The political geographies of religious sites in Moscow’s neighborhoods

Abstract

This paper addresses the spatial politics of Russia’s increased religiosity in Moscow. It analyzes the rights of minority Muslim communities within the context of increased political support for expressions of Russian Orthodoxy in Moscow’s public space. Moscow’s Russian Orthodox and Muslim religious leaders claim that their communities have a lack of religious infrastructure, with one church per 35,000 residents and one mosque per three million residents, respectively. The Russian Orthodox Church has been more successful than Muslim organizations at expanding their presence in Moscow’s neighborhoods. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, religious spaces are examined as sites of dissent as well as participatory, active citizenship at three different sites in Moscow. Protests over Russian Orthodox Church construction in one neighborhood are contrasted with the protests over mosque construction in two neighborhoods. This paper provides insights into how civil society and religious groups have increased their public presence in Moscow and shows the unequal access that different groups have to public space in that city.     

Divided by faith—The impact of religious affiliation on ethnic segregation

Abstract

This paper re-examines a theme that has long permeated human geography research—that of ethnic minority segregation. However, this re-examination is carried out with an awareness of the internal religious composition of ethnic populations. The paper contends that religion is an important factor that needs to be considered in any understanding of ethnic segregation. This argument is supported by an investigation of Indian and Pakistani residential segregation in the Scottish cities of Dundee and Glasgow. This investigation assesses whether Indian residents of different faiths (Hindu, Muslim and Sikh) have divergent experiences of segregation. The concept of segregation is further explored by using the P? segregation index alongside the Index of Dissimilarity (ID). This highlights the everyday realities of segregated ethnic-faith group geographies in terms of neighbourhood interaction and thus investigates the degree to which ethnic-faith groups are segregated from each other as well as from the overall population.     

Religiosity or racism? The bases of opposition to religious accommodation in Quebec

Though Canada is internationally lauded for the success of its multiculturalism policies, debates about immigrant integration have arisen in recent years. These debates have turned on the extent to which religion should be accommodated in the public sphere. They have also been disproportionately concentrated in the French‐speaking province of Quebec. This paper asks whether this disproportionality is due to the Quebec population being particularly unfavourable to religious accommodation and, if so, whether this disfavour is grounded in racial antipathy toward newcomers or in the province's unique religious history. The findings show that while opposition to religious accommodation is higher in Quebec, and higher among francophones, it is rooted more in the low level of religiosity of the francophone population than in racial animus. These results emphasise the importance of correctly conceptualising distinctions between ethnocentric and culturally based sources of group conflict in multicultural settings such as Canada.     

The kingdom's two bodies? Corporeal rhetoric and royal authority during the religious wars

The conventional discourse of the body politic assumed a peculiarresonance during the French religious wars due to the uniqueidentification of the king with the well-being of his kingdom.The duality of this relationship was echoed in the languageand imagery of corporeal rhetoric which infused the declarationsof all sides during the conflict. The combined threat of heresyand civil war, and the shared imperative to defend the unityand integrity of the kingdom, lent a renewed relevance, butalso a profound discord, to this rhetoric. While opinions differedabout the best means to cure France's ills—the royal policyof pacification being the most controversial of them—monarchicalauthority was bolstered by the king's undisputed role as headof the body politic and protector of, and physician to, hisrealm.     

‘Con il volere di Dio’: Bernardo Provenzano and religious symbolic ritual

This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to analyse the symbolic religious language utilised by mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano in his social interactions with the lower echelons of the Sicilian mafia. When Provenzano assumed control of Cosa Nostra in the 1990s, he inherited an organisation severely diminished by a decade of internal conflicts, violence and the arrest of numerous leaders. The article argues that religious performative behaviour and language were used by the mafia boss to establish his leadership over Cosa Nostra, reshape its internal structure, and thereby revitalise an organisation in apparent terminal decline.     

Moderation and religious criticism in William Cartwright’s The Ordinary (1635)

Building on the recent revival of critical interest in the drama of William Cartwright, this article explores the politics of religious moderation in his 1635 play The Ordinary. I situate the concept of moderation in Caroline England in relation to recent historical work on the subject, examining how Cartwright treats the subject in his poetry, where he argues that religious extremism inhibits the proper articulation of moderate politics. I then consider religious criticism in The Ordinary, suggesting that it attacks aspects of Puritan and Arminian theology alike. Although he ranges over a number of topics, Cartwright is particularly concerned with the way in which religious innovation is undermined by economic unfairness, incompetence, and greed. The play shows how Caroline comedy engages with polemical culture in subtle and sophisticated ways.     

Bibliography of articles and books dealing with seventeenth-century religious thought, 1975–1980

This essay examines Tocqueville's conception of the “social” against the background of debates over the relationship between the social and the political in France from the Revolution to mid-century. It focuses on three groups: those associated with the social philosophy of industrialisme, those concerned with the evils of pauperism from the standpoint of Catholic social reform, and those allied with the new Doctrinaire view of society and politics. It argues that Tocqueville consistently resisted the primacy of the “social” as articulated by these thinkers, even in the seductive form offered by François Guizot, whose influence on Tocqueville is examined in light of recent debates over this issue.     

A “Theological Junto”: the 1641 Lords’ subcommittee on religious innovation

Abstract

The 1641 Lords’ sub-committee on religious innovation has never been the focus of a dedicated study, despite its acknowledged significance. This article presents the sub-committee as an attempt to control parliamentary discussion of the Church. Its membership was carefully selected to ensure that it would have an anti-Arminian bias. Its discussions addressed a wide range of doctrinal and liturgical questions. The Conformist members of the sub-committee were attempting to re-assert the Reformed identity of the English Church, and roll back the doctrinal and liturgical developments of the 1630s. However, despite the political crisis, they were not prepared to give much ground to Puritan opinion. The sub-committee therefore illustrates the strength of commitment, even amongst leading Reformed theologians, to the idiosyncratic aspects of the English Church Settlement. It is therefore a significant witness to the development of English Conformist opinion.     

The long road to religious toleration: Emeric Crucé predecessor of the enlightenment

ABSTRACT

Le Nouveau Cynée has been neglected and little cited by Anglo-American historians of political thought, and its author, Emeric Crucé, considered a secondary figure and nearly forgotten. Why is he largely ignored if his book offers the broadest notion of toleration of its time, along with new and original proposals to make peace and organize the world without distinction as to religion and race? Indeed, his peace plan compared with Sully’s, Saint-Pierre’s or Leibniz’s was the only one not addressed exclusively to Christians, but which incorporated all kinds of people, no matter what their religion was. And he did so at a time when the Turks were considered by Christian kings to be their natural enemies, since their threat to Christianity was constant. Besides, his concept of toleration goes beyond that of the so-called champions of toleration of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as Locke, Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, Rousseau or Kant. Thus, he can be regarded, along with Spinoza, as one of the most tolerant authors prior to Enlightenment.     

City with or without God? Features of post-secularism in religious landscape of post-communist Prague

The religious climate caused significant changes over the last few decades which led to intense debates about post-secularism in Western Europe. However, there is particularly a distinct lack of analyses of the features of post-secularism in post-communist cities. The paper draws on the case study of Prague where the religious landscape is in many ways unique in a European context because of its highly secularized society. Nevertheless, Prague also experienced a revival of religious life, which has found expression in the religious landscape (not only) through the emergence of new sacral structures, pluralization of religion and post-secular rapprochement in religious institutions. The paper examines the convergent and contradictory processes shaping the religious and non-religious landscape in Prague and therefore opens the discussion about post-secularism in post-communist context. The results point to the importance of historical, social, and urban development for the new geographies of religion. New areas of research should also draw attention on the new religious movements and alternative spirituality which helps to explain the relationship between sacred and secular phenomena in current European society and space and the re-definition of the minority role of religion in the secular society.     

The Catholic Church,religious Revival,and the nationalist movement in East Timor, 1975–98

’We have nothing left to lose. We are human beings and they have treated us like insects. We will never accept them here. Even if we have to die resisting, we will resist. We have our dignity and our own identity. And God is with us!‘     

The religious self-alteration of Shem Irofa'alu during the anti-colonial Maasina Rule in Solomon Islands (1944–1953)

This essay explores the post-World War Two anti-colonial Maasina Rule in north Malaita, Solomon Islands, to show how a church leader Shem Irofa'alu decided to establish a religious movement independent of the state and the traditional evangelical church. Irofa'alu's movement indexes an important moment of culture change towards increasing enthusiasm for the often-overlooked Christianity-based forms of sovereignty in the region. It highlights that Maasina Rule was not only a powerful rupture in social processes, but also sharpened the growing division between state and church. Irofa'alu's role in Maasina Rule shows that his influence peaked between 1948 and 1950 and then went into rapid decline. This change in fortune coincided with a critical turning point in the colonial government's attempts to end the movement through appeasement. No longer the head of the evangelical church in Malu'u sub-district and frustrated about the mother church's governance, Irofa'alu retreated to his home area and set about establishing a new church, Boboa (‘Foundation’), his first attempt at organizing a self-governing assembly before introducing Jehovah's Witnesses in north Malaita. In later years, Irofa'alu became a prophet-exemplar for new generations of religious leaders trying to establish Malaitan sovereignties based on their own power to move the truth of prophecies away from foreign state and church organizations.     

Exploring Tibetan religious transmission from generational perspective in modern China——A case study of Jiuzhaigou National Park

Since the Reform and Opening-up in 1978,Tibetan area has been through a rapid social,cultural and economic change.A number of studies have focused on economic development1,Tibetan modernization2,educational development2 and women's changing status4 etc.As heated topics,cultural protection and inheritance have also been explored a lot5.     

The religious geography of Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode”: popery,presbytery, and parti-coloured picts

ABSTRACT

Marvell’s “Ode” (1650) is an English poem about a British problem – a problem further problematized by religion. The “Ode” lauds Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns, but English responses to these “colonial” wars were in reality complicated by protestant infighting among presbyterians, independents, and sectarians. Writers like Milton and Nedham rallied English support for Cromwell’s Irish campaign by recycling Spenserian stereotypes of Irish catholic barbarity. But Milton and Nedham also undercut English protestant unity by flinging these same anti-catholic stereotypes at Scottish presbyterians in Belfast and Edinburgh. Departing from previous studies, this article argues that Marvell’s “Ode” eschews Milton and Nedham’s anti-Presbyterianism in ways calculated to elide, rather than divide, protestant communities. The article explores how the “Ode” presents Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns as exclusively anti-catholic (rather than anti-presbyterian) crusades, comparing Marvell’s presentation of Cromwell in the “Ode” with his identification of Cromwell as an anti-catholic crusader in “First Anniversary” (1655). Both poems anticipate in this respect Marvell’s later anti-catholic, but pro-nonconformist, approach to Ireland in Rehearsal transpros’d (1672–1673). The article is therefore concerned to root Marvell’s post-Restoration commitment to protestant tolerationism within the anti-catholic language of the “Ode”.     

‘Highway to Heaven’: the creation of a multicultural,religious landscape in suburban Richmond,British Columbia

We analyse the emergence of the ‘Highway to Heaven’, a distinctive landscape of more than 20 diverse religious buildings, in the suburban municipality of Richmond, outside Vancouver, to explore the intersections of immigration, planning, multiculturalism, religion and suburban space. In the context of wider contested planning disputes for new places of worship for immigrant communities, the creation of a designated ‘Assembly District’ in Richmond emerged as a creative response to multicultural planning. However, it is also a contradictory policy, co-opting religious communities to municipal requirements to safeguard agricultural land and prevent suburban sprawl, but with limited success. The unanticipated outcomes of a designated planning zone for religious buildings include production of an agglomeration of increasingly spectacular religious facilities that exceed municipal planning regulations. Such developments are accommodated through a celebratory narrative of municipal multiculturalism, but one that fails to engage with the communal narratives of the faith communities themselves and may exoticize or commodify religious identity.     

The British Pharaoh?: James I and VI and internationalist religious writing at the wedding of Friedrich V and Elizabeth Stuart

The marriage of Elizabeth Stuart and Friedrich V, Prince Palatine, has recently been described as “the pinnacle of Protestant European festival,” a transnational, transcultural event celebrated throughout Protestant Europe. Politically, it marked a high point of internationalist Protestant sentiment in England. In this article, I examine three sermons preached for the occasion, by the court preacher Andrew Willet, the Wiltshire parson George Webbe, and Friedrich’s court chaplain, Abraham Scultetus. All three use the wedding to advocate an internationalist agenda and subtly critique the Church of England. This is done, in part, through a shared typological understanding of the event based on Psalm 45, read by early moderns as a song on the marriage of Solomon and Pharaoh’s daughter, which aligns James with an idolatrous Pharaoh. Their interpretation of the marriage implicitly anticipates a move toward the pure biblical worship practiced by the continental reformed churches, and shifts the focus of Pan-Protestant hopes from London to Heidelberg.