Reply to Steven Foertsch's “Defending Critical Epistemology: The Case of Christian Nationalism and Christofascism”

Christian nationalism and Christofascism theorists have surrendered the discursive floor to their empiricist critics. A flurry of recent research has asserted that critical paradigms within the sociology of religion are ideologically committed and empirically invalid. In this reply to Jesse Smith's “Old Wine in New Wineskins” (2024), I contend several things: (1) Christian nationalism and Christofascism research is based in empirical validity, (2) claims of “conceptual slippage” are irrelevant given the sociopolitical context, (3) rejection of the critical perspective reifies the unjust power structure through a normative appeal to rational‐legal scientific authority, and (4) critical epistemology in the sociology of religion remains a crucial tool in combating authoritarian slippage. It is my hope that this reply sparks further reflection and debate on the role of sociology and the nature of sociological praxis.

In 2001, John Levi Martin published a critique of authoritarianism scholarship, arguing that it was marred by fundamental biases of tautology, selective interpretation, and overtheorization of some research subjects but neglect of others. Drawing from this critique, I argue that Christian nationalism scholarship in sociology operates as a variant of authoritarianism research, exhibiting similar claims, strengths, and shortcomings. In a short span of time, the Christian nationalism research agenda has come to dominate the sociological study of religion and enjoyed a high profile in public discourse, presumably due to its relevance to matters of acute political concern. However, this literature interprets empirical results based on unverified assumptions of essentially authoritarian goals and motivations while ignoring plausible alternative explanations. It further neglects respondents who are low on Christian nationalism measures, despite evidence that these respondents play a role in religiopolitical conflict. The result is an essentialist account of Christian nationalism that is politically resonant but theoretically problematic. I propose that these issues can be addressed by a shift away from essentialist and toward social models of belief systems, which offer important advantages: greater consistency with current theories of political polarization, a stronger sociological element, and less susceptibility to researcher bias.

New Testament studies has over the past years seen an increase in the use of digital methods, but some of the more advanced methods still lack proper integration. This article explores some of the advantages and disadvantages in employing computational/algorithmic approaches, such as so-called semantic models of word embedding and topic modelling analysis. The article is structured into three main parts. The first part (1) introduces the reader to the field of computational studies in literary, historical, and religious research areas and outlines the computational methods, namely topic modelling and word embedding. The second part, (2) showcases two computational tools in analyzing New Testament narratives. The third part (3) discusses and compares how the methodology of applying computational techniques can maintain and advance a focus on the historical and literary context of New Testament texts. The specific problem the article addresses is how computational methods can be wielded and not sacrifice the contact to the text and the historical context. We argue that applying computational methods in New Testament hermeneutics necessarily involves methodological pros and cons. These computationally assisted analyses can be regarded as old wine in new wineskins—classic, hermeneutical questions can be posed with new methods.

The institution of counselling is present in all human communities as people share their sorrows, mentor, empower and advise each other. The service of advising and grooming is all that counselling is. This paper seeks to explore the institution of counselling in Shona and Ndebele traditional societies before the advent of western formalised counselling institutions. The research sets to prove that counselling is not a new phenomenon in these societies, that is a remnant of colonialism but rather it is an old institution that has been window dressed with western strategies and formalisms. African traditional counselling strategies as seen in the Shona and Ndebele examples emphasise more on the preventive forms of counselling than crisis counselling. Advice and mentoring are prioritised in these societies as a way of helping people stay out of trouble that in future will require therapeutic or crisis counselling. Modern day counselling has been professionalised and commercialised and requires people to pay for it yet in Shona and Ndebele traditional societies it was part of one’s responsibility to make sure others are well advised and counselled if they are emotionally troubled. Professional counselling in marriage, carrier guidance, teenage grooming for example is not a new practice but an old practice done differently like old wine in new wineskins.

This book explores the extraordinary contribution that classical poetics has made to twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of narrative. Its aim is not to argue that modern narratologies simply present ‘old wine in new wineskins’, but to identify the diachronic affinities shared between ancient and modern stories about storytelling, recognizing that modern narratologists bring particular expertise to bear upon ancient literary theory and offer valuable insights into the interpretation of some notoriously difficult texts. By interrogating ancient and modern narratologies through the mutually imbricating dynamics of their reception it aims to arrive at a better understanding of both. Each chapter selects a key moment in the history of narratology on which to focus, zooming in from an overview of significant phases to look at core theories and texts—from the Russian formalists, Chicago school neo-Aristotelians, through the prestructuralists, structuralists, and poststructuralists, to the latest unnatural and antimimetic narratologists. The reception history that thus unfolds offers some remarkable plot twists. It unmasks Plato as an unreliable narrator and theorist, and offers a rare glimpse of Aristotle putting narrative theory into practice in the role of storyteller in his work On Poets. In Horace’s Ars Poetica and in the works of ancient scholia critics and commentators it locates a rhetorically conceived poetics and a sophisticated reader-response-based narratology evincing a keen interest in audience affect and cognition—and anticipating the cognitive turn in narratology’s mot recent postclassical phase.

Putting Old Wine in New Wineskins:A New Synthesis of the Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew that is Neither new nor a Coherent Synthesis John A. Cook A review of The Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew: A New Synthesis Elaborated on the Basis of Classical Prose. By Jan Joosten. Jerusalem Biblical Studies 10. Pp. viii + 513. Jerusalem: Simor, 2012. Cloth, $75.00. Joosten’s work is a landmark publication and the capstone of his careerlong study of the Hebrew verbal system—an interest that extends back to the beginning of the 1980s, as he explains in the preface. Joosten’s analyses of the Hebrew verbal forms, scattered in various journal articles and book chapters, appear together here in a work whose scope is ambitious. In the first four chapters, he discusses the basics of the inventory of forms and their semantic and text-linguistic functions (chap. 1), he provides an overview of the system through an examination of the oppositions among the verbal forms (chap. 2), he explores meaning variation for the verbal forms due to interactions with lexical semantics, adverbial modification, and similar syntactic configurations (chap. 3), and he treats inter-clausal relationships among verbal forms (chap. 4). At this point he returns in detail to the “usage” of each of the main verbal forms in turn—the wayyiqtol, qatal, predicative participle, yiqtol and weqatal, and the volitives, respectively (chaps. 5–9). The final three chapters he devotes to text-linguistic perspectives on the verbal forms (chap. 10), changes to the system in late Biblical Hebrew (in contrast to the focus of his work on the Classical Biblical Hebrew corpus; chap. 11), and the function of the verbal forms in poetry (chap. 12). In the back of the book are a bibliography, index of Scripture references, and a detailed table of contents, which presumably serves in lieu of a topical index. Although Joosten’s book should represent a welcome addition to the field, I found the book to be disappointing because of the confused and problematic analyses in it. It is easy enough to quibble over analyses of individual passages in a book that treats so much data, as this one does. But what the reader needs to be aware of are two problems that are pervasive in the book and undermine its contribution to the field. First, the linguistic theory is [End Page 379] underdeveloped and outdated, leading to incomplete analyses, ad hoc explanations, and special pleading regarding the data. Second, the book shows repetitive, uneven treatments related to the lengthy development of the manuscript, so that the reader sometimes faces multiple and potentially contradictory explanations of the same phenomenon. The origin of these two pervasive problems can be identified from Joosten’s opening comments. In the acknowledgements he states that his interest in the Hebrew verbal system began at the beginning of the 1980s, and he cites F. Rundgren (1921–2006) and J. Kuryłowicz (1895–1978) as the early and formative influences on his thinking (p. ii). It is evident that Joosten’s thinking in many regards has progressed little beyond these early formative influences, even while the linguistic discussion of tense-aspectmood has advanced markedly. He begins the body of the book by stating his intent “to keep theory and technical terminology to a minimum,” so as to fulfill his “practical” goal of providing exegetes with “a dependable analysis” of the Hebrew verbal forms (p. 1). It is laudable to keep theoretical discussion from hindering the reader’s understanding of the analysis of the data. But it is a problem if keeping theory “to a minimum” glosses over a faulty, underdeveloped, or outdated theory behind the analysis. Joosten does not provide a theory-uncluttered analysis as much as a theory-thin and outdated one. This is particularly evident in his vague and underdeveloped idea of future-modal/irrealis, in his idiosyncratic understanding of anterior qatal, which is indebted to Kuryłowicz’s outdated ideas, and in his inadequate accounting for the role of situation aspect and the semantic property of boundedness. Joosten states in his acknowledgements that the first two chapters were “in near-final form” after a sabbatical in 2001–2002 (p. i). This...

Old Wine in New Wineskins? How to Write Classical Egyptian Rituals in More Modern Writing Systems

‘Old Wine in New Wine-Skins?' – Towards a New University Curriculum

Widely thought to have been demolished by Hume and Darwin, the teleological argument for God's existence came roaring back into prominence during the latter half of the last century. Defenders of the argument earlier in the same century appealed to what F.R.Tennant called "wider teleology," which emphasizes the necessary conditions for the existence and evolution of intelligent life, rather than specific instances of purposive design. Unfortunately, they could speak of this wider teleology for the most part only in generalities, for example, "the thickness of the earth's crust, the quantity of water, the amount of carbon dioxide," and so forth, but could furnish few details to describe this alleged teleology (Tennant 1935, vol. 2:87).

In the mid 2000s, a fundamental labour market reform has been carried out in Germany. The so-called Hartz-reforms were supposed to implement the paradigms of “activation” and “individual responsibility”. It was also discussed, whether in this context the “adult worker model” and more gender equality in the labour market should and could be achieved. This article clarifies the reforms ambivalent impact on women: there is a stronger but only partial labour market inclusion predominantly into the low-wage sector. Women´s responsibility in private care remains unchanged. Besides, in both fields, gender equality is not only a matter of quantity but also of quality. In other words, it is not about work inclusion at any cost, but rather the circumstances for female employment must be critically analyzed. The labour market reforms have so far done little to oppose the gender specific structures of the labour market. Keywords : Gender Equality, Labour Market Reforms, Gender Models, Low Wage Sector

Old Wine in New Wineskins

The Liquids Reflectometer (LR) Instrument installed at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) enables observations of chemical kinetics, solid-state reactions, phase-transitions and chemical reactions in general [1]. The ability of the instrument to complete measurements quickly and therefore process many samples is a key capability inherent in the system design [2]. Alignment and sample environment management are a time consuming and error prone process that has led to the development of automation in the control software operating the instrument. In fact, the original LR user interface, based on the Python scripting language, has been modularized and adapted to become the standard interface on many other instruments. A project to convert the original Python [3] implementation controlling the LR instrument into the modular version standardized at SNS was undertaken in the spring of 2012. The key features of automated sample alignment and robot-driven sample management system enable the instrument to reduce the manual labor required to prepare and execute observations, freeing up precious time for analysis and reporting activity. We present the modular PyDas control system [4], its implementation for the LR, and the lessons learned during the upgrade process.

In this thesis the orientation of macro-sized fibres in turbulent flows is studied, as well as the effect of nano-sized fibrils on hydrodynamic stability. The focus lies on enabling processes for new materials where cellulose is the main constituent. When fibres (or any elongated particles) are added to a fluid, the complexity of the flow-problem increases. The fluid flow will influence the rotation of the fibres, and therefore also effect the overall fibre orientation. Exactly how the fibres rotate depends to a large extent on the mean velocity gradient in the flow. In addition, when fibres are added to a suspending fluid, the total stress in the suspension will increase, resulting in an increased apparent viscosity. The increase in stress is related to the direction of deformation in relation to the orientation of the particle, i.e. whether the deformation happens along the long or short axis of the fibre. The increase in stress, which in most cases is not constant neither in time nor space, will in turn influence the flow. This thesis starts off with the orientation and spatial distribution of fibres in the turbulent flow down an inclined plate. By varying fibre and flow parameters it is discovered that the main parameter controlling the orientation distribution is the aspect ratio of the fibres, with only minor influences from the other parameters. Moreover, the fibres are found to agglomerate into streamwise streaks. A new method to quantify this agglomeration is developed, taking care of the problems that arise due to the low concentration in the experiments. It is found that streakiness, i.e. the tendency to agglomerate in streaks, varies with Reynolds number. Going from fibre orientation to flow dynamics of fibre suspensions, the influence of cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) on laminar/turbulent transition is investigated in three different setups, namely plane channel flow, curved-rotating channel flow, and the flow in a flow focusing device. This last flow case is selected since it is can be used for assembly of CNF based materials. In the plane channel flow, the addition of CNF delays the transition more than predicted from measured viscosities while in the curved-rotating channel the opposite effect is discovered. This is qualitatively confirmed by linear stability analyses. Moreover, a transient growth analysis in the plane channel reveals an increase in streamwise wavenumber with increasing concentration of CNF. In the flow focusing device, i.e. at the intersection of three inlets and one outlet, the transition is found to mainly depend on the Reynolds number of the side flow. Recirculation zones forming downstream of two sharp corners are hypothesised to be the cause of the transition. With that in mind, the two corners are given a larger radius in an attempt to stabilise the flow. However, if anything, the flow seems to become unstable at a smaller Reynolds number, indicating that the separation bubble is not the sole cause of the transition. The choice of fluid in the core flow is found to have no effect on the stability, neither when using fluids with different viscosities nor when a non-Newtonian CNF dispersion was used. Thus, Newtonian model fluids can be used when studying the flow dynamics in this type of device. As a proof of concept, a flow focusing device is used to produce a continuous film from CNF. The fibrils are believed to be aligned due to the extensional flow created in the setup, resulting in a transparent film, with an estimated thickness of 1 um.

Old Wine in New Wineskins:

Performance appraisal interviews are a distinct feature of modern work organisations. A generic organisational script, appraisals have also been adopted by traditional professions within old religious institutions. Based on the theory of institutional logics, this article aims at providing new knowledge about the interplay of professionalism and managerialism in pastoral appraisals. It addresses the following research question: How do professional and managerial logics intersect in performance appraisal interviews of pastors in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Norway? This study clarifies the function, contents and ambiguity of appraisals by interviewing pastors and their leaders and analysing their experiences and expectations of appraisals. The author discusses how ideal-typical professional and managerial logics are demarcated and hybridised in appraisals. With the church in a state of transition, this study shows how the pastor profession constructs itself in appraisals by drawing on both logics yet primarily safeguarding professionalism.