Author Archives: Ricardo M. Barrera

Note from Cambridge Journals

Dear Colleague,

To kick off 2013, Cambridge Journals has gathered together 2012's top five most downloaded articles from Politics and Religion. Now through March 1, 2013, download these articles free of charge.

2012's Most Downloaded Articles

Islamist Feminism: Constructing Gender Identities in Postcolonial Muslim Societies(vol. 4:3)
Jeffry R. Halverson, Amy K. Way
The Bible in the Political Rhetoric of the American Founding (vol. 4:3)
Daniel L. Dreisbach
Liberalism, Multiculturalism, and the Case for Public Religion (vol. 3:3)
Sonia Sikka
The First Amendment, Varieties of Neutrality, and Same-Sex Marriage (vol. 2:3)
Emily R. Gill
On the Public Discourse of Religion: An Analysis of Christianity in the United Kingdom (vol. 2:3)
Steve Kettell

Stay tuned as the journal moves from three issues to four in 2013.

Send Politics & Religion journal articles to your Kindle device

According to Cambridge Journals:

You can send Cambridge Papers to your Amazon Kindle by email from within CJO. Pressing the ‘Send to Kindle’ link found on fulltext articles opens a form, which allows the user to send that paper to their unique Kindle email address, to read on the device later.

This email address can be found by going to the second page of your Kindle’s Settings menu and will look like “name.surname@kindle.com” or “username123@kindle.com”.

To send a paper to your Kindle, simply fill in the username part of your email address, select whichy variation of your Kindle email you wish to use, and press submit. You can select to send to either the @kindle.com or @free.kindle.com variations. @kindle.com emails will sync over 3G, directly to your device, but may incur a fee from Amazon. @free.kindle.com emails may take longer, and can only be accessed when syncing your device over wi-fi, or via USB, but will incur no charge.

The user must also register kindlejournals@cambridge.org as a trusted email address for their device. This function is uses the Amazon Personal Documents Service. To read more about this, visit http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200767360 or http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200767340

In the case of PDF articles, the full PDF will be emailed to your Kindle device. There will be no re-formatting, but it will include all images and tables, as on the desktop PDF. For the moment, HTML articles will be text-only, however you will be able to change the font size, and inter-paragraph links should function (as will outgoing links, provided wireless is enabled on your device).

Call for committee members, Aaron Wildavsky Dissertation Award

The Aaron Wildavsky Award recognizes the best dissertation on religion and politics successfully defended within the last two years. Nominations will be accepted until Mar 15 2013, and the winner will be announced at the 2013 meetings. Please email Iza Hussin (hussin@uchicago.edu) to express interest.

Political Scientist Quoted in NY Times Opinion on American Christianity and Secularism

The Protestant bias of the American public sphere has mellowed over time, but it still depends on “Christian secularism,” said Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a political scientist at Northwestern University. This is a “political stance” premised on a “chiefly Protestant notion of religion understood as private assent to a set of propositional beliefs,” she told me. Other traditions, such as Judaism and Islam and to some degree Catholicism, do not frame faith in such rationalist terms, or accept the same distinction between internal conviction and public argument.

via www.nytimes.com

"Professor Hurd works at the intersection of international politics, legal studies and religious studies. She is currently writing a book on the legal and administrative regulation of religion in global and transnational politics. Central themes include the politics of international human rights, global governance, legal and religious pluralism, and the international legal construction and regulation of religious freedom." {from faculty profile}

Section Journal, Volume 5, Issue 3, online

Published Online on 20th December 2012.

Download Table of Contents

Lead Article

"Religious Regulation and the Muslim Democracy Gap"
by Ani Sarkissian
Michigan State University

Abstract
This article argues that high levels of government regulation of religion help to explain the “democracy gap” in majority Muslim countries. Controlling for previously hypothesized determinants of democracy, it finds that as levels of regulation increase, levels of democracy decline. Examination of specific types of religious regulation in Muslim-majority countries uncovers a pattern of repression of religious expression that may be used to mobilize citizens politically. These regulations are targeted more often at Muslims who seek independence from state-controlled religion or who wish to challenge authoritarian governments, rather than at non-Muslim minorities or at religious worship more generally. Thus, authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes in Muslim-majority states successfully use policies toward religion to restrict political competition and inhibit democratic transition.