Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion: 3 (Studies in Social Analysis, 3) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1789207606 ISBN 13: 9781789207606

Publisher: Berghahn Books, 2020

Synopsis

If piety, faith, and conviction constitute one side of the religious coin, then imperfection, uncertainty, and ambivalence constitute the other. Yet, scholars tend to separate these two domains and place experiences of inadequacy in everyday religious life - such as a wavering commitment, religious negligence or weakness in faith - outside the domain of religion 'proper.'

Straying from the Straight Path breaks with this tendency by examining how self-perceived failure is, in many cases, part and parcel of religious practice and experience. Responding to the need for comparative approaches in the face of the largely separated fields of the anthropology of Islam and Christianity, this volume gives full attention to moral failure as a constitutive and potentially energizing force in the religious lives of both Muslims and Christians in different parts of the world.

About this title

About the Authors

Daan Beekers is a social anthropologist currently affiliated with the Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World, University of Edinburgh. His first monograph, an ethnographic study of religious commitment among young Muslims and Christians in the Netherlands, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury.

David Kloos is a senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden, The Netherlands. He is the author of Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority and Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia (Princeton University Press, 2018).

Edition details

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1789207606
• ISBN 13: 9781789207606
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 146
• Editor: Beekers Daan, Kloos David