Search Results (86)

India’s 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) made religion a criterion for expedited naturalization, granting a fast track to citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from three Muslim-majority countries while excluding Muslims. This article examines how such a law came to be normalized in public discourse. Analyzing 60 articles published between December 2019 and December 2024 in three influential English-language media outlets—The Times of India, The Wire, and Organiser—the article examines how the CAA was made to appear legitimate, even as its religious logic remained contested. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of “regime of truth,” it identifies three interrelated mechanisms through which this normalization occurred. First, humanitarian appeals and civilizational narratives created a hierarchy of suffering that made some lives more visible and grievable than others. Second, this hierarchy was recast in administrative terms, presenting religious exclusion as a matter of procedure rather than politics. Third, dissent was narrowed through prohibition, epistemic disqualification, and the privileging of authorized knowledge. Religion, in this process, was discursively reconfigured as a humanitarian criterion, civilizational claim, administrative category, and security marker. The article finally reveals that the CAA’s religious logic was normalized through the seemingly secular languages of law, governance, and compassion. Full article

This article examines Nacer Khemir’s Looking for Muhyiddin (2012), a documentary-fiction film that explicitly names its operative space as barzakh (a liminal threshold between two realities). It asks how cinema can mediate between visible form and invisible religious meaning without reducing one to the other. The method is mutual illumination: close formal analysis of the film is brought into dialogue with Ibn ʿArabī’s ontology of barzakh, khayāl, dhawq, wajh/hijāb, and tajallī (imaginal reality, experiential tasting, face and veil, and divine self-disclosure, respectively), alongside debates in religion-and-film studies, documentary theory, haptic visuality, and spectatorship. The analysis shows that the film’s barzakhic structure operates through two encompassing dimensions—the ontology of production and the epistemology of reception—and three formal operations: barzakhic thresholds of cemetery, dream, and yakaza; the aniconic withdrawal of the faceless khirqa/burnous (the Sufi patched cloak); and tissage and superimposition as alternatives to montage. The article argues that these operations do not merely represent Ibn ʿArabī’s thought but stage cinematic analogues of its relational logic. It concludes that “barzakhic cinema” names a limited reading framework derived from the Islamic intellectual tradition, useful for rethinking how religious meaning can be sensed through cinematic form. Full article

Cloud Atlas (2004) presents a process of religious genesis. This genesis is set against the backdrop of the retreat of stable institutions and recoverable origins, gradually taking shape at the far end of a broken transmission chain. Existing criticism has tended to examine this novel’s nested form separately from Sonmi~451’s posthumous sanctification. This article connects these lines of inquiry by reading the orison as a witness medium within a broken chain of narrative transmission. Along this chain, Ewing’s Pacific diary establishes a compromised model of institutional Christianity, in which faith gains public effectiveness from conversionist rhetoric. This damaged state of institutional religion constitutes a reverse baseline prior to the formation of Sonmi’s testimony as a witness medium. Sonmi’s interrogation in Nea So Copros records political speech as testimony, giving material form to a condemned voice and supporting it to survive beyond her execution at the end of her world. Zachry’s post-apocalyptic valley receives this damaged medium, whose legal grammar has vanished from local memory, but the loss of this grammar does not bring reception to an end. In this context, Meronym’s historical interpretation of Sonmi’s origin intensifies the pressure on devotional allegiance, with sacred use first persisting in prayer and ritual space, then entering the cradle-side oral narrative. The novel’s nested design allows the reader to move across separate storyworlds. Only in this cross-world position can the reader juxtapose the state-recorded testimony with its afterlife as an object of prayer. Thus, religion as a communal claim is formed under semantic loss and becomes clearly visible only from the reader’s cross-world position. Full article

This study examines how religious socialization unfolds within a multi-religious academic campus, focusing on Palestinian–Muslim female students studying in a Jewish-majority institution in Israel. While academic spaces are often framed as secular and neutral, this research investigates how religion continues to shape identity, belonging, and everyday interactions in such contexts. Drawing on an interpretive qualitative approach, the study is based on in-depth interviews with 28 Palestinian–Muslim female graduate students. The findings reveal that the campus functions as a post-secular space characterized by three interconnected dynamics: (1) institutional arrangements that privilege majority religious norms while marginalizing minority practices; (2) the reproduction of power relations and symbolic boundaries between Jewish and Muslim students; and (3) subtle yet significant processes of identity transformation emerging through interreligious encounters. The study shows that religious socialization extends beyond family and community, taking shape within institutional contexts that require ongoing negotiation of visibility, legitimacy, and belonging. It further highlights forms of agency expressed through strategic adaptation, selective participation, and everyday resistance under conditions of constraint. These findings contribute to post-secular theory by demonstrating how religion is reconfigured rather than diminished in contemporary academic institutions, and position higher education as a critical site for understanding religion, gender, and power in divided societies. Full article

This article reconsiders Joseph Levenson’s Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (hereafter Trilogy) as a modern site for the classification of Confucianism within, against, and alongside the category of religion. Rather than revisiting the question of whether Confucianism “is” a religion, we ask how Levenson’s account makes Confucianism legible through a double movement of de-religionization and partial religionization. On the one hand, Levenson presents Confucianism as an ethical, political, and civilizational order rather than a religion in the doctrinal or ecclesiastical sense; on the other hand, his analysis repeatedly invokes forms of sacralized authority, symbolic centrality, and moral transcendence that complicate any simple secularization of the Confucian tradition. Through a close reading of Levenson’s conceptual vocabulary and historical framing, this article argues that his interpretation does not merely deny Confucianism religious status; it reveals the instability of the modern classificatory boundary between moral philosophy, civil religion, and religious formation. By treating Levenson not simply as an interpreter of Confucian China but also as a producer of modern categories, the article contributes to current debates on rujia (Confucian “school”, 儒家) and rujiao (Confucian “religion”, 儒教) and reflects more broadly on what becomes visible, and what is distorted, when Confucianism is examined through the conceptual toolkit of religious studies. Full article

This article examines how Confucianism becomes religionized through ritual performance in Korean mask dance drama (gamyeon-geuk), focusing on Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori and Bongsan Talchum. It argues that these performances should not be understood only as folk entertainment or carnivalesque satire, but as ritualized forms that mediate divine and ancestral witnessing, communal publicity, and gendered moral evaluation. Within this ritual horizon, laughter, music, embodied movement, masks, props, and stage choreography distribute authority, visibility, speaking positions, and standards of judgment. Methodologically, the study employs multimodal critical discourse analysis of contemporary full-length performance recordings, treating language, movement, staging, costume, props, and audience response as an integrated semiotic field. Across both repertoires, female figures are repeatedly configured as silent or constrained speaking subjects, as visible carriers of moral disorder, or as expendable intermediaries within marital and status hierarchies, while male characters more consistently occupy positions of interpretation, judgment, and ritual agency. By foregrounding ritualized spectatorship as a process of moral common-sense production, the article contributes to debates on Confucianism as lived religion and shows how performance can stage critique while reauthorizing Confucian patriarchal order. Full article

In the history as well as historiography of Chinese Buddhism, the tradition has often been closely associated with death-related cultural practices and ideas, an association that has frequently carried negative connotations. Early twentieth-century reformers such as Taixu famously criticized Buddhism as a religion of ghosts and funerals and sought to redirect Mahāyāna Buddhism toward engagement with an urban, modernizing society. Contemporary Taiwanese Buddhists have realized many aspects of this socially engaged vision. Yet concern with death remains deeply embedded in Buddhist life. Far from standing in contradiction to social engagement, this concern has become one of its central expressions, most visibly in the emergence of modern Buddhist palliative care. Focusing on the writings of the scholar-monk Shi Huimin, this article examines the development of Buddhist palliative care in Taiwan in response to a secular, multireligious, and rapidly aging society, with primary attention to Huimin’s conceptual work. Rather than treating death in isolation, Huimin situates dying within a broader ethical horizon that links good death to good aging, good living, and community formation. Through his reinterpretation of the Five Śīlas and his notion of a Community Pure Land, he extends prevailing concerns with dying well toward a more comprehensive reflection on everyday moral cultivation, healthy lifestyles, and communal responsibility. In this sense, the study reads Buddhist palliative care as a site that “provincializes” dominant Euro-American frameworks of spiritual and palliative care, highlighting their particular historical and Christian-inflected origins while tracing how they are reconfigured and made productive in a multireligious, secular context. By foregrounding Huimin’s conceptual contributions, this study highlights how palliative and spiritual care are localized and reworked within Taiwanese Buddhism, connecting end-of-life care to broader questions of life, aging, and community well-being. Full article

Through the process of modernization, Turkish literature transcends aesthetics to reflect sociological and cultural changes. The tensions between the individual and society, tradition and modernity, and religion that emerged with Westernization are particularly reflected in the novel. Religious discourse takes different forms at each historical threshold during the modernization process. During the Tanzimat, Servet-i Fünûn, Milli Edebiyat and Socialist Realist periods, it served as a defensive or critical reference point in the face of debates on modernization and Westernization. With the secular policies of the Republic, its public function transformed, evolving into an arena for cultural and moral debate, and it increased its visibility within the multiparty political structure after 1950. From the 1980s onwards, Islamic discourse became an artistic and ideological force in both the social and literary spheres. This article examines the stages of Islamic discourse in Turkish novels within a historical framework, arguing that religious representations are not merely elements reflecting social change, but also play an active role in the reconstruction of identity formation and narrative aesthetics. The study analyzes the functions of religious elements using a text-centered approach. The findings show that religion is not merely a theme in literary texts, but a living element that transforms alongside society, influences identity formation, and shapes narrative aesthetics. Full article

In contemporary Muslim societies, digital platforms, algorithmic infrastructures, and networked religious content have fundamentally reshaped not only the circulation of fatwas but also the conditions under which religious authority is constituted, recognized, and contested. This article develops an integrated analytical framework that brings Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) into sustained dialogue with mediatization theory and digital religion scholarship in order to examine how digital mediation reconfigures fatwa authority. Grounded in a qualitative analytical–comparative methodology, the study reconstructs the classical architecture of fatwa authority—rooted in scholarly qualification, isnād-based transmission, contextual discernment, and institutional oversight—and systematically compares it with contemporary digitally mediated environments structured by visibility metrics, platform logics, audience engagement, and algorithmic amplification. It identifies a series of interrelated transformations affecting the epistemic foundations, institutional gatekeeping mechanisms, communicative forms, and normative accountability of fatwa practice. The analysis demonstrates that digital mediation does not merely expand access to religious guidance; it alters the balance between evidentiary reasoning and infrastructural prominence, reshapes the relationship between muftī and mustaftī, and introduces new ambiguities concerning authority, legitimacy, and moral agency—particularly in the context of AI-assisted religious tools. While digital fatwas may enhance accessibility and transnational connectivity, they also risk epistemic fragmentation, erosion of institutional credibility, and the diffusion of accountability. By articulating a Critical Islamic Legal and Media-Theoretical Framework structured around epistemic, institutional, and communicative axes and evaluated through maqāṣid al-sharīʿah, this article offers a systematic model for analyzing digitally mediated Islamic authority. It concludes by outlining jurisprudential and ethical guidelines for integrating digital technologies into the fatwa domain in ways that preserve methodological rigor, moral responsibility, and the integrity of religious guidance. Full article

While new religious movements are increasingly widespread worldwide, a recent case emerged in Türkiye. Based on the allegations about the rise of Tengrism—the religion of ancient Turks—among the Turkish society and the increasing visibility of Turkish Tengrist accounts on various social media platforms, the question of whether there is a new challenge to the dominance of Islam in Türkiye or not arose. While there is little information about the presence of a Tengrist movement in Türkiye, social media, as the only ground of their public visibility, stands as the sole source of information about this phenomenon. In this sense, with the aim of analyzing the Tengrist movement in Türkiye, 21 social media accounts that frequently post about Tengrism have been studied with respect to the discourses used in their posts. To this aim, the critical discourse analysis technique has been applied, and the discourses of these Tengrist accounts have been categorized and analyzed under three main discursive themes. Reading the findings in these discursive themes in accordance with the political developments in Türkiye, it has been concluded that the Tengrist movement in Türkiye is an outcome of political and cultural responses by certain segments of Turkish society and that it yet lacks the necessary grounds to turn into a new religious movement while possessing potential in this sense. Full article

This article argues that John Calvin’s account of the church in Institutes of the Christian Religion IV is best read through the formative logic of worship. Calvin famously identifies preaching the Word and administering the sacraments as the marks of the visible church. Rather than regarding these marks merely as identifiers, this study interprets them as worship practices that shape Christian life “in-between” church and society. First, the preached Word is not simply received as information but functions as the medium through which faith is generated and sustained, forming a community tasked to bear truth publicly. Second, the sacraments operate as embodied theology: baptism initiates believers into ecclesial belonging through cleansing, renewal, and confession, while the Lord’s Supper repeatedly schools the church in remembrance, thanksgiving, unity, and mutual love. Finally, by situating the Word and sacrament within the church’s maternal nurture and the ministry of reconciliation, the article shows how worship extends beyond the sanctuary, cultivating conscience and communal practices oriented toward public peace and responsibility. In Calvin’s Reformation vision, worship is thus the hinge that links ecclesiology to social ethics without collapsing the distinction between the church and civil society. Full article

This article analyzes the governance of religious diversity in public employment through the study of Quebec’s Bill 21. It examines how the State uses neutrality to manage religious symbols, focusing on implications for pluralism and fundamental rights within democratic governance frameworks and diversity regulation in plural societies. It situates Bill 21 within Quebec’s longer legal and political trajectory, marked by failed legislative attempts, recourse to the “notwithstanding clause,” and deep social polarisation around the construction of a francophone, secular identity. Methodologically, the study combines doctrinal analysis of Canadian constitutional law with a detailed examination of European Court of Human Rights and Court of Justice of the European Union case law, as well as a critical discussion of the Bouchard–Taylor Commission’s model of “open secularism” and later reinterpretations by Bouchard, Taylor and Maclure. The article finds that Quebec’s lawmakers selectively invoke European jurisprudence and the language of neutrality to justify far-reaching restrictions on visible religious symbols, especially for officials with coercive powers such as judges, police and prison staff, in ways that go beyond typical European practice. It argues that equating impartiality with an appearance of strict neutrality reflects the cultural assumptions of the majority and produces discriminatory effects on religious minorities, limiting both freedom of religion and equal access to public employment. The conclusion contends that neutrality should be assessed primarily through officials’ conduct rather than their appearance and that more inclusive models of secularism—grounded in open secularism and reasonable accommodation—offer better tools for reconciling State neutrality, pluralism and fundamental rights. Full article

In post-Soviet Georgia, the renewed visibility of religion in the public sphere has generated ambivalent effects, fostering both social cohesion and identity-based exclusion. This article focuses on the work I Am the Way by Georgian Orthodox thinker Zurab Kiknadze to explore how a non-instrumental, ethics-based conception of public religion can be sociologically conceptualized. Drawing on a qualitative, hermeneutic-narrative method, the analysis identifies two core motifs in Kiknadze’s thought—“spiritual journey” and “silent witness”—and interprets them through the lenses of public religion theory (Casanova), lived religion paradigms (McGuire, Ammerman), and post-secular debates (Habermas). The findings indicate that Kiknadze understands faith not as a marker of dogmatic or ethno-political belonging but as a practice contributing to ethical continuity and the reconstruction of social trust. Within this framework, “silent witness” is defined as a form of faith grounded in consistency, humility, and action-oriented conviction; it is proposed as a transferable sociological mechanism that supports trust, reconciliation, and inclusive citizenship in transitional societies. Centering on the Georgian case, this article offers a conceptual contribution to rethinking the public role of religion in post-authoritarian contexts within an ethical framework. Full article

This article examines the trajectory of secularization and desecularization in Turkey through the lens of Imam Hatip high schools, focusing on how religion has been reintroduced into the public sphere and reshaped educational exposure. While secularism in Turkey historically emerged as a state-driven project imposed from above, recent decades have witnessed a marked process of desecularization under the Justice and Development Party, facilitated by institutional reforms in law, education, and bureaucracy. The study draws on qualitative interviews with experts, analyzed through grounded theory, to capture their perceptions of religious schooling and its impact. The analysis is organized into three themes: the persistence of top-down secularism, the institutionalized reintroduction of religion, and the intersection of religionized politics with educational practices. Findings indicate that while family socialization remains a primary source of religious identity, Imam Hatip schools function as a symbolic site of religiosity and political contestation. The study concludes that Turkey’s current desecularization is not merely a grassroots revival but a state-mediated restructuring of the secular–religious balance, with education serving as a central arena for negotiating visibility, autonomy, and identity. At the same time, the legacy of top-down secularism has paradoxically contributed to alienating younger generations from religion, shaping ambivalent attitudes toward faith and schooling. Full article

This article examines the complex interplay between plurality and neutrality in Slovenian education in the context of increasing religious and cultural diversity associated with global migration. Drawing on a pilot study conducted with five primary school counsellors working in high-diversity school environments, it explores the tensions between the normative principles of plurality and neutrality and their practical implementation in everyday school life. The aim is to highlight the concrete challenges that schools and school staff encounter when addressing religious and cultural diversity. The pilot study shows that schools react differently to religious and cultural diversity, depending on the challenges faced by pupils, staff, school management and family-school co-operation. While the study included pupils from various religious backgrounds, only certain minority groups, particularly Muslim pupils, emerged as the minority group most clearly observed in the interviews. This visibility reflects the combination of cultural and religious differences from the majority and the more explicit demands these pupils and their families raised within the school context. In contrast, Orthodox Christian pupils were generally perceived as culturally and institutionally aligned with the majority population, and their practices (such as observing their New Year or other holidays) were accommodated by the existing school system without specific challenges. It also suggests that there are different understandings of how schools should teach neutrality and plurality beyond the official curriculum. The study identifies common challenges that schools face in relation to religious and cultural diversity, some of which are closely linked to the multicultural approach to education. The challenges identified are illustrated using Muslim pupils as an example of the minority group most prominently observed in the data, while acknowledging that other minority groups may experience different or less visible challenges. The findings are therefore limited to the context observed in this pilot study and cannot be generalised to all minority pupils in Slovenia. Full article