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This research aims to examine character education in pesantrens (Islamic boarding schools also known as pondok pesantren) as a model of religious education in transforming the attitudes of students in line with the values and culture of a diverse society. This study is based on documents related to the curriculum and student guidance system, which were confirmed through interviews with leaders and teachers, as well as observations at Pondok Modern Darussalam Gontor, Indonesia. The research findings indicate that Pondok Modern Darussalam Gontor, Indonesia, has implemented a transformative education system. Students have undergone a transformation from traditional, fanatic, and closed values to modern, rational, disciplined, inclusive, independent, and responsible ones. The transformation in students' personalities occurs not only through classroom learning but also through reflective engagement in pesantren management, discussions, and public speaking exercises. The findings of this study imply that the religious education system in pesantrens should prioritize not only the cognitive aspects of doctrinal religious knowledge, but also involve students in society, fostering open, tolerant, and rational characters.

In recent years, nonviolent action has gained global attention owing to the so-called Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street Movement in the U.S., the MST Movement in Brazil, the Zapatista Movement in Mexico, and the BDS Movement in Israel/Palestine. Several studies demonstrate that movements that maintain nonviolent discipline have higher rates of success than movements that turn to armed struggle. The ability to maintain nonviolent discipline is crucial to achieving success because violent methods tend to undermine popular support of contentious movements and provide a pretext for states to use violence to prevent harm andestablish law and order. Recent research has also shown that nonviolent movements are much more likely to succeed when state elites and/or security forces defect. It is well known that religious actors have played important roles in several nonviolent campaigns, such as the Indian Independence Movement, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, the People Power Movement in the Philippines, and the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement, but the impact of religion on nonviolent discipline and defection has not been adequately addressed in previous research. In this paper, I examine nonviolent discipline and defection in terms of obedience and disobedience. Drawing on contemporary nonviolence research and psychological studies of obedience/disobedience, I argue that religion can, and sometimes does, facilitate obedience to nonviolent principles and disobedience to state authorities.

War and propaganda have been linked together for a long time because of a natural human inhibition against killing other humans. To get citizens to give their consent to go to war and kill, the leader(s) need to influence them. The aim of this study is to analyse the content and functions of the U.S. governments post 9/11 propaganda to find out how this where done. Coyne and Hall argue that propagandists need the publics enlighted consent to be able to influence them. This work will prove that the U.S. government used propagandistic tools, like the fear of our own and our civilizations annihilation through an apocalyptic language, to circumvent our rational thinking and talk unbridled to our emotions and thereby inhibit our higher cognitive functions. As method we use bricolage. Bricolage interpretations adapt different technical discourses to each other and move freely between different techniques and concepts. In this work it had an advancement over other methods because our field of investigation stretched over different fields of research and we were free to use the method that best suited our collected data. We demonstrate that the U.S. government functioned as fearmongers on their home audience to stir up emotions so the citizens would choose the path that best suited the leader(s), but that it was far from being enlighted.

Vad är fundamentalism och terrorism och hur förhåller de sig till varandra? Varför ansluter sig vissa till militanta grupper och vad kännetecknar radikalisering? Vilka inre och yttre faktorer ligger bakom religiöst motiverade våldshandlingar? Fundamentalism och terrorism är globala fenomen som berör alla religioner på ett eller annat sätt. I boken behandlas dessa företeelser ur ett religionspsykologiskt perspektiv. Forskning har visat att det finns ett antal sociala och psykologiska faktorer som kan få helt vanliga människor att begå fruktansvärda handlingar. Med hjälp av konkreta exempel visar författaren att religiösa och sekulära våldshandlingar styrs av samma mekanismer och kan förklaras på likartade sätt. Denna andra upplaga av Fundamentalism och helig terror är reviderad, utökad och uppdaterad.

Categorization is an innate human ability that helps us understand and perceive the world around us. In this article, we explore how this ability affects how and why people, groups, and states around the world categorize Muslims. Our focus is primarily on the categories of moderate and radical, and the problems associated with these two distinctions. We argue that what counts as radical as opposed to moderate is always changing, because it depends on what is considered moderate at a particular time and place and is therefore also dependent on existing power arrangements. We also argue that the categorization of radical and moderate is linked to liberal values and liberal politics, rather than to theological beliefs.

A growing number of scholars argues that we are witnessing a resurgenceof religion in world politics, accompanied by an increasein religiously inspired conflict. Empirical studies demonstrate thatreligious conflicts are more violent, more intense, more durable, andmore difficult to resolve through negotiated settlements than theirsecular counterparts. In this paper, we argue that these conclusionsare unreliable, because they fail to provide convincing criteria forseparating religious conflicts from non-religious ones. Our mainconcern is with the categorization problem. What characteristics orfactors make a conflict party, conflict issue, or identity religious, andwhat characteristics or factors frame a conflict party, conflict issue,or identity as non-religious? A basic assumption behind much of thisresearch is the contested idea that religion is a universal phenomenonembodied in various forms such as Islam and Christianity. The majorityof scholars simply assume a sharp division between religion andthe secular without problematizing or justifying such a distinction. Inthis article, we argue that religious conflict is an ideologically chargedconcept, and that the study of the religion-conflict nexus reinforcesthe neoliberal status quo and current systems of power.

In psychological literature, the concept of spirituality is typically defined as something private, internal and experiential that includes meaning-making, sacred values, connectedness, and/or transcendence. Thus, spirituality is distinct from social, economic, and political spheres of human life. Most scholars who concern themselves with spirituality assume that it is a universal phenomenon that is essentially the same everywhere. But the isolation of spirituality as a sphere of life that is separated from other spheres is not a universal feature of human history. Mahatma Gandhi, who argued that spirituality is associated with political activism and the struggle for social and economic justice, illustrates this point. Spirituality is a modern concept with a specific history and what counts as spirituality and what does not depend on different configurations of power. In this paper, we explore why a category as amorphous and indeterminate as spirituality has maintained such a currency in the literature of the psychology of religion. We argue that the category of spirituality is a sociopolitical management technique for reinforcing political quietism, which is necessary for the maintenance of the neoliberal status quo.