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When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted in 1945, French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain observed, “We agree on these rights, providing we are not asked why. With the ‘why,’ the dispute begins.” The world since then has continued to agree to disagree, fearing that an open discussion of the divergent rationales for human…
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Much feminist scholarship has viewed Catholicism and Shi’i Islam as two religious traditions that, historically, have greeted feminist claims with skepticism or outright hostility. Creative Conformity demonstrates how certain liberal secular assumptions about these religious traditions are only partly correct and, more importantly, misleading. In this highly original study, Elizabeth Bucar compares the feminist politics…
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This book contains essays on current projects from several rising figures in religious ethics, collected into a field-shaping anthology of new work. As a whole, the book argues that religious ethics should make cultural and moral diversity central to its analysis. This can include three main aspects, in various combinations: first, describing and interpreting particular…
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Banned in public institutions in France and Turkey, mandatory in Saudi Arabia and Iran, no other item of clothing incites such furious reactions. The Islamic veil – a catch-all term that encompasses everything from a simple headscarf to the all-covering burqa – has, over the past decade, become a heated battleground for debates on everything…
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For many Westerners, the Islamic veil is the ultimate sign of women’s oppression. But Liz Bucar’s take on clothing worn by Muslim women is a far cry from this older feminist attitude toward veiling. She argues that modest clothing represents much more than social control or religious orthodoxy. Today, headscarves are styled to frame the…
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Through an examination of publicly mourned gay deaths in America, Brett Krutzsch counters the common perception that LGBT politics and religion have been oppositional to one another. Dying to Be Normal reveals how gay activists have used religion to bolster the argument that gays are essentially the same as straights, and therefore deserving of equal…
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Because identification with and affect toward social groups is a primary heuristic for citizens, the social group profiles of candidates are important for electoral behavior. We focus on an increasingly important element of candidates’ social characteristics: their levels of religiosity and secularism. We argue that as religious groups and identities become structured less by what…
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Do female politicians serve as political role models? This paper is the first to employ panel data to examine whether the presence of non-presidential female candidates leads to an increased propensity for political engagement – specifically, discussion – among women. We hypothesize that younger people who are still learning and establishing political engagement habits will…
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This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-0961700. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We are grateful for the research assistance of Patrick Schoettmer and Jeremy Castle. Thanks…
