Interpreting Religion: Making Sense of Religious Lives

Description

This edited collection harnesses a diversity of interpretivist perspectives to provide a panoramic view of the production, experiences, contexts, and meanings of religion. Scholars from the US, South Asia and Europe explore religious phenomena using ethnographic, comparative historical, psychosocial, and critical theoretical approaches. Each chapter addresses foundational themes in the study of religion – from identity, discourse and power to ritual, emotion, and embodiment. Authors examine dynamic intersections of race, gender, history, and the present within the religious traditions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism, as well as among the non-religious. Cutting boldly across religious traditions and paradigms, the book investigates areas of harmony and contradiction across different interpretive lenses to achieve a richer understanding of the meanings of religion. Front Cover Half Title Series page Interpreting Religion: Making Sense of Religious Lives Copyright information Table of contents List of Figures and Tables Notes on Contributors Series Editors’ Preface: Interpretive Lenses in Sociology – On the Multidimensional Foundations of Meaning in Social Life Notes References Introduction: Interpretive Approaches in the Study of Religion Scholarship as interpretation Interpreting religion and beyond Note References 1 Making Sense of Queer Christian Lives Shifting narratives Rewriting the script Reconciliation scripts Apologetics Mosaic expansion/radical inclusion Reconciliation scripts in context Beyond contradiction? The significance of affirmative communities Sociotemporal context and the articulated/actualized self Self-actualization quests and social movements Notes References 2 The Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma: Religion, Spirituality, and Ritual among Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors Methodology and the researcher as witness Survivorship and the intergenerational transmission of religious beliefs Belief in a higher power Descendant spirituality and the turn toward immanence Ritual: emotion and innovation among descendants of survivors Culture bearing and the reinvention of Jewish ritual among descendants Conclusion References 3 Doing It: Ethnography, Embodiment, and the Interpretation of Religion Bodies and souls: grasping the corporeal effects of religious praxis From the somatic to the symbolic: interpreting practices from within Conclusion Notes References 4 Mind the Gap: What Ethnographic Silences Can Teach Us Silence at the shared table Sitting with silence The sounds of difficult silence Self-silencing Conclusion: silence as presence Notes References 5 The Public Sphere and Presentations of the Collective Self: Being Shia in Modern India The Shia in India Sociology of religion and collective identity Identity and boundary making in the public Sectarian controversies and the Piggot Committee: prior to 1919 Between Khilafat and freedom: 1919–47 Hindutva and Islamophobia in contemporary India: 1990s and beyond Conclusion Notes References 6 The Power of Meaning: Toward a Critical Discursive Sociology of Religion Discourse as social practice Meaning in the service of power The “folk church” as ideology1 Church and state, according to the Church “Folk church” in parliamentary politics Conclusion Notes References 7 The Religion of White Male Ethnonationalism in a Multicultural Reality White supremacy in the United States Whiteness as religion Decisive moments when white people embraced racism Reconstruction after the American Civil War Twentieth-century labor movements The Evil Other The rite of white American restorative violence Conclusion References 8 Totalitarianism as Religion Introduction The founding act and the constitution of a new world The sacred The underside of the sacred From the sublime to the grotesque: the transition From inevitability to eternity: the rise of the new deity Notes References 9 The Heritage Spectrum: A More Inclusive Typology for the Age of Global Buddhism Categorical erasure Typologies of Buddhist practitioners outside Asia and their shortcomings Typologies of Buddhist institutions and their shortcomings The heritage spectrum The heritage spectrum: zooming out at the big picture The heritage spectrum: zooming in on FPMT Conclusion Notes References 10 Interpreting Nonreligion The interpretive challenge for nonreligion The typical solution: disaggregation A different solution: the interpretive approach Conclusion Notes References Afterword: Approaching Religions – Some Reflections on Meaning, Identity, and Power Neosecularization or repaganization Religion and ideology Religion and identity Notes References Index Back Cover