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Massimo Introvigne Quotes
born 1955 Italy
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements.
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[Deprogramming survivor Toru Goto] teaches us that resilience is not a trait, but a choice. That faith is not weakness, but armor. That freedom is not always granted—sometimes, it must be reclaimed.
It is one of the most difficult exercises for democracy to tolerate those who think differently, think independently from the powers that be, and sometimes behave differently or do not actively support the parties in power.
[People] who develop forms of unaffiliated 'self-religion,' a deep but vague and unorganized interest in the sacred.
The victims of [pedosexual] priests and other religious ministers deserve our sympathy and respect—but so do those who have been slandered and vilified by the media based on accusations courts have later recognized as false.
[The Supreme Court of California’s 1931 decision “People v. Blackburn”] demonstrates that religious liberty is truly protected only if donations even to the most marginal and “strange” religions are protected.
Why did a reaction hostile to religious liberty manifest itself almost at the same time in France, Japan, Taiwan, and other democratic countries (but not all) in the late 1980s and 1990s? Obviously, there is not a single answer, but a look at the context may help.
…repeating defamation taken from another source is still defamation. The fact that the victim has not sued others who spread the defamation first does not authorize anybody to repeat their slanderous statements.
A free press is a press capable of recognizing that its real freedom comes from its commitment to the truth. We need media brave enough to tell the truth even when this truth is unpopular, or disturbs the powers that be, as it often happens when religious or spiritual minorities are persecuted.
Today, in my decade-long experience of studying them, Jehovah’s Witnesses interact respectfully with people of all religions. However, as most other religionists, they are persuaded that their own religious organization offers the genuine path to salvation devised by God. If believing this is a crime, then it is a crime committed by most if not all religions.
Serious newspapers publish attacks against minority religions they would [feel] ashamed of printing if they were directed against Catholicism, Judaism, or Islam—without realizing that the doctrines of mainline religions would appear just as strange as those of these smaller groups to those who would encounter them for the first time.
Imagine a Kingdom of God where peace reigns, criminals are punished only by love, and everyone speaks Polish—not Hebrew, not Latin, but Polish. This is no utopia conjured by a novelist, but the real-world vision of the Mariavites, a Catholic splinter group that has persisted for over a century in Poland and abroad, and keeps some 20,000 devotees today.
Colonial powers have long recruited soldiers from the periphery to fight wars at the center. …When war becomes a business model, and soldiers are sourced like cheap labor, we are no longer in the realm of politics. We are in the realm of trafficking.
Many of the typologies that have shaped the study of African spirituality were developed in colonial contexts, often by scholars who, despite their best intentions, viewed African spiritualities through the lens of Christianity or secular rationalism.
At the Rome conference, I introduced the “Rome Model,” a three-stage model that predicts a slippery slope from intolerance to discrimination and from discrimination to persecution. The OSCE and other international bodies, as well as scholars, quoted repeatedly the Rome Model in the years after the event.
There are governments that claim that limiting religious liberty is necessary to protect social stability or the harmony of the country. Romero’s message is that this is [no] valid justification. [Civil or natural] rights protection defines what a legitimate social stability is, rather than the other way around.
Although the expression “citizen diplomacy” was coined in the late 20th century, in fact some 2,200 years before the word existed Guiguzi had already established the fundamental principle that diplomacy and promoting peace between the states [and between other kinds of parties] is not a profession, but a skill acquired through self-cultivation.
As we reflect, on Taiwan’s Judicial Day, on the rule of law, we remember that since the expression was coined in the 17th century, it was connected with freedom of religion or belief, although this idea was not fully developed at the time. Today, we should repeat and affirm that there is no rule of law without respect for religious and spiritual minorities.
…abolishing unjust systems does not automatically abolish injustice. Because injustice is not only a matter of law. It is a matter of how bureaucrats interpret the law, how officials use their power, how institutions treat the people they are meant to serve.
The distinctiveness of Mouridism consists in the “sanctification” of work, which plays an equally, if not more important, role than meditation and prayer. Through this spirituality of work, [Ahmadou Bamba Mbacké (1853–1927)] inserted an authentically African element into Sufism, and at the same time exposed himself to criticism and reservations especially from Tijânî circles.
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