ALMOST,BUT NOT QUITE: THE FAILURE OF NEW YORK'S GET STATUTE

The quandary of Jewish women unable to remarry because of their husbands’ refusal to grant them religious divorces is a real problem affecting real people. Husbands are wielding this lopsided power to “extort” money from their wives, obtain favorable child custody settlements, property settlements, and child support payments. The burgeoning divorce rate is certain to exacerbate this problem. Already, this situation has garnered international attention. In the wake of New York's legislative attempt to remedy this problem, countries, including the United Kingdom and Australia, have promulgated legislative solutions to this dilemma. New York is the only state in the United States to pass such a statute. Unfortunately, New York's statute is flawed because it is of limited applicability and still allows for situations in which the Jewish wife is civilly divorced but religiously married. This Note proposes amending New York's statute to make it applicable to any and all divorce proceedings and to any barrier to remarriage. This Note will further recommend that the proposed amended statute should be adopted worldwide.     

谈宗教因素对恐怖主义的影响

宗教因素对恐怖主义的影响由来已久。近年来,宗教问题与恐怖主义经常纠缠在一起,构成对人类和平与安全的严重威胁。文章通过研究宗教史上恐怖主义活动的基本情况,试图消除宗教恐怖主义,发挥宗教社会功能,为人类和平与发展服务。     

美学三题

人类审美个性与其普遍性文化功能是德国古典美学两主题 ,其间存在的逻辑矛盾与历史张力以及其审美个性研究的不够深入 ,都深刻地影响了 2 0世纪中国美学。以宗教为参照 ,可以深化审美个性研究 ,则审美是人类追求即时性感性精神愉悦的活动。审美感性是物质感性、具体感性和即时感性 ,这些决定了审美乃人类精神生活起点、大众文化之典型代表。审美是最世俗的人类精神活动 ,美学则是人类感性精神现象学 ,这当是当代美学基础理论研究的确当起点。在拓展人类精神世界的深度和广度上 ,审美较科学、宗教、哲学均远为逊色。     

后现代性与宗教走向

前现代性、现代性、后现代性意味着三种不同社会的范式转换或超越。宗教在其中呈现着不同特征:在前现代性中,宗教是一元的、垄断性的;在现代性中,宗教是多元的、具有世俗化的倾向;而在后现代性中,宗教除仍具有世俗化的倾向外,还具有灵性追求、教主崇拜、家庭式社区型小宗教团体等特征。这代表了后现代宗教的发展趋势。     

Acts of Faith: Churches and Political Engagement

Many observers suggest that white evangelical Protestant churches serve to mobilize their members into politics, while others argue that they encourage withdrawal from political life. This paper reconciles these two claims. I hypothesize that the time members of evangelical Protestant denominations spend in service to their church comes at the expense of participation in the wider community, contrary to the way mainline Protestant and Catholic churches foster civic activity among their members. However, I further hypothesize that the tight social networks formed through this intensive church activity can at times facilitate rapid and intense political mobilization. Data from the Citizen Participation Study supports the first hypothesis, while applying King's method of ecological inference to two elections in Alabama supports the second.     

从宗教理念视角观察世界和平大势

和平、发展、合作是当今时代的主流,但其中也存在诸多问题。世界和平最大的挑战来自单边主义和恐怖主义,这同以“和”理念为核心的宗教文化和合和文化精神相抵触。中国的和平发展战略是时代精神和“合和”传统的体现。     

论宗教与和谐社会

宗教作为一种社会意识和文化系统,它几乎与人类文明史上的所有社会形态都结下了"不解之缘".它既有深广多面的精神资源,又有丰厚辉煌的历史文化遗产,同时还是民族融合的纽带.在社会主义社会,它将具有长期性、民族性、群众性、复杂性、国际性等特点.在和谐社会的构建中,具有很强的道德教化作用、社会稳定作用、心理慰藉作用、文化展示作用和对政治文明建设的推动作用,是社会主义和谐社会的有机组成部分.     

Old (Molotov) cocktails in new bottles? “Price-tag” and settler violence in Israel and the West Bank

In the early morning of July 31, 2015, masked attackers threw firebombs into two Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Duma, south of Nablus, killing three Palestinian civilians. Contrary to claims by Israeli and Palestinian politicians, this attack was neither an isolated anomaly nor just another incident of settler violence. Instead, it was the latest attack in an important but largely unknown phenomenon called “price-tag,” in which a loosely connected group of young Israelis called “hilltop youth” burn Palestinian mosques and destroy property in hundreds of attacks accompanied by threatening graffiti that references Israeli settlers, outposts, and anti-Arab slogans. Using an original dataset of price-tag incidents and interviews with key actors, we demonstrate that the perpetrators, targets, and strategies of price-tag are different than previous patterns of settler violence. Whereas previous settlers saw the Israeli state as legitimate and largely decided to cooperate with it, the hilltop youth have decided to confront it by using price-tag attacks to deter settlement withdrawals and chain-gang the state into a conflict with the Palestinians. This analysis of the strategic logic of price-tag reveals its potential to shift the political landscape within and between Israelis and Palestinians.     

The mioritic nation – an alternative approach to Moldovan national identity

Moldova has been widely argued to be a failed nation-building project, with two national identity discourses coexisting within Moldovan society and amongst Moldovan elites: Romanianism and Moldovanism. Challenging the dominance of these discourses in the literature, this article argues that in spite of its absence from the nationalism debate in Moldova, the ballad Miori?a is a key element for the Moldovan articulation of national identity. The analysis employs a discursive approach focused on language as a constituting phenomenon and draws from Miori?a's appeal to the grass roots level, its banality in day-to-day life, and, more importantly, its promotion by Moldovan cultural elites. This latter part focuses specifically on the writings of novelist Ion Dru??. Dru?? places Miori?a at the very center of his construction of Moldovan national identity. He highlights its links with Moldovan history, culture, religious thinking, and geographical space, both reproducing a structure similar to the two national identity discourses, Romanianism and Moldovanism, and building on their similarities. But more importantly, Dru??'s representation of national identity sheds light on the possibility of an all-encompassing Moldovan identity, overcoming the existing cleavage, and a series of mechanisms that can be employed to achieve this.     

Under construction and highly contested: Islam in the post-Soviet Caucasus

While scholarship on Islam in the Caucasus has focused on the late Soviet religious revival – the rise of Salafi jihadism and religious radicalisation in the northern part of these strategic crossroads – no study to date has addressed the discursive struggle over the social functions of regional Islam. This article deconstructs these discourses in order to examine the very varying, and often conflicting, representations of Islam advocated by various actors across the region and within particular republics. The article highlights the contested functions of regional Islam against the background of a religious revival that is still a work in progress.