Money and Moralities in Contemporary Asia provides original, nuanced insights into social meanings of money and wealth in moral economies of Asia. Through case studies from South and Southeast Asia, the collection sheds important light on how the new mobilities and wealth created by neoliberal globalization transform people's ways of life, notions of personhood, and their meaning making of the world. It highlights the moral dilemmas and anxieties emerging from the profound socio-economic transformations that are taking place across the region and deepens our understanding of local cultures as well as the inner contradictions of global capital in Asian contexts. With rich ethnographic insights and a diverse range of empirical contexts, chapters in this volume reveal multifaceted complexities and contradictions in the relationship between money and moralities. Money, they affirm, is not an impersonal, objective economic instrument with homogenizing powers but a culturally constructed and socially mediated currency in which meanings are constantly contested and re-negotiated across time and space.

In What Money Can't Buy, renowned political philosopher Michael J. Sandel rethinks the role that markets and money should play in our society. Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In his New York Times bestseller What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? Over recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?

China, Laos, and Vietnam are three of a handful of late socialist countries where capitalist economics rubs up against party-state politics. In these countries, sweeping processes of change open up new vistas of opportunity and imaginaries of the future alongside much uncertainty and anxiety, especially for their large rural populations. Contributors to this edited volume demonstrate the diverse ways in which rural people build futures in this unique policy landscape and how their aspirations and desires are articulated as projects involving both citizens and the state. This produces a politics of development that happens through and around the state as people navigate discourses of betterment to imagine and make new futures at individual and collective levels.

The Routledge Handbook of Megachurches provides a survey of global megachurch phenomena, with an international slate of authors introducing existing and emerging research on a wide variety of relevant topics. Over the past decade, the field of megachurch studies has matured and become global in its scope and orientation. The Handbook offers 33 chapters by top scholars in the field, focusing in particular on: The location, demographic nature, and transnational connections of megachurches. Megachurch worship, hermeneutics, and theology (in theory and practice). Megachurch institutional dynamics. The various ways that megachurches have both influenced and been influenced by their social contexts in terms of class, age, gender, sexuality, and pop culture. The Handbook's interdisciplinary orientation makes it essential reading for sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, media specialists, pop culture observers, business strategists, leadership consultants, marketing analysts, scholars of religion, and Christian historians, theologians, and missiologists. Experienced scholars of megachurches will gain valuable insight into aspects of megachurch research beyond their own specializations. Scholars new to the field will find the chapters useful as signposts for where to begin their own academic exploration. Christian pastors and laypeople will learn more about this increasingly prominent and influential form of their faith.

The Anglican Church in Singapore has a unique place both in the study of World Christianity and in the history of Southeast Asia. From its beginnings as a Church for colonial settlers, to its role as an unlikely agent of change in Singapore’s postcolonial transition, and its reinvention as part of a highly prosperous, hyperglobalized, supercapitalist, aspiration-driven modern state, the extraordinary trajectory of the Anglican Church in Singapore merits considerable attention. This study draws on archival material, incisive scholarship, and candid memoirs to chart the two-hundred-year history of Singapore’s Anglican Church, through world wars and communist insurgency towards hard-won national independence and the unparalleled social transformation of today, but this book goes far beyond mere chronological narrative. The author’s approach is inquisitive, rigorous, and ardently multidisciplinary, providing insights from theological, anthropological, political, and sociolinguistic perspectives. Homing-in on critically important and currently relevant themes, this book subjects the colonial-era Anglican Church’s social, ethnic, and interreligious engagement to scrutiny. The Church’s more recent and controversial commitment to the Anglican Realignment movement and its unexpected reorientation towards Pentecostalism are thoroughly investigated. The remarkable case of Singapore’s Anglican Church is indispensable for a complete understanding of World Christianity and Christianity in Asia today.

With contributions from a diverse team of global authors, this cutting-edge Handbook documents the impact of the study of gender and sexuality upon the foundational practices and precepts of anthropology. Providing a survey of the state-of-the-art in the field, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students of anthropology.

A cutting-edge introduction to contemporary religious studies theory, connecting theory to data This innovative coursebook introduces students to interdisciplinary theoretical tools for understanding contemporary religiously diverse societies—both Western and non-Western. Using a case-study model, the text considers: A wide and diverse array of contemporary issues, questions, and critical approaches to the study of religion relevant to students and scholars A variety of theoretical approaches, including decolonial, feminist, hermeneutical, poststructuralist, and phenomenological analyses Current debates on whether the term "religion" is meaningful Many key issues about the study of religion, including the insider-outsider debate, material religion, and lived religion Plural and religiously diverse societies, including the theological ideas of traditions and the political and social questions that arise for those living alongside adherents of other religions Understanding Religion is designed to provide a strong foundation for instructors to explore the ideas presented in each chapter in multiple ways, engage students in meaningful activities in the classroom, and integrate additional material into their lectures. Students will gain the tools to apply specific methods from a variety of disciplines to analyze the social, political, spiritual, and cultural aspects of religions. Its unique pedagogical design means it can be used from undergraduate- to postgraduate-level courses.