Religion and Disaster Risk Reduction: A Review of the World Disasters Report 2014

The 2014 edition of the International Federation of the Red Cross’ (IFRC) World Disasters Report (WDR 2014) focuses on risk and culture.[1] The intersection of these two areas represents a response to the current trend for disaster risk reduction (DRR) research, policy, and programming in the humanitarian sector and the introduction of culture as a potentially …

Is there a secular humanitarian faith?

There's been much discussion recently about faith-based and secular responses to humanitarian emergencies that has attempted to highlight the normative assumptions present in both. Some have even gone so far as to say that secular humanitarianism is a faith of its own in many ways. But while such a description may help to highlight that …

The Religious/Secular Divide and the Global Displacement Crisis

Today is World Refugee Day and if the numbers released by the UNHCR today tell us anything, more action and new approaches are urgently needed to address the needs of the rapidly growing globally displaced population. While religion is often consider marginal in discussions about the displacement crisis, in today’s post Erin Wilson argues that …

Humanity in Action: Religion, Human Rights and the Question of Neutrality

In today’s blog post, Brenda Bartelink reflects on aid in humanitarian emergency and disaster situations, drawing attention to how religion and human rights are lived out and practiced amidst the multiple moral frameworks that influence humanitarian practice. From secular perspectives faith based humanitarianism is questioned because of the potential threat it poses to realizing the …

Is the ‘new’ religious engagement really all that new? The need for reflection on the underlying values and assumptions in the engagement with religion

In this post, Brenda Bartelink draws on her research on faith based development organisations in the Netherlands and Uganda, and Dutch initiatives to engage with religion to raise some critical points for reflection on the new US Office for Faith-Based Community Initiatives . Following on from last week’s post on this new office,  she points …

Manuel A. Vasquez’s response to: “The Homo Economicus and transnational religious networks in a post-secular society”.

In today's post, prof. Manuel A. Vasquez suggests an alternative view to the 'Homo Economicus' in his response to Ella Sebamalai's post on transnational religious networks and faith-based organizations. Rather then calculated rationality, Vasquez argues in favor of a form of contextualized rationality that influences the choices of migrants on both individual and communal level. …

The Homo Economicus and transnational religious networks in a post-secular society

Last week,  Prof. Manuel A. Vasquez gave a guest lecture on “Conceptualizing domination and resistance in transnational religious networks” at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies in Groningen. Here Ella Sebamalai engages with the ideas he raised and applies them to practical contexts, in particular faith-based organisations in the contemporary Sri Lankan context. In his …

Transnational faith based development and the post secular experiment

In her blog-post on the Religion Factor, Cecelia Lynch discusses FBOs in the context of the neoliberal competition on the ‘market’ of international development. In my work on and with development FBOs in the Netherlands I see this illustrated. Changes in government funding for development organizations, has created a highly competitive market in which religious …

Religious Humanitarianism in a Neoliberal Age

Guest contributor Cecelia Lynch explores how neoliberalism, a phenomenon closely connected with the rise of the post-secular, is affecting the language and practice of religious humanitarian organizations. Part of my current work involves interviewing representatives from various humanitarian organizations, religious and secular, on the place of religion in contemporary development and humanitarian aid work. Invariably, …