State, Society, and Religious Engineering

Download or read book State, Society, and Religious Engineering written by Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce and published by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. This book was released on 2009 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book looks at how religion in Singapore is being subjected to the processes of modernisation and change. The Singapore State has consciously brought religion under its guidance. It has exercised strong bureaucratic and legal control over the functioning of all religions in Singapore. The Chinese community and the Buddhist Sangha have responded to this by restructuring their temple institutions into large multi-functional temple complexes. There has been quite a few books written on the role of the Singapore State but, so far, none has been written on the topic - the relationship between state, society and religion. It will help to fill the missing gap in the scholarly literature on this area. This is also a topic of great significance in many Asian, particularly Southeast Asian, countries and it will serve as an important book for future reference in this area of research and comparative studies.