This book demonstrates the highly productive effects of applying contemporary views of discourse to religious language, seen (in theological terms) from a postliberal viewpoint. The emphasis is on critical discourse analysis (CDA), with its well-developed methodology for deconstructing the manifestations of power. What emerges is a combination of two complementary, surprisingly simple models which explain many aspects of the language used and witnessed by contemporary Christian believers. A wide variety of detailed, worked examples provide a very practical introduction to the revealing practice of understanding how discourse analysis responds to the question: - When language is used in a religious context, what's going on here?"

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Religion is the first ever comprehensive collection of research on religion and language, with over 35 authors from 15 countries, presenting a range of linguistic and discourse analytic research on religion and belief in different discourse contexts. The contributions show the importance of studying language and religion and for bringing together work in this area across sub-disciplines, languages, cultures, and geographical boundaries. The Handbook focuses on three major topics: Religious and Sacred Language, Institutional Discourse, and Religious Identity and Community. Scholars from a variety of different disciplinary backgrounds investigate these topics using a range of linguistic perspectives including Cognitive Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, and Conversation Analysis. The data analysed in these chapters come from a variety of religious backgrounds and national contexts. Linguistic data from all the major world religions are included, with sacred texts, conversational data, and institutional texts included for analysis. The Handbook is intended to be useful for readers from different subdisciplines within linguistics, but also to researchers working in other disciplines including philosophy, theology, and sociology. Each chapter gives both a template for research approaches and suggestions for future research and will inspire readers at every stage of their career.

The discursive study of religion is a growing field that attracts increasing numbers of students and researchers from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds. This volume is the first systematic presentation of the research into religion and discourse. Written by experts from various disciplines, each chapter offers an integrative overview of theory, method, and contextual studies by focusing on a specific approach, interdisciplinary relationship, controversy, or theme in the field. Taking the discursive dimension in the production of knowledge seriously, the book also provides a critical analysis of academic practice and explores new forms of scholarly communication, including open peer-review. The collected volume will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students across a variety of disciplines, including religious studies, history of religion, sociology of religion, discourse studies, cultural studies, and area studies.

In recent peace initiative (a common word) in Muslim-Christian relations, emphasis on the way forward between Islam and Christianity has been a frantic call to "love of God and love of neighbor." This call, argued in this book, provokes rival and parallel logic in the concepts of monotheism between Christian religious leaders and scholars on the one hand and Islamic religious leaders and scholars on the other. Using in places the framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA), the author analyzes some text extracts from a common word in order to expose the underlying problems of ideologies, dichotomies, identity constructions, and orthodoxy claims that are associated with the Islamic Tawhid and Christian Trinity. Drawing from various conferences and workshops convened by both religious communities as well as some social scientist insights, this book finds authentic communication in Muslim-Christian relations grounded in recognition and acceptance of the differences between Islam and Christianity. Recognizing the ideological issues in the usage of the appositional pronouns us Muslims and you Christians as suggesting dichotomy, the author suggests rather the education of both Muslims and Christians, starting from the kindergarten on the religion and beliefs of the other and to re-interpret and revise conflicting Qur'anic and biblical issues pertaining to Muslim-Christian relations.

This ground-breaking book takes an interdisciplinary approach to language, religion and media using an audience-response study. In this book, the author investigates how the three Abrahamic faiths - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - are represented in mainstream British media and analyses how members of each religious group and those with no religion receive those representations. Employing Critical Discourse Analysis, Al-Azami considers the way the media use their power of language to influence the audience’s perceptions of the three religions through newspaper articles, television documentaries and television dramas. Chapter 3 presents the results of an original investigation into the responses of members of the three religious groups and those with no religion when exposed to those same media materials. The author applies the encoding/decoding model and also considers people’s views in face-to-face interactions compared to comments on online newspapers. Comprehensive in its analysis, this book will be of interest to students of Linguistics, Media Studies, Religious Studies, and Journalism.

Discursive approaches to the study of religion have received a lot of attention recently. Making Religion brings together leading theorists in the field who explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of the analysis of religious discourse. The volume provides an overview of current debates in the field, extends and improves upon contemporary theories and methodologies, and contributes to the discipline more broadly by flagging the importance of this emerging field of research. The combination of theoretical reflection and practical application of discourse analysis as a tool to study religion opens up new perspectives for future research. Contributors are: Helge Årsheim, Stephanie Garling, Adrian Hermann, Titus Hjelm, Mitsutoshi Horii, George Ioannides, Jay Johnston, Reiner Keller, Jens Köhrsen, Marcus Moberg, Heinrich Wilhelm Schäfer, Leif-Hagen Seibert, Adrián Tovar Simoncic, Kocku von Stuckrad, Teemu Taira, and Frans Wijsen.