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This paper unites disparate literature to test the influence of religious belonging and behavior characteristics along with secular welfare boundaries on anti‐immigrant attitudes. We suggest that welfare states varied in their religious foundations during the transition from religious‐based solidarity to modern state‐based solidarity and formulate a novel analytical framework to hypothesize effects across individuals and welfare regime types. Using eight waves of the European Social Survey (2002–16), we find that religious effects are strongest in welfare states with the most religious foundations, the Southern European welfare states, and weak in the universalist welfare states, which lacked historical state‐church tensions. Other welfare types show a mix of religious effects, with some challenging expectations. Furthermore, Christian majority membership is often associated with heightened anti‐immigrant attitudes, most consistently in contrast to the non‐Christian minority. For welfare‐based forms of inclusion, we find consistent institutional trust effects and two competing logics for secular boundaries: a propensity for welfare chauvinism and a culture of inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs symbolic boundary theory to investigate how a sample of radicalised Sunni and Shi'a Muslims in Norway make meaning of their views, behaviour and interactions with denominational others. It draws on 23 interviews with individuals who legitimise violence or are willing to use violence themselves to achieve political change. Research on boundary construction shows that the relative importance of boundaries varies across geographical contexts for different individuals. This article introduces the concept of 'multilocal' boundaries, which vary across contexts for the same individuals. The findings suggest that despite the boundaries being firmly agreed upon, their impact is limited by participants' avoidance of religion and politics, their need to stand together as a minority and the enforced laws in Norway. At the same time, these boundaries can remain largely undiluted in another context. The war in Syria and Iraq seems to strengthen the influence of boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In the past decades, Western European countries have become increasingly religiously diverse; furthermore, a growing share of their population is now youth with a migration background. Little is known about the role religion plays in social ties among children of native and immigrant origins. Purpose: This study examines religious group boundaries among youth in secondary schools in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. To this end, it describes to what extent youth's positive and negative ties in the classroom are segregated along religious lines. Furthermore, it analyzes the role of structural opportunities and religious in-group preferences in the formation of religious boundaries in the social networks of youth. Methods: The data come from the first wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries (CILS4EU), which contains more than 18,000 adolescents (aged 14–15) in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. First, we describe overall religious segregation in the social ties of youth by using the full survey data. Second, we test our hypotheses by analyzing the complete social networks of 5236 students in 247 classes. Results: The analysis reveals that friendships are more likely between classmates with similar religious affiliations than classmates with different religious affiliations. In particular, in terms of friendships, there is clear segregation between non-religious and Christian youth on the one hand and Muslim youth on the other. This segregation is partly driven by structural forces that constrain intergroup meeting opportunities. However, group segregation goes beyond the patterns expected from opportunities alone. The results show strong preferences for intrareligious friendships and a tendency to avoid ties between Muslim and non-Muslim youth. Conclusion and Implications: There are religious boundaries in the social relationships of youth in ethnically and religiously diverse school classes in Western Europe. In particular, social boundaries between Muslim and non-Muslim youth are the strongest. Creating opportunities for positive intergroup contact, such as the promotion of religiously diverse schools, apparently is not sufficient to avoid religious boundaries among youth. To reduce segregation along religious lines, interventions would also need to address the factors that shape youth's preferences for intrareligious friendships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between Evangelical Christian Zionists and West Bank Jewish settlers and its implications to the Jewish-Christian boundary. Significant contact with Christian Zionists has sparked a fierce debate among rabbinical leaders in the settlements, with some working to radically redefine the Christian-Jewish boundary and others attempting to maintain it in its traditional form. Thus, while some view the shifting of boundaries as a mark of the messianic era, others perceive it as a serious threat that must be opposed. Based on fieldwork conducted among rabbis and Christian Zionist volunteers, we attempt to demonstrate the ways in which Jewish theology is negotiated regarding the definition of monotheism, approaches to Christian missionary motives and the involvement of non-Jews in the Zionist project. Such negotiation of religious boundaries reflects the larger story of religion in the global age, a time in which boundaries are challenged and borderland identities abound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simply reading sacred texts across religious boundaries rarely achieves an “aha moment” or an encounter with ultimacy. The possibility of engaging with ultimacy requires establishing some necessary conditions. Any attempt to compel an experience results in false spiritual encounters rather than permitting authentic ones to occur. Therefore, a balance is necessary between being open to the possibility of a religious experience and seeking, but not forcing, an encounter with ultimacy. Placing oneself in a prayerful or spiritual state, for example, achieves the potential for encountering ultimacy by actively reading and meditating on various traditions’ sacred texts. These diverse writings relate others’ encounters with ultimacy and reveal multiple perspectives and imaginative descriptions of the transcendent. An encounter with ultimacy entails an open, willing, prayerful demeanor, intellectual curiosity, a rich imagination regarding divine imagery, and a sincere effort at understanding such a religious experience. A Christian contemplative process known as Lectio Divina satisfies many of these requirements. The method is general and flexible enough to utilize with sacred texts across religious boundaries; it invites a person to slow down, read, pay attention, respond with wonder, and humbly submit to the transforming presence and revelation of ultimate reality.

Issues of segregation and difference in early-modern Dutch Batavia prove harder to define once we move beyond the picture presented by colonial authorities and move away geographically from the centre of colonial knowledge production. Ethnic quarters were established in the colonial cities, but religious identities blurred strict racial boundary making. Three case studies demonstrate how new lines of identification and distinction emerged, which cut across formal ethnic classifiers. Colonial societies were extremely complex places, where race, occupation, religion, class, and legal status constantly interplayed and directed the definition of social boundaries. Instead of thinking in terms of ethnic segregation as presented in the colonial records, this contribution proposes to think in terms of 'moral communities'. By so doing, we might be able to balance better between 'Closeness and Proximity' in colonial societies. We can thus try to visualise colonial society not primarily as a hierarchical order with fairly strict or at least distinctive internal boundaries as defined by the colonial authorities, but as a society of different and overlapping socio-cultural spheres and as circles of trust rather than of bounded ethnic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of multiple religious belonging is studied from different perspectives, each of which reveals a different understanding of religion, religious diversity and religious belonging. This shows that the phenomenon of multiple religious belonging is challenging the applicability of these central notions in academic enquiry about religion. In this article, I present the different perspectives on multiple religious belonging in theology of religions and show how the understanding of some central scholarly notions is different. In Christian theology, the debate on multiple religious belonging is conducted between particularists, who focus on the uniqueness of religious traditions, and pluralists, who focus on the shared religious core of religious traditions. Both positions are criticized by feminist and post-colonial theologians. They believe that both particularists and pluralists focus too strongly on religious traditions and the boundaries between them. I argue that the hermeneutic study of multiple religious belonging could benefit from a more open understanding of religious traditions and religious boundaries, as proposed by these feminist and post-colonial scholars. In order to achieve this goal we could also benefit from a more intercultural approach to multiple religious belonging in order to understand religious belonging in a nonexclusive way.

This article examines evidence from plague outbreaks in Ottoman Anatolia and its environs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that psychological rather than religious factors explained people’s reactions to calamities such as plague epidemics. Ottoman archival and European accounts of responses to plague outbreaks indicate confessional boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims were rather fluid, thus undermining previous explanations that tied responses to plague to people’s affiliation with a religious group. Recent psychological studies on modern reactions to disasters help shed light on the choices Ottoman urbanites made when catastrophe was imminent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

th The insertion and establishment of Protestantism in the 19 century forged a new religious identity in Brazil. In the clash with Roman-catholicism, Protestantism and inversely Roman-catholicism built their identities in the différance, each one delimiting symbolic boundaries through discour- ses opposing one another. In this way, the roots of the Brazilian Protestant and Catholic identities are strongly marked based on the différance, that is, on the contrast: being Protestant simultaneously meant not only being Protestant but also being anti-Catholic; inversely being Catholic also me- ant being anti-Protestant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much contemporary scholarship in Religious Studies emphasizes communities who contest the standard definitions of their religion. However, religious labels and terms such as syncretism often implicitly validate the dominant definitions that identify these diverse practices as peripheral. This essay explores the challenges that the dominant definitions present to such communities and suggests an emphasis on agency and the contestation surrounding any definition of a religion to avoid privileging one definition of a religion and, thereby, to facilitate a more balanced analysis. The example of Sindhi Hindus illustrates the value of this emphasis on agency. Sindhi Hindu communities and individuals construct and defend their own definitions of religions in environments where non-Sindhis challenge Sindhi practices, which do not necessarily correspond exactly to the definitions that the Sindhis construct for themselves. Adding Bell's conception of ritual inscription to this discussion of agency further highlights how participation in practices commonly associated with different religions can foster internal tensions. Therefore, an emphasis on agency with its complexity and limitations enables scholars to recognize the internal pressures that exist in some constructions of religious practices without contributing to the external challenge from dominant definitions. This approach also enables a more nuanced analysis of processes of syncretism that are more complex than traditional applications of that term allow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]