Fundamentalisms Comprehended: v. 5 (Fundamentalism Project S.) - Hardcover

Marty, Martin E

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226508870 ISBN 13: 9780226508870

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1995

Synopsis

This volume marks the culmination of the "Fundamentalism Project", a series that brings together scholars from around the world to explore the nature and impact of fundamentalist movements in the 20th century. Based on an interdisciplinary programme conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the series is dedicated to promoting an understanding of fundamentalism at a time when misinformation and misperceptions have exacerbated national and international conflicts. The four previous volumes provide information on the social, political, cultural and religious contexts of fundamentalism in the major religious traditions. In this fifth volume, the contributors return to, and test, the project's beginning premise: that fundamentalisms in all faiths share certain "family resemblances". Several of the essays reconsider the project's original definition of fundamentalism as a reactive, absolutist and comprehensive mode of anti-secular religious activism. Some contributors challenge the idea that fundamentalism is a distinctively modern phenomenon, while others question whether the term "fundamentalist" can accurately be applied to movements outside Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Several of the essays also employ new approaches, drawn from literary criticism and from psychology, in their assessments of the problems of comparing fundamentalisms. This book concludes with a capstone statement by R. Scott Appleby, Emmanuel Sivan, and Gabriel Almond that builds upon the entire Fundamentalism Project. Identifying different categories of fundamentalist movements, and delineating four distinct patterns of fundamentalist behaviour toward outsiders, this statement provides an explanatory framework for understanding and comparing fundamentalisms around the world.

About this title

About the Author

Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby direct the Fundamentalism Project. Marty, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of modern Christianity at the University of Chicago, is the senior editor ofChristian Century. His many books include the multivolume Modern American Religion, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Appleby, director of Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of Church and the Age Unite!: The Modernist Impulses in American Catholicism.

From the Inside Flap

In this fifth volume of the Fundamentalism Project, Fundamentalisms Comprehended, the distinguished contributors return to and test the endeavor's beginning premise: that fundamentalisms in all faiths share certain "family resemblances." Several of the essays reconsider the project's original definition of fundamentalism as a reactive, absolutist, and comprehensive mode of anti-secular religious activism. The book concludes with a capstone statement by R. Scott Appleby, Emmanuel Sivan, and Gabriel Almond that builds upon the entire Fundamentalism Project. Identifying different categories of fundamentalist movements, and delineating four distinct patterns of fundamentalist behavior toward outsiders, this statement provides an explanatory framework for understanding and comparing fundamentalisms around the world.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226508870
• ISBN 13: 9780226508870
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 532