This essay explores religion’s need for law, comparing the story told in Mitra Sharafi’s Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia (2014)—about the virtual hijacking of British colonial law to serve the communal religious needs of Parsis in colonial India—to other contexts in which secular and religious legal systems have built symbiotic relationships, including in the United States and Thailand....

Does Secular Education Impact Religiosity, Electoral Participation and the Propensity to Vote for Islamic Parties? Evidence from an Education Reform in a Muslim Country Using a unique survey of adults in Turkey, we find that an increase in educational attainment, due to an exogenous secular education reform, decreases women’s propensity to identify themselves as religious, lowers their tendency...

In order to avoid both religious intolerance and religious indifference, we need to develop a positive notion of an open laicity or secularity that permits us to respect our religiously plural as well as secular contemporary situation. Open laicity or secularity is the practical and political consequence of a Protestant theology and spirituality. It represents a critical answer to the disaster ...

Contemporary philosophy of religion is often focused, at a theoretical level, on the epistemic value of religious doctrines, and at a practical level, on the possible impact of organized religion on secular society and politics. However, the cultic dimension of religion, such as prayer, religious service, ascetic practices, and other rituals, is considered as completely “irrational” and incompr...

Prior research suggests that religiosity, especially public religious participation, is related to greater volunteerism. However, less is known about religious transmission across the life course, in particular whether and how religiosity in childhood is linked to later life volunteerism. This study investigates a sample of emerging adults in South Texas (n = 701) with a high percent of Hispani...

The term ‘secular religion’ first appeared in the description of modern totalitarian ideologies but soon became a general category applied to other political, socio-economic and cultural phenomena. problem with this approach is inherent contradiction term, since ‘secular’ by all definitions means ‘non-religious’, making secular religion something like ‘nonreligious religion’. second wide range ...

Historically, marriage has always been at the center of a tension between religious and secular systems, which relationships tend towards influence and cooperation rather than exclusiion and separation. Religious law has given an input to the process of emphasizing the freedom of selfdetermination of indiividuals in marriage matters and promoted a woman’s recognition of an equal position. Marri...

Recent religious studies and international relations scholarship has highlighted secularism as a critical element in dominant modes of identity, power, and exclusion in global politics. Yet, the implications of these insights for global justice theory and practice have rarely been considered. This article suggests that the current dominance of secularism within global justice theory and practic...

I began my study of religion as a hobby years before I formally entered the academic world. During my informal studies I never gave much thought to just what religion is. I gleaned the bookstore shelves in sections marked " Religion, " never considering why some books appeared on these shelves and others appeared on the " New Age and Occult " section. My study of religion was simple — my concep...