Search results

Your search found 22 items
Sort: Relevance | Topics | Title | Author | Publication Year
Home  / Search Results
Date: 2024
Abstract: Veganism, a philosophy and practice constituting the eschewal of all animal-derived products and forms of animal exploitation, has grown exponentially in the UK over the past decade, including among individuals of faith. This phenomenon has been increasingly studied within social science, but there is one area that is noticeably absent in existing scholarship: how religion intersects with veganism. Given the perceived centrality of animal bodies to Abrahamic religious observance, coupled with potential ethical similarities between veganism and religion as possible guiding forces in an individual’s life, this intersection is pertinent to study. I ask, how are Muslim, Jewish, and Christian vegans reshaping and redefining veganism and religiosity in late modern Great Britain? I recruited 36 UK-based vegans identifying as either Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, and conducted a multi-modal qualitative methods study in 2021, comprising interviews, diary methods, and virtual participant observation. I then thematically analysed the data, drawing on theories relating to Bourdieusian sociology, reflexive religiosity, and embodied ethics and values. This research reveals that religion and veganism are often mutually constituted, with veganism being understood by faith vegans as an ethical lifestyle that may be incorporated into their religious lifestyles. Religious ethics, values, and principles are reflexively interrogated, enabling participants to bring together faith and veganism. However, for many, religion is non-negotiable, so specific knowledge and support is sought to aid the negotiations that take place around religious practice. Through reflexive religiosity, religious practice becomes veganised, whilst veganism becomes faith based. I develop a series of concepts that help explain the characteristics of faith veganism, such as faith vegan identity, faith vegan community, faith vegan ethics, and faith vegan stewardship, as well as contribute new ways of theorising veganism: as transformative, mobile, reflexive, and more-than-political. Thus, this empirical study offers a new understanding of veganism, one that intersects with and is underpinned by religion, and which I term faith veganism.
Author(s): Tzuberi, Hannah
Date: 2024
Abstract: This article focuses on a multireligious building project named House of One in contemporary Berlin. Initiated in 2012 by a Protestant community at the center of Berlin, House of One consists of a synagogue, a church, a mosque, and a communal room. My central suggestion is that House of One is invested in a pluralist re-branding of (liberal) Protestantism, a rebranding that underlies the post-unification emergence of a new national German imaginary: out of “soil” marked as historically Christian spreads an “Abrahamic” future that transcends its particularity via its assumed ability to incorporate Islam and Judaism. Liberal, Christian-secularized norms and affects are thus being rearticulated in a language of religious pluralism, so that a normative, Christian-secularized category of religion can be extended to Christianity’s “monotheistic brothers.” Elaborations of this building project’s intended purpose, I argue, are thus animated by a broader question about the appropriate relation between religion and the state, and conjointly, between the self and culture at a moment in time in which hitherto normative, Christian-secularized assumptions concerning this relation are challenged. As such, the discursive representation that sustains the yet-to-be-built House of One is conducive to the making of a new national imaginary: it is driven both by the desire to renounce past evil through a recognition and inclusion of alterity into the body politic, as much as by the simultaneous de-politization and scrutinization of such alterity.
Author(s): Bharat, Adi Saleem
Date: 2020
Abstract: This thesis examines representations of Jewish-Muslim relations in contemporary French newspaper discourse, literary writing, and interreligious dialogue initiatives. Specifically, it analyses the extent to which a dominant discourse of inherently tense binary Jewish-Muslim relations exists and how individual Jewish and Muslim writers and interreligious dialogue activists navigate this difficult socio-political terrain. While I conceptualize some aspects of literary writing and interreligious dialogue as counter-narratives, this thesis does not simply seek to counterbalance the dominant narrative of polarization found in the media, but to demonstrate, first, how this narrative constructs public Jewish and Muslim identities and shapes the terrain on which interactions between Jews and Muslims occur. My thesis reveals that Jewish and Muslim writers and interreligious activists are deeply invested in challenging the oppositional model of Jewish-Muslim relations. However, my research also suggests that their level of success depends in large part on their ability to navigate normative understandings of Jewishness and Muslimness that are often overdetermined by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. First, this thesis traces how Jewish-Muslim relations are defined and constructed in the media, focusing on the national dailies Le Monde and Le Figaro due to their considerable agenda-setting and framing power as elite and prestigious sites of journalistic expression. Subsequently, I consider how a set of contemporary novelists, Emilie Frèche, Thierry Cohen, and Nadia Hathroubi-Safsaf, formulate their visions of intergroup relations within this broader context. The novelists in this project have been included in the extent to which their works can be read as—and often are explicitly stated by these authors to be—a set of political interventions into the contemporary and highly politicized category of Jewish-Muslim relations. Finally, I examine how Jewish and Muslim activists promote interreligious dialogue and the challenges they face in doing so within a French republican framework that privileges the non-differentiation of ethnoreligious specificities. I conclude that the initiatives most likely to effectively challenge the dominant model of polarized Jewish-Muslim relations in contemporary France are those that de-emphasize Jewishness and Muslimness as separate and mutually exclusive categories, and instead emphasize hybrid identities and shared histories, while adopting an embodied, differentiated approach to solidarity.
Date: 2022
Author(s): Törning, Lenita
Date: 2021
Abstract: This thesis focuses on young Christians’, Jews’ and Muslims’ experiences of interfaith work in the UK and what impact(s) being involved in interfaith might have on their religious, social, ethical and political identities. It is situated in a growing academic and policy interest in interfaith work as a means to build cohesive communities, mitigate tension and conflicts, and encourage active citizenship. It also engages with still under-explored questions around how young people active in interfaith work are affected by this activism. The aim is not only to understand how and why young people from different religions are involved in interfaith work, but also the impact being involved in interfaith work might have on young people’s identities and sense of belonging. Focusing on the biographical accounts of young Christians, Jews and Muslims involved in three different interfaith organisations in UK, the thesis explores how the young people have become interested in interfaith work; the relationships, messages and contexts that have been important in forging this interest and activism; what interfaith work means to them socially, theologically, ethically and politically; and the challenges they have experienced with this form of faith-based engagement. Drawing on Kate Tilleczek’s ‘complex cultural nesting approach’, this thesis attends to the young people’s complex personal experiences of interfaith work and the different social actors, contexts and frameworks that have been important in forming this interest. The thesis shows that, to understand young people’s interfaith work, we need a multidimensional approach that considers social and theological dimensions in young people’s lives; look at how interfaith work is a means to fulfil social and political goals, but also forms of theological commitment; and explore how challenges facing interfaith work inform young people’s experiences in different ways, particularly theological, social and political tension in relation to interfaith space, religious congregations and British society at large.
Author(s): Jansen, Yolande
Date: 2020
Author(s): Tiffany, Austin
Date: 2018
Date: 2018
Author(s): Borowski, Ephraim
Date: 2010
Author(s): Erlanger, Simon
Date: 2008
Abstract: The Muslim population in Switzerland has increased rapidly from 16,353 in 1970 to an estimated 400,000 persons today, while the general population grew from around six million to 7.6 million. The Jewish community today is some 18,000 strong, a number that has not changed since the 1950s. Whereas the Jewish community, given its small size and its age profile, is likely to shrink and lose influence, the Muslim community can be expected to become more influential. Already up to eight percent of the population in the large cities is Muslim. Muslims in Switzerland are younger and less well educated than the average, whereas the Jewish community is older than average and the best-educated group in the country.
The Muslim community in Switzerland is marked by extreme religious and ethnic diversity and hence, also, by a variety of attitudes toward Jews and Israel. There has so far been no openly anti-Jewish mass movement among Muslims with multiple hate crimes committed such as in France. Kurds, Turks, and Bosnians tend to be more secular and friendlier toward Jews than Arabs from North Africa and the Middle East.
There has been some cooperation between the Jewish and Muslim communities with the former even providing support to the latter. Certain Muslim groups want to learn from the established Jewish community how to gain legal, political, and social acceptance in Switzerland.
Muslims have not been the driving force behind the Swiss version of the new Europe-wide anti-Semitism. However, there is a growing radicalization of disaffected Muslim youth, with Islamism gaining ground among certain groups.
Date: 2011
Abstract: Читателю предлагается сборник интервью, записанных на протяжении последних лет, для того, чтобы показать участников исторических событий нашего времени. Среди них ученые, публицисты, диссиденты и общественные деятели. Они представляют свое видение украинско-еврейских отношений, формулируют актуальные вопросы сегодняшнего дня. Авторы не обходят «горячие точки» отношений, наиболее острые для украинцев и евреев.

Упомянутые в книге факты, а также опыт поиска взаимопонимания украинских и еврейских лидеров в последние десятилетия, по мнению авторов, достойны всеобщего обозрения.

Читачеві пропонується збірник інтерв’ю, які записані впродовж кількох останніх років, аби показати учасників історичних подій нашого часу. Cеред них науковці, публіцисти, дисиденти і громадські діячі. Вони представляють своє бачення українсько-єврейських відносин, формулюють актуальні питання сьогодення. Автори не обминають «гарячі точки» взаємин, найбільш болючі для українців та євреїв. Зазначені у книзі факти, а також досвід знаходження порозуміння українських та єврейських лідерів в останні десятиліття, на думку авторів, варті всебічного висвітлення.25 жовтня 2011 року в Києво-Могилянській академії відбулася презентація книги. Свої думки про важливість видання висловили Є. Сверстюк, М. Маринович, Я. Грицак, Й. Зісельс, К.Сігов, Ж. Ковба. Модератором зустрічі виступив директор Центру юдаїки і керівник проекту Леонід Фінберг.3 листопада 2011 р. Ізабелла Хруслінська, Петро Тима та Леонід Фінберг стали гостями програми “Вечір з М. Княжицьким” на телеканалі ТВі. Творці книги розповіли, чому вони зацікавилася українсько-єврейською темою, в чому особливість цієї збірки, зокрема, та міжкультурних взаємин загалом.