Religion, ethnicity, and self-identity

Ethnicity and religion at the end of this century are fused in surprising, creative, and ominous ways. News stories connect words like Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant with various movements of peoples. Whereas ethnicity and religion have, in the past, succumbed to secular, urban, technological, ideological, educational, and mass communication influences, they now surface as a freshly volatile force in world cultures. To overcome these conventional influences, people establish personal and group identity, mutual security, and empowerment by creatively merging their ethnicity and religion. This collection of essays examines, in Martin Marty's terms, the "explosion of public faith and aggressive action."