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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Gospels Of (Anti)Inequality: The Politics Of Biblical Interpretation In The New Poor People’S Campaign And Capitol Ministries, Jonathan Peter Tschudy
Gospels Of (Anti)Inequality: The Politics Of Biblical Interpretation In The New Poor People’S Campaign And Capitol Ministries, Jonathan Peter Tschudy
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation explores the role of biblical interpretation in the politics of inequality in the United States. Building on scholarship in American Political Development that identifies ideas as integral to institution building, I analyze the interplay between biblical interpretations, organizational structures, and political strategies within two contemporary religio-political groups: the New Poor People’s Campaign (NPPC) and Capitol Ministries (CM). Methodologically, I combine in-depth, interpretative readings of primary source documents with an historical institutional analysis of the secondary literature on the role of religion in American politics. I argue that the two organizations’ elite leaders – Reverends William Barber II and …
Closing The Chasm: Al-Fārābī On Islam And Politics, Onur F. Muftugil
Closing The Chasm: Al-Fārābī On Islam And Politics, Onur F. Muftugil
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Much Islamic history evinces a separation between religious and political registers of thought and action. To be sure, these two registers always remained, to some extent, mutually intertwined since the origins of Islam. However, in about two hundred years into Islamic history, or, in other words, in the 9th century, the political register based on coercion began to mark itself off from the moral concerns associated with the religious register. Political authority acquired an increasingly absolute character. It focused more on ensuring the obedience of its subjects than the moral/religious purpose of creating a just society where even the weakest …
Liberal Translations: Secular Concepts, Law, And Religion In Colonial Egypt, Jeffrey Culang
Liberal Translations: Secular Concepts, Law, And Religion In Colonial Egypt, Jeffrey Culang
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation is a conceptual history of Egypt’s national formation between the 1880s and the 1930s. This period involved the convergence of nationalism, colonial rule, missionary activity, and new modes of governance at the national and international levels. Drawing on state and missionary archival material, periodicals, legal compendia, laws, and parliamentary transcripts, and adapting methods developed by Reinhart Koselleck, I trace shifts within Egypt’s socio-political lexicon through processes of translation and demonstrate their effects upon social experience and political aspiration. I focus on a set of liberal-secular concepts critical to national politics—religious freedom, public interest, nationality, and the minority—as they …
Refractions Through The Secular: Islam, Human Rights And Universality, Zara Khan
Refractions Through The Secular: Islam, Human Rights And Universality, Zara Khan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Universal human rights (HR) are often theorized as philosophically neutral. Because they do not espouse any particular theory of the human being, it is argued, they can be reasonably appropriated by all. In this thesis, I explore HR’s universality claim, by focusing on the discourse’s secular foundation. In the universal human right to freedom of religion, I find a distinctly modern grammar of ‘religion,’ one that separates ‘religion’ from politics and power, law from morality, and the public and private realms. The modern concept of religion also espouses a secular theory of the human, insofar as the human is defined …
Religion Is Not The Answer: How To Turn Restlessness Into Meaningful Change - The Egyptian Conundrum, Alain C. Seckler
Religion Is Not The Answer: How To Turn Restlessness Into Meaningful Change - The Egyptian Conundrum, Alain C. Seckler
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The situation in Egypt and elsewhere in parts of the Arab world is to some extent reminiscent of the situation that prevailed before 1914 in Europe, where a motley array of unharnessed popular micronationalisms (today, instrumentalized religious fervor) combined with big power politics and interests and led to the cataclysm of war. With regard to Egypt, there is also a huge generational gap, with 2/3 of Egypt's population below the age of 35 years. The so-called "solutions" of the past, whether religious or secular, will no longer work if the voice of the young people is not heard by their …