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Griera, Mar; Nagel, Alexander-Kenneth
In recent years, the growth and expansion of interreligious initiatives have received increasing scholarly attention worldwide, and interreligious actors and repertoires are gaining relevance within emerging governance regimes of religious diversity in Europe and beyond. However, empirical research in this field is still very limited. With the aim to fill this gap, this special issue gathers four original contributions aimed at critically describing, understanding and reflecting upon the rise of the ‘interreligious sector’ and its growing relevance to the governance of religious diversity in contemporary Europe.
Griera, Mar; Giorda, Maria Chiara; Fabretti, Valeria
Many European local governments are seeking out ways to encourage interreligious initiatives. This article focuses on the cases of Barcelona and Turin. Both cities are pioneering new forms of governance of the religious field in Southern Europe, while also being a source of inspiration for other cities. The article traces the genealogy of the institutional collaboration between interreligious actors and local governments, and develops a typology to examine how interreligious groups intervene in both cities’ public sphere. The article shows the crucial role of Catholic intellectuals and also of the celebration of the Olympic Games in fostering local dynamics of cooperation between municipalities and religious actors. The article concludes by arguing that the increasing securitarization of the religious domain in both cities have transformed the active involvement of interreligious groups in local governance into a process of domestication of the religious field.
Paulsen Galal, Lise; Lund Liebmann, Louise; Nordin, Magdalena
In the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, as elsewhere in Europe, governance of religious diversity has become a matter of renewed concern. A unique aspect of the Scandinavian situation is the hegemonic status of the respective Lutheran Protestant majority churches, usually referred to as ‘folk churches’, with which the majority of the population associates, alongside a prevalence of high degrees of regional secularism. As such, the majority churches have played a key role as both instigators and organisers of several interfaith initiatives, and have thereby come to interact with the public sphere as providers of diversity governance. Based on country-level studies of policy documents on majority-church/interreligious relations and field studies, this article sets out to explore the prompting and configuration of majority-church-related interfaith initiatives concerning church–state relations and the governance of religious diversity.
Körs, Anna; Nagel, Alexander-Kenneth
Religious pluralization in line with participatory policy approaches has led to a new field of cooperative governance of religious diversity. This article explores the collaboration between state and (inter-) religious actors in two metropolitan regions in Germany, namely Hamburg and Rhine-Ruhr. Drawing upon qualitative fieldwork, this article provides a systematic analysis of discursive and structural measures of state-interfaith governance in the two regions. It clearly shows that state-interfaith governance gains in importance and is practiced in various forms depending on the contextual setting. Based on this, comparative case analysis shows that state-interfaith governance in Germany is characterized by (1) a prominent role of the established churches; (2) a potential of accommodating religious diversity which is, however, restricted by a narrow orientation of the world-religion model and the predominant focus on Islam; and (3) takes place in a complex multi level setting which calls for further investigation.
This article analyses the governance of religious diversity in the United Kingdom by focussing upon a number of faith-based organisations undertaking interreligious and multireligious activities in and around the northern English city of Leeds. The piece opens by delineating the ‘UK religion policy window’ which has existed for a number of decades and comprises a range of changing political priorities and programmatic approaches that inform the governance of religious diversity in the United Kingdom. A subsequent section provides a detailed engagement with selected examples of multifaith activities and interfaith organisations in and around the city of Leeds. This grounded reading of exemplar organisations is then developed by a concluding section that reflects upon the mutually constitutive dynamics of contemporary governance mechanisms as they play out through the partnerships embodied by the interfaith sector and framed by the UK religion policy window.
This article presents an analysis of the role of emotions during the conversion process to a specific Tibetan Buddhism teaching – the dzogchen. It is based on qualitative data gathered from field research in France and in Italy amongst two organisations. I draw on Arlie Russel Hochschild’s interactionist approach to demonstrate that the aspiring convert carries out an emotional work on him/herself as a means of learning certain feeling rules proposed by the dzogchen organisations. This dynamic contributes significantly in the conversion process, which takes place during intersubjective interactions. Firstly, the ‘conversion agents’ use tools such as ‘training devices’, symbols, and a system that helps decide between the emotions to show and to avoid. This system stimulates the collective learning process of the dzogchen feeling rules by the social actor. Secondly, the dzogchen practitioners, by interacting with each other, learn to adjust their emotional behaviour.
Bokek-Cohen, Ya’arit; Ben-Asher, Smadar
This article demonstrates the contrasting experiences of military widows in the modern Jewish Orthodox and the Bedouin sectors in Israel. While fallen Jewish soldiers are honored in a fashion similar to martyrs, Bedouin fallen soldiers are perceived as anti-martyrs; their anti-martyr status causes predicaments for their widows. While Jewish war widows are glorified, their Bedouin counterparts are subject to various modes of marginalization and exclusion. The article offers Bourdieusian theoretical analysis of the differing status of the Bedouin war widows and proposes the concept of negative symbolic capital to describe a situation where a social agent not only lacks a certain sort of capital, but instead possesses an intangible attribute which is negatively sanctioned owing to cultural-specific beliefs, values, and circumstances. We demonstrate how widows who possess negative symbolic capital invest much effort in accruing religious capital, in order to cope with their excluded position as widows of anti-martyrs.
Molteni, Francesco; Biolcati, Ferruccio
Religious change continues to be a controversial topic that involves both theoretical and methodological issues. As to the European context, the main dispute is between secularization and individualization theory, especially considering the ‘believing without belonging’ thesis. This article will tackle this dispute given these three choices: firstly, we assume that cohort replacement is the main driver of religious change; secondly, religious tradition has to be taken fully into account to explain religious change; thirdly, we consider religiosity as a complex phenomenon that requires a multidimensional approach. Results from a multilevel multiple responses model based on EVS (European Values Study) data show that practice is declining across cohorts in all the countries whereas trends for belief and self-definition diverge only for Eastern Orthodox countries. Depending on the interpretation, such exception seems supporting rather than undermining the ‘believing without belonging’ theory.
Cardano, Mario; Pannofino, Nicola
This article deals with an aspect of religious behavior that has remained in the shadows, both in the scientific literature and in public discourse: deconversion from New Religious Movements. The article analyses the deconversion from a magico-esoteric community located in Northern Italy: Damanhur. Founded in the 1970s, Damanhur is one of Europe’s major spiritual communities that counts about 400 devotees. The article starts with an outline of the process of deconversion, followed by a brief description of the religious organization studied. Lastly, the process of disaffiliation from Damanhur, is reconstructed, through the close reading of twenty narratives of deconversion of former Damanhurians interviewed in 2010. The process of deconversion is analysed, distinguishing four ideal-typical steps that repropose the main results of the research in this field. They are the coming out of a vague and unfocused discomfort; the attempt to deconstruct the discomfort; the opening of a reflexive instance; and the departure from the community.
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