A New Book: Topographies of Faith Religion in Urban Spaces

Edited by Irene Becci, Marian Burchardt, and José Casanova

Brill, 2013

Topographies of Faith offers a unique and compelling analysis of contemporary religious dynamics in metropolitan centers. While most scholarship on religion still sidelines questions of spatiality and scale, this book creatively draws on perspectives from urban studies to study the spatiality of religion in modern cities. It shows how globalization, transnational migration and urban expansion in big cities engender new religious forms and practices and their spatial underpinnings. Space affects urban religious diversity, religious innovations, decline or vitality. But it also shapes the relationships between religion and social equalities. Spanning distances between New York, Delhi and Johannesburg, the book also engages with issues of secularity and religious vitality in genuinely new ways.
Based on ethnographic explorations in cities across the globe,

Contents:

• Introduction: Religion Takes Place: Producing Urban Locality

• Alevis in Cemevis: Religion and Secularism in Turkey

• Somalis in Johannesburg: Muslim Transformations of the City

• Urban Aspirations in Mumbai and Singapore

• Excarnation and the City: The Tower of Silence Debates in Mumbai

• Connecting the Local, National and Transnational Powers of a Religious Youth Organisation in Berlin

• Religious Associations, Religious Innovations and Denominational Identities in Contemporary Global Cities

• The Geopolitics of Religious Spatiality and Falun Gong’s Campaign in New York

• Religious Involvements in a Post-Socialist Urban Space in Berlin

• Belonging and Success: Religious Vitality and the Politics of Urban Space in Cape Town

• Porous Boundaries: Hindu-Muslim Demarcation and Crossings in Delhi

• ‘Exit’ and ‘Inclusion’: The Changing Paradigm of Pentecostal Expression in the Nigerian Public Space

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