This book offers a systematic and comparative analysis of the intersections of religion and gender in times of populism across the EU-Mediterranean. The chapters explore tensions and issues related to religion and gender in nations including Portugal, Italy, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Greece, Turkey, and Israel/Palestine. Shifting attention from the European Union to the Mediterranean area allows the inclusion of countries whose history is significantly interwoven, taking into account the legacies of colonialism, the effects of post-colonialism, and the role of the EU in relation to gender-related issues in particular. The volume investigates not only country-specific cases but highlights similarities and differences in the region and aims to understand how the interconnections influence the issues at stake. It draws together countries with non-Christian majoritarian religions, with different political regimes, and where feminism and women’s movements have different shapes, histories, and relationships with religion. The book will appeal to scholars interested in the entanglements of gender, religion and populism from a range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, political science, religious studies and gender studies.

Editorial 7 Part One: World Situations Populism and Religion in Bosnia and Herzegovina 14 MILE BABIĆ Populism and Religious Nationalism in India 26 FRANCIS GONSALVES The Nationalisation of the Central Islamic Reference Point: Islam and Populism in the History of Turkey 37 DILEK SARMIS Part Two: Analyses Religious Populism: the New Avatar of Political Crisis 50 FRANÇOIS MABILLE Masculinist Populism and Toxic Christianity in the United States 61 SUSAN ABRAHAM Part Three: Challenging populism by theology The 'People' of God and its Idols in the 'One and Other' Testaments: How Sacred Scripture Challenges Populist Rhetoric 74 MARIDA NICOLACI 'Bridges not Barriers': The Potential of Christian Hope to Counter Right-Wing Populism 89 ANDREAS LOB-HÜDEPOHL Right-wing Populism and Catholicity: An Ecclesiological Reflection 101 FRANZ GMAINER-PRANZEL The Paradoxes of Populism and the Church's Contribution to Democracy: Some Hypotheses 111 CARMELO DOTOLO Part Four: Theological Forum Summer of Shame: American Catholics and the Latest Wave of the Abuse Crisis 124 CATHLEEN KAVENY Listening to the Conversation: After the Synod of Bishops Meeting on Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment 130 BRUNO CADORÉ Contributors 136

This book takes a fresh look at the trajectories of Israeli politics since the election of Likud in 1977, examining how right wing parties have adopted populist policies in order to carve out an identity and win support at the polls. As such it demonstrates how populism has become a hugely significant factor in shaping Israeli politics and society. The original perspective taken by the author allows for an understanding of the central phenomena of the contemporary political system in Israel, such as the Likud's party centrality in Israeli politics, the political force of the religious Shas party and the growing influence of certain political leaders. Through this innovative analysis of the concept of populism, the book contributes to a better understanding of the Israeli political system. With Israel playing such a central role in the Middle East conflict, this analysis of the ways in which populism contributes to the consolidation of governing political forces in Israel will allow for a better understanding of this conflict. Combining the theoretical elaboration of the concept of populism with its application in the analysis of a specific test-case, this novel approach contributes to the ongoing research on populist politics, and as such will be a useful tool for understanding many issues in the study of populism, comparative politics and the Middle East.

Taking the notion of embodiment as a starting point, this volume maps the interconnecting relationships between religion, gender and sexuality. The chapters highlight how the body – its location, the narratives that surround it, its movement and negotiations – is central to understanding these multifaceted relationships. The contributors recognise the ways in which gender and sexuality are crucial to how we embody religion and encourage a more complex and nuanced understanding of embodied religion. The material is organised according to three central themes: (1) the relationship between the religious and the secular; (2) power, regulation and resistance; and (3) the symbolism of gendered bodies. Cutting across a range of disciplinary perspectives, Embodying Religion, Gender and Sexuality will be relevant to students of sociology, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, theology and religious studies.

Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? is the first volume to address the gendered intersections of religion, spirituality and the secular through an ethnographic approach. The book examines how ‘spirituality’ has emerged as a relatively ‘silent’ category with which people often signal that they are looking for a way to navigate between the categories of the religious and the secular, and considers how this is related to gendered ways of being and relating. Using a lived religion approach the contributors analyse the intersections between spirituality, religion and secularism in different geographical areas, ranging from the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy to Canada, the United States and Mexico. The chapters explore the spiritual experiences of women and their struggle for a more gender equal way of approaching the divine, as well as the experience of men and of those who challenge binary sexual identities advocating for a queer spirituality. This volume will be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists as well as scholars in other disciplines who seek to understand the role of spirituality in creating the complex gendered dynamics of modern societies.

This books explores the rise of civilizational populism throughout the world, and its consequences. Civilizational populism posits that democracy ought to be based upon enacting the ‘people’s will’, yet it adds a new and troubling dimension to populism’s thin ideology: a civilization based classification of peoples and division of society. Today, we increasingly find not conflict between civilizations, but conflict within states over their civilizational identity. From Western Europe to Turkey, and from India and Pakistan to Indonesia, populists are increasingly employing a civilization based classification of peoples in order to define the identities of ‘the people’ and their perceived enemies. This book is the first to examine civilizational populism as global phenomenon rather than a uniquely Western form of politics. Through a series of case studies, the book examines the role played by religion in forming civilizational identities, but also investigates the often deleterious consequences of civilizational populism entering the political mainstream.