Public Faith and the Politics of Faith: A Review Essay

Abstract

A symposium entitled In the Presence of Faith: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Southern African Studies of Religion was held in Johannesburg from 24 to 26 February 2010.1 This review essay outlines our rationale for the symposium, highlights its most pressing debates, and introduces the papers included in this special edition of the journal for the Study of Religion, an edition entitled Public and the Politics of Faith.The SymposiumThere were a number of reasons to call together a symposium of this nature. As organisers and in our own work we have been struck by the very limited extent of inter-disciplinary reading, discussion or collaboration about Our first wish was to create a place where scholars from different disciplines who have an interest in religion could converse together and be exposed to a diversity of questions, methods and literatures. In doing this, we hoped to open a debate about how religion has been studied in Southern Africa, what is missing and where the field should be moving. Drawing on the experience of Wiser' s 2007 Reasons of event, the organisers made efforts to invite the participation of historians, sociologists and anthropologists as well as those working from religious studies departments.Our second wish was to invite and stimulate more empirical attention to religion, particularly by social science and humanities scholars. We also hoped to raise a discussion on topics not normally encountered under the purview of religion in the social sciences. We were interested in the relationship between religion and the state, both in how religious communities attempt to influence the state, but also how the state structures its relationship with religious communities. The relationship of African nationalism to religion, both Christianity (independent and mainstream) as well as traditional, was also something we felt would lead to productive discussion. We were also interested in topics we felt had been neglected in the regional scholarship, such as personal conceptions and appreciations of faith; the public role of Christians who attend mainstream churches in Southern Africa; and the need to engage between traditional, independent and mainstream forms of religion in our theory and research. And we sought to pay attention to some of the growing religious phenomena of the last two decades, not least of which is the increasing Pentecostal involvement in public life. There is a great deal of work yet to be done on this.As part of our planning we carefully weighed up the use of our words. In choosing our symposium title, we opted for the more polysemie word faith, instead of the more normative religion. The former, we felt, offered a point of ingress into the symposium of a wider set of views on spiritual practice; it also offered a way to move beyond more dogmatic understandings of Faith also seemed to offer a way for comparative discussions between some of the major world religions practised in the region, allowing for a symposium in which scholars of Islam, Judaism, African spirituality and Christianity could speak alongside one another.A third rationale for the symposium lay in the great need for scholars working in South Africa and other Southern African countries to engage in dialogue on One reason is that there is an increasingly dense network of religious and labour migration across our respective borders. A regional perspective on such migration and the study of transnational religious communities is increasingly imperative.The call for papers elicited an enthusiastic response. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the majority of abstracts were theological in orientation. The planning group decided to exclude them. Many reflected a narrow focus on Biblical scholarship, or were poorly-researched from a social scientific perspective. As such, they did not meet the requirements of our call for papers. The high volume of scholarly theological and Biblical publishing in South Africa does not evidence much attention to most of the issues referred to above. …