Overview

This book is about new forms of religiosity and religious activity emerging in the context of their dialectic relations with contemporary multicultural realities. World religions are effectively a major agent of the multiculturalization of contemporary societies. However, multiculturalism pushes them not only toward change and reforms, but also toward new conflicts between and within them. This process should remind us of the Jewish legend of the Golem – an animated being created by man which finally challenges the latter’s control over it - a dialectic relation, indeed. World religions today greatly contribute to a world (dis)order that is multicultural both when viewed as a whole, and from within most societies that compose it. It is a development that contrasts both with the assumption that globalization implies one-way homogenization and convergence to Western modernity, and the expectation that globalization would be bound to polarize homogeneous civilizations.

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Eliezer Ben-Rafael, PhD (1974) in Sociology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Tel Aviv University. He is past President of the International Institute of Sociology. His recent works include Jewish Identities (2001) and Is Israel One? (2005). His edited works include Identity, Culture and Globalization (2001); Sociology and Ideology (2003); Comparing Modernities (2005) and Transnationalism (2009). Yitzhak Sternberg, PhD (2004) in Sociology, Tel Aviv University, teaches Sociology at the Open University and at Beit Berl College, Israel. His edited works include Identity, Culture and Globalization (2001); Comparing Modernities (2005); New Elites in Israel (2007, in Hebrew); and Transnationalism (2009).

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