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| Description | | - Selling point: Sheds new light on current events and politics
- Selling point: Essays by some of the world's leading scholars of religion and globalization
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The extraordinary changes in world society at the beginning of the 21st century have involved religion to a degree that would have amazed earlier observers of modernity. Within the past decade religion has been associated with some of the world's most strident forms of political encounter, including new movements of nationalism, the clerical leadership of political sects, and the religiously
motivated acts of terrorism. Religion seems to be trying to tear the planet apart, even as other cultural forces seem to be trying to pull it together. The technology of the Internet, film, television, cell phones, and other forms of rapid universal communication seem to be knitting the world into a single social fabric. Consumer franchises and popular culture seem to be making the world a single
global city. Religion seems to be at odds with all of this. Is religion the natural enemy of globalization? The essays in this volume explore the difficulties and possibilities of a diversity of religious groups occupying the same civil society. The authors avoid simplistic generalizations. Religion, they show, is not only identified with the culture and politics of the hostile anti-urban village
- it is not simply the jihad
that Benjamin Barber identified as the opponent of the homogenous global culture of McWorld. True, some religious activists have blown things up. But others have tried to smooth things over. Even the religious opposition to globalization is nuanced. Some violent activists (like Hindu extremists in India) want a new religious state. Others, like Christian militias
or al Qaeda, envision a transnational religious entity - a kind of religious globalization to supplant the secular one. Prophetic religious voices call for moderation, justice, and environmental protection. Religion, these essays demonstrate, plays diverse and sometimes contradictory roles in the new cultural globalization. In a global culture the shared values of different religious traditions
can provide a collective sense of virtuous conduct in public life. But religion can also support the position of enemies of global society - those who see in globalization the effort to impose the values and power of one country over the others.
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Readership: Scholars and students of religion, political science, international studies as well as general readers interested in gloablization
| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Edited by Mark Juergensmeyer, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Global and International Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara
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