For the majority of cultures around the world, religion permeates and informs everyday rituals of survival and hope. But religion has also served as the foundation for national differences, racial conflicts, class exploitation, and gender discrimination. Indeed, religious spirituality, having been transformed by contemporary economic and political events, remains both empowering and controversial. Religions/Globalizations examines the extent to which globalisation and religion are inseparable terms, bound up with each other in a number of critical and mutually revealing ways.
As the contributors to this work suggest, a crucial component of globalisation - the breakdown of familiar boundaries and power balances - may open a space in which religion can be deployed to help refabricate new communities. Examples of such deployments can be found in the workings of liberation theology in Latin America. In other cases, however, the operations of globalisation have provided a space for strident religious nationalism and identity disputes to flourish. Yet in still other cases, as in Africa, religion has helped inspire racial healing. Has religion in fact been essential to globalisation, essentially preparing the ground for it? Insofar as globalisation has challenged the nation state, might it not also resist the ways religion has been pillaged and mobilised for nationalistic causes? Is there in fact a dialectical tension between religion and globalisation, a co-dependence and co-determinism?
A provocative assessment of a contemporary phenomenon with both cultural and political dimensions, Religions/Globalizations will interest not only scholars in religious studies but also those studying Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.
Contributors. David Batstone, Berit Bretthauer, Enrugue Dussel, Dwight N. Hopkins, Mark Juergensmeyer, Lois Ann Lorentzen, Eduardo Mendieta, Vijaya Rettakudi Nagarajan, Kathryn Poethig, Lamin Sanneh, Linda E. Thomas