Dr.Philos

Religion, Poverty and Social Justice

Religion is an important part of most, if not all, societies and cultures around the globe. It plays a vital role in people’s understanding and interpretationof who they are and why the world is ordered in the way it is. Religion, however, has not been taken seriously enough in the academic approaches to poverty-issues, neither as constituting a part ofcultures and people’s lives, nor as a field of study in relationship to social justice issues. The reasons for why this is so are complex and manifold. One reason might be that the academic discourseswithin Western social science have been too focused on the ‘secular-paradigm’; e.g. problems expected to be solved around the world have been targeted from the (rational) spheres of politics and law.In addition, the perception that religion would (will) vanish as cultures and societies progress and modernize has obscured the reality that people actually are religious and that religion actuallymatters and will not go away. Another ‘problem’ of historic character is the fact that much of the efforts directed at ‘helping the poor’ have been undertaken by religious and secular actors with aseemingly ‘double’ agenda; missionary efforts have gone hand in hand with development related work, or development projects have incorporated not only the assistance directed at lifting the poor out oftheir misery but also added guidelines in order to change cultures and religions. Hence, in a postcolonial context the questions surrounding the motives of the development-actors have caused quite a fewproblems, which have led to tensions between the ‘developer’ and the ‘developing’ as well as between secularly and religiously based development-groups which again have been reflected in distrust andsuspicion between them.
We want to take religion as an academic field of study seriously and put emphasis on the relationship between religion, poverty and social justice in order to: (1)...