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This paper focuses on contemporary religious practices and expressions of social groups influenced by the Catholic church in Western Mexico. The patronal festival in San Francisco Tesistán is exposed, under an ethnographic study, to describe its structure, organization and function. The category of popular religiosity is presented as an analytical model to address the explanations manifested in the social structure by the patron-client bond, providing meaning to the political, economic, and symbolic order. Reinforcing the category of popular religiosity, the analysis of the popular production points to subcultural groups within larger societies. Within this model, it seeks to contribute to the understanding of the “popular” in religious practices of a fragment of the population determined by the division of labor, in a space of invention, interpretation and representation. The symbolic power preserves memories, determines a common origin and crystallizes the holistic worldview in the social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elaborates a detailed comparison of the enthronement rites performed for the Mexica ruler, called tlatoani, and the Purépecha ruler, known as cazonci. On the one hand, it establishes their similarities and differences. On the other, it explains the coincidences and discrepancies in certain aspects of their respective rites. The argument is based on a comparative analysis of 16th-century chronicles of the Mexica and Purépecha traditions, in which their history, religion and political ideas were compared to interpret the rites. From the comparative analysis of those sources, the paper concludes that both rites shared the same structure because the Mexica and Purépecha peoples held similar conceptions about religion and government. Both ceremonies emphasized the importance of the patron god, the values of war, and the worship of deities related to the sun and earth. It is important, however, to recognize the lack of diversity for the Purépecha case, since only one chronicle contains information on their rite. Because the enthronement rite of the tlatoani has been studied in greater detail, the value of this paper lies in its contribution to our understanding of the cazonci rite, its interpretations, and its elucidation, for the first time, of similarities and differences with the Mexica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focus on the religious and political issue in Brazil from a socio-historical perspective. In recent years, we have seen the rise of the right-wing, anarcho-capitalist biopower in socio-political and reactionary-conservative terms in religious terms. How was the emergence of the current religious-political panorama possible? There are two complementary interpretative hypotheses: the construction of a conservative and reactionary religious-political camp and neoliberal social and economic changes. The research methodology is qualitative and primary and secondary documentary sources on contemporary Brazilian religion and politics were used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politics and religion have always been closely connected, as both depend on the manner in which man sees himself and the world around him. But one of the main features of democracy, the political system more widely accepted in the world today, is its secularization. Democracy no longer allows thrones, and religion has been reduced to one of the many possibilities individuals have when choosing how they want to live their lives. But every political system implies a different religion and vice versa. Democracy is not, in fact, the time of the end of religion, but a total reconfiguration of religious experience that could become considered the most authentic of all. This paper investigates the interdependence between politics and religion from the worldview that man has of himself in the context of democracy assuming the challenge posed to religious freedom from the political horizon as the task of the path of peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the SAHWA Youth Survey 2016 (2017), this paper presents a study of the degree and types of political and religious participation - as well as the links that connect one to the other - among the youth of five Arab Mediterranean countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon). In politics, four types of participation are distinguished: official, everyday, community and protest. Between 5% and 17% of those surveyed could be considered hyperactivists, in that they participate in three or four of these types; in around a third, there was no participation at all. On the other hand, the majority of the young people considered themselves to be highly religious and, in three of the countries, a third attended the mosque at least three times a week. But the levels of religiosity did not influence political participation, as even the majority of the highly religious supported separating politics from religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of the Brazilian republic triggered political agents within the religious sphere to analyze the 1891 Constitution. The Protestant political insertion increased and one may trace the catalyzing elements of its political activities, even though most segments kept aloof from politics. They merely manifested themselves when religious issues on religious freedom were involved. The 1950 political context brought to the fore new concerns on the religious polarization. Foregrounded on the conflict theory of Lewis Coser, current paper discusses the construction of these two subjects that heralded the social and religious projects of the republican period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Sciences have often claimed the end of religiosity as an explanatory factor of electoral behaviour in Europe. Nevertheless, left and right parties still insert religious and moral issues in the agenda in order to distance themselves from their opponents. This paper shows a comparative study of 34 European democracies examining the extent to which religious voting has diminished since the eighties. Results point to a sharp decline in the levels of religious vote until the nineties, with a revitalization since then in some of the countries of the sample. The analysis also highlights the important role played by the political elite on the activation of religious vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of philosophical and religious arguments in public reason, focusing on John Rawls' proposal for the debate about abortion. The thesis is that for Rawlsian liberalism, philosophical and religious arguments play a semi-public role, that is, they basically refer to social reason, which is part of civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While positions on the public role of religion in Western societies are polarized primarily into the secular and secularism, for some years there have been a series of arguments that do not seem to fit either in one or the other category. They therefore suggest a revision of the model that the West has assumed to be secular and politically correct when encompassing the relationship between politics and religion. These ideas are held by non-Catholic intellectuals, including some who are not believers. They argue for the re-visioning of secularization from different scientific and epistemological positions: historical, philosophical, sociological, political theory, theological and others. The objective of this paper is to briefly describe these and also set forth the problems associated with this discussion when establishing human rights, an area of particular sensitivity due to the interaction between politics and religion in the contemporary context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]