Ritual and Social Dynamics in Christian and Islamic Preaching

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This volume explores the socio-cultural dynamics of religious speeches through an analysis of Christian and Islamic sermons and preachers in the past and present. Part I focuses on the explicit contribution of sermons in socio-cultural transformation processes. It shows how the sermons connection to holy texts and religious norms of the specific group results in a tense relationship between preaching and the respective socio-cultural present. Part II intensifies this observation, analysing the dynamic tension between normativity and popularity. Rather than juxtaposing normative stances and popularity of sermons, it shows how that normativity can itself contribute to popularity and the quest of popularity carries its own normative stances. Part III explores the relevance of the ritual embeddedness of religious speech for the sermon as a catalyst of social dynamics and as a hybrid of normativity and popularity. It shows how speech and rituals are situated in a reciprocal relationship, where the performance of the speech, its own ritual character, and its positioning within religious practice must be individually examined.

Author Bio

Ruth Conrad is Professor of Practical Theology at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. Roland Hardenberg is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Hanna Miethner is a research assistant for the Faculty of Practical Theology at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. Max Stille is Executive Director of NETZ Partnership for Development and Justice, Germany.