This article explores how two religious traditions, Judaism and Islam, confer meaning on the phenomenon of mortality, and it examines how their adherents seek to make sense of death in 21st century Britain. This research scrutinizes the religious identities of these two groups within the context of British multiculturalism, and it proposes approaching the manners in which death is perceived and experienced by Muslims and Jews as identity markers. The article argues that death issues contribute to the processes of collective labelling, self-perception and definition, through the perspective of religion. This inquiry will try to elucidate how the study of doctrines and practices to do with death can provide a meaningful platform for exploring identity boundaries. What does it mean to be a Jew or a Muslim in Britain today? Can the ways in which Jews and Muslims relate to mortality help us to answer this?

Cemeteries are seldom what they seem. A headstone tells a brief tale, but what if there are no headstones? Is it possible to extract more than the obvious? The dearth of information most frequently encountered necessitates a more interpretive approach. As documents of social history, Australian burial places have a great capacity to reveal not only how people died, but how they lived. In providing a tangible and evocative link to past communities, the history found in cemeteries acts as an insightful ingredient in shaping cultural identity. By ‘reading’ these cultural landscapes, the wider implications of identity, meaning making and the value of individual belonging and wellbeing can be explored. The notion of ‘place making’ and ‘place meaning’ suggests a bigger responsibility to social cohesion and personal development than may be first considered.

Based on fieldwork, this article analyses the Brahmakumaris movement in India in terms of its contemporary perspectives and praxis nuances. The focus is that its contemporary stance is a mix of millenarianism, simultaneous accommodation-assimilation and subtle exclusivity. Commencing with a brief overview of the charisma, genesis and cultural geographies, the contemporary perspectives and visions on society, stratification, ethics and transformation have been discussed. These include the re-interpretations reflecting in ontology and epistemology, through the Raja Yoga propositions; in cosmology and historicity, through the world tree concept; and, an eventual instrumentalism and “New Age-ification” in praxis. Woven intermittently is the critique of the epistemological hybrid. The “social” angle in praxis nuances comes through aspects of volition, prescriptivism and doctrinarism, and the institutionalized endeavours. The political economy of practice through dimensions of memory and oblivion which determine the operational style has been deliberated. The new thematic and methodological insights gained from fieldwork have been discussed.

Religion and sexuality have been historically uneasy siblings. This large study (n = 2269) examines the role of religion (or no religion) in the construction and living out of gay, lesbian or bisexual identity in Aotearoa New Zealand. The study confirmed that more women consider spirituality important than do men, but that there is significant movement away from Christianity to No Religion. Christian women attain milestone ages later, and demonstrate greater sexual involvement and attraction to men over their lifetimes, and have more children, than do No Religion respondents. Christian men also had longer opposite-sex relationships. Christians were more likely to value, expect and behave exclusively in relationships. Regardless of religiosity, women preferred marriage and men civil unions as the legal recognition of their relationships. The adoption of a life-paradigm by Christian women is considered.

This article offers a reflexive account of the process of researching religious identity with young people, and considers how combining methods may enable young people to explore their own identities in different ways. Drawing upon three participant case studies it explores the public–private spectrum produced as part of discussion groups, semi-structured interviews and an innovative online e-Journal research activity. As participants moved through each stage of the research process, the way in which they represented their religious identities shifted as they encountered differing social environments, became more practised at telling their own lives, or had evolved their own perspectives over time. Employing mixed methods contributes a more nuanced understanding of the role of religion in young people’s lives yet also raises important ethical implications surrounding participant confidentiality in research.

The ‘turn to experience’ has been described as one of the most defining characteristics of contemporary religion. Research on religion, and in particular on spirituality, therefore increasingly concentrates on the description of its experiential dimensions. The turn to experience, however, asks for something more than just the observation that a particular dimension (experience) has become of greater value for practitioners of religion. Dimensions which have for a long time been central to the social-scientific study of religion, but are avoided in the practitioners’ discourse and, surprisingly, in the social-scientific discourse as well, such as authority and power, turn out to be of lasting significance in the mediation and construction of religious experience. In this contribution, the authors take the social construction of religious experience in contemporary spirituality as a starting point for a reflection and discussion on the methodological challenges of experiential religion for those engaged in the study of religion.

In this chapter we will discuss the consequences for doing research in the case of a topic and field that has become subject to intense public debate. In three cases involving research on Islam and Muslims we will take up questions pertaining to inter-subjectivity, and show how research on public issues, the relation between the worldviews of informants and those of the researcher, and processes of inclusion and exclusion during fieldwork are influenced by the politicization of Islam. We show how sudden changes in the societal context influence local identifications and allegiances. In our cases these changes produced a politicization of the field which, in turn led to the construction of the researchers as ‘natives’ by the informants. We argue that a reflection on this construction is necessary in order to better analyse processes of signification among informants and render a more adequate representation of the researched.