Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1177/20503032221124550
David Newheiser
For many of us, I suspect, the last two years have called hope into question. Millions have died from COVID-19, millions have lost someone they cared about, and millions more have fallen ill themselves. In addition to these direct effects, the virus has disrupted normal patterns of life. Some of us have endured exhausting lockdowns, while others were exposed to infection by virtue of their employment. In typical fashion, the neoliberal systems that govern our lives have placed the heaviest burdens on those who were already vulnerable, but even those of us who are insulated from the worst effects of the pandemic have had moments in which our hope was challenged by suffering and uncertainty. In a strange coincidence, my first book—Hope in a Secular Age—appeared at exactly the moment that COVID began to spread around the world. I had no idea what was coming, of course, but the book sought to address a situation like the one we are experiencing. Even before the challenges of pandemic life, I was convinced that the only hope worth keeping has to be honest rather than easy. As we have found, hope has a certain fragility, but I believe that this is the source of its power. In my view, hope is premised upon the possibility of disappointment, pressing forward without guarantees. At some level, although we invent a thousand ways to forget it, we all know that we are vulnerable. We cannot be sure that our loves will endure, that our projects will succeed, or that we stand on the side of justice and truth. It does no good to pretend that things are more certain than they are; as we have repeatedly seen over the last two years, such bluster is prone to shatter upon the complexity of lived experience. This is the context in which I hear the question that frames this symposium: “Is hope reasonable or necessary?” My answer on both counts will be “no,” but that does not mean hope must be abandoned. Instead, I aim to suggest that hope is an extra-rational discipline that is contingent but indispensable.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-21DOI: 10.1177/20503032221124551
Ehsan Aqababaee, M. Razaghi
Various political groups were involved in the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Iran, which led to the downfall of the Pahlavi regime. However, Islamic Fundamentalists gradually seized power and eliminated rival ideologies in the 1980s. In the late 1990s, Iranian Reformers won the elections and oversaw the management of the film industry for two four-year administrations until 2005. As liberals and religious democrats, the Reformers supported a modern portrayal of Iranian women in movies. The findings of this research challenge the previous studies that voiced optimism about the new individualistic portrayal of women in Iranian movies. The research methodology is based on Theresa de Lauretis's technologies of gender involving a narrative analysis of sixty-eight Iranian movies produced from 2001 to 2005. Given the political defeat of the Reformers in 2005, the main research question is to what extent has the portrayal of Iranian women gone beyond (or remained under) the ideological domination of Islamic Fundamentalism.
各种政治团体参与了1979年伊朗伊斯兰革命，导致巴列维政权垮台。然而，伊斯兰原教旨主义者在20世纪80年代逐渐夺取了政权，并消除了对立的意识形态。20世纪90年代末，伊朗改革者赢得了选举，并在2005年之前的两届四年任期内监督电影业的管理。作为自由主义者和宗教民主主义者，改革派支持电影中对伊朗女性的现代刻画。这项研究的发现挑战了之前对伊朗电影中女性新的个人主义形象表示乐观的研究。该研究方法基于Theresa de Lauretis的性别技术，对2001年至2005年制作的68部伊朗电影进行了叙事分析。鉴于改革派在2005年的政治失败，主要的研究问题是对伊朗妇女的描绘在多大程度上超越了（或仍然处于）伊斯兰原教旨主义的意识形态统治之下。
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Pub Date : 2022-09-16DOI: 10.1177/20503032221124547
Matteo Di Placido
{"title":"Book Review: Lived Religion in Latin America. An Enchanted Modernity","authors":"Matteo Di Placido","doi":"10.1177/20503032221124547","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032221124547","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"10 1","pages":"369 - 373"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43352860","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 : 2022-09-16DOI: 10.1177/20503032221124544
H. Evans, Jerry Z. Park
Research repeatedly shows that stratification occurs through racial classification and systemic racism. Scholars have also shown that stratification in wealth, education, and occupational attainment for Americans varies by religious affiliation. In this article, we incorporate theories of intersectionality and complex religion to study the ways that religion stratifies status attainment within racial groups in the United States. We hypothesize that relational proximity to predominantly white denominations increases status attainment for racial minorities in the United States. Using data from the 2000-2016 waves of the General Social Survey, we find that Black Evangelicals have higher levels of occupational prestige than Black non-Evangelicals. We argue that this is because of networks of social capital via multiracial churches that allow Black Evangelicals access to increasing levels of occupational prestige.
{"title":"Intersectional Stratification: Race, Religion, and Status Attainment","authors":"H. Evans, Jerry Z. Park","doi":"10.1177/20503032221124544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032221124544","url":null,"abstract":"Research repeatedly shows that stratification occurs through racial classification and systemic racism. Scholars have also shown that stratification in wealth, education, and occupational attainment for Americans varies by religious affiliation. In this article, we incorporate theories of intersectionality and complex religion to study the ways that religion stratifies status attainment within racial groups in the United States. We hypothesize that relational proximity to predominantly white denominations increases status attainment for racial minorities in the United States. Using data from the 2000-2016 waves of the General Social Survey, we find that Black Evangelicals have higher levels of occupational prestige than Black non-Evangelicals. We argue that this is because of networks of social capital via multiracial churches that allow Black Evangelicals access to increasing levels of occupational prestige.","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"11 1","pages":"82 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42245533","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 : 2022-09-15DOI: 10.1177/20503032221124542
Fabian U Nnadi, K. I. Uwaegbute
This article argues that the practice of child adoption among Igbo Christians of Nigeria is some kind of “paradox.” This is because, Igbo Christians reject and practice child adoption at the same time. This applies to Igbo Christians irrespective of denominations. Igbo cultural practices like the quest for children to partake in inheritance, the denial of participation in some traditional roles, the individualized nature of Igbo contemporary society, and Christian teaching on love contribute to this. The findings in this article challenge previous scholarship which claims that Igbo Christians do not practice Child adoption although they are sympathetic to it.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-14DOI: 10.1177/20503032221124554
Christina Petterson
This essay springs from my current project, namely an introduction to and translation of Ernst Bloch ’ s Thomas Münzer: Theologian of the Revolution funded by CenSAMM, the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements. The essay here will focus mainly on history and community, after a bit of background. Importantly, the issues raised here are only addressed within a small Western context. Christianity in its various forms plays very different roles in non-Anglo/European countries, and class struggle as it is thought of in this essay is also very limited to small centers of former empires and is not meant in its global anti-imperialist context. This is primarily due to the material itself. My own overarching interest in various texts from different periods of the past, is the sense of history and what governs our understanding of it. This is something I have been working with in different ways over the past years, looking at both Francis Fukuyama ’ s essay on 1989 as the end of history, New Testament understandings of class struggle as history, and also the meaning of history and the questions we are urged to ask, and which ones we are urged to avoid.
{"title":"Bloch’s Münzer and the Horizons of History","authors":"Christina Petterson","doi":"10.1177/20503032221124554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032221124554","url":null,"abstract":"This essay springs from my current project, namely an introduction to and translation of Ernst Bloch ’ s Thomas Münzer: Theologian of the Revolution funded by CenSAMM, the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements. The essay here will focus mainly on history and community, after a bit of background. Importantly, the issues raised here are only addressed within a small Western context. Christianity in its various forms plays very different roles in non-Anglo/European countries, and class struggle as it is thought of in this essay is also very limited to small centers of former empires and is not meant in its global anti-imperialist context. This is primarily due to the material itself. My own overarching interest in various texts from different periods of the past, is the sense of history and what governs our understanding of it. This is something I have been working with in different ways over the past years, looking at both Francis Fukuyama ’ s essay on 1989 as the end of history, New Testament understandings of class struggle as history, and also the meaning of history and the questions we are urged to ask, and which ones we are urged to avoid.","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"10 1","pages":"339 - 344"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41929644","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 : 2022-09-14DOI: 10.1177/20503032221124548
M. Sharpe, M. King
In this period of pandemics, the environmental crisis, and fraying of political consensus, the question of hope is especially pressing. Is hope reasonable or is it necessary, and for what and for whom? Is it only the property now of right-wing populists, using the rolling economic, immigration, and pandemic crises, and the new affordances of social media, in the cause of reactionary revolt against the social and cultural gains of the last centuries, such as the inclusion of women and other minorities, as well as awareness of ecological depredation? Dowe find ourselves in a Yeatsian time, wherein proverbially, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats 2016, 33), or does the stretching and failing of contemporary paradigms announce new, more affirmative possibilities? What resources for hope can we find in the great religious and political traditions, whether Islamic, Jewish, Christian, or other? Does the instrumental and ideological use of these traditions disqualify them as sources of renewal and reorientation? Likewise, are there existing resources within the political paradigms of liberalism, democracy, republicanism, or socialism which can be looked to resolve the present symptoms of despair, alienation, and incivility, or must entirely new political models be imagined or looked to? Are more two-sided theoretical assessments of these traditions, as sources of both corruption and catharsis, dominion and liberation, needed if we are to build new coalitions capable of addressing the crises, or is hope necessarily open or blind, committed to holding open the possibility that something absolutely Other must occur? Critical theorising in the last decades has been engaged in a significant process or processes of rethinking, as Marxist-Leninism’s credibility as the alternative to regnant capitalism declined, and then failed after 1989. At the same time, the absence of any serious systematic opposition has enabled parties of business globally to prosecute their neoliberal ambitions, of universal commodification and marketisation, with unprecedented success. Societies have become increasingly economically unequal, wealth has become more concentrated, organisational structures have become more corporatized, and as the pandemic has shown in countries like the US, the state has been divested of its democratic capacities to better the lives of citizens. The resulting alienation has produced pools of discontent from which right-wing populists draw, promising a simple solution to these widespread problems by scapegoating minorities, targeting the remnants of the social democratic “elites” in the educational, governmental, and community sectors, conducting vitriolic
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Pub Date : 2022-09-08DOI: 10.1177/20503032221124560
M. King
Every philosophy ’ s content and method are determined by the class struggles of its age. Although philosophers — like scholars, artists and other ideologists — may more or less fail to recognize it and sometimes remain totally unaware of it, this conditioning of their attitude to so-called “ ultimate questions ” takes effect notwithstanding. ― Gy¨orgy Luk´acs (2021, 313), The Destruction of Reason
{"title":"Between Hope and The Overman: Ernst Bloch and The Anti-Christ","authors":"M. King","doi":"10.1177/20503032221124560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032221124560","url":null,"abstract":"Every philosophy ’ s content and method are determined by the class struggles of its age. Although philosophers — like scholars, artists and other ideologists — may more or less fail to recognize it and sometimes remain totally unaware of it, this conditioning of their attitude to so-called “ ultimate questions ” takes effect notwithstanding. ― Gy¨orgy Luk´acs (2021, 313), The Destruction of Reason","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"10 1","pages":"345 - 350"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44603177","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 : 2022-09-08DOI: 10.1177/20503032221124559
M. Sharpe
the truth of these doctrines] we must avoid the pitfalls of both dogmatism and relativism … The truth of a doctrine does not depend solely upon its utility. Many propositions of Natural Law are progressive, though they may appear futile in certain historical sit-uations. Others may serve in one historical stage and may be worthless in another one. The truth of a doctrine will depend upon the extent to which it embodies concrete liberty and human dignity, upon its ability to provide for the fullest development of all human potentialities . (Neumann 1942, 72; my italics)
{"title":"Giving the Angel the Benefit of Law: Natural Law and Human Dignity in Franz Neumann and Ernst Bloch","authors":"M. Sharpe","doi":"10.1177/20503032221124559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032221124559","url":null,"abstract":"the truth of these doctrines] we must avoid the pitfalls of both dogmatism and relativism … The truth of a doctrine does not depend solely upon its utility. Many propositions of Natural Law are progressive, though they may appear futile in certain historical sit-uations. Others may serve in one historical stage and may be worthless in another one. The truth of a doctrine will depend upon the extent to which it embodies concrete liberty and human dignity, upon its ability to provide for the fullest development of all human potentialities . (Neumann 1942, 72; my italics)","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"10 1","pages":"351 - 356"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44780765","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 : 2022-09-08DOI: 10.1177/20503032221124557
A. Bielik-Robson
In my essay, I want to ponder on the psychotheology of hope: the messianic affects which attach themselves to the promise of Exodus—of yetziat, a liberating getting-out from the world imagined as a “house of bondage” or an “iron cage” without exits. In my juxtaposition of Bloch’s philosophy of Exodus with Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critique of Western modernity as an Exodus gone wrong, I would like to focus on the intricate relation between hope (represented at its purest by the former) and despair (represented at its purest by the latter). I would like to prove that, contrary to appearances, the one cannot be thought without the other: hope can only come to the fore at the background of the darkest despair and vice versa—the despair can only be understood as a loss of hope. By correcting Bloch’s metaphysical optimism with the Frankfurt duo’s plunge into the abyss of hopelessness (recall Lukacs’s malicious joke about Adorno as an inhabitant of the “Grand Hotel Abyss”), I wish to reclaim the idea of despair for the messianic idiom which too often feels uneasy about it, wrongly convinced that it cannot let in a sense of the loss of hope.
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