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This article draws upon and contributes to current discussions in the study of conversion, Muslims in Europe, and gender and emotion by taking media productions as an ethnographic starting point for analyzing the subject position of women who converted to Islam. In contemporary Western European contexts, the phenomenon of conversion to Islam evokes various affective responses, including bewilderment, concern, and fear. This article assesses the frames through which female converts to Islam are represented in the media and particularly explores the existing focus on mother and daughter relationships. Based upon an analysis of the emotions named and generated, this article argues that such affective framings contribute to the shaping of the subject position of female converts to Islam. It moreover demonstrates that emotions such as concern, sadness, grief, and fear are the result of, as well as constructively infuse, contemporary debates on religious and cultural diversity in the Netherlands in which Islam and Muslims are considered to pose a "problem" for Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of cultural expertise in asylum judicial decisions in the UK by focusing on witchcraft-based persecution. The case study highlights multiple challenges to decision-making created by religious and cultural diversity, and the ensuing problems of assessing unfamiliar facts and beliefs against the often lack of corroborating evidence. Drawing on legal sources and a small number of anthropological studies, as well as analyses of judicial decisions, the article discusses how the unique characteristics of witchcraft cases, with their unfamiliar paradigms, are illustrative of the need to analyse and understand asylum claims within their broad cultural, historical, economic, and political contexts. The article exposes how cultural expertise assists judges in appreciating specific contexts and curbing their Eurocentric understanding of culture and religion, and shapes the final outcome of cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the question as to why there are so many different kinds of organizations. It puts forth the general proposition that organizational diversity in a community is isomorphic to the heterogeneity of the composition of its population. Given that religion is a fundamental category of identity and association, with potentially far-reaching implications for social structure, we focus on religious pluralism. By linking religious pluralism to organizational diversity for the first time our study contributes to both the sociology of religion and organizational ecology. We propose that religious pluralism spurs organizational diversity, and vice versa. Specifically, denominational pluralism may drive community differentiation with respect to the supply of and demand for different products and services, which ultimately determines community-level organizational diversity. Second, organizational diversity might trigger immigration of people from specific religious denominations, so affecting the community's religious composition in turn. We empirically explore this reciprocal relationship with detailed time series data for the Dutch city of Zwolle in the 1851–1914 period. Our exploratory findings are consistent with our proposition. Avenues for further research are discussed in relationship with some of the limitations of our exploratory case study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the U.S. as a religiously diverse nation. It mentions that the U.S. is the most diverse country in religion in the planet. It also states that Los Angeles, California has the most varieties of Buddhism in the world. In addition, it provides information on the history of various religions in the country that is influenced by other nations. According to the author, the complication in North America worsens because of globalization. Moreover, he examines the impact of global factors on different religions in the U.S.

This paper addresses religious pluralism as an academic, civic, and theological challenge. Looking at religious communities in their connections and interrelations is a critical academic challenge for students of religion who would gain insight into the dynamics of religious life and identities today. The encounter of people from different religious traditions in hometown America has reshaped the context of religious life, calling for attention and serious study. In short, the study of a complex city like Fremont, CA, might well be the study of today's Silk Road, today's convivencia. Religious pluralism is also a critical civic issue for citizens of increasingly diverse societies, raising fundamental questions about the nature of civic polity, the "we" of our civic life. And, to be sure, religious pluralism is a critical theological issue for people of faith, raising fundamental questions about one's own faith in relation to the religious other. Scholarly, civic, and theological issues have their own distinctive realms of discourse and require us to think carefully about the meaning of "voice" in our work. We cannot evade the question of voice in thinking theoretically about pluralism, for diversity is not only the characteristic of the worlds we study but of our own identities, our multiply-situated selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that church membership rates are lower in contemporary US counties having greater religious pluralism and that the same negative relationship is found in most historical data on US church membership. Finke and Stark find a positive relationship but in most cases only after statistically controlling for the percent of the population that is Catholic and/or Mormon. Breault has shown that these statistical controls create multicollinearity problems that distort the true, negative effects of pluralism. Finke and Stark counter that such multicollinearity is unavoidable because the statistical controls measure important substantive characteristics of Catholicism that are necessary to accurately observe pluralism's true, positive effects. This paper shows that the statistical controls do not measure substantive effects of Catholicism and that the resulting multicollinearity problems are the result of a mathematical artifact of the way pluralism is calculated and the cases Finke and Stark select for analysis Without these problematic statistical controls, most contemporary and historical analyses of US data reveal a negative association between religious pluralism and church membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]