Global Growth
Exploring Philanthropy in Yemen from the Perspective of Expatriates and Local Charitable Organizations
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sumaia Al Kohlani
Philanthropy plays a significant role in the Muslim world, and its role is more crucial in poor and most war-torn countries such as Yemen. In this study, I conducted an in-depth interview with the CEO of four local charitable organizations in Yemen and surveyed eighty-two Yemeni expatriates. The interviews and the survey focus on examining the current scale and the scope of philanthropy in Yemen. The goal of the interviews is to understand the philanthropy work environment and how public and charitable organizations function in Yemen. The interviews and the survey contain three sections. The first section is about the characteristic of the charitable organizations and participants. The second concentrates on assessing philanthropy in Yemen, and the last section discusses the participants and charitable organization strategy and contribution.
Featured Zen Buddhism and Social Theory in the United States
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Siddhesh Mukerji
This paper shares findings from a recent qualitative study with 35 leading Zen Buddhist social activists in the United States. This research used a social constructionist grounded theory methodology to explore how its participants conceptualize and approach social action from the standpoint of Zen Buddhism. Participants in this research explicitly and implicitly discussed how Zen in the present-day USA integrates, adapts to, and critiques current social theory. For example, some participants viewed social theory as a demand for Buddhism to adapt beyond its historical tendencies (e.g., feminism requires Buddhism to reckon with its legacy of patriarchy). Other participants spoke in terms of social theory to describe the broad soteriological project of Buddhism (e.g., collective awakening in Buddhism necessarily includes a collective awakening to the ills of systemic oppression, including racism and colonialism). Participants also shared Buddhist critiques of social theory (e.g., Buddhism offers a way to acknowledge systemic oppression without falling into demonizing forms of identity politics). By examining this conversation between Zen and social theory–especially in a time and place of intense social-political divisions and crises–the findings of this study demonstrate how religion absorbs and influences the social discourses that surround it.
Cults as Religious Foundation: An Object Oriented Practices Approach to Aztec-Catholic Contact
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Laura Ammon, Cheryl Claassen
Categories for cross-temporal and cross-spatial comparative approaches to human religious and spiritual practices often fall short of clarifying the concepts. Cheryl Claassen and I have argued that the term cult, understood as a series of patterned actions that focus on an object, place, belief, or practice where humans communicate with the transcendent, best describes the practices found in early modern Spanish Catholic and pre-Columbian Aztec lifeways and approaches to the sacred (2022). However, the term cult is problematic in our century, often invoked to delegitimize groups that are outside of cultural comfort zones. Recognizing that concern, we argue that to compare cultic behaviors across historical, religious, and spiritual arenas we need more clarifying language. Following Ann Taves’ work on a building blocks approach to religion (Taves 2009), in this paper we propose considering 15-16th century Aztec and Iberian Catholic cultic expressions as Object Oriented Practices that had structural similarities offering fertile ground for the growth of what becomes Mexican Catholicism. Object Oriented Practices offers a lens to see objects - mountains, idols, bundles, relics - and practices such as pilgrimage, offerings, sacrifices - as human spiritual and religious behaviors across space and time without denigration or legitimation. We discuss the example of pilgrimage from a comparative lens, emphasizing the structural ways humans orient similar behaviors in differing contexts of the Aztecs and colonizing Catholics in sixteenth-century Spain and Mexico.
From Brazil to the World: Transnational Lusophone Megachurches View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Johnson
Brazilian megachurches have spread throughout the Lusophone world over the past thirty years. The growth of these churches in Angola, Mozambique, and Portugal reflects the increasing impact of Brazilian Christianity in these countries, but also how transnational networks established through colonialism, and maintained through a shared language, continue to operate and shape global Christianity. This study relies on qualitative research collected from the Brazilian Pentecostal megachurch, Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and Baptist megachurches, Lagoinha and Atitude, to show how transnational networks operate in the Lusophone world and the role Brazilian megachurches have in shaping Christianity in these countries. This research was conducted as part of the Global South Megachurch Project which involved a study of 18 megachurches with congregations of at least 15,000, in ten different countries throughout the Global South.
