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Sinceits founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.

Article 18 on the freedom of religion in the Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 presented religious studies with the task of rethinking its concept of religion. Through it, religious organisations were granted inviolable rights. Now religion is also manifesting itself in international religious NGOs, whose public activities have made them global players and, as a result, possible partners in or even opponents of states’ foreign policies. The majority of studies on religious freedom do not go beyond Article 18 and its emergence. They rarely examine the question of how it should be implemented in the further explanations and institutions of the UN and those of the EU, and thus constitute a void in research into the history of religion, religious sociology, religious studies and theology. In this study, the author focuses on how freedom of religion has been realised and regulated both in terms of universal and European human rights as well as in the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

When in the 1960s religious congregations were suffering from diminishing membership, the sociology of religion turned away from the study of organized religion in order to study private religiosity, even though new social forms of religion were emerging. The article addresses first the impact of globalization on the place of religious communities in the fabric of national and transnational society. Labor migration severs the individual from his or her transmitted loyalties and places him or her amid the risks of the labor market. Parallel to this, the nation state conveys public tasks into private hands in the realms of education, health care, social welfare, and sometimes security. Both changes open up new opportunities for religious communities. Second, the paper addresses the subjective side of the shift, focusing on the Abrahamic religions. They claim the promise given to Abraham—that he and his descendants will be blessed and become a great nation—for their communities. When the factual history contradicts that expectation, prophetic and apocalyptic visions of a bright future keep alive that faith. They summon the believers to fight for the well being of their community, to assist and support each other, and to claim public recognition for their community, since it is beneficial to the entire society. The article argues that this model of religious communality enabled believers in the past to appropriate official legal and social forms for their community. Max Weber in his Economy and Society also argued that religious communality remains a powerful social order in modern society. According to him its strength derives from the subjective religious expectations of social actors and the positive or negative impact their practices exercise on other social orders such as economy, family, state, and law.

An instruction manual consisting of four sheets in Arabic was found with three of the four teams that performed the terror attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. The writing conceived of the action as a raid (ghazwa), as we know it from early Islamic history. It instructed the teams how to perform the ghazwa correctly. Purifying their intentions by recitals, rituals, and bodily cleaning, they turn their attack into an act of worship. A part called the “second stage” anticipates the issue of assuring divine protection at the airport. Finally “a third stage” urges the teams to act in the plane according the practice of the Prophet and to achieve martyrdom. To understand the manual and its framing of the violence, six dimensions will be analyzed: (1) Arguments for and against the authenticity of the document are discussed. (2) The attack happened in the wake of a declaration of war by the “World Islamic Front for the Jihad against Jews and Crusaders” in 1998, signed by Osama bin Laden and leaders of other jihadist groups. (3) The message spread across the Internet and was accepted by various groups that regarded the situation of Islam as threatened, among them a group of young Muslim men in Hamburg. A network called al-Qaeda emerged. (4) The present world is dominated by the power of ignorance and hubris (jahiliyya). The manual prescribed an attack in terms of the raids (ghazwa) of the Prophet in Medina. (5) The manual presumes a particular communal form of organizing militant Muslims. (6) It celebrated militancy of Muslims and presupposed a fighter’s ethos in the diaspora. An argument is made that the American concept of terrorism as a manifestation of evil and immorality destined to be eradicated militarily by the United States and their allies ignores the secular character of conflict and accelerates the cycle of violence.

Current religious violence is a challenge to students of religions. Do we need categories like “cult,” “fundamentalism,” or “terrorism” in order to distinguish it from allegedly “genuine” and peaceful religion? Do monotheistic religions—with their exclusive claims to truth—necessarily generate intolerance? Sociologists have demonstrated conclusively that every action is based on a definition of the situation. Social actors do not put a norm or a model into practice independent of the immediate context of action. I argue that this holds true for religious actors as well. It is not the personal motive of actors, but the religious meanings they attribute to a conflict of their faith community, which is crucial for understanding religious violence.

Since the publication of the In Memoriam of Stefan George in “Understanding and Believing. Essays by Jochim Wach edited by Joseph Kitagawa” (1968), the George-circle is seen as a major source for Wach's understanding of religion. According to the author nature is not a realm of abstract laws but the place where the divine reveals itself in the physical. Yet the In Memoriam was not composed by Wach, but by Gerardus van der Leeuw in 1934 and happend, by chance, to find its way among the posthumous papers of Wach. From other statements we know that Wach rejected pagan conceptions of the epiphany of the divine. Nevertheless there exists an impact of the George-circle on Wach's sociology of religion. He was an early reader of Max Webers “Sociology of Religion (Types of Religious Communities)” (1921/22), in which Weber chose as perspective a growing disenchantment of the world. Wach adopted the typology, but rejected Weber's systematics. The reason can be found in his essay on the relationship between Master and Disciple from 1925. Here he analyzed the George-circle as a case in point that the charisma of a master possesses a metaphysical quality that is resistant against the power of disenchantment. In contrast to Weber who correlated the varieties of religious communities with social conditions, Wach studied them as variations of genuine religious expressions.

If participation in church activities is critical for the strength or weakness of religion, there is no denying that Europe comes off poorly. According to American sociologists of religion the rise of religious pluralism in the USA was due to the strict separation between state and church; it compelled congregations and denominations to compete for believers. The European case is different. Here the diversity of religions existed long before the modern period. Since its ancient beginning European culture sought its authorities outside its geographical confines. Greeks and Jews, Hellenism and Hebraism, Athens and Jerusalem, later Mecca and Islam became cultural points of orientation for people living in Europe. The article addresses the cultural and social processes that transformed these and other foreign religious traditions into typical European manifestations: the Roman legal system turned foreign religions into legal categories; it was modernization that led to the articulation of distinctly religious meanings of history and of nature; and it was the detachment from the church that provided the impetus for new societal forms of religion. Those processes are at the center of the European plurality and diversity of religions.