Though W. E. B. Du Bois was critical of traditional religion, he understood the power of religious orientations to the world, including religious attitudes of faith and hope. Although many scholars have commented on Du Bois’s secular faith, few have understood the secular, scientific sources that he used to develop it. In this article, we examine how Du Bois built a post-Christian otherworldly perspective in part by drawing from popular science writers who examined the possibilities, both real and imagined, of higher-dimensional spaces and planes of existence. We analyze Du Bois’s scholarship, visionary fiction, prayers, and poems to better understand how he repurposed higher-dimensional concepts to envision a post-racial God, reimagine the social order, and develop key ideas that informed his life’s work, including the concept of the “color line.”
{"title":"Above the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Otherworldly Perspective and a New Racial Order","authors":"Christopher White, Matthew W Hughey","doi":"10.1093/jaarel/lfae019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfae019","url":null,"abstract":"Though W. E. B. Du Bois was critical of traditional religion, he understood the power of religious orientations to the world, including religious attitudes of faith and hope. Although many scholars have commented on Du Bois’s secular faith, few have understood the secular, scientific sources that he used to develop it. In this article, we examine how Du Bois built a post-Christian otherworldly perspective in part by drawing from popular science writers who examined the possibilities, both real and imagined, of higher-dimensional spaces and planes of existence. We analyze Du Bois’s scholarship, visionary fiction, prayers, and poems to better understand how he repurposed higher-dimensional concepts to envision a post-racial God, reimagine the social order, and develop key ideas that informed his life’s work, including the concept of the “color line.”","PeriodicalId":51659,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140153904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This study contributes to contemporary discussions about the entanglement, cross-fertilization, and co-implicatedness of religion and empire by adding a voice from the still underexamined field of Jewish thought. It claims that the European imperial project is inherent to the vision of Judaism, Jewish-Christian relations, and global redemption offered in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, and that its proper conceptual background is the fin de siècle Protestant discourse offering justifications for empire by wedding territorial expansion, mission, and messianism. By examining the appropriate passages from The Star in light of his early wartime geopolitical writings, it demonstrates that Christian proselytization is essential to Rosenzweig’s vision of redemption and that his contribution to the religious discourse justifying empire resides in his conceptualization of the Jews, subtracted from history and politics, as not targets of mission but as prefiguring the empire-like, borderless, and redeemed existence toward which the Christians, always on “the way,” strive. It concludes by calling for an 'imperial turn' in the study of modern Jewish thought.
{"title":"Empire, Mission, and Messianism: Franz Rosenzweig’s Understanding of the Relation between Judaism and Christianity","authors":"Daniel M Herskowitz","doi":"10.1093/jaarel/lfae022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfae022","url":null,"abstract":"This study contributes to contemporary discussions about the entanglement, cross-fertilization, and co-implicatedness of religion and empire by adding a voice from the still underexamined field of Jewish thought. It claims that the European imperial project is inherent to the vision of Judaism, Jewish-Christian relations, and global redemption offered in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, and that its proper conceptual background is the fin de siècle Protestant discourse offering justifications for empire by wedding territorial expansion, mission, and messianism. By examining the appropriate passages from The Star in light of his early wartime geopolitical writings, it demonstrates that Christian proselytization is essential to Rosenzweig’s vision of redemption and that his contribution to the religious discourse justifying empire resides in his conceptualization of the Jews, subtracted from history and politics, as not targets of mission but as prefiguring the empire-like, borderless, and redeemed existence toward which the Christians, always on “the way,” strive. It concludes by calling for an 'imperial turn' in the study of modern Jewish thought.","PeriodicalId":51659,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140154005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A concept is vague if it admits of borderline cases—cases in which it is not clear whether the concept applies. Thus vague concepts are concepts without sharp boundaries. I argue that religion is vague, and I draw conclusions from this claim for both framing up conceptions of religion and studying it. One result will be to undermine arguments to the effect that any account of religion that does not sharply demarcate the religious from the nonreligious is somehow defective. Another will be that admitting the existence of borderline cases relieves us of the obligation to seek high levels of precision in our various usages of the term. And a third will be that is it not at all clear that any periods of human history can be characterized as times “before religion” on any but the narrowest of definitions.
{"title":"The Vagueness of Religion","authors":"Andrew C Dole","doi":"10.1093/jaarel/lfae017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfae017","url":null,"abstract":"A concept is vague if it admits of borderline cases—cases in which it is not clear whether the concept applies. Thus vague concepts are concepts without sharp boundaries. I argue that religion is vague, and I draw conclusions from this claim for both framing up conceptions of religion and studying it. One result will be to undermine arguments to the effect that any account of religion that does not sharply demarcate the religious from the nonreligious is somehow defective. Another will be that admitting the existence of borderline cases relieves us of the obligation to seek high levels of precision in our various usages of the term. And a third will be that is it not at all clear that any periods of human history can be characterized as times “before religion” on any but the narrowest of definitions.","PeriodicalId":51659,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140153847","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the intersection of racial and religious identity among progressive US Christians in the context of transnational travel. We approach our analysis through a comparative ethnographic study of two majority-Black and two majority-white Christian Palestinian solidarity tours, representing mainline, evangelical, and historically Black Protestant progressive theological traditions. We conceptualize majority-white tours as “journeys to the margins” and majority-Black tours as “journeys among the margins,” considering how the racial makeup and theological orientation of trips offer a range of affordances for meaning-making, identity construction, and solidarity-building. Using Judith Weisenfeld’s religio-racial framework, we focus on how participants’ progressive Christian values are embedded in divergent racial schemas. Attending to how the logics of these schemas are reinforced or interrogated in transnational encounters, we extend Weisenfeld’s concept from the nation-state to the transnational as we examine how participants reproduce, revise, and re-envision religio-racial frameworks.
{"title":"Journeys to and among the Margins: Transnational Religio-Racial Identity on American Christian Palestinian Solidarity Tours","authors":"Roger Baumann, Sara A Williams","doi":"10.1093/jaarel/lfae016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfae016","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the intersection of racial and religious identity among progressive US Christians in the context of transnational travel. We approach our analysis through a comparative ethnographic study of two majority-Black and two majority-white Christian Palestinian solidarity tours, representing mainline, evangelical, and historically Black Protestant progressive theological traditions. We conceptualize majority-white tours as “journeys to the margins” and majority-Black tours as “journeys among the margins,” considering how the racial makeup and theological orientation of trips offer a range of affordances for meaning-making, identity construction, and solidarity-building. Using Judith Weisenfeld’s religio-racial framework, we focus on how participants’ progressive Christian values are embedded in divergent racial schemas. Attending to how the logics of these schemas are reinforced or interrogated in transnational encounters, we extend Weisenfeld’s concept from the nation-state to the transnational as we examine how participants reproduce, revise, and re-envision religio-racial frameworks.","PeriodicalId":51659,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140154009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the rationale behind philanthropist John Templeton’s investment in the field of science and religion. His support stems in part from the conviction that historical developments in science are finally leading us to the right understanding of God’s relationship to the created order. The older, mechanical picture of nature that science purportedly gave us implies that God is distant from nature, whereas more recent discoveries are revealing nature’s complexity, elusiveness, intangibility, unpredictability, and creativity and imply God’s intimate presence to, and involvement in, nature. This newer theological picture is consistent with a theological tradition to which Templeton had been exposed since childhood. Believing that science is finally uncovering theological truths about God and God’s relationship to the world, Templeton sought to shape science and (especially) religion so that comparable breakthroughs might continue to flow in the future.
{"title":"The Theological Significance of the History of Science: John Templeton and the Promotion of Science and Religion","authors":"Peter N Jordan","doi":"10.1093/jaarel/lfae021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfae021","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the rationale behind philanthropist John Templeton’s investment in the field of science and religion. His support stems in part from the conviction that historical developments in science are finally leading us to the right understanding of God’s relationship to the created order. The older, mechanical picture of nature that science purportedly gave us implies that God is distant from nature, whereas more recent discoveries are revealing nature’s complexity, elusiveness, intangibility, unpredictability, and creativity and imply God’s intimate presence to, and involvement in, nature. This newer theological picture is consistent with a theological tradition to which Templeton had been exposed since childhood. Believing that science is finally uncovering theological truths about God and God’s relationship to the world, Templeton sought to shape science and (especially) religion so that comparable breakthroughs might continue to flow in the future.","PeriodicalId":51659,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140154003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article presents a rereading of Buddhist scriptures from the Pāli Nikāyas in the light of Christopher Beckwith’s 2015 theory that Pyrrho professed early Buddhist ideas. This changes, above all, how we read one of the central terms in Buddhism, dukkha/duḥkha (usually “suffering,” now “unreliable” or “precarious”). I argue that many scriptures make better sense with Pyrrho’s reading and, moreover, that it reveals a depth of wisdom in many otherwise obscure passages in early Buddhist teachings. Through an exploratory, hermeneutic method, the article suggests a reconceptualization of Buddhist scriptures and philosophy in the light of Pyrrho.
{"title":"Pyrrho’s Buddha on Duḥkha and the Liberation from Views","authors":"Jonathan C Gold","doi":"10.1093/jaarel/lfae001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfae001","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents a rereading of Buddhist scriptures from the Pāli Nikāyas in the light of Christopher Beckwith’s 2015 theory that Pyrrho professed early Buddhist ideas. This changes, above all, how we read one of the central terms in Buddhism, dukkha/duḥkha (usually “suffering,” now “unreliable” or “precarious”). I argue that many scriptures make better sense with Pyrrho’s reading and, moreover, that it reveals a depth of wisdom in many otherwise obscure passages in early Buddhist teachings. Through an exploratory, hermeneutic method, the article suggests a reconceptualization of Buddhist scriptures and philosophy in the light of Pyrrho.","PeriodicalId":51659,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139769824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the ritual functions of medical and mythical embryologies in Jewish ritual texts from late antiquity to the present. Together these sources tell three stories that show the development of participatory models of ritual efficacy. The first is the integration of medical embryologies into Jewish ritual practice. The second is that of a growing collaboration between human and divine in reproduction, and in prayer, through shared experience, shared embodiment and affect, and mutual mimesis that together constitute a powerful methexis. These in turn grant increased access to power. The third story is the growing maternalization of the divine, which in turn amplifies human-divine collaboration and inter-embodied participation in pregnancy. Thus from the period of late antiquity to early modernity, we see the ritualization of embryologies, remythologized to articulate an emerging theology of divine maternity and of inter-embodied human-divine participation in reproduction.
{"title":"God’s Magical Womb: Pregnancy, Power, and the Feminized Divine in Jewish Ritual Texts","authors":"Marla Segol","doi":"10.1093/jaarel/lfad082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfad082","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the ritual functions of medical and mythical embryologies in Jewish ritual texts from late antiquity to the present. Together these sources tell three stories that show the development of participatory models of ritual efficacy. The first is the integration of medical embryologies into Jewish ritual practice. The second is that of a growing collaboration between human and divine in reproduction, and in prayer, through shared experience, shared embodiment and affect, and mutual mimesis that together constitute a powerful methexis. These in turn grant increased access to power. The third story is the growing maternalization of the divine, which in turn amplifies human-divine collaboration and inter-embodied participation in pregnancy. Thus from the period of late antiquity to early modernity, we see the ritualization of embryologies, remythologized to articulate an emerging theology of divine maternity and of inter-embodied human-divine participation in reproduction.","PeriodicalId":51659,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139648860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Since 2001, visual artist Ellen Gallagher has been working on “Watery Ecstatic,” an ongoing, expansive project that depicts real and imaginary underwater life through drawings, films, reliefs, and paintings. Thus far, this series—indeed, Gallagher’s oeuvre—has not been studied by scholars of religion. Arguing that the series provokes an extended conversation about mysticism, (para)religion, and constructions of blackness, humanness, and animality, this article addresses this lacuna. Placing the series in conversation with Sigmund Freud and Fred Moten, I argue that “Watery Ecstatic” displays a particular kind of mysticism that I call blue black mysticism: an experience of sociality that, in and through the oceanic, refuses the categorical distinctions and modes of identification that ground and mark normative and racialized ideations of humanness and subjectivity. I suggest, further, that blue black mysticism, because it engages the alterity of the ocean, offers a prime site to trouble the racialized, hierarchical boundary between human and nonhuman animals.
{"title":"Blue Black Ecstasy: Ellen Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic, Oceanic Feeling, and Mysticism in the Flesh","authors":"Justine M Bakker","doi":"10.1093/jaarel/lfad080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfad080","url":null,"abstract":"Since 2001, visual artist Ellen Gallagher has been working on “Watery Ecstatic,” an ongoing, expansive project that depicts real and imaginary underwater life through drawings, films, reliefs, and paintings. Thus far, this series—indeed, Gallagher’s oeuvre—has not been studied by scholars of religion. Arguing that the series provokes an extended conversation about mysticism, (para)religion, and constructions of blackness, humanness, and animality, this article addresses this lacuna. Placing the series in conversation with Sigmund Freud and Fred Moten, I argue that “Watery Ecstatic” displays a particular kind of mysticism that I call blue black mysticism: an experience of sociality that, in and through the oceanic, refuses the categorical distinctions and modes of identification that ground and mark normative and racialized ideations of humanness and subjectivity. I suggest, further, that blue black mysticism, because it engages the alterity of the ocean, offers a prime site to trouble the racialized, hierarchical boundary between human and nonhuman animals.","PeriodicalId":51659,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139374483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
According to some cognitive and neuroscientific theories, religion is not an evolved adaptation but rather an artifact, one that may lead to adaptive behaviors. Here I relate (a) an empathetic theory of religion with (b) a functional theory of musicality to clarify religion’s adaptive features. This theory contributes to previous research by explaining the link between spirituality and music and makes the nontrivial prediction that increasing numbers of people who are disaffected by traditional religious institutions will find modes of meaning-making and fellow-feeling in contemporary festival and live music scenes.
{"title":"B-Side Spirituality: An Empathetic Theory of Religion and Ethnographic Data About Spiritual (but Not Religious) Belonging","authors":"Lucas Johnston","doi":"10.1093/jaarel/lfad081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfad081","url":null,"abstract":"According to some cognitive and neuroscientific theories, religion is not an evolved adaptation but rather an artifact, one that may lead to adaptive behaviors. Here I relate (a) an empathetic theory of religion with (b) a functional theory of musicality to clarify religion’s adaptive features. This theory contributes to previous research by explaining the link between spirituality and music and makes the nontrivial prediction that increasing numbers of people who are disaffected by traditional religious institutions will find modes of meaning-making and fellow-feeling in contemporary festival and live music scenes.","PeriodicalId":51659,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139374980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Modernity, the Environment, and the Christian Just War Tradition. By Mark Douglas","authors":"Rosemary Kellison","doi":"10.1093/jaarel/lfad048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfad048","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51659,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION","volume":"47 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139006935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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