Religion, Society and Contemporary Issues
This domain tests whether you can place belief inside public life: how religion relates to science, political authority, other faiths, gender relations and development. Marks come from naming a model or thinker, explaining it, and applying it to a concrete case, usually African or Cameroonian.
Religion and science
- Ian Barbour's four models: conflict, independence (Gould's non-overlapping magisteria), dialogue, integration.
- Flashpoints: Galileo 1633; Darwin 1859 and the evolution debate; creationism and intelligent design.
- Cosmology: Lemaître's primeval atom; fine-tuning; the claim that Genesis 1 is theology, not physics.
- Qur'anic concordism and its critics; ATR ecological knowledge.
Religion and politics
- Types: theocracy, establishment, separation, secularism.
- Liberation theology: Gutiérrez, the preferential option for the poor, base communities.
- Islamic political thought: ummah, sharia, caliphate, Islamist movements.
- Cameroon: Law No. 2019/014 of 19 July 2019 regulates religious congregations, requiring authorisation and ministerial oversight of worship and religious institutions; churches also act as mediators and as major providers of schools and hospitals.
Pluralism, gender, development
- Exclusivism, inclusivism (Rahner's anonymous Christians; Nostra Aetate, 1965) and pluralism (Hick's "the Real").
- Feminist theology: Ruether, Daly, the hermeneutics of suspicion; women's ordination; Wadud's Qur'anic hermeneutics.
- Development: Weber's Protestant ethic thesis; the prosperity gospel critique; zakat and church social teaching; faith-based health and education.
Worked example
"Religion is a barrier to development." Set the criterion first: development as income plus human capability (Sen). For the charge: resistance to vaccination or girls' schooling, prosperity gospel diverting giving, corruption in religious institutions. Against: mission hospitals and schools, zakat, community credit, social trust. Then Weber on Protestantism and capitalism. Conclude with a verdict conditional on the criterion chosen.
Traps
- Listing examples without stating a criterion.
- Treating "science" or "religion" as single monolithic things.
- Asserting secularisation as universal (Berger's desecularisation; Cox on the secular city).
- Using "cult" or "sect" as a slur rather than a technical classification.