When Ways Of Life Collide

In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered on a busy Amsterdam street. His killer was Mohammed Bouyeri, a twenty-six-year-old Dutch Moroccan offended by van Gogh's controversial film about Muslim suppression of women. The Dutch government had funded separate schools, housing projects, broadcast media, and community organizations for Muslim immigrants, all under the umbrella of multiculturalism. But the reality of terrorism and radicalization of Muslim immigrants has shattered that dream. In this arresting book, Paul Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn demonstrate that there are deep conflicts of values in the Netherlands. In the eyes of the Dutch, for example, Muslims oppress women, treating them as inferior to men. In the eyes of Muslim immigrants, Western Europeans deny women the respect they deserve. Western Europe has become a cultural conflict zone. Two ways of life are colliding. Sniderman and Hagendoorn show how identity politics contributed to this crisis. The very policies meant to persuade majority and minority that they are part of the same society strengthened their view that they belong to different societies. At the deepest level, the authors' findings suggest, the issue that government and citizens need to be concerned about is not a conflict of values but a clash of fundamental loyalties.

In Praise of When Life and Beliefs Collide.Sooner or later, life’s difficulties bring every Christian woman to God’s doorstep with questions too personal to ignore. “Why does God let me go through such painful circumstances?” “Why does he seem indifferent to my prayers?” We’re tired of spiritual pie in the sky. We want authentic, God-as-he-really-is faith—the kind that holds us together when our world is falling apart and equips us to offer strength and hope to others.When Life and Beliefs Collide raises a long-overdue call for us to think seriously about what we believe about God. With passion, brilliance, and eloquence, Carolyn Custis James weaves stories of contemporary women with episodes from the life of Mary of Bethany to illustrate the practical benefits of knowing God deeply. Examining the misperceptions and abuses that discourage women from pursuing a deeper understanding of God, this insightful book demonstrates how practical and down to earth knowing God can be.“This outstanding book offers the best demonstration that everyone needs theology, the best expository account of Mary and Martha, and the best trajectory for women’s ministry in modern North America that I have yet read.” —James I. Packer“Thoughtful, scholarly, and motivating . . . should inspire and encourage women for years to come.” —Joni Eareckson Tada“You will not think the same way, nor hopefully be the same, after reading this thought-provoking book.” —Vonette Zachary Bright“. . . affirms women in their calling, chosen-ness, and gifting, and makes us know we are cherished and planned for.” —Jill Briscoe

When Heaven and Earth Collide is an investigation into what went wrong in the American South in regard to race and religion—and how things can be and are being made right. Why, in a land filled with Christian churches, was there such racial oppression and division? Why didn’t white evangelicals do more to bring racial reconciliation to the South during the 19th and 20th centuries? These questions are asked and answered through an exploration of history, politics, economics, philosophy, and social and theological studies that uncovers the hidden impetus behind racism and demonstrates how we can still make many of the same errors today—just perhaps in different ways. The investigation finally leads us in hopeful directions involving how to live out the better way of Jesus with an eye on heaven in a world still burdened and broken under the sins of the past.

How should a liberal democracy respond to hate groups and others that oppose the ideal of free and equal citizenship? The democratic state faces the hard choice of either protecting the rights of hate groups and allowing their views to spread, or banning their views and violating citizens' rights to freedoms of expression, association, and religion. Avoiding the familiar yet problematic responses to these issues, political theorist Corey Brettschneider proposes a new approach called value democracy. The theory of value democracy argues that the state should protect the right to express illiberal beliefs, but the state should also engage in democratic persuasion when it speaks through its various expressive capacities: publicly criticizing, and giving reasons to reject, hate-based or other discriminatory viewpoints. Distinguishing between two kinds of state action--expressive and coercive--Brettschneider contends that public criticism of viewpoints advocating discrimination based on race, gender, or sexual orientation should be pursued through the state's expressive capacities as speaker, educator, and spender. When the state uses its expressive capacities to promote the values of free and equal citizenship, it engages in democratic persuasion. By using democratic persuasion, the state can both respect rights and counter hateful or discriminatory viewpoints. Brettschneider extends this analysis from freedom of expression to the freedoms of religion and association, and he shows that value democracy can uphold the protection of these freedoms while promoting equality for all citizens.

The book is an anthology of seven critical essays on the work of Mirza Ghalib, and considers a number of issues such as comparisons between him and Muhammad Iqbal, William Shakespeare and John Donne. It also foregrounds the most distinguishing features in his poetry, including his art of dialectical poetics, the obsession with the theme of death throughout his poetry, and the representation of Karbala and Ahle-Bayt in his work. The book thus highlights the different shades of meaning in both his poetry and letters. These myriad shades are embedded in Ghalib’s vision of life. Like Shakespeare and Sophocles, Ghalib details the colourfulness of life in all its horror and glory. Just as life itself is colourful in its myriad shades, Ghalib’s poetry offers us a vision of life which is pluralistic, multifarious and universal at the same time.

Written by the team carrying out the EVS surveys in France, this book contrasts with the popular belief that values are converging. It demonstrates that increasingly individualized value systems do not necessarily mirror a more individualistic society.

The Yearbook of Muslims in Europe provides up-to-date factual information, statistics and analysis of the situation of Muslims in 46 European countries.

Intergroup competition and conflict create pervasive problems in human society, giving rise to such phenomena as prejudice, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and interstate war. Citizens, policy makers, social workers, schoolteachers, and politicians wrestle with these problems, and with difficult questions these issues pose: What causes conflict to escalate? How should we manage conflict within communities, and also in society at large? Is conflict always bad, or does it have other more beneficial consequences? Social Conflict within and between Groups provides an overview of contemporary research from the social sciences on these questions. It brings together the research output of a number of leading researchers in psychology, management and economics, sociology and political science, and draws on the outcomes of ten prominent research programs conducted over the past five years. The chapters cover a range of fascinating topics, including prejudice and discrimination in multi-ethnic societies, and conflict and negotiation in the field of industrial relations. The authors also consider the possibilities for intervention at the interpersonal, intergroup and societal level. This is the first volume to provide an interdisciplinary overview of the various scientific approaches to studying the origins and consequences of social conflict. It will be of great interest to researchers, graduates and upper-level undergraduate students from across the social and behavioural sciences.