Female Religious Authority among Tarbiyah Communities in Contemporary Indonesia

Muslims: Religious Authority and Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia

The Indonesian province of Aceh is known as rebellious. The most recent eruption was the civil war between the Indonesian army and the ethno-nationalist separatist movement GAM, which started in 1976 and could only be ended after the destructive Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Aceh is also known as strictly Islamic. When Aceh is featured in the media, the focus is often on the implementation, sin...

Models of Religious Authority

The State's Authority in Religious Rights

Legal analysis of church-state relations in European countries presupposes a concept or at least a notion of the state. The concept is largely avoided in contemporary legal and political theory. Nonetheless, Western and Central European Continental legal systems, including the Croatian Draft Law on the Legal Position of Religious Communities of April 2002, tacitly presuppose the idea that the s...

A rational choice theory of religious authority

The rational choice literature on religion has been noticeably silent on the nature and purpose of religious authority. I first summarize the rational choice theory of authority and offer a rational choice definition of religious authority. A primary insight is that (religious) authority exists to coordinate social action. I then argue that social coordination is a fundamental aspect of religio...

‘Religious Diversity’ in Contemporary Chinese Scholarship

Contemporary China offers a particularly interesting setting to study religious diversity as a result of its unique socio-political context. Based on the quantitative and qualitative evidence in a representative sample of Chinese dissertations, this essay identifies two characteristics associated with the usage of ‘religious diversity’ in contemporary Chinese scholarship: firstly, the focal poi...