be traced to a multifaceted overlay of different developments and factors, including cultural and media globalisation, the unsettling social effects of the Arab Spring, and the severe doubts and disappointments suffered by sympathisers of political Islam in the post-2013 period. It is conceivable that a significant number of people defected from conservative Islam to other shapes of religion and nonreligion, but their personal trajectories await further research. More manifestly, the crisis provided an opportunity for a new generation of conservative religious guides and thinkers who have been leading an updating of religious socialisation and propagation methods among conservative Muslims. Full article

The reception of the so-called New Atheism in the 2000s in the intellectual community was harsh. Its main figures were accused of elaborating on a subject of which they were mostly ignorant. Criticism focused on the narrow way they described religion as a set of factual beliefs that compete with—and pale in the face of—modern science, instead of a life experience, an ethical orientation, an existential commitment, or a set of communal practices. In the spirit of S.J. Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria thesis, these critics contended that religion has little to do with factual assertions. This paper challenges this strict separation, arguing that many theistic traditions, such as Christianity, inherently make factual claims about the universe and history, intertwining their beliefs with cosmic realities. Following Ronald Dworkin’s posthumous distinction between the “science part” and the “value part” of religion, the paper underscores the philosophical legitimacy of religious factual claims, thus acknowledging the potential overlap between science and religion. In this sense, it argues that the New Atheists may have got wrong the meaning of religion in many people’s lives, but they got the “science part” right enough. In the same vein, it concludes that while creationists are most likely wrong in their account of the origin of life and biodiversity, their contestation in the factual domain cannot be discarded as a disfigurement of religion. Full article

Whilst there is much published research looking at the use and/or interpretation of the Bible in popular culture, there has been little research investigating the impact of such cultural biblical engagement upon contemporary Christian Bible readers. Drawing upon focus group data, this paper thus explores the influence that the cultural history of Noah’s ark, particularly in popular culture, has upon the way evangelicals interpret. This paper shows that evangelical readers were influenced by the interpretations of the Noah story in the spheres of science, new atheism, children’s books and films, and this affected the conclusions they came to about the issue of historicity, morality and applicability. The paper closes with a reflection on why this phenomenon occurs and what hermeneutical benefits it might offer the reader by considering how God might be at work in the cultural depictions of Scripture and what they might offer interpretative practice. Full article

This essay reflects on the concept of the death of God as part and parcel of modern philosophical theology: a genre of thinking that came into existence with Hegel’s announcement of the “speculative Good Friday” as the most natural expression of die Religion der neuen Zeiten, “the religion of modern times”. In my interpretation, the death of God not only does not spell the end of the era of atheism but, on the contrary, inaugurates a new era of characteristically modern theism that steers away from theological absolutism. The new theos is no longer conceived as the eternal omnipotent Absolute but as the Derridean diminished Infinite: contracted and self-negated—even “unto death”. Such God, however, although coming to the foremost visibly in modernity, is not completely new to the monotheistic religions, which from the beginning are engaged in the heated debate concerning the status of the divine power: is it absolute and unlimited or rather self-restricted and conditioned? I will enter this debate by conducting a comparison between the two traditional models of divine self-restriction—Christian kenosis and Jewish-kabbalistic tsimtsum—and then present their modernised philosophical variants, most of all in the thought of Hegel. Full article

In response to the trend of information technology development, religions in China are undergoing a process of mediatization. This study takes the popular Chinese animated films Ne Zha: Birth of the Demon Child (哪吒之魔童降世) (2019) and New Gods: Yang Jian (新神榜: 杨戬) (2022) as research cases of mediatization of religion and conducts a focused study of the respective protagonists Ne Zha (哪吒) and Yang Jian (杨戬), both prominent figures in Chinese religious and folk traditions. Through text analysis and empirical research on the two movies and their fans, this study examines how religion is being mediatized in contemporary China in the transformation to Religion 2.0 or a type of amalgamation of real- and virtual-world practices that enact a relationship with the divine, and how this shapes identity formation for fans, who are mostly young individuals in their teens and twenties. This research argues that to obtain permission for dissemination in mainstream media and thrive in the cultural context of China, religion chooses to assume the form of media products that can bypass scrutiny that forbids “supernatural phenomena” and aligns with the mainstream ideology. It has to be a “contributory religion” that contributes to the “revitalization” of national spirit and inherited Chinese culture, not a potential “superstitious” threat to the Marxist orthodoxy. In the context of official promotion of atheism and the regulation of public discourse, animated films with themes adapted from traditional mythological and religious stories, such as Ne Zha: Birth of the Demon Child and New Gods: Yang Jian, have become a major cultural form through which people in China engage with religious symbols and narratives. The enormous success of the two movies resulted in a large population of young fans. Influenced by these films, their fans have developed an egoistic religious perspective rather than assimilating the religious or cultural messages contained in the movies. These fans may experience solace and a call to faith to some extent in their consumption of the movies, but they selectively enhance religious literacy that only meets their personal needs. Interest in divine individuals far outweighs interest in or loyalty to the religious doctrine or sect itself. Pilgrimages are undertaken to fulfill personal fantasies, and the promotion of the divine is aimed at vying for influence within fan communities. The second part of this study examines the activities of the fans that I argue are characteristic of the age of Religion 2.0. Full article

Atheism has stirred up controversy in the Arabic-speaking world since the 2011 uprisings, when atheists there began appearing in public. What role does Arabic mass media play in the modern politics of minorities such as atheists, given the heated debates that it hosts on atheism? This question is important because perceptions of media frames influence the behavior of politicians and the electorate—and, as a result, laws that affect minority groups such as atheists. This article focuses on Lebanon, where eight of the nine television channels are affiliated with and funded by religious–political parties. It explores the existence of bias against atheists on televised Lebanese talk shows and news reports (2010–2022). Our findings reveal significant bias (69% overall and over 85% in speaker prominence bias), with channels that promote communal religious practice exhibiting the highest levels. Ultimately, our findings demonstrate that television, as the most influential Lebanese and Arabic mass medium, likely affects the public’s negative perceptions of Arabic-speaking atheists. Our findings reflect the decrease in objectivity in conflict-based media and such media’s poor understanding or intentional disregard for media’s crucial role in building a fair, democratic society. Full article

If a new generation of phenomenologists (Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jean-François Courtine) in France sought to overcome the “methodic atheism” imposed on the phenomenological method by the fathers of phenomenology, it was at the price of going beyond experience immanent to existence which targeted the invisible, and therefore of lacking a discourse on the critical restriction of the phenomenological method and on the points of contact between phenomenology and theology. The task of this paper is to show how this lack is overcome by Marc Richir’s “quasi theology” viewed from his articulation of the relationship between the phenomenological and the symbolical. This paper argues that whereas for the new French phenomenologists it is usually a question of a subreptitious crossing from one discipline to another, in Richir, what we have is an enigmatic relationship of the overlap between phenomenology and the symbolical. While Richir was only interested in the articulation of the relationship between the phenomenological, the symbolical and the absolute transcendence, his thoughts motivate us to explore, following Emmanuel Falque’s approach, the reciprocal transformation between phenomenology and theology. The paper concludes, on the one hand, that experience remains the immanent ground for phenomenology and theological science and, on the other, that Richir’s approach could be understood as a “metaphysical phenomenology”. Full article

Western New Atheism is witnessing a resurgence in the Arab world which has provoked a strong Islamic counter-atheism reaction. The present essay seeks to: 1—briefly describe the cultural resurgence of both opposing camps, 2—illuminate a philosophical Qur’ānic approach to atheism, 3—present a peculiar defense of atheism by Muḥammad li-Mzūghī utilizing classical Arab-Islamic scholasticism and literature, 4—examine an attempt to counter atheism by utilizing modern philosophy as articulated by ʻAbd al-Jalīl al-Kūr, 5—expand the theoretical debate by highlighting the current social magnitude of the atheistic-Islamic strife, 6—reveal an inner camp schism between the higher and lower intellectual levels of both Islamic and atheistic camps, an inner camp rivalry, and a cross camp alliance, and finally, 7—propose some epistemic solutions that can reduce the magnitude of this socio-cosmological debate. Full article

To have the right and possibility to criticize religions in public life is crucial for developing a healthy liberal democratic society. However, this criticism could take many different forms with respect to who offers the criticism, on what grounds it is based, its aim, what the target of the criticism is, and whom the critics try to convince. In this article, I develop a theoretical framework we can use to distinguish and assess different forms of criticism, focusing primarily on secular criticism of religion. Furthermore, I argue that in performing such a meta-study of criticism, it is vital that we reflect more carefully on how to develop plausible ethics of criticism. Finally, by comparing public criticism and academic criticism, I show that such ethics must be developed in a way that is sensitive to discourse. Full article

Various contemporary phenomena of social regression and authoritarianism are related to religious actors, movements, and beliefs. This text, however, seeks to follow this up with the political–theoretical argumentation that New Atheism has to be understood as a way of thinking which carries illiberal and authoritarian tendencies with it as well. In defence of this position, this article will first reconstruct, with reference to Habermas’s and Rawls’s theory of democracy, elements that must include personal beliefs in order to be considered congruent with democratic values. Subsequently, New Atheism’s conception of rational politics will be presented in order to show in which aspects it contradicts the demands of reasonable convictions. This concerns, in particular, the rejection of reasonable pluralism on the one hand and a non-positivistic view of human beings on the other. As a conclusion, this text supports the proposition that, when speaking of the connection between certain worldviews and today’s illiberalism, New Atheism must also be considered as an unreasonable comprehensive doctrine. Full article

Mainland Chinese grow up in a nation with Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism as their cultural heritage, and are educated with atheism, materialism, and scientism in contemporary China. However, the high rate of conversion to Christianity among Chinese immigrants in Anglo-Saxon countries constitutes a distinctive feature in studies of migration. This paper aims to investigate the reasons for becoming Christian and the development of spirituality of a group of first-generation Chinese Australians from mainland China. All the seven participants are highly educated women who migrated to Australia as adults and had young children at the time of conversion. Data were collected mainly through open-ended in-depth interviews, and triangulated with private conversations, observations, and WeChat messaging. This ethnographic qualitative research found that these immigrants’ Christian attempts were prominently triggered by settlement crisis as new immigrants and as immigrant parents. They see Christianity and church community as a strong vehicle to resolve integration difficulties in a new society, such as economic and career insecurities, social isolation, language barriers, marital crises, and parenting dilemmas. Their Christian movement is facilitated by identified ideological congruence but hindered by cultural conflicts between their newly acquired Christian doctrines and their previously instructed values. The findings have implications for immigrant families, secular institutions, and religious organizations, as to the psychosocial well-being of new migrants. Full article

The new sociology of religion differs from the classical and mainstream sociology, which was in force until the end of the last century, in that it no longer considers religion only as an independent variable, but places it together with other dependent variables, so that it becomes possible to investigate new themes, especially those that do not consider religious involvement—from atheism to the phenomenon of ‘nones’ (non-believers and non-practicing), from spirituality to forms of para-religions and quasi-religions and the varied set of multiple religions. Full article

Atheists are among the most disliked “religious” groups in the United States, but the origins of this aversion remain poorly understood. Because the media are an important source of public attitudes, we analyze coverage of atheism and atheists in American and British newspapers. Using computational text analysis techniques, including sentiment analysis and topic modeling, we show that atheism is portrayed negatively by the print media. Significantly, we show that greater negativity is associated with atheism as a concept than with atheists as individuals. Building on this insight, and challenging arguments that prominent atheist intellectuals attract negative coverage, we also find that coverage of famous atheists is actually more positive than that of atheists or atheism in general. Overall, our findings add a new dimension to scholarship on differences between individual-targeted and group-targeted tolerance in public attitudes, establishing for the first time that media coverage mirrors such differences. Full article

This article approaches the grammars of meaning creation by Scientific Creationism and New Atheism from an anthropological-communicological perspective. By grammars of meaning creation, we understand the different languages that the human being uses to communicate the meaning of their existence to themself and others. Nowadays, Scientific Creationism is disseminated around the world and has transcended evangelical Christianity by permeating non-Christian religions. On the other hand, New Atheism, headed by Richard Dawkins, has also reached non-Western cultures such as Muslim cultures. Starting from Apelian transcendental semiotics, the hermeneutics of Durand’s symbol, and Lluís Duch’s anthropological study on mythos and logos, we reflect on the horizons of understanding of both movements. Our study shows that, contrary to what one might think given the antagonistic metaphysical positions the two movements seem to profess, Scientific Creationists and New Atheists share the same grammar of meaning creation: positivism. What one could interpret as a new epistemological controversy between science and religion can be better understood as a fight based on positivist science to establish the true origin myth. Thus, creationists and atheists implicitly recognize positivism as the contemporary theological discourse, i.e., the self-evident grammar of meaning creation that allows the Truth to be expressed. Full article