Articles

Current discussions in the extreme right spectrum of society are strongly related to migration and its blanket rejection. It is still unclear to what extent these attitudes towards refugees and immigration are the first signs of a societal spread of right-wing extremist attitudes. It is also still unclear whether the polarisation of citizens in their attitudes towards flight and migration endangers the social cohesion or even the democratic political culture in Germany and encourages a radicalisation of parts of the population. A starting point for understanding these dynamics could be the references to the religious affiliation of refugees made in public debates.

Pickel, Gert, and Alexander Yendell. “Religion als konfliktärer Faktor im Zusammenhang mit Rechtsextremismus, Muslimfeindschaft und AfD-Wahl.” In Flucht ins Autoritäre: Rechtsextreme Dynamiken in der Mitte der Gesellschaft. Edited by Elmar Brähler and Oliver Decker, 217–42. Forschung psychosozial. Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2018.

Religiosity is the individual expression of the religious. Its diffusion in a population provides information about the social significance of religion in a society as well as about its current social depth. The structure and spread of religiosity also allows conclusions to be drawn about the legitimacy of religious communities. A church, for example, as a social form of the religious, can sooner or later only have social significance if believers exist in relation to it and if it represents a sufficient number of members.

Pickel, Gert. “Entwicklung der Religiosität in Deutschland und ihre politischen Implikationen.” In “Religionspolitik.” Edited by Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Special issue, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 68, 28-29 (2018): 22–27.

The number of members of the Christian churches in Germany is decreasing, while the number of people without a denomination is continuously increasing. This development can be understood as a secularisation process, but other interpretations are also possible. For example, although people without a denomination may keep their distance from the church organisation, they may still be individually religious. Most non-denominationals, however, are also non-religious or at least religiously indifferent. The most important reason for this development is the erosion of religious socialisation in recent decades. Even a not insignificant number of members of the Protestant and Catholic Churches in Germany describe themselves as non-religious or no longer believe in God. In the future it is very likely that the process of increasing de-denominationalisation and unchurching of Germany, which has been observable up to now, will continue.

Pickel, Gert. “Konfessionslose in Deutschland.” In Handbuch der Religionen. Edited by Michael Klöcker and Udo Tworuschka, 1–28. Bamberg: Mediengruppe Oberfranken, 2018.

The long unquestioned secularisation thesis of a progressive loss of significance of religion for politics is coming under pressure in the current discussions on integration, Islam, religious pluralisation and populism. This also raises the question of how religion and religiosity relate to the growing right-wing populist tendencies in European democracies. This article provides an overview of various studies on this issue, focusing in particular on the spread of right-wing populist attitudes among Christians.

Pickel, Gert. “Religion als Ressource für Rechtspopulismus? Zwischen Wahlverwandtschaften und Fremdzuschreibungen.” Zeitschrift für Religion, Gesellschaft und Politik, no. 2 (2018): 277–312.

Pilgrimage to religious sites and secular travel culture have been closely linked for many centuries in Japan. Pilgrims in the Japanese Buddhist context usually visit a series of temples that form a fixed set or ‘circle’ of Buddhist sites thought to be miraculous. The circulatory Buddhist pilgrimage to thirty-three sites in and around the old capital of Kyoto – the Saikoku pilgrimage – is one of the most enduring complex religious institutions known. The article examines possible reasons for the undiminished success of the pilgrimage, highlighting the role of foundation legends and miracle tales in the management of memory. The narratives reveal bureaucratic site administration and are connected to the act of mapping of paths both through the physical and the spiritually endowed landscape.

Triplett, Katja. “Approaching Emptiness: Buddhist Pilgrimage in Japan.” In Approaching the Sacred: Pilgrimage in Historical and Intercultural Perspective. Edited by Ute Luig, 59–89. Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2018.

The links between religion and urban space have attracted the interest of an increasing number of sociologists over the last decade. Starting from a critique of the assumption that urbanization leads to the decline of established religions, scholars have focused on the vitality of urban religion spawned by religious innovations, urban religious events, and transnational migration (Hervieu-Leger 2002; Casanova 2013; Orsi 1999). In order to analyse this complex context of multiple urban diversities emerging from new waves· of immigration, scholars have drawn upon the concept of superdiversity, coined by Vertovec (2007). Starting from the observation that the number and type of religious communities settling in European cities after the Second World War have multiplied spectacularly, in this chapter we explore how in contemporary European cities, different historical memories, each storing a variety of collective religious and secular experiences, are layered upon one another: materially and symbolically in architecture, immaterially in urban religious imaginaries, and socially through the coexistence of multiple religious mobilizations and expressions.

Burchardt, Marian, Irene Becci, and Mariachiara Giorda. “Religious Superdiversity and Urban Visibility in Barcelona and Turin.” In Religious Pluralism and the City: Inquiries into Postsecular Urbanism. Edited by Helmuth Berking, Silke Steets and Jochen Schwenk, 83–103. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

This paper takes the social constructivist approach, formulated by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, as a starting point for an investigation into epistemology and theorizing in the contemporary study of religion. It discusses various strands of scholarship in dialogue with social constructivism and questions in particular the reductionism of radical constructivist positions. Exploring the boundaries of the classical social constructivist paradigm, the article argues that students of religion should consider the implication of social, historical, embodied and material structures in the production of knowledge about religion. For that purpose, it draws on various soft realist approaches to stress the importance of remaining attentive to positionality (reflecting on the sites from where we theorize) and contextuality (reflecting on the inter-relation of discourse and materiality) in theorizing “religion”. Finally, the article suggests that soft realist positions can be integrated in a slightly broadened social constructivist framework for the study of religion.

Dressler, Markus. "The Social Construction of Reality (1966) Revisited: Epistemology and Theorizing in the Study of Religion." Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 2018: 1-32, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341434

The spread of Tibetan Buddhism to the Mongolian regions in the late sixteenth century did not only result in often violent confrontations be tween Tibetan Buddhist monks and Mongolian religious specialists, the male and female shamans, but also led to a reification process of local religious practices and concepts resulting in the creation of a single tradition on the discourse level. In my paper I will show how the ‘teaching of the shamans’ has come to be formed as both a concept and a practice in early-modern Inner Asia. By analyzing its discursive formation and entangled historical configurations, from late sixteenth century Mongolia to late nineteenth century Buryatia, the paper aims to shed light on the question how religious traditions are discursively created and socially affirmed.

Kollmar-Paulenz, Karénina. “Of Yellow Teaching and Black Faith: Entangled Knowledge Cultures and the Creation of Religious Traditions.” In Dynamics of Religion: Past and Present. Edited by Christoph Bochinger and Jörg Rüpke, 231–50. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017.

This text sheds light on the development of Monika Wohlrab-Sahr's work in the sociology of religion since the 1990s. It began with a comparative study on conversion to Islam and continued with research on secularisation and secularity in the GDR and East Germany. Parallel to this, conceptual and empirical essays on non-religiousness as well as on the conception, investigation and comparison of religious and non-religious world views were produced. These texts also address the question of religious-secular tensions and conflict zones, especially with regard to Islam. Under the label "Multiple Secularities", these works culminate in an attempt to compare different forms of secularity (defined as the boundary drawing between the religious and the non-religious) and their relation to societal norms. In cooperation with scholars of religion and area studies, the concept of secularity is further developed here with a global perspective and extended into the pre-modern era

Wohlrab-Sahr, Monika. “Von Konversion zu multiplen Säkularitäten: Wissenschaftsbiographische Anmerkungen und systematische Zusammenhänge.” In Religion soziologisch denken: Reflexionen auf aktuelle Entwicklungen in Theorie und Empirie. Edited by Heidemarie Winkel and Kornelia Sammet, 45–67. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2017.

The earliest extant medical handbook to be compiled in Japan, the Essentials of Medical Treatment (Ishinpo), quotes numerous texts from the Buddhist world, excerpts of medical writings from China, and Japanese prescription manuals. Tanba no Yasuyori (912-995), a court physician, selected passages from pre-Tang period Chinese literature and other sources and compiled them together in a monumental thirty-fascicle medical work that he presented to the imperial court in 984. The work is still extant today, but only in a few late versions. The best preserved copy of the complete set is the so-called Nakaraibon edition (with most of its scrolls produced in the twelfth century), which is categorized as a Japanese national treasure. This edition was copied, printed, and published by the Government Institute of Medicine in 1860. Even after the first print edition was produced, the scrolls themselves continued to be preserved in a closed archive until the Imperial Household Agency purchased them in 1982. A decade later, Maki Sachiko published a complete translation into modern Japanese and a critical text edition of the entire work. Despite its importance, the Essentials of Medical Treatment has yet to be translated in full into any Western language.

Triplett, Katja. “Using the Golden Needle: Nagarjuna Bodhisattva's Ophtalmological Treatise and Other Sources in the Essentials of Medical Treatment.” In Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources. Edited by C. P. Salguero, 543–48. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

This chapter discusses two academic strands with respect to scholarly attempts to identify the secular. Based on a review of criticism brought forward against the classical secularization thesis, it outlines, on one hand, what consequences have been drawn by descriptive and explanatory social scientists and how they apply notions such as secularity, secularism, and secularization today, and, on the other, examines the conceptual histories as well as distinct genealogical studies of “the secular” to explore the ways in which attempts to identify the secular may also imply an identification with or against the secular. Here, recent arguments concerning the importance of researching how worldview secularism and political secularism are both to be differentiated as well as historically intertwined are taken up. Finally, the chapter attempts to determine whether and how both academic strands can be brought together in research on the heterogeneity of religious–secular entanglements in the contemporary world.

Quack, Johannes. “Identifying (with) the Secular: Description and Genealogy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Secularism. Edited by Phil Zuckerman and John R. Shook, 21–39. Oxford handbooks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

This chapter examines the significance of Christianity in the public sphere through a case study of Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960)—one important Japanese Protestant leader—whose vision and activities had a formative influence and social impact during the first half of the twentieth century. As a prolific author, social reformer, evangelist, and public speaker, his influence extended far beyond the minority religious community. Under Kagawa’s leadership, counterpublics were forged and, on occasion, representatives of this minority tradition—so often regarded as peripheral to mainstream Japanese society—were also given a role to play in the dominant public sphere. This study highlights Kagawa’s distinctive contributions through a review of his activities in the changing political environments of Taishō democracy and wartime Japan.

Mullins, Mark R. “Religious Minorities and the Public Sphere: Kagawa Toyohiko and Christian ‘Counter-Publics’ in Modern Japanese Society.” In Religion, Culture, and the Public Sphere in China and Japan. Edited by Albert Welter and Jeffrey Newmark, 161–91. Religion and Society in Asia Pacific. Singapore: Springer, 2017.

The close relationship between patterns of immigration and the spread of the Catholic Church is well documented in many places—the United States, Canada, and Australia, for example—but it has been largely irrelevant for understanding similar developments in Japan until very recently. The arrival of migrant laborers from Catholic countries began in the 1980s and. over the course of several decades, has contributed to the emergence of diaspora religious communities within the church in Japan. This has created an unanticipated growth in the Catholic population and created new challenges for a minority church that, for the past half century, has focused on the task of "inculturation" and what it means to be a "Japanese" church.

Mullins, Mark R. “Becoming a Multicultural Church in the Context of Neo-Nationalism: The New Challenges Facing Catholics in Japan.” In Scattered and Gathered: Catholics in Diaspora. Edited by Michael Budde. Portland, OR: Cascade Books, 2017.

Yijing, whose family name was Zhang, was a native of Fanyang (now the Daxing district ofBeijing). When he was only seven years old, he became the disciple of the Buddhist monks Shanyu and Huizhi at the Shentong Temple in present-day Shandong. At the age of fourteen, he was ordained, and in his eighteenth year he first developed the wish to travel to the so-called Western Regions (meaning Central Asia and India). Inspired by his master Huizhi, Yijing became particularly interested in the monastic rules and regulations (vinaya), which he henceforth studied arduously. He realized his original dream oftravelingto the West when he was thirty-seven. 

Kleine, Christoph. “Healthcare in Indian Monasteries: Selections from Yijing's Record of the Inner Law Sent from the Southern Seas.” In Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources. Edited by C. P. Salguero, 145–60. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.