Religion and its Conceptual Others
Ates Altinordu
The Incorporation of Religious Politics
Religious-political movements often arise as anti-system movements of protest. Their initial trajectory is thus characterized by cycles of conflict with state institutions and established elites, in which state repression and political mobilization reinforce each other. However, in some cases, the cycle of confrontation gives way to the gradual incorporation of the religious-political movement into the mainstream polity. After defining political incorporation by drawing insights form the field of immigrant incorporation, the paper offers a systematic critique of the “religion and democracy” literature. Based on the empirical analysis of the incorporation of political Catholicism and the Center Party into the German Empire (1887-1914), the paper takes a first step towards identifying the conditions under which such incorporation takes place.
Jeff Guhin
Aristotelian Resistance to the Secular
Debates about whether or not public education is effective hinge upon what public education ought to do, or, in other words, the kind of student that public schools ought to produce. What makes this kind of analysis difficult from a sociological perspective is the is/ought problem: to decide the relative success of an educational system, a sociologist must recognize not only what is happening at a school but also what ought to happen in order to create an appropriate measurement. However, a discussion of what ought to occur is politically and practically difficult, making an emphasis on procedure both easier to agree upon and easier to measure. Out of this common procedure, ideally, come results that everyone can be happy with. However, this is not always the case. This problem is obviously not unique to the sociology of education: in fact, contemporary ethicists are facing similar dilemmas, particularly regarding the somewhat controversial "virtue ethics." In this article, I'd like to look at how the discussions surrounding virtue ethics might illuminate a different approach on the is/ought problem in the sociology of education, pulling also from Durkheim's idea of a moral education.
Andy Junker
Eight Approaches to Nationalism and Religion
This essay considers how two fundamental categories of analysis, religion and nationalism, have been used together within the sociological literature. Recognizing that the meanings and applications of these terms within sociology are contested and vary, this essay identifies eight different standpoints on religion and nationalism that are relevant to macro theoretical understanding. All of the “standpoints” exist in the literature, although not necessarily in the combinations formulated here. Cataloguing discrete analytical approaches is useful to demonstrate their comparative viability, strengths and weaknesses; any of these standpoints might be employed in future research. In addition, the essay emphasizes those analytical directions that are relatively novel or that have not yet been well developed, in order to suggest new analytical orientations for empirical research.
Commentator: Prof. Ivan Szelenyi
