Download Free Religious Pluralism In Democratic Societies Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Religious Pluralism In Democratic Societies and write the review.

A collection of essays that situates and furthers contemporary debates around the prospects of democracy in diverse societies within and beyond the West. Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism examines the relationship between the functioning of democracy and the prior existence of religious plurality in three societies outside the West: India, Pakistan, and Turkey. All three societies had on one hand deep religious diversity and on the other long histories as imperial states that responded to religious diversity through their specific pre-modern imperial institutions. Each country has followed a unique historical trajectory with regard to crafting democratic institutions to deal with such extreme diversity. The volume focuses on three core themes: historical trends before the modern state's emergence that had lasting effects; the genealogies of both the state and religion in politics and law; and the problem of violence toward and domination over religious out-groups. Volume editors Karen Barkey, Sudipta Kaviarj, and Vatsal Naresh have gathered a group of leading scholars across political science, sociology, history, and law to examine this multifaceted topic. Together, they illuminate various trajectories of political thought, state policy, and the exercise of social power during and following a transition to democracy. Just as importantly, they ask us to reflexively examine the political categories and models that shape our understanding of what has unfolded in South Asia and Turkey.
In 1945, Sukarno declared that the new Indonesian republic would be grounded on monotheism, while also insisting that the new nation would protect diverse religious practice. The essays in Religious Pluralism in Indonesia explore how the state, civil society groups, and individual Indonesians have experienced the attempted integration of minority and majority religious practices and faiths across the archipelagic state over the more than half century since Pancasila. The chapters in Religious Pluralism in Indonesia offer analyses of contemporary phenomena and events; the changing legal and social status of certain minority groups; inter-faith relations; and the role of Islam in Indonesia's foreign policy. Amidst infringements of human rights, officially recognized minorities—Protestants, Catholics, Hindus, Buddhists and Confucians—have had occasional success advocating for their rights through the Pancasila framework. Others, from Ahmadi and Shi'i groups to atheists and followers of new religious groups, have been left without safeguards, demonstrating the weakness of Indonesia's institutionalized "pluralism." Contributors: Lorraine Aragon, Christopher Duncan, Kikue Hamayotsu, Robert Hefner, James Hoesterey, Sidney Jones, Mona Lohanda, Michele Picard, Evi Sutrisno, Silvia Vignato
Provides a comparative analysis of church-state issues in the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, England, and Germany, and argues that the U.S. is unique in the way it resolves religious freedom and religious establishment questions.
How should liberal democratic governments respond to citizens as religious believers whose values, norms and practices might lie outside the cultural mainstream? Some of the most challenging political questions arising today focus on the adequacy of a policy of ‘live and let live’ liberal toleration in contexts where disputes about the metaphysical truth of conflicting world-views abound. Does liberal toleration fail to give all citizens their due? Do citizens of faith deserve a more robust form of accommodation from the state in the form of ‘recognition’. This issue is far from settled. Controversies over the terms of religious accommodation continue to dominate political agendas around the world. This is the first edited collection to provide a sustained examination of the politics of toleration and recognition in an age of religious pluralism. The aftermath of the events of September 11th have dramatised the urgency of this debate. It has also surfaced, nationally and globally, in disputes about terrorism, security and gender and human rights questions in relation to minority communities. This volume brings together a group of new and established scholars from the fields of law and philosophy, who all present fresh and challenging perspectives on an urgent debate. It will be indispensable reading for advanced researchers in political and legal philosophy, religious and cultural studies and related disciplines.
This book argues that contemporary liberal democracy is reaching a crisis. Brendan Sweetman contends that this crisis arises from a contentious pluralism involving the rise of incommensurable worldviews that emerge out of the absolutizing of freedom over time in a democratic setting. This clash of worldviews is further complicated by a loss of confidence in reason and by the practical failure of public discourse. A contributory factor is the growing worldview of secularism which needs to be distinguished from both the process of secularization and the concept of the secular state. After describing the crisis, and exploring these themes, and also rejecting proposed solutions from recent liberal political theory, Sweetman develops an approach to pluralist disagreement which requires a re-envisioning of the relationship between religion, secularism and politics, and which allows a limited place for all worldviews in the state, including religious worldviews. Engaging with the work of Philip Kitcher, Robert Audi, John Rawls, A.C. Grayling, Martin Luther King, Cécile Laborde, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, and Plato, Sweetman's approach is a formidable innovation in the quest to maintain a free and fair society.
Policies dealing with religious diversity in liberal democratic states—as well as the established institutions that enforce those policies—are increasingly under pressure. Politics and political theory are caught in a trap between the fully secularized state and neo-corporate regimes of selective cooperation between states and organized religion. This volume proposes an original, comprehensive, and multidisciplinary approach to problems of governing religious diversity—combining moral and political philosophy, constitutional law, history, sociology, and religious anthropology. Drawing on such diverse scholarship, Secularism or Democracy? proposes an associational governance—a moderately libertarian, flexible variety of democratic institutional pluralism—as the plausible third way to overcome the inherent deficiencies of the predominant models.
Religious Freedom and Evangelization in Latin America provides an indispensable resource for understanding the range of issues confronting the continent, offering Catholic as well as Protestant perspectives, and trenchant analyses of the situation in different countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Cuba."--BOOK JACKET.
Polarization between political religionists and militant secularists on both sides of the Atlantic is on the rise. Critically engaging with traditional secularism and religious accommodationism, this collection introduces a constitutional secularism that robustly meets contemporary challenges. It identifies which connections between religion and the state are compatible with the liberal, republican, and democratic principles of constitutional democracy and assesses the success of their implementation in the birthplace of political secularism: the United States and Western Europe. Approaching this issue from philosophical, legal, historical, political, and sociological perspectives, the contributors wage a thorough defense of their project's theoretical and institutional legitimacy. Their work brings fresh insight to debates over the balance of human rights and religious freedom, the proper definition of a nonestablishment norm, and the relationship between sovereignty and legal pluralism. They discuss the genealogy of and tensions involving international legal rights to religious freedom, religious symbols in public spaces, religious arguments in public debates, the jurisdiction of religious authorities in personal law, and the dilemmas of religious accommodation in national constitutions and public policy when it violates international human rights agreements or liberal-democratic principles. If we profoundly rethink the concepts of religion and secularism, these thinkers argue, a principled adjudication of competing claims becomes possible.
In contemporary political philosophy, there is much debate over how to maintain a public order in pluralistic democracies in which citizens hold radically different religious views. The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism deals with this theoretically and practically difficult issue by examining three of the most influential figures of religious pluralism theory: John Rawls, Jacques Maritain, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Drawing on a diverse number of sources, Kozinski addresses the flaws in each philosopher's views and shows that the only philosophically defensible end of any overlapping consensus political order must be the eradication of the ideological pluralism that makes it necessary. In other words, a pluralistic society should have as its primary political aim to create the political conditions for the communal discovery and political establishment of that unifying tradition within which political justice can most effectively be obtained. Kozinski's analysis, though exhaustive and rigorous, still remains accessible and engaging, even for a reader unversed in the works of Rawls, Maritain, and MacIntyre. Interdisciplinary and multi-thematic in nature, it will appeal to anyone interested in the intersection of religion, politics, and culture.