The Religion Factor

In humanitarian aid there is often a strong focus on the biomedical angle of disease, as we can see right now in the Ebola crisis in West Africa. However, the role of religion should not be underestimated...

Gender and feminism seem to be gaining attention again in the broader global public sphere. Religion – as a concept and as representative of broad traditions of belief and theology – has frequently had a problematic relationship with both of these concepts and frameworks.

Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, the DRC. In each of these contexts, and numerous others, complex dynamics around politics, resources, religion and power are contributing to the creation of a global crisis of displacement of unprecedented scale, with a record number of 51.2 million people displaced in 2013.

The 2014 edition of the International Federation of the Red Cross’ (IFRC) World Disasters Report (WDR 2014) focuses on risk and culture.[1] The intersection of these two areas represents a response to the current trend for disaster risk reduction (DRR) research, policy, and programming in the humanitarian sector and the introduction of culture as a potentially important cross-cutting issue.

There’s been much discussion recently about faith-based and secular responses to humanitarian emergencies that has attempted to highlight the normative assumptions present in both.

Stories of transformation in development contexts tend to be separated into secular narratives of social transformation, and religious narratives of personal transformation.

Rethinking “security”, the role of the state, the secularist biases that exist in policy and practice around displacement and religion’s potential to address these problems are crucial issues to consider in terms of religion’s intersection with the global crisis of displacement.

Rethinking “security”, the role of the state, the secularist biases that exist in policy and practice around displacement and religion’s potential to address these problems are crucial issues to consider in terms of religion’s intersection with the global crisis of displacement.

In the third and final piece in our series on “Religion, Secularism and Multiple Modernities in Europe”, Professor of Secularization Studies, Herman Paul, argues that the religious/secular divide is unhelpful for thinking about the realities of human existence and should be done away with.

In the second instalment for our series reflecting on Religion, Secularism and Multiple Modernities in Europe, Christoph Jedan considers what our practices of grief and consolation, considered in historical context, can reveal about the nature of modernity.