This article explores the labeling of the iPhone as the ‘Jesus phone’ in order to demonstrate how religious metaphors and myth can be appropriated into popular discourse and shape the reception of a technology. We consider the intertextual nature of the relationship between religious language, imagery and technology and demonstrate how this creates a unique interaction between technology fans a...

Introduction This chapter considers social patterns that contribute to shaping the position of women in Arab societies today. It focuses on the impact of two central sources of influence: cultural and especially religious heritage and Arab intellectual production. Culture plays a pervasive role in composing the social context of women's position in the Arab world, and religious interpretations ...

The recent incident of a priest in the Syriac Orthodox church encouraging two parents not to baptize their new born child with an ancient Assyrian name can either be interpreted as an isolated phenomenon, or, which I will stress here, a form of religious conservatism positioning itself against modernism. In order to do demonstrate my thesis, I will first start with describing the role of religi...

Critics of Hindutva nationalism see it as either an elite conspiracy or a mass political movement with no necessary relation to the Hindu faith. I focus instead on its ideological deployment, treating it as a modern religious construction of Hinduism that legitimates capitalism—much like Christianity in the 17th and 18th century. I mobilize Slavoj Žižek, Erenesto Laclau, and Louis Althusser’s t...

asha, meaning order and honesty as apposed to anarchy and hypocrisy is the most significant principle of the anciant persian religion . there are some events and tales they are coloured by the asha principle . the manifestation of asha in such cases is the result of a certain religious experience known as the exegetic experience . the exegetic experience is in fact a religious interpretation an...

Empirical research on fundamentalist biographies—presented are three case studies and a summary of research results—demonstrate the complex biographical-motivational factors for fundamentalist turns, but also a transformational potential. Explaining fundamentalist conversion and deconversion within a theoretical framework of fundamentalism as “modern anti-modernism” and as “dislocation of relig...

Trust is a critical aspect of social interaction. One might predict that individuals trust religious out-groups less than religious in-groups, and that costly signals performed by members of religious in-groups increase trust while costly signals performed by members of religious out-groups decrease trust. We examined how Christian participants perceived the trustworthiness of Muslim and Christ...

The paper analyzes the relation between religious beliefs, religious participation and social cooperation. In particular, we focus on religions that instill beliefs about the connection between rewards and punishments and social behaviour. We show how religious organizations arise endogenously, analyze their e¤ect on social interactions in society and identify a "spiritual" as well as a "materi...

the main purpose of this study is to comparative of two alternative approaches capabilities in the field of religious education pathology. salafism and fundamentalism is moving toward quasi education in religious education; but religious traditionalism and post revivalism can be adopted an alternative approach to religious education. critical analysis and interpretation of concept method used i...