Citizens of the World deals with the Bahaâis and their religion. While covering the historical development in sufficient detail to serve as a general monograph on Bahaâi, emphasis is laid on examining contemporary Bahaâi, with the Danish Bahaâi community as a recurrent case.
The book discusses Bahaâi religious texts, rituals, economy, everyday life, demographic development, mission strategies, leadership, and international activism in analyses based on primary material, such as interview studies among the Bahaâis, fieldwork data from the Bahaâi World Centre in Israel, and field trips around the world.
The approach is a combination of history of religions and sociology of religion within a theoretical framework of religion and globalisation. Several general topics in the study of new religions are covered. The book contributes to the theoretical study of globalisation by proposing a new model for analysing globalisation and transnational religions.
Margit Warburg graduated in 1979 in sociology of religion and is now professor at the University of Copenhagen. Among her publications are New Religions and New Religiosity, Aarhus University Press, 1998 (edited with Eileen Barker), Religion and Cyberspace, Routledge, 2005 (edited with Morten T. Højsgaard). She is currently working on religious change in Denmark within a theoretical framework of globalisation, migration and civil religion.