Libri sul tema "Education (Sectarian)"

The history of education is enmeshed with the growth and final crisis of the Ancien Régime. The rapid expansion of the state, and the vigour of international competition in the eighteenth century, interlocked with educational change. Struggles between church and state for the control of schools and pupils were vital for the making of well-trained armies and docile peasants. The vast and complex international intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment is incomprehensible without a history of education. It is from sectarian conflicts under the French Third Republic that the history of education has evolved many of its traditional themes: institutions, literacy, ideologies, religion, curriculum, personnel, and young and not so young learners.

The debate over religion in public schools in the United States since the 1960s has pitted two forces of democracy celebrated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract against each other. The Supreme Court’s exclusion of sectarian prayer and Bible reading reflected democracy’s commitment to respect the rights of all. The politically engaged response of evangelical and conservative Christians has drawn upon democracy’s need for robust participation by ordinary citizens. While Rousseau believed that only an agreement upon a civil religion could reconcile these democratic forces, the results of a required world religions course in Modesto, California, suggests otherwise. The course enhanced students’ respect for religious liberty while allowing them to maintain their sectarian beliefs. Modesto’s course did not resolve all the dilemmas of democracy, however. The aversion to open-ended class discussions neglects the value of democratic deliberation that notable democratic theorists like Jurgen Habermas and Amy Gutmann celebrate.

Modern Buddhist education in Asia is an organic part of the project of Buddhist modernization pursued by a number of Buddhist reformers, often as a response to the challenges of imperialism, capitalism, and Christian proselytism. While in some cases (notably in colonial Burma) the resistance to colonialism could translate into the resistance of the monastery schools to the introduction of “modern” subjects, in most cases Buddhist educational systems attempted to reinvent themselves, using modern techniques of teaching and evaluation as well as modern institutional forms—for example, that of a sectarian Buddhist university. Such a reinvention brought considerable successes in many places, notably Japan and South Korea, but modernization success is rife with inherent pitfalls. Once integrated into standardized modern educational marketplace, Buddhist educational institutions risk quickly losing their specifically religious character, with religion remaining as simply one compartmentalized and professionalized subject. In the countries where modernization has been state-driven (typically, People’s Republic of China), Buddhist educational modernization often implies close cooperation with—and ultimately co-optation by—the state institutions.

Advocates of religious schooling have frequently had to answer the charge that what they supported was un-American. In a book that is more than just a history, Jones tries to make sense of that charge by tracing the development of religious schooling in America over the last 125 years. He explores the rationale for religious schooling on the part of those who choose it for their children and in terms of its impact on communities, and he considers the arguments of those who criticize such schools for undermining efforts to promote national unity. The book focuses on the gradual embrace of sectarian schooling by different religious communities in America, particularly Catholics, Jews, and later, conservative Protestants (mainly in the form of homeschooling). It also considers Muslim schools, not currently a force in private schooling or the subject of much debate, but perhaps next in line to make their case for a place in America's educational landscape. Near the end of the 19th century, publicly financed, publicly administered schooling emerged as the default educational arrangement for American children. But this supremacy has not gone unchallenged. The sectarian schools that, in fact, predate public education in America have survived, even thrived, over the past century. Multiple religious communities, including those that opposed sectarian schooling in earlier generations, have now embraced it for their children.

This chapter discusses how the breakdown of the Iraqi regime in 2003 led to religious insurgencies in Iraq. Sunni Islamists and jihadists were given the space and opportunity to organize in a way that would have been unthinkable prior to 2003. Within the Shi’i community, Islamists from the Sadrist trend in Iraq, and Iranian backed religious actors, emerged in southern Iraq and in Baghdad. Over the previous decade, religious institutions had begun to play important roles in education, politics, and security. They continued playing this role post-2003; but because the authoritarian controls of the former regime no longer existed, these institutions were often controlled by extremist and sectarian actors. The result was insurgencies launched by the Sadrists, Sunni Islamists, al-Qaida, and eventually the Islamic State.

This chapter examines the Internal Revenue Code’s treatment of religious entities. The federal tax statute embodies three diverse approaches to taxing and exempting sectarian organizations and activities. Some provisions of the Code—the charitable deduction, the general income tax exemption for eleemosynary institutions, the federal unemployment tax—exempt religious entities and other charitable, educational, and philanthropic institutions. Other provisions of the Code narrowly target churches for tax exemption. For example, the Code relieves churches of filing requirements with which nonchurch religious entities and other eleemosynary organizations must comply. Similarly, churches’ retirement plans receive lenient treatment under the Code. Churches receive procedural protections from IRS audits.Yet other provisions of the Code tax churches as for secular entities. Churches generally pay FICA taxes—Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes—on the compensation paid to nonclerical employees. These payroll taxes can be considerable. Churches also pay federal income taxes on their unrelated business incomes.

The ʻAlawis, or Alawites, are a prominent religious minority in northern Syria, Lebanon, and southern Turkey, best known today for enjoying disproportionate political power in war-torn Syria. This book offers a complete history of the community, from the birth of the ʻAlawi (Nusayri) sect in the tenth century to just after World War I, the establishment of the French mandate over Syria, and the early years of the Turkish republic. The book draws on a wealth of Ottoman archival records and other sources to show that the ʻAlawis were not historically persecuted as is often claimed, but rather were a fundamental part of and Turkish provincial society. It argues that far from being excluded on the basis of their religion, the ʻAlawis were in fact fully integrated into the provincial administrative order. Profiting from the economic development of the coastal highlands, particularly in the Ottoman period, they fostered a new class of local notables and tribal leaders, participated in the modernizing educational, political, and military reforms of the nineteenth century, and expanded their area of settlement beyond its traditional mountain borders to emerge from centuries of Sunni imperial rule as a bona fide sectarian community. Using an array of primary materials spanning nearly ten centuries, the book provides a crucial new narrative about the development of ʻAlawi society.

Dissenters in the long nineteenth century believed that they were on the right side of history. This chapter argues that the involvement of evangelical Nonconformists in politics was primarily driven by a coherent worldview derived from a Congregationalist understanding of salvation and the gathered nature of the church. That favoured a preference for voluntarism and a commitment to religious equality for all. Although Whig governments responded to the rising electoral clout of Dissenters after 1832 by meeting Dissenting grievances, both they and the Conservatives retained an Erastian approach to church–state relations. This led to tension with both those Dissenters who favoured full separation between church and state, and with Evangelical Churchmen in Scotland, who affirmed the principle of an Established Church, but refused government interference in ministerial appointments. In 1843 this issue resulted in the Disruption of the Church of Scotland and the formation of a large Dissenting body north of the border, the Free Church. Dissenting militancy after mid-century was fostered by the numerical rise of Dissent, especially in cities, the foundation of influential liberal papers often edited by Dissenters such as Edward Miall, and the rise of municipal reforming movements in the Midlands headed by figures such as Joseph Chamberlain. Industrialization also boosted Dissenting political capacity by encouraging both employer paternalism and trades unionism, whose leaders and rank and file were Nonconformists. Ireland constituted an exception to this pattern. The rise of sectarianism owed less to Irish peculiarities than to the presence and concentration of a large Catholic population, such as also fostered anti-Catholicism in Britain, in for instance Lancashire. The politics of the Ultramontane Catholic Church combined with the experience of agrarian violence and sectarian strife to dispose Irish Protestant Dissenters against Home Rule. The 1906 election was the apogee of Dissent’s political power, installing a Presbyterian Prime Minister in Campbell-Bannerman who would give way in due course to the Congregationalist H.H. Asquith, but also ushering in conflicts over Ireland. Under Gladstone, the Liberal party and its Nonconformist supporters had been identified with the championship of oppressed nationalities. Even though Chamberlain and other leading Dissenting liberals such as Isabella Tod resisted the extension of that approach to Ireland after 1886, preferring local government reform to Home Rule, most Dissenting voters had remained loyal to Gladstone. Thanks to succeeding Unionist governments’ aggressive foreign policy, embrace of tariff reform, and 1902 Education Act, Dissenting voters had been keen to return to a Liberal government in 1906. That government’s collision with the House of Lords and loss of seats in the two elections of 1910 made it reliant on the Irish National Party and provoked the introduction in 1912 of a third Home Rule Bill. The paramilitary resistance of Ulster Dissenters to the Bill was far from unanimous but nonetheless drove a wedge between British Nonconformists who had concluded that religion was a private matter and would do business with Irish Constitutional Nationalists and Ulster Nonconformists, who had adopted what looked like a bigoted insistence that religion was a public affair and that the Union was their only preservative against ‘Rome Rule’. The declaration of war in 1914 and the consequent suspension of the election due in 1915 means it is impossible to know how Nonconformists might have dealt with this crisis. It was the end of an era.

This Handbook offers an up-to-the-minute analysis of Islam in America by 30 of the best scholars in the field. It covers the initial growth of Islam in the US from the earliest arrivals through the beginnings of African American Islam, as well as the waves of pre- and post-WWII immigrants when Muslims had little sense of religious identity in relation to their American compatriots. Providing basic information about Sunni, Shi‘ite, sectarian and Sufi movements in America, the volume considers the role of ethnic and racial identity in religious formation. Special attention is given to the role and status of women, marriage, and family. The rise of religious and educational institutions, leadership and youth movements, along with the expansion of Islam through outreach in prisons and through volunteerism, have served to give cohesion and a growing sense of what it means to be part of American Islam. The final section of the book deals with the component pieces of contemporary Islam in America such as politics and government, intellectual life and interfaith endeavors. The process of integration and assimilation that has been intensified as a response to 9/11 has brought about a creative response in which Muslims are eager to be Muslim and American at the same time. The volume concludes with elements of Muslim culture that are part of the current creative response to the reality of American Islam, including Islamic dress and fashion, art and architecture, film and filmmaking, health and medicine, politics, and Muslim-Christian relations. Bracketing these articles on integration and assimilation are thorough investigations of both the effects of the war on terror and the continuing Islamophobia that it has engendered, and of the relationship of American Islam to international Islam.