ABSTRACT

To talk about religion is to talk about politics, identity, terrorism, migration, gender, and a host of other aspects of society. This volume examines and engages with larger debates around religion and proposes a new approach that moves beyond the usual binaries to analyse its role in our societies at large.

Formatting Religion delves into these complexities and demonstrates the topical need for better understanding of how religion, society, culture, and law interact and are mutually influenced in periods of transition. It examines how over the last two decades, people and institutions have been grappling with the role of religion in socio-cultural and political conflicts worldwide. Drawing on a host of disciplines – including sociology, philosophy, anthropology, politics, media, law, and theology – the essays in this book analyse how religion is formatted today, and how religion continuously formats society, from above and from below.

The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of religious studies, politics, media and culture studies, and sociology.

chapter 1|16 pages

Formatting Religion

The approach

chapter 2|20 pages

Sacralization and Desacralization

Political domination and religious interpretation 1

chapter 3|19 pages

A New Formatting

Myanmar’s 2015 ‘race and religion laws’

chapter 4|21 pages

Monitoring Religious Freedom

Persecution, documentation and the role of political facts

chapter 6|17 pages

A Time of Change in the Estonian Islamic Community

The question of power among the surrendered ones

chapter 9|14 pages

Salient or Silenced

How religion and terrorism are formatted in school