This is perhaps where the author's social diagnostics and religion-construction intersect most strongly: if the desire for reassurance has produced neo-fascist reassurance for some and thereby become a deadly trap for all those left outside the fascistic in-group, then perhaps effective response lies in a critique of that desire and a different emotional grounding for religion.
"Islam is a religion of construction.
The essays that follow consider the role of taxonomy and classification in the study of religion, the construction of difference, and the procedures of generalization and redescription that Smith takes to be key to the comparative enterprise.
The government issues standardized weekly sermons, and this year's topics have included "Islam Is the Religion of Building and Construction" and "National Products and Their Priority in Selling and Buying".
The government issues standardized weekly sermons, and this year's topics have included "Islam Is the Religion of Building and Construction" and "National Products and Their Priority in Selling and Buying". There have been sermons about conserving water and electricity.
Topics include secularization, the rationality of religious belief, the psychological pathologies, social functions, and political effects of religion, the social construction of identities, and international cinema as vehicle for the expression of "religious" and "secular" visions of transformation.
Humans settling down and starting agriculture was always supposed to have preceded the origin of religion and the construction of places of worship, let alone pilgrimage.
In a region where the sociology of religion shapes political expression, the construction of extreme and sacralised identities drives Hobbesian political mobilisation and brutal civil conflicts.
Holloway is in no doubt that Christianity, like other great religions, is a construction of human imagination, designed to cast light on the human condition.
And so at the edge of town, an "Esplanade of the Religions" is under construction, a sort of holy quarter in the fields that includes a mosque, a synagogue, a Laotian Buddhist pagoda and a $20 million Taiwanese Buddhist temple, said to be Europe's largest.
Of these constructions, "Religion(s)" and "Theology" are among the most notorious.
