Publisher's Synopsis
Almost every major belief system in the world has believers who use their faith to strictly guide their daily lives and views, at times resulting in violence. Religious Fundamentalisms are about the strategic management of religion by particular State and/or non-State actors to gain or retain power and control and limit rights, and so in many ways RFs contradict the fundamental spirit and essence of many faiths and religions: justice, equality and compassion. Additionally, religious fundamentalisms undermine women's and girls' rights across contexts - fundamentalism is not the monopoly of any one religion or region. Fundamentalist arguments originate from actors across all major world religions and in local religious traditions and ethno-religious movements. Further, the rise of extremist religious forces around the world is not occurring in a vacuum, but is inextricably linked to political, social and economic factors, including geopolitics, systemic inequalities and economic disparities and militarism. Globalization is a modernizing and destabilizing influence, which locks even more solidly a nation-state into the global order. Some people feel threatened by change and the influx of foreign influences. They often look to religious leaders or politicians for answers. There is longing for the past, when life seemed less hurried, more ordered and less threatening. That golden era seems all the more golden; the further people move away from it, as time and change stick them along. Religious Fundamentalism Global, Local and Personal contains worldwide studies dealing with all of these levels of analysis, exclusively integrating sociological and psychological perspectives, and connecting them to each other. Both a consequence and a cause of this turbulence is a resurgence of religion. Religious fundamentalism has appeared at the turn of the century as a prominent tendency, a habit of mind found within religious communities and paradigmatically embodied in certain representative individuals and movements. There has been a tremendous upsurge in religion all over the world. All religions are interacting with modernity which is enshrined in human freedom, market freedom and value freedom as encapsulated or manifested in secularism and democracy. This 1st volume of Encyclopaedia of The Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism will be of a comprehensive guide on social scientific perspective on a subject of immense contemporary significance, and will be of interest to both university students and to the practitioner and researcher dealing with the religion.
