Pub Date : 2021-10-15DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044421
E. Pothou
Matteo Di Placido has recently obtained his PhD in Sociology and Social Research at the University of Milan – Bicocca, Italy, with a dissertation on what he calls the “pedagogies of salvation” of modern forms of yoga. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Political Science and the Center for Ideas and Society of the University of California Riverside (UCR) during the Spring and Summer quarters of the academic year 2018-2019; and an Academic Associate at the Cardiff School of Sport and Health Sciences of the Metropolitan University of Cardiff, Wales, during the first semester of 2020. Matteo’s current research deals with the ethnographic study of the apprenticeship processes of modern yogi in a variety of contexts, such as ashrams and urban yoga schools. He is particularly interested in the pedagogies of modern forms of yoga, their disciplining and self-transformative dynamics as well as the discursive study and the politics of modern yoga research and the sociology of religion.
Matteo Di Placido最近在意大利米兰大学比科卡分校获得了社会学和社会研究博士学位，他的论文是关于现代瑜伽形式的“救赎教育学”。2018-2019学年春季和夏季，他是加州大学河滨分校政治学系和思想与社会中心的访问学者；2020年上学期，在威尔士卡迪夫都市大学卡迪夫体育与健康科学学院担任学术助理。Matteo目前的研究涉及在各种背景下对现代瑜伽士学徒过程的民族志研究，如道场和城市瑜伽学校。他对现代瑜伽形式的教育学、它们的自律和自我变革的动力，以及现代瑜伽研究和宗教社会学的话语研究和政治学特别感兴趣。
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Pub Date : 2021-10-15DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044422
Bryan Turner
{"title":"Book Review: The Sage Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Religion","authors":"Bryan Turner","doi":"10.1177/20503032211044422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032211044422","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"9 1","pages":"353 - 356"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42015239","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-14DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044427
Kızıltepe Beyza Hatun
{"title":"Book Review: Spiritual Subjects Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire","authors":"Kızıltepe Beyza Hatun","doi":"10.1177/20503032211044427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032211044427","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"1 1","pages":"205030322110444"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43302790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-14DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044423
Bradley Onishi
The trademark virtue of Newheiser (2019)Hope in a Secular Age is how it simultaneously carries on conversations with a multitude of scholars and discourses. Something would be worrisome if it did not. No work can approach the theme of hope in the 21st century without a nuance and complexity that removes it from charges of both obliviousness and nihilism. As the respondents in this symposium note in their respective ways, hope has been hard to discover and/or muster (depending on how you understand it) in recent years. From the gnarls of the COVID-19 pandemic to the brutalities of the Trump administration, not to mention the increasing effects of climate change, and the rise of authoritarianisms all over the globe, it seems that the more we look for hope, the less there is to be found. Newheiser is not blind to this paradox. In some sense, he makes it the basis for a contemporary sense of hope. As AndrewWillis notes in “The Elusiveness of Hope,” for Newheiser hope seems to be something akin to “acceptance without resignation,” a steely gaze into the despicable conditions of our time that refuses to surrender to them. ForWillis, it is this determination to affirm a future “we cannot grasp” that provides the ground for “ethical transformation.” A persistence that leads to discipline. However, for Marius Mjaaland, there is an open question as to whether or not hope is a matter of willfulness or discipline. Like Willis (2021), and Mjaaland (2021) sees Newheiserian hope as “a quest for possibility even when there are no viable options.” But he disagrees on how we might arrive at it. Neither a function of the will, nor the result of self-discipline, for Mjaaland hope is rather a gift that emerges from the suspension of the will in expectation of an unexpected possibility. In a less critical review, Michelle Flores applauds Newheiser for refusing to ground hope in a false sense of certainty. By taking the shifting grounds of both secularity and theology into consideration, Flores sees Newheiser’s approach as fittingly careful, without resorting to fecklessness. “Hope,” she writes, “is what refuses to settle for, among other things, the stability of the divine-political analogy” (Sanchez 2021). Anna Rowlands takes a similar angle in her reading of Newheiser. For her, Newheiser’s approach represents “A political theology that takes its secularity and religiosity seriously,” thereby providing the basis for “ethical negativity as the grounds of a political theology” (Rowland 2021).
Newheiser(2019)《世俗时代的希望》(Hope in a Secular Age)的标志性优点是它如何同时与众多学者和话语进行对话。如果不是这样，那就令人担忧了。在21世纪，没有一件作品可以不带一丝细微差别和复杂性地接近希望的主题，从而避免被指责为健忘和虚无主义。正如本次研讨会的受访者以各自的方式指出的那样，近年来，希望很难被发现和/或聚集(取决于你如何理解它)。从新冠肺炎疫情的肆虐到特朗普政府的暴行，更不用说气候变化的影响日益加剧，以及全球威权主义的兴起，我们似乎越想找到希望，就越找不到希望。纽威瑟并非对这种矛盾视而不见。在某种意义上，他把它作为当代希望的基础。正如安德鲁·威利斯(AndrewWillis)在《希望的难以捉摸》(The incredible of Hope)中所指出的那样，对纽威瑟来说，希望似乎是一种类似于“不服输地接受”的东西，是一种对我们这个时代的卑鄙状况不愿屈服的钢铁般的凝视。对威利斯来说，正是这种确认“我们无法把握”的未来的决心，为“伦理转型”提供了基础。一种导致纪律的坚持。然而，对马吕斯·姆雅朗来说，希望究竟是一种任性还是一种纪律，这是一个悬而未决的问题。和Willis(2021)和Mjaaland(2021)一样，他们认为纽惠斯式的希望是“即使没有可行的选择，也要寻求可能性”。但他不同意我们如何达到这个目标。它既不是意志的功能，也不是自律的结果，对米阿兰德来说，希望更像是一种礼物，它来自于对意想不到的可能性的期望中意志的暂停。在一篇不那么挑剔的评论中，米歇尔·弗洛雷斯(Michelle Flores)称赞纽威瑟拒绝将希望建立在虚假的确定性之上。通过考虑到世俗和神学的变化，弗洛雷斯认为纽威瑟的方法非常谨慎，而不是诉诸于无能。“希望，”她写道，“在其他事物中，是拒绝满足于神与政治类比的稳定性的东西”(Sanchez 2021)。安娜·罗兰兹在阅读《纽威瑟》时也采取了类似的角度。对她来说，Newheiser的方法代表了“一种认真对待其世俗性和宗教性的政治神学”，从而为“作为政治神学基础的道德消极性”提供了基础(Rowland 2021)。
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Pub Date : 2021-10-14DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044438
A. Willis
Hope is ever elusive. To describe it compellingly from the inside is to dive into an abyss of despair, look up (and around), and make metaphors from the recognition of a stranded togetherness. Rich depictions of the mystery we call “hope” emphasize its gravity rather than its immensity. They give it form without any definite shape and reveal its substance without drawing strict boundaries. In short, they grammatically enact its elusiveness. In a moment where hope is on the wane, and most academic discussions reduce its complexity, David Newheiser has gifted us with a poignant scholarly meditation on hope that preserves its mystery and confirms its evasiveness. Newheiser’s question is not “What is hope?” for his aim is neither analytical clarity nor conceptual coherence. Rather, he wants an effective way to describe how the human heart presses forward in the face of insurmountable odds at an unprecedented moment in the history of the modern West where the conditions for religion have fundamentally shifted. Thus, his is not a conventional hope; it is a hope only made lucid via melancholy and love. And it is given form by an aching emptiness that will remain—in spite of itself—unfulfilled. Though ultimately unsatisfied, this hope is neither “tragic” nor “dark.” It is, rather, simply the practice of living, thoughtfully and reflexively, in the face of existential uncertainty and the always-unforeseeable future. Hope in a Secular Age strikes a quiet tone of awe in the face of disaster as it posits a hope that might achieve the same. It connects a line of spiritual/intellectual descent that eloquently links Western notions of “sacred”/“secular” (and the personal to the political) and highlights the perpetual affirmation in all negation. In doing so, the text helps us better understand the dynamics of our tryings and our failings in the face of the impossible and allows us to confront the absurd and the unknown (all primary features of human experience) with equanimity. To wonder in the face of this mystery is to perform an epic act of reverence. To keep going in the face of loss and uncertainty is to act with hope. As much as it is an intervention in multi-disciplinary scholarly approaches to hope, Newheiser’s focus goes well beyond the virtuous hope that sits at the core of his Christian theological heritage and extends past the hope-as-a-passion that lies at the heart of the Anglo-Enlightenment philosophical inheritance. His hope is derived from the margins of those traditions, particularly the thought of 5th century Christian theologian Dionysus and the late modern philosophical skeptic Jacques Derrida.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-12DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044429
Tremlett Paul-François
{"title":"Book Review: The Critical Study of Non-Religion: Discourse, Identification and Locality","authors":"Tremlett Paul-François","doi":"10.1177/20503032211044429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032211044429","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"9 1","pages":"356 - 358"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49567487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-06DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044425
Michelle C. Sanchez
David Newheiser’s Hope in a Secular Age appeared at the threshold to a year in which “hope” has become particularly elusive—or worse, laughable. Like 2020 itself, pandemics and politics have rendered hope a punchline. I remember one acquaintance remarking, all the way back inApril, that she was feeling much better now that she had “given up hope.” I remember this because it rang true to me at the time. I wonder how she feels now? As I write this, it’s 4:10pm, and the sun has already set over Massachusetts. The resurgence of the virus hangs like a toxic fog over the impending winter season as a yet-unconceded election settles like a terminal diagnosis on an ailing body politic. It’s a good thing that Newheiser’s book re-positions “hope” alongside deconstruction and negativity—in short, alongside the very gestures of giving up or letting go. Anything short of this would have risked losing my attention—itself an elusive commodity in 2020. Perhaps the most honest praise I can give this excellent book is that its argument has stuck with me during the latter half of this year, since I first read it in July. I am a theologian by training and committed to the claim that the truth-value of theological discourse is tied to the lives it illumines, embedded as they are in peculiar material conditions. Theology for us is nothing without us, its readers. It is an empty cloth without bodies to wear it. This approach has the effect of tipping hierarchical negotiations between familiar taxonomic categories like biblical, systematic, constructive, and historical. It refuses to restrict the power of theology to temporal periods or particular communities of practice. It focuses on the relationships forged among texts and people, ancients and moderns, the putatively faithful and the putatively faithless, and the imaginative possibilities these relationships engender. Newheiser’s book shares this sensibility, moving as it does from Dionysius to Derrida in order to relate one of the cardinal theological virtues to the tantalizing prospect of a negative political theology in a present-time when secularity—whatever it may be—feels familiar and unavoidable. Newheiser has essentially sewn an argument from his own vantage, shaped by these cross-disciplinary debates and cross-historical sources, and then stepped out of the argument so that his readers can inhabit it, perhaps better able to make sense of things. Hope in a Secular Age should be recommended for its fresh contribution to niche debates from a generation ago over the relationship between Derridean deconstruction and negative theology, not least contributing captivating treatments of little-known and newly translated pieces by Derrida. Along the way, it also recombines sources that recast the basic assertions of Schmittian political theology. Schmitt’s readers will know that there is a structural and historical analogy between
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Pub Date : 2021-05-13DOI: 10.1177/20503032211015299
Eyad Abuali
Light is a discursive tool that Sufis have drawn upon over the centuries in order to elucidate systems of thought and practice. In medieval Islamic thought, light was closely associated with the soul as well as conceptions of sight and the eye. It also occupied an important place in cosmology. By the twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries, Sufis began to consider notions of light more systematically, creating close correspondences between vision, cosmology, and anthropology within Sufi thought. This coincided with the increased production of complex diagrams in Sufi texts. This article shows that these developments were interrelated. By analyzing Shams al-Dīn al-Daylamī’s (d. 587/1191) diagrams alongside his theories of light with respect to the nature of the soul and body, it demonstrates that the theory of the soul as light played an important part in shaping Sufi thought, practice, and visual culture.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-12DOI: 10.1177/20503032211015293
M. Goudarzi
In the recent decades, many Muslim intellectuals have devoted their intellectual efforts to reconstructing the jurisprudence through a new interpretation of Islam in order to solve the problem of human rights. While they have mostly tried to find a solution based on Ijtihad in derivation of Shari’a, Mahmoud Mohammad Taha and Mohsen Kadivar have asked for structural Ijtihad, presenting reversed and rational abrogation theories. In the current article, the researcher aims to focus on three main questions: Why do they believe that traditional jurisprudence and Ijtihad in derivatives are not able to solve the conflict between Islam and human rights? What are the most important governing principles in the corrective theory of each thinker, and how can their proposed theories lead to the reconciliation of Islam and human rights? And finally, what are the most fundamental principles and common features that lie in the theory of the two thinkers?
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Pub Date : 2021-05-12DOI: 10.1177/20503032211015285
Jakub Ort
This article interprets critiques of secularity and the related concept of history as progress in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Judith Butler. At the same time, it defends their approach against the criticism voiced by Gregor McLennan. It shows that the postsecular conception of the politics of both authors is not just an attempt to open public space to a wider range of religious and cultural voices. Rather, it is a critique of the way in which political secularism and the ideology of progress are used by the modern state to legitimize the exercise of its own power. Butler and Chakrabarty's postsecular policy is thus based primarily on coalition building against these legitimization frameworks, which opens up the possibility of forming new postsecular political subjects. It illustrates the theoretical approach of both authors with an example of the church sanctuary movement in Germany.
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