ABSTRACT
Over recent years, societies and scholars have increasingly expressed a need to negotiate religion – that is, to provide better accounts of, ways of engaging with and recommendations regarding the nature and role of religion in contemporary, often culturally diverse societies. These concerns respond to a number of developments that have made religious claims and actors much more visible in the public arenas that they had for a long time been absent from – or, at least, concealed within. For one, religious beliefs, practices and identifications have failed to decline in proportional relation to modernisation processes, as mainstream ideas about secularisation once anticipated and this has reopened questions about what the relationship between religious actors and cultures and contemporary indus - trialised and hyper-mediated societies really is. Scholars and social commentators have come to recognise the forms of religiosity that not only persist but are created or revitalised in the contexts of these modernities, as well as the role that globalisation and other processes have played in transforming religious experience and agency into distinctly ‘modern’ phenomena. The need to attend to the ways in which religion can be bound up with political upheaval, social division and violence has also been reasserted, sometimes dramatically and religion has thereby been brought back into debates about conflict, which had for a long time focused on other forces – nationalism, ethnicity, political ideology, economic inequality and so on. In short, whether seen to be enriching to human life and societies, challenging to them, or both, contemporary expressions of religion are increasingly recognised as being precisely that: contemporary; not a remnant or reawakening of a pre-modern past but a legitimate part of the present and the future, too.
