Religion, Power, andReligion, Resistance Power, • Anna Halafoff, Caroline Starkey, HanJamesSam and • AnnaStarkey, Caroline Halafoff, Spickard Religion, Power, and Resistance New Ideas for a Divided World Edited by Anna Halafoff, Caroline Starkey, Sam Han and James Spickard Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Religions www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religion, Power, and Resistance Religion, Power, and Resistance New Ideas for a Divided World Editors Anna Halafoff Caroline Starkey Sam Han James Spickard MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade • Manchester • Tokyo • Cluj • Tianjin Editors Anna Halafoff Caroline Starkey Sam Han Deakin University University of Leeds The University of Western Australia Australia UK Australia James Spickard University of Redlands USA Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Religions (ISSN 2077-1444) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special issues/ dividedworld). For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Article Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-03936-864-8 (Hbk) ISBN 978-3-03936-865-5 (PDF) Cover image courtesy of James Spickard: Church Candles. c 2020 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Contents About the Editors .............................................. vii Anna Halafoff, Sam Han, Caroline Starkey and James V. Spickard Introduction to the Special Issue: Religion, Power, and Resistance: New Ideas for a Divided World Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 306, doi:10.3390/rel11060306 ................... 1 James V. Spickard The Sociology of Religion in a Post-Colonial Era: Towards Theoretical Reflexivity Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 18, doi:10.3390/rel10010018 .................... 5 Federico Settler Curating Violence: Reflecting on Race and Religion in Campaigns for Decolonizing the University in South Africa Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 310, doi:10.3390/rel10050310 ................... 19 Tak-ling Terry Woo A Flexible Indeterminate Theory of Religion: Thinking through Chinese Religious Phenomena Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 428, doi:10.3390/rel10070428 ................... 33 Cristi´an Parker Popular Religions and Multiple Modernities: A Framework for Understanding Current Religious Transformations Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 565, doi:10.3390/rel10100565 ................... 53 Michael Perry Kweku Okyerefo Scrambling for the Centre: Ghana’s New Churches as an Alternative Ideology and Power Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 668, doi:10.3390/rel10120668 ................... 69 Rafael Cazarin The Social Architecture of Belonging in the African Pentecostal Diaspora Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 440, doi:10.3390/rel10070440 ................... 83 Hossein Godazgar From ‘Islamism’ to ‘Spiritualism’? The Individualization of ‘Religion’ in Contemporary Iran Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 32, doi:10.3390/rel11010032 .................... 99 Anna Clot-Garrell and Mar Griera Beyond Narcissism: Towards an Analysis of the Public, Political and Collective Forms of Contemporary Spirituality Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 579, doi:10.3390/rel10100579 ...................125 Peter Beyer and Lori G. Beaman Dimensions of Diversity: Toward a More Complex Conceptualization Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 559, doi:10.3390/rel10100559 ...................141 Alan G. Nixon ‘Non-Religion’ as Part of the ‘Religion’ Category in International Human Rights Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 79, doi:10.3390/rel11020079 ....................157 v Anna Halafoff, Heather Shipley, Pamela D. Young, Andrew Singleton, Mary Lou Rasmussen and Gary Bouma Complex, Critical and Caring: Young People’s Diverse Religious, Spiritual and Non-Religious Worldviews in Australia and Canada Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 166, doi:10.3390/rel11040166 ...................175 vi About the Editors Anna Halafoff, Dr., is an Associate Professor in Sociology and a member of the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University in Australia. She is also a Research Associate of the UNESCO Chair in Interreligious and Intercultural Relations—Asia Pacific, at Monash University. Her current research interests include religious diversity, preventing violent extremism, religion and young people, worldviews education, and Buddhism in Australia. Her recent books include The Multifaith Movement: Global Risks and Cosmopolitan Solutions (Springer 2013), Education about Religions and Worldviews: Promoting Intercultural and Interreligious Understanding in Secular Societies (Routledge, 2016 edited with Elisabeth Arweck and Daniel Boisvert), and Re-Enchanting Education and Spiritual Wellbeing: Fostering Belonging and Meaning-making for Global Citizens (Routledge, 2017 edited with Marian DeSouza). Sam Han, Dr., is an interdisciplinary social scientist, working primarily in the areas of social/cultural/critical theory, new media studies, and religion, as well as their various overlaps and nodal points. He is a Senior Lecturer of Anthropology and Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of many books, and recent titles include (Inter)Facing Death: Life in Global Uncertainty (Routledge, 2020), Technologies of Religion: Spheres of the Sacred in a Post-Secular Modernity (Routledge, 2016), and Digital Culture and Religion in Asia (Routledge, 2015) (with Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir). Caroline Starkey, Dr., is an Associate Professor of Religion and Society at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on religion in contemporary Britain, particularly in relation to minority religions and gender. Her monograph, Women in British Buddhism: Connection, Commitment, Community, was published by Routledge in 2020. James Spickard (Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology) recently retired from the University of Redlands, where he taught courses on social theory, research design, the sociology of religion, social inequality, and homelessness, among other topics. He has published six books and over 75 journal articles and book chapters on religion in contemporary society, human rights, social research, non-Western social theory, and the social foundations of ethics. He is President-Elect of the Association for the Sociology of Religion and Past-President of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on the Sociology of Religion. He is working on a book on religion’s future in the contemporary world. vii religions Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue: Religion, Power, and Resistance: New Ideas for a Divided World Anna Halafoff 1,* , Sam Han 2 , Caroline Starkey 3 and James V. Spickard 4 1 Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Highway, Melbourne, VIC 3125, Australia 2 School of the Social Sciences/Anthropology & Sociology, The University of Western Australia, M257, Perth 6009, Australia; [email protected] 3 School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK; [email protected] 4 Sociology & Anthropology, University of Redlands, 1200 East Colton Ave P.O. Box 3080, Redlands, CA 92373, USA; [email protected] * Correspondence: anna.halafoff@deakin.edu.au Received: 2 June 2020; Accepted: 18 June 2020; Published: 23 June 2020 The world is currently gripped by pressing environmental, social, and economic challenges. Many people have lost faith that existing power structures can handle them, but they have come to no consensus on solutions. We thus find ourselves in increasingly divided societies, riven by ideological battles for the future of the human and the more-than-human world. In its myriad forms, religion plays many roles in this picture. It can be an underlying source of divisions as well as a powerful means of addressing them. The sociology of religion is also changing. Scholars no longer see religion as centred only on churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, and so on, nor do they see it as simply focused on supernatural beliefs. Therefore, they now investigate folk religions, indigenous knowledge systems, contemporary spiritualities, and non-religious worldviews as well as formal religious life, and they look for new concepts to help them grasp this religious diversity. They discover that the old binary frameworks of ‘private’ vs. ‘public’ religion and ‘religious’ vs. ‘secular’ no longer so easily apply. Theoretical frameworks derived from one context cannot so simply be transposed to another. Lived experiences of diverse religious forms do not always match up with ideological or theological underpinnings. In short, we are living in a time of religious complexity, where religion plays a role in both creating and ameliorating conflict and division. The articles in this Special Issue were drawn from the July 2018 World Congress of Sociology—the International Sociological Association (ISA)’s 19th quadrennial meeting. They come from sessions organised by