Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1177/20503032211015297
M. D. Placido
and important about the constitution of culture and society in the not so (these days!) UnitedKingdom. But I want to return to Bayart to pursue the postmodern or perhaps Deleuzian dimensions of nonreligion—the fact that non-religion is not a thing or an object but a contingent relation that emerges through specific, situated acts and performances—and what this means for the way societies and religions are understood and studied. Postmodern methodologies such as deconstruction take the instability of structures and objects for their point of departure. Not just Bayart and Deleuze but new materialists such as Jane Bennett, Rosa Braidotti, and Bruno Latour as well as post-Marxists such as Donna Haraway and Ernesto Laclau take the incompleteness of the social as a point of departure, its tendency for transformation as a given. But this point of departure is arguablymarginal to the “critical” tradition of Religious Studies with which Cotter identifies. So, why does this study of non-religion matter? Because it draws into view a range of wider questions about theory and method in Religious Studies which are only hinted at in Cotter’s otherwise excellent study.
{"title":"Book Review: White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals","authors":"M. D. Placido","doi":"10.1177/20503032211015297","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032211015297","url":null,"abstract":"and important about the constitution of culture and society in the not so (these days!) UnitedKingdom. But I want to return to Bayart to pursue the postmodern or perhaps Deleuzian dimensions of nonreligion—the fact that non-religion is not a thing or an object but a contingent relation that emerges through specific, situated acts and performances—and what this means for the way societies and religions are understood and studied. Postmodern methodologies such as deconstruction take the instability of structures and objects for their point of departure. Not just Bayart and Deleuze but new materialists such as Jane Bennett, Rosa Braidotti, and Bruno Latour as well as post-Marxists such as Donna Haraway and Ernesto Laclau take the incompleteness of the social as a point of departure, its tendency for transformation as a given. But this point of departure is arguablymarginal to the “critical” tradition of Religious Studies with which Cotter identifies. So, why does this study of non-religion matter? Because it draws into view a range of wider questions about theory and method in Religious Studies which are only hinted at in Cotter’s otherwise excellent study.","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"9 1","pages":"358 - 362"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/20503032211015297","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48937645","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 : 2021-10-26DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044432
David Newheiser
Over the last year, many of us have found our hope to be tested. In this context, I think theorical reflection can clarify the resilience required to acknowledge and address the challenges we face, both personal and political. Because that is the aim of my book, I am grateful for these responses from four readers whose work I admire. Although their comments diverge in important ways, they constellate around a question that I see as central: how does hope become concrete? In her contribution to this symposium Sanchez (2021, 337) writes that, on its own, theological discourse “is an empty cloth without bodies to wear it.” As her own research shows, theoretical texts address real people, and they can be taken up in new ways to inform particular lives (Sanchez 2019). My book focuses on two figures, Jacques Derrida and Dionysius the Areopagite, whose work is famously abstruse. Despite their reputation, I was drawn to both authors because they helped me to better understand my own life and that of the communities I care about. In my experience, disappointment sometimes hits hard, and yet people somehow persist. Through Dionysius and Derrida, I found tools to illuminate this persistence, which holds hopes while acknowledging the possibility of loss. As Sanchez points out, in the time since my book appeared the prevalence of loss has become painfully apparent. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused widespread suffering, and it has shattered established patterns of normalcy. Against this background, Sanchez agrees that hope should take negativity seriously, but she presses me to say more about the rituals through which hope is cultivated. I think Sanchez is right that communal practices are indispensable. Whereas the first half of my book presents hope as an ethical discipline, the later chapters argue that the personal practice of hope is also political. In my view, hope enables the receptivity and resilience through which genuine community is possible, and the bonds established in this way nurture hope in turn. Although relationship with others is always a risk, hope is the discipline that empowers people to pursue desires that are vulnerable to disappointment. For this reason, it is the precondition for mutual care and political mobilization. For me, the reciprocal relation between individual hope and communal action became particularly clear through the isolation imposed by COVID-19. DuringMelbourne’s long lockdowns, my neighbor would walk by the windowofmy homemost afternoons, and his daughters would tell mewhat they did that day at school. Although it was a lonely time, this quiet ritual sustainedmy ability to persist, and that
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Pub Date : 2021-10-25DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044430
S. Bracke, L. M. Hernández Aguilar
Understanding the ways in which Muslims are turned into “a problem” requires an analytic incorporating the insights gained through the concepts of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism into a larger frame. The “Muslim Question” can provide such a frame by attending to the systematic character of this form of racism, explored here through biopolitics. This article develops a conceptualization of Europe’s “Muslim Question” along three lines. First, the “Muslim Question” emerges as an accusation of being an “alien body” to the nation, often expressed through the Trojan horse legend. Second, the “Muslim Question” is elaborated through demands of integration and assimilation, in which the production of difference entangles with calls and measures to regulate Muslims. And third, the “Muslim Question” is brought to life upon the terrain of gender and sexuality, as the imaginary of threat at the heart of the “Muslim Question” is a replacement conspiracy centered on birthrates.
{"title":"Thinking Europe’s “Muslim Question”: On Trojan Horses and the Problematization of Muslims","authors":"S. Bracke, L. M. Hernández Aguilar","doi":"10.1177/20503032211044430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032211044430","url":null,"abstract":"Understanding the ways in which Muslims are turned into “a problem” requires an analytic incorporating the insights gained through the concepts of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism into a larger frame. The “Muslim Question” can provide such a frame by attending to the systematic character of this form of racism, explored here through biopolitics. This article develops a conceptualization of Europe’s “Muslim Question” along three lines. First, the “Muslim Question” emerges as an accusation of being an “alien body” to the nation, often expressed through the Trojan horse legend. Second, the “Muslim Question” is elaborated through demands of integration and assimilation, in which the production of difference entangles with calls and measures to regulate Muslims. And third, the “Muslim Question” is brought to life upon the terrain of gender and sexuality, as the imaginary of threat at the heart of the “Muslim Question” is a replacement conspiracy centered on birthrates.","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"10 1","pages":"200 - 220"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48184271","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 : 2021-10-24DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044437
N. Khan
Fifty years after Loving v. Virginia, oppositional attitudes toward interracial relationships are still advanced by religious institutions in the United States. Extant social science literature characterizes these attitudes as generated largely by Evangelical and Christian nationalist traditions where members harbor negative attitudes toward interracial relationships. Hidden behind this characterization are the significant, but less obvious ways in which non-Evangelical denominations construct and disseminate similar attitudes. Through discourse analysis and digital interviews with LDS women of color, this study uses the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon) as an entry point for examining intermarriage discourses in other faith traditions. Findings highlight that LDS messaging about interracial relationships shifted over time, integrating multiple racial frames in ways that expanded the scope of LDS racism with especially harsh implications for LDS women of color. Broader theoretical implications for the study of race, gender, and religion are discussed.
{"title":"“Light cleaveth unto light”: Intermarriage discourse, LDS women of color, and the new racism","authors":"N. Khan","doi":"10.1177/20503032211044437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032211044437","url":null,"abstract":"Fifty years after Loving v. Virginia, oppositional attitudes toward interracial relationships are still advanced by religious institutions in the United States. Extant social science literature characterizes these attitudes as generated largely by Evangelical and Christian nationalist traditions where members harbor negative attitudes toward interracial relationships. Hidden behind this characterization are the significant, but less obvious ways in which non-Evangelical denominations construct and disseminate similar attitudes. Through discourse analysis and digital interviews with LDS women of color, this study uses the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon) as an entry point for examining intermarriage discourses in other faith traditions. Findings highlight that LDS messaging about interracial relationships shifted over time, integrating multiple racial frames in ways that expanded the scope of LDS racism with especially harsh implications for LDS women of color. Broader theoretical implications for the study of race, gender, and religion are discussed.","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"10 1","pages":"78 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46129934","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 : 2021-10-23DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044435
Md. Didarul Islam, A. Siddika, Shafi Md Mostofa
{"title":"Book Review: American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present","authors":"Md. Didarul Islam, A. Siddika, Shafi Md Mostofa","doi":"10.1177/20503032211044435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032211044435","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48781170","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 : 2021-10-22DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044431
Elise Margrethe Vike Johannessen
This article examines the experiences of Norwegian high school girls with Muslim backgrounds in learning about Islam in religious education (RE). The empirical material consists of observations from a high school class in Norway and interviews with girls in the class. The findings support previous reports that Islam as a topic may be challenging for students with Muslim backgrounds. They also suggest that the RE classroom is a space where religious boundaries can go from blurred to bright as a result of students’ reactions to educational content and its foci on Islam. As many teachers find the topic of Islam potentially controversial and thus challenging to teach, this article offers insights that may help teachers to understand and deal with students’ reactions in the classroom context.
{"title":"Contesting religious boundaries at school: A case from Norway","authors":"Elise Margrethe Vike Johannessen","doi":"10.1177/20503032211044431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032211044431","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the experiences of Norwegian high school girls with Muslim backgrounds in learning about Islam in religious education (RE). The empirical material consists of observations from a high school class in Norway and interviews with girls in the class. The findings support previous reports that Islam as a topic may be challenging for students with Muslim backgrounds. They also suggest that the RE classroom is a space where religious boundaries can go from blurred to bright as a result of students’ reactions to educational content and its foci on Islam. As many teachers find the topic of Islam potentially controversial and thus challenging to teach, this article offers insights that may help teachers to understand and deal with students’ reactions in the classroom context.","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"10 1","pages":"187 - 199"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48782520","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 : 2021-10-22DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044436
Yuen-Yung Sherry Chan
Incidents of racism against Asians have been rising since the COVID-19 pandemic turned global in early 2020. Employing Foucault’s concept of panopticism and Kathryn Lofton’s insights on the function of religion to demarcate group boundaries, this article argues that American religion constructs Asian American stereotypes to limit the discursive space within which Asian Americans may negotiate their identities. These discursive limitations have, in turn, buttressed white supremacy. This article examines how some Asians and Asian Americans respond to anti-Asian sentiments during the pandemic by performing a close reading of an op-ed by prominent Asian American politician Andrew Yang in The Washington Post. This reading reveals that Yang’s colorblind solution upholds whiteness as the American gnosis and limits the discursive space in which Asian Americans may negotiate their identities. This article also discusses how the myth of America as a white Christian country withstands challenges from minority groups contesting its dominance.
{"title":"The heathen, the plague, and the model minority: Perpetual self-assessment of Asian Americans as a panoptic mechanism","authors":"Yuen-Yung Sherry Chan","doi":"10.1177/20503032211044436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032211044436","url":null,"abstract":"Incidents of racism against Asians have been rising since the COVID-19 pandemic turned global in early 2020. Employing Foucault’s concept of panopticism and Kathryn Lofton’s insights on the function of religion to demarcate group boundaries, this article argues that American religion constructs Asian American stereotypes to limit the discursive space within which Asian Americans may negotiate their identities. These discursive limitations have, in turn, buttressed white supremacy. This article examines how some Asians and Asian Americans respond to anti-Asian sentiments during the pandemic by performing a close reading of an op-ed by prominent Asian American politician Andrew Yang in The Washington Post. This reading reveals that Yang’s colorblind solution upholds whiteness as the American gnosis and limits the discursive space in which Asian Americans may negotiate their identities. This article also discusses how the myth of America as a white Christian country withstands challenges from minority groups contesting its dominance.","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"9 1","pages":"265 - 283"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49555578","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 : 2021-10-21DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044420
Anna Rowlands
The usual reference points for considerations of hope in political theology have been in the twentieth century writings of Ernst Bloch, Jürgen Moltmann and the virtue ethicists of more recent years. Newheiser returns to this classic political theological theme in this book, but via a different route. In so doing, he offers a tantalizing glimpse of what a renewed negative political theology of hopemight look like. Newheiser’s book is important for at least three reasons. The first reason lies in his brokering a dialogue between deconstructive continental philosophy and Christian patristic and mystical theologies. The second reason builds upon the first; Newheiser writes for a secular audience, who may also happen to be religious, and he writes in such a way that he does not presuppose the commitments of his reader or their field of knowledge. He takes his reader into a newly created territory and argues his case with simplicity and clarity. In doing so, he writes political theology that takes the conditions of both its religiosity and its secularity seriously. The third reason this text is important relates to the field of political theology itself. The argument that Newheiser offers here is for a renewal of ethical negativity as the grounds of a political theology suitable for our age. It is in this last regard that the text is perhaps most timely. It is on this final point that I will focus in what follows. Newheiser (2019, 40, 48, 68) defines apophasis as a form of “unsaying” that creates in its practitioner “an ethical discipline that enacts the dispossession of the self,” or as he also expresses it, a discipline “oriented towards future transformation.” As such hope and negativity belong together, they are practices of the will that reinforce each other. The practice of negativity seems to refine hope, enabling it to become properly itself, shorn of pretention. Negativity enables the owning of uncertainty, the speaking with a pebble in one’s mouth, as Newheiser notes on the closing page of the book. Negativity does not mean silence. Speech must proliferate, for divine creation begets speech in the creature, but speech turns against itself, living diachronically between and with the dual practices of affirmation and negation. This is the necessary “unsaying” of faith. Newheiser is clear that his project is not primarily about linguistic or propositional negativity, but rather ethical, embodied negativity: the way in which faith bears itself into the world as a practiced disposition across a lifetime. One of Newheiser’s most suggestive, although not fully developed, themes concerns the ways in which a negative theology relates to questions of time and temporality. He notes that he is not arguing for a synchronicity of affirmation and negation, but rather a diachronic lived experience of
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Pub Date : 2021-10-21DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044428
Marius Timmann Mjaaland
David Newheiser’s Hope in a Secular Age raises a number of significant questions addressing the philosophical, political, ethical and theological situation of the world today. The philosophical approach, influenced by Jacques Derrida, is deconstructive. Deconstruction is all about questioning metaphysical and religious certainties, and thereby raising existential, ethical and political questions from a new angle in a situation of profound uncertainty. As Newheiser points out, the key to a deconstruction of metaphysics is a rereading of texts, in order to detect inherent tensions in arguments, notions or conceptual binaries. In this case, the reader is challenged to reconsider the meaning of religion in a “secular” age, but thereby also her own construction of ultimate sense, religious or secular. Authors as different in time and framework as the apophatic theologian Dionysius Areopagita (fifth century) and the postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida (late twentieth century) are the odd companions for such wayfarers. Newheiser has written a book that is both timely and thought-provoking. Not only the notion of modernity, but also the notion of secularity is questioned: What has changed in our perception of “the secular” today? Is it destabilized by a new sense of “religion”? What is, then, the meaning of “God” and God’s name in a secular age? Can we be certain about what we reject or embrace, deny or worship under this name? Moreover, how could such deliberations provoke us to rethink and possibly react, ethically and politically, to vital societal and existential issues in an age when democracies are undermined by authoritarian forces? Hope is the crucial term in this attempt to discuss religion, ethics and politics from a new angle: Hope as a quest for possibility, even when there are no viable options and the political situation seems impossible. Hope as an ethical virtue and attitude. Hope as reaction to despair. Hence, the author’s personal and political quest to his audience reads as follows: How can we find hope when the world seems to fall apart through violence, lies and moral decay? Newheiser answers this with an example and an ethical imperative: “Dionysius and Derrida show that it is possible to keep faith in the dark through the discipline of hope.” (Newheiser 2020, 11) Hence, we ought to practice the “discipline” of hope. I disagree with Newheiser at this point, but the point of disagreement needs further clarification. To be sure, I am hardly an enemy of hope, and I can admit that there is a need for courage and discipline in the world today. Moreover, I warmly welcome the insisting tone of this book. However, I disagree when it comes to Newheiser’s
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Pub Date : 2021-10-20DOI: 10.1177/20503032211044433
Jean-Pierre Reed
{"title":"Book Review: American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present","authors":"Jean-Pierre Reed","doi":"10.1177/20503032211044433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032211044433","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43214,"journal":{"name":"Critical Research on Religion","volume":"9 1","pages":"365 - 367"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46959937","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}
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