Religious Entanglements

Under the leadership of William F. P. Burton and James Salter, the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) grew from a simple faith movement founded in 1915 into one of the most successful classical Pentecostal missions in Africa, today boasting more than one million members in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Drawing on artifacts, images, documents, and interviews, David Maxwell examines the roles of missionaries and their African collaborators—the Luba-speaking peoples of southeast Katanga—in producing knowledge about Africa. Through the careful reconstruction of knowledge pathways, Maxwell brings into focus the role of Africans in shaping texts, collections, and images as well as in challenging and adapting Western-imported presuppositions and prejudices. Ultimately, Maxwell illustrates the mutually constitutive nature of discourses of identity in colonial Africa and reveals not only how the Luba shaped missionary research but also how these coproducers of knowledge constructed and critiqued custom and convened new ethnic communities. Making a significant intervention in the study of both the history of African Christianity and the cultural transformations effected by missionary encounters across the globe, Religious Entanglements excavates the subculture of African Pentecostalism, revealing its potentiality for radical sociocultural change.

Religion as a form of cultural expression constitutes a critical element in the relationship between Germany and India. The discovery of Indian traditions in Germany and re-interpretations of those traditions in India fueled not only new theological and philosophical explorations, but also extensive innovations in the fields of music, dance, bodily experience, and political intervention. Seeking to uncover the enfolding of colonial thought structures through presentations of the Self, while placing them in the context of global colonial value chains that connected the peripheries with the centre, this interdisciplinary volume addresses India through the lens of an entangled relationship. Adopting the position that the acceleration of communication, technical development, and colonisation locally triggered re-interpretations of the religious sphere, This volume takes a look at the period from 1800 to the end of National Socialism, tracing the strands of an Indo-Germanic religion in the making as it goes along. A special emphasis is placed on the artistic expressions of religious experience including re-enactments of musical compositions and dance configurations, which were created to embody India in Germany. This is an open access book.

This open access book brings into dialogue emerging and seasoned migration and religion scholars with spiritual leaders and representatives of faith-based organizations assisting refugees. Violent conflicts, social unrest, and other humanitarian crises around the world have led to growing numbers of people seeking refuge both in the North and in the South. Migrating and seeking refuge have always been part and parcel of spiritual development. However, the current 'refugee crisis' in Europe and elsewhere in the world has brought to the fore fervent discussions regarding the role of religion in defining difference, linking the ‘refugee crisis’ with Islam, and fear of the ‘Other.’ Many religious institutions, spiritual leaders, and politicians invoke religious values and call for strict border controls to resolve the ‘refugee crisis.’ However, equally many humanitarian organizations and refugee advocates use religious values to inform their call to action to welcome refugees and migrants, provide them with assistance, and facilitate integration processes. This book includes three distinct but inter-related parts focusing, respectively, on politics, values, and discourses mobilized by religious beliefs; lived experiences of religion, with a particular emphasis on identity and belonging among various refugee groups; and faith and faith actors and their responses to forced migration.

Born into a low-level literati family in the port city of Ningbo, the seventeenth-century Chinese Christian convert Zhu Zongyuan likely never left his home province. Yet Zhu nonetheless led a remarkably globally connected life. His relations with the outside world, ranging from scholarly activities to involvement with globalizing Catholicism, put him in contact with a complex and contradictory set of foreign and domestic forces. In Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled, Dominic Sachsenmaier explores the mid-seventeenth-century world and the worldwide flows of ideas through the lens of Zhu‘s life, combining the local, regional, and global. Taking particular aspects of Zhu‘s multiple belongings as a starting point, Sachsenmaier analyzes the contexts that framed his worlds as he balanced a local life and his border-crossing faith. At the local level, the book pays attention to the intellectual, political, and social environments of late Ming and early Qing society, including Confucian learning and the Manchu conquest, questioning the role of ethnic and religious identities. At the global level, it considers how individuals like Zhu were situated within the history of organizations and power structures such as the Catholic Church and early modern empires amid larger transformations and encounters. A strikingly original work, this book is a major contribution to East Asian, transnational, and global history, with important implications for historical approaches and methodologies.

Music, Education, and Religion: Intersections and Entanglements explores the critical role that religion can play in formal and informal music education. As in broader educational studies, research in music education has tended to sidestep the religious dimensions of teaching and learning, often reflecting common assumptions of secularity in contemporary schooling in many parts of the world. This book considers the ways in which the forces of religion and belief construct and complicate the values and practices of music education—including teacher education, curriculum texts, and teaching repertoires. The contributors to this volume embrace a range of perspectives from a variety of disciplines, examining religious, agnostic, skeptical, and atheistic points of view. Music, Education, and Religion is a valuable resource for all music teachers and scholars in related fields, interrogating the sociocultural and epistemological underpinnings of music repertoires and global educational practices.

How do people live together in cities shaped by inequality? This comparative ethnography of two African cities, Maputo and Johannesburg, presents a new narrative about social life in cities often described as sharply divided. Based on the ethnography of entangled lives unfolding in a township and in a suburb in Johannesburg, in a bairro and in an elite neighborhood in Maputo, the book includes case studies of relations between domestic workers and their employers, failed attempts by urban elites to close off their neighborhoods, and entanglements emerging in religious spaces and in shopping malls. Systematizing comparison as an experience-based method, the book makes an important contribution to urban anthropology, comparative urbanism and urban studies.

The moral values and interpretive systems of religions are crucially involved in how people imagine the challenges of sustainability and how societies mobilize to enhance ecosystem resilience and human well-being. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology provides the most comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field. It encourages both appreciative and critical angles regarding religious traditions, communities, attitude, and practices. It presents contrasting ways of thinking about "religion" and about "ecology" and about ways of connecting the two terms. Written by a team of leading international experts, the Handbook discusses dynamics of change within religious traditions as well as their roles in responding to global challenges such as climate change, water, conservation, food and population. It explores the interpretations of indigenous traditions regarding modern environmental problems drawing on such concepts as lifeway and indigenous knowledge. This volume uniquely intersects the field of religion and ecology with new directions within the humanities and the sciences. This interdisciplinary volume is an essential reference for scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities and for all those looking to understand the significance of religion in environmental studies and policy.