Category Of Religion Research Articles

The census categorization of ethnic identity: Between theoretical comprehensions and statistical practice

Theoretical debates about ethnic identity during the second half of the 20th century did not just attract attention of academic circles, but they influenced creation of political discourse which determined public life in almost every multinational society, regardless the level of socio-economic development. In recent decades, many theories about ethnic identity have emerged, especially those about ethnicity as a relatively new concept, which caused a great deal of controversy that has been ongoing since the 1960s. Modern demography deals with problems of great social importance, especially when it comes to anthropological, social and political demography, whose results often take lead in the modern political debate. In that sense, a lot of theoretical approaches tried to emphasize the decline of importance of traditional elements of ethnic identity, even their disappearance in favor of supranational concepts, over the past more than half a century. However, in practice, the opposite processes are constantly repeating and the awareness of belonging to certain ethnic group, not only remained the important part of social life, but its significance rapidly grew in certain periods and societies. Ethnic and social pluralism of modern societies, together with massive migration flows, have initiated the review of sustainability, not only the traditional definitions of ethnic identity, but also the various supranational concepts which have mostly emerged from ethnic identification and legal nationality. The fear that ethno-cultural pluralism will have negative effects on ethno-demographic differentiation increased the need for quantitative researches of demographic characteristics of population towards ethnic marks, also for reviewing of methodological solutions of ethno-statistic evidence, starting from definitions, categorizations and statistic classification, as far as the ways of collecting and publishing the data. In that sense the censuses are considered as a base of ethno-demographic studies of French and Serbian population, in which different theoretical concepts of ethnic identity created two different approaches to ethno-statistic census process. In every Serbian census from the middle of the 19th century till today central topics were the questions about static ethno-cultural categories of religion and about mother tongue, while the question about ethnicity was asked in each and every census taken after Second World War. On the other hand, although it has the longest census tradition in Europe, the official ethno-statistic evidence of population in France has been for a long time determined by constant rejection of ethnic categorization and by the absence of questions about primary ethnic marks of population. Instead, the supranational concept of legal nationality has become the central spot while, as a feature of political integration of immigrants in a census, the question about state of birth starts to appear. The main dilemma regarding relations between prevailing theoretical concepts of ethnic identity and the official statistic practice based on Serbian and French models, still remains. Therefore, this paper shows two-way influence of ethno-statistic categorization and the real ethnic structure, and opens a discussion whether the ethnic identities have been defined by statistics or the ethnic identity is the one which defines the official statistics.

Religious Discourse in Modern Japan: Religion, State, and Shintō by Isomae Jun’ichi

Reviewed by: Religious Discourse in Modern Japan: Religion, State, and Shintō by Isomae Jun’ichi Jolyon Baraka Thomas Religious Discourse in Modern Japan: Religion, State, and Shintō. By Isomae Jun’ichi. Translated by Galen Amstutz and Lynne E. Riggs. Leiden: Brill, 2014. 501 pages. Softcover $209.00. When I was a visiting research student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tokyo between 2006 and 2007, Isomae Jun’ichi’s 2003 monograph Kindai Nihon no shūkyō gensetsu to sono keifu: Shūkyō, kokka, shintō was indispensable reading. In that Japanese-language predecessor of the book under review here, Isomae refreshingly traced the adventitious process whereby shūkyō came to be the default translation for the English word “religion.” He also showed how the discursive structures of the religious studies field—including the assumed naturalness of the very word “religion”—shape the research questions scholars have been inclined to ask. Isomae’s willingness to critically examine religious studies was a stimulant for the field in general, and it would be no overstatement to say that his treatment of the political effects of the “R word” provided inspiration for my own current research on religious freedom in modern Japan. The sharp critiques that follow must be read with this indebtedness and profound respect for Isomae’s pathbreaking work in mind. Although the titles are similar, the English-language edition departs in significant ways from Isomae’s 2003 work, incorporating several new sections that reflect his voluminous output in the intervening years. While its topic is of indisputable importance to those of us who professionally study “Japanese religions” (a phrase I use here out of convenience), frankly the book would have benefited from some ruthless editing, a clearer framing of the argument, and a more rigorous chronological presentation. The introduction, for example, is a literature review of the sort one expects to find in some doctoral dissertations but cannot be justified in an academic monograph. Subsequent chapters are redundant, retracing the same material several times rather than providing a cogent presentation from start to finish. Translators Galen Amstutz and Lynne E. Riggs deserve congratulations for rendering Isomae’s text with fidelity to his idiosyncratic tone. Isomae habitually writes in the passive voice or—when using more active verbs—speaks of objects or institutions as if they were agents: “Shinto succeeded in prescribing its acts of religiosity as the public [End Page 186] duty of all the people of the state regardless of what beliefs they might hold as private individuals” (p. xix). He also speaks unhesitatingly about what Japanese people felt or believed without offering any evidence to support his claims. This creates the unavoidable impression that Isomae’s rigid binary between “the West” and “the non-West” and his sharp division of Japanese history into pre- and post-“religion” are premised on a rather naïve assumption that premodern Japanese people were somehow more noble or pure for lacking the modern concept of religion. Indeed, in Isomae’s telling the concept of religion becomes a sort of polluting agent or irritant. It is the small foreign body around which modern Japanese identity, the field of religious studies, and the religion/secular distinctions of the modern Japanese state cohered. This last claim that the foreign category of religion constructed modern Japanese governance is not dissimilar to Trent Maxey’s recent argument in The “Greatest Problem”: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014). In contrast with Maxey’s stolid historical approach, however, Isomae advances an activist project that aims to recuperate a romanticized Japanese past while dreamily idealizing a different future for the study of religion. Isomae is on slightly firmer ground when he turns to actual historical data in part 1, “The Formation of the Concept of ‘Religion’ and Modern Academic Discourse.” Chapter 1 provides a sweeping overview of the introduction of the category “religion” to Japan and the diplomatic difficulties and domestic policy implications it engendered. Isomae sees the introduction of religion as a problem of the imposition of “Western logic” on Japan. But because he never clearly defines the “Japanese logic” against which he juxtaposes this (similarly undefined) “Western logic,” the reader...

Expert Religion: The Politics of Religious Difference in an Age of Freedom and Terror

Based on her recently published book, "Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion", Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s paper is an attempt at disaggregating the category of religion. It distinguishes between forms of knowledge about religion (including constructs of religious extremism and religious freedom) authorized by experts (expert religion); religion as construed and authorized by governments and courts at home and abroad (official or governed religion); and the broader fields of spiritual practices, beliefs, and forms of belonging on the ground (lived or everyday religion) which are entangled with but not reducible to expert or official religion.

Prospects and Challenges in the Study of New Age Tourism: A Critical Commentary

The New Age phenomenon is a marginal unknown in tourism studies, despite its inclusion under the broader umbrella of religious tourism, and various attempts to conceptualize it as a form of New Age tourism. It offers an opportunity for researchers in the field to study a large part of a society that is neither separate from, nor necessarily included in, categories of religion. In this review article, Pernecky and Poulston challenge typical tourism approaches to segmenting markets into discrete groups, and work with the premise that if approached through an understanding of social, cultural, political, and spiritual contexts, New Age is a fertile capping term for a phenomenon that shapes the global mind change, shifting values, understandings, and behaviors in the world. To address broader concerns, the authors provide both a critical review of existing definitions and conceptualizations of the New Age phenomenon and an historical foundation for both the phenomenon and the term. Pernecky and Poulston also highlight potential pitfalls in the study of the New Age concept, and present a complex set of challenges for tourism researchers, students, and practitioners who may be tempted by etic framings of the subject. In that light, the authors emphasize the need for emic approaches, that is, those which painstakingly and demonstrably acknowledge the perspectives, viewpoints, and experiences of the actors involved, which they argue are more richly suited for understanding “New Agers.” Importantly, the review article presents the New Age movement and concept not only as a singular “special interest group,” but as a context of noteworthy conceptual value, as touristic objects, places, and experiences indeed play a vital role in the constitution of meaning and interpretation—that is, in the worldmaking processes of our time. (Abstract by Reviews Editor)

The classification of religions and religious classifications: a genre approach to the origin of religions

Scholars have long worried over the fact that the categories of religion that they bring to their scholarship imperfectly match folk classifications of the ‘same’ religion. The more precisely we attempt to define a religion, the more our target seems to elude our grasp. Here, I argue that by looking at religions through the lens of genre theory, we can make more sense of both the range of classifications as well as the apparent uniformity assumed by scholars and practitioners at any given moment. Religious classes are nouns. The tack taken by a genre theory is to think of genres as verbs that are either performed by producers or distinguished by critics. When the emphasis shifts to actions and decisions made by individuals, we begin to address the variations and fluctuations that could not be accounted for when religious classes were understood as either objectively or analytically given. Moreover, when religious categories are simply taken as given, we have no way to talk about the origin of new categories (i.e. of new religions). Emphasising the verbal aspect of producing and of criticising allows us to explain the origins of religions as the efforts of producers and critics working in tandem.

Nathan Glazer’s American Judaism : Evaluating Post–World War II American Jewish Religion

Nathan Glazer’s 1957 semi-popular book, American Judaism, was unprecedented in its academic and unapologetic approach to its topic. Even more noteworthy was Glazer’s perspective on the future of Jews and religion in America. While Glazer did not foretell the end of Jews in America, his book, unlike several “Introduction to Judaism” books of its era, also did not attempt to portray Judaism as a religion just like Christianity. Rather, Glazer noted the essential difference of Judaism: it did not fit comfortably within the category of religion. And yet, Judaism had, in recent years, attained a hallowed position among American religions. Much of Glazer’s book sought to explore this puzzle of why contemporary Judaism in America did not harmonize with Protestant notions of religion even as it was being embraced as “America’s third faith.” To understand this tension between Judaism and other religions and between Jewish intellectuals such as Glazer and the Judaism that they observed on the new suburban frontiers of American Jewish life was not resolve it. Glazer’s book sought to keep alive such tensions. In this way, Glazer shared common with some of the young Jewish novelists of his era. Glazer’s book is also distinctive in its attention to socioeconomic factors: a newly middle class status among American Jews affected their use of a religion category and the level of acceptance they received from other Americans. So too did a rise in economic status become correlated with a loss of distinctive Jewish culture, in Glazer’s telling.

Saving Buddhism: the impermanence of religion in colonial Burma

Saving Buddhism explores the dissonance between the goals of the colonial state and the Buddhist worldview that animated Burmese Buddhism at the turn of the twentieth century. For many Burmese, the salient and ordering discourse was not nation or modernity but s?sana, the life of the Buddha's teachings. Burmese Buddhists interpreted the political and social changes between 1890 and 1920 as signs that the Buddha's s?sana was deteriorating. This fear of decline drove waves of activity and organizing to prevent the loss of the Buddha's teachings. Burmese set out to save Buddhism, but achieved much more: they took advantage of the indeterminacy of the moment to challenge the colonial frameworks that were beginning to shape their world. Author Alicia Turner has examined thousands of rarely used sources-- newspapers and Buddhist journals, donation lists, and colonial reports--to trace three discourses set in motion by the colonial encounter: the evolving understanding of s?sana as an orienting framework for change, the adaptive modes of identity made possible in the moral community, and the ongoing definition of as a site of conflict and negotiation of autonomy. Beginning from an understanding that defining and redefining the boundaries of operated as a key technique of colonial power--shaping subjects through European categories and authorizing projects of colonial governmentality--she explores how Burmese Buddhists became actively engaged in defining and inflecting to shape their colonial situation and forward their own local projects. Saving Buddhism intervenes not just in scholarly conversations about and colonialism, but in theoretical work in religious studies on the categories of religion and secular. It contributes to ongoing studies of colonialism, nation, and identity in Southeast Asian studies by working to denaturalize nationalist histories. It also engages conversations on millennialism and the construction of identity in Buddhist studies by tracing the fluid nature of s?sana as a discourse. The layers of Buddhist history that emerge challenge us to see multiple modes of identity in colonial modernity and offer insights into the instabilities of categories we too often take for granted.

Buddhism and Religious Diversity ed. by Perry Schmidt-Leukel (review)

Buddhism and Religious Diversity. Edited by Perry Schmidt-Leukel. Critical Concepts in Religious Studies, vol. 1: Eastern Religions (402 pp.); vol. 2, Christianity (330 pp.); vol. 3, Islam and Judaism (361 pp.); vol. 4, Religious Pluralism (344 pp.). London and New York: Routledge, 2013. The 4-vol. set costs $1,430. As Tomoko Masuzawa and other critics of the category of religion have noted, most of the discussions of issues surrounding religious diversity in the modern academy have been broadly confined historically to Christian and secular authors. Of course, religious diversity is not a topic that has been limited to modern academia, and the only thing that surpasses the cultural and religious diversity throughout human history is the sheer number of cross-religious and cross-cultural encounters throughout that history. Given this discrepancy between the dearth of scholarship in the academy (on the topic of diversity, no less) and the breadth and depth of the reality, the recent growth in works on non-Christian perspectives on religious diversity is quite refreshing, and Schmidt-Leukel's work is certainly a valuable contribution to this new wave. This four-volume set covers Eastern religions, the Abrahamic religions, and religious pluralism broadly conceived. These Buddhist volumes deal with their perspectives on other religious traditions; those looking for texts on other religious traditions' perspectives on Buddhism should look elsewhere. This set is primarily a collection of articles and excerpts from previously published works, and it does not contain much novel content. However, as any scholar in the field of Buddhism and religious diversity will tell you, the value of simply gathering many of these texts together for the first time is immense, as many were difficult to acquire. While it does include some translations of older works, the set generally includes just modern scholarly secondary sources on earlier periods, in addition to primary and secondary sources on Buddhism and religious diversity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Many important topics are simply not considered--Schmidt-Leukel laments, for instance, the lack of recent literature on Buddhist perspectives on Jainism (one could certainly add Sikhism and non-Asian indigenous religions as well). There are several articles that discuss Buddhist perspectives on diversity within Buddhism, but most focus on Buddhist perspectives of religious diversity outside of the tradition, however broadly conceived. Topics that are included are considered quite extensively; readers will discover that nearly all of the important authors and modern texts on Buddhist perspectives on Eastern religions, Abrahamic religions, and religious pluralism are included, such as excerpts from Arthur Wright's classic study on Buddhism and Chinese culture and Masao Abe's famous reflection on kenosis. Unfortunately, there are no introductions for the texts, which would have been very helpful to contextualize many of the pieces. …

The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History by Jeremy Clarke (review)

Dong Zhongshu but not an attempt at understanding the potentially religious dimension of Confucianism as a social phenomenon in traditional Chinese culture. The book really is on “controversies,” as the title says, not on the facts that lie behind these controversies. Chapter 4 on the “Cultural and Historical Significance of the Controversy over Confucian Religiosity” is an attempt to deal with the “consequences.” It does so by first pointing to the “loss of meaning” that characterizes today’s China and then again goes back to some important books on Confucianism such as Joseph Levenson’s trilogy Confucian China and its Modern Fate.4 A discussion of the famous Confucian Manifesto of 1958 follows before we get to the theoretical limitations of the Neo-Confucianism of the twentieth century (pp. 158ff.), which have been pointed out by such scholars as Yü Ying-shih 余英時. Jiang Qing marks the end of the book. In his epilogue Chen states that his book “attempts to illustrate how the controversy has less to do with the academic discipline of religious studies or of philosophy than with the cultural and social concerns of Chinese intellectuals. What is at stake in the controversy is not an academic examination of Confucianism within the Western category of religion, but rather an existential endeavor to explore the possibility and feasibility of reinventing Confucianism within the paradigms of modernity” (p. 181f.). I was grateful to read these sentences although I would have been glad to find them on the first pages of the book, not the last, because here I finally understood that this book is not about facts, but about a contemporary Chinese discussion that is not all that interested in historical facts. I do wonder, however, whether a discussion that is removed so far from historical realities, be they historical or present, will have actual consequences in the future. HANS VAN ESS LMU Munich JEREMY CLARKE, The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013. xiii, 275 pp. HK$420, US$55 (hb). ISBN 978-988-8139-99-6 The Virgin Mary is a tough subject in the history of Catholicism in China. It seems that we have more sources about the blending of the Virgin’s identity with local religions, and of her story as it was associated with different levels of Chinese people, than for other sacred images including that of Christ. However, a variety of primary sources and rigorous interactions with Chinese discourses make Mary in China a fascinating but complicated subject. Until the publication of this book by Jeremy Clarke, there had not yet been a scholarly book on this knotty topic. Although it is not the principal purpose of Clarke’s research to describe Mary’s cult overall in China, a number of primary sources raised in this book ought to be of great interest to scholars of Christianity in China. In terms of Catholic history in 4 Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958–1965), p. 195 of the bibliography the years are incorrectly given as 1958–1968. 96 BOOK REVIEWS China, writing about the Virgin Mary in the modern period covered by this book, beginning with the First Opium War (1839–1842) until the early twentieth century, is not an easy task, since the era simultaneously witnessed a chaotic transformation in Chinese history and an unstable up-and-down response to Christianity in China. Clarke organizes the multiple entangled threads with a great number of longneglected but tremendously valuable sources and images. A reader who is interested in this history seen from different perspectives can enjoy this book. The book has three parts and six chapters in total, excluding Introduction and Conclusion. Clarke’s primary thesis is that the Virgin Mary, or “the way Marian devotions are portrayed artistically” (p. 195), can best be regarded as a lens through which the establishment of a Chinese and local Catholic identity may be observed after 1900. This evolution is in contrast with that of the preceding decades, when French influence on the China missions was strong after a series of treaties was signed by the Qing dynasty with...

Introduction

This article surveys the role of religion in postcolonial theory and the role of colonialism in studies of secularism. Despite a secularist image, postcolonial theory from its start has critically engaged with questions of religion. Similarly, despite secularism’s Eurocentric image, some studies of secularism have reflected on the way the category of religion is constructed in colonial encounters. Bringing these conversations together, we examine the secular–modern–colonial conceptual knot. The article concludes that close study of specific examples of the intersection of the modern, the colonial, and the secular is the most effective method of answering the article’s animating question.

Anthropology and the Making of Billy Graham: Evangelicalism and Anthropology in the 20th‐Century United States

ABSTRACTIn theorizing the relationship between Christianity (or religion) and anthropology, scholars have often emphasized the “incommensurability,” tension, or distance between two seemingly opposed epistemological frameworks. In this article, I take the case of Billy Graham, one of the most famous Christian leaders of the 20th century, as well as an undergraduate anthropology major, to illustrate how anthropology was imagined to serve Christian purposes, defined by the theological categories of religion. In the modernist Christianity of Graham's 20th‐century evangelicalism, anthropology could be comfortably subsumed under Christian categories. Rather than seeing anthropology, or any science, as being a product of, or coterminous with, secularism, Graham, and his college professors before him, understood anthropology to be fully amenable to Christian uses, so long as secular or atheistic influences were expunged. [Christianity, evangelicalism, secularism, science, race]

DEFINING “RELIGION” AS NATURAL: A CRITICAL INVITATION TO ROBERT McCAULEY

AbstractPrevious critics have argued that Robert McCauley defines religion and science selectively and arbitrarily, cutting them to fit his model in Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. McCauley has responded that final definitions are “overrated” and that artificial distinctions can serve an important role in naturalistic investigation. I agree with this position but argue that a genealogy of the category of religion is crucial to the methodology that McCauley describes. Since the inherent ambiguity of religion will undermine any essential claims about its cognitive naturalness, I invite McCauley to consider how his research might investigate scientific and religious cognition in new terms.

Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith

Cusack, Carole M. Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith. Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2010. 179 + viii pp. 55.00 [pounds sterling], $89.95. Cloth. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6780-3 Carole Cusack's Religions examines six recently religions: Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds, the Church of the SubGenius, Jediism, Matrixism, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Because these religions have received little to no attention from scholars, Cusack's work is a very valuable contribution. However, the book itself is at times frustrating, and Cusack's analysis is occasionally sharp but often muddled. ideas around which the book is organized are provocative and enticing. Invented Cusack's chosen category, refers to those and organizations that, most important, announce their invented status (1). distinguishes them from other new religious movements (NRMs) that purport to be true. religions are meant as commentaries on the category of religion itself, knowingly parodying common religious themes and specific religions. first chapter, The Contemporary Context of Religion, sets the terms for the argument and analysis. Cusack emphasizes the role of secularization in the West, especially in the last fifty years. Relying primarily on Peter Berger and Charles Taylor, she links secularization with consumerism and individualism--resulting in the condition wherein belief is a personal choice (11) and the rise of NRMs, Asian religions and their offshoots in the West, and New Age. is all well and good, but Cusack quickly takes the study in the wrong direction. Strangely, she decides to take up the question of whether or not they really count as religions, rather than situating invented religions as perceptive and clever critiques of these cultural shifts. Cusack writes, This study argues that invented religions are neither trivial nor necessarily invalid (3). What validity could possibly mean in this context is not discussed, but some functionalist definition is at work. religions are valid because, like real religions, they pique curiosity, and send the imagination soaring (5), and their narratives fire the imagination of certain people (125). Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds, and the Church of the each receive their own chapter. In these chapters Religions is most compelling. founders of these are invariably fascinating characters with insightful, cheeky, and often sarcastic critiques of twentieth-century consumerism and religion. The Church of the SubGenius (COSG), for example, relentlessly parodies existing religions, particularly megachurch Christianity and Scientology (84). …

Christianity, fetishism, and the development of secular politics in Ghana: A Dumontian approach

The paper discusses the impact of Christianity on the institutions of divine kingship and chiefship among the Asante people of Ghana during the late pre-colonial and colonial periods. The thrust of the paper is that separate categories of religion and politics emerged in Asante society as the colonial administration sought to facilitate missionary work and conversion while at the same time they supported the chiefs as the secular rulers of the country. The analysis is based on Dumont’s ideas on the differentiation of the political category and the characteristics of the modern state. Dumont’s own work on secularization focused on long-term historical developments that were markedly different from the abrupt changes described here. Nevertheless, his ideas help us significantly in comprehending the profoundness and radicality of this transformation. Additionally, the aim of the paper is to provide some historical background for understanding debates about the nature and value of traditional chieftaincy in present-day Ghana.

Japanese History, Post-Japan

The three recent works on Japanese history discussed in this essay are con- nected only tenuously in terms of their subject matter: the construction of the category of religion, Buddhism in colonial Korea, and the evolution of liberalism in prewar Japan, respectively. What unites these studies is, rather, their approach. Highlighting the vital links between their subjects and other areas of the world, these studies yield a composite portrait of Japan as viewed through the transnational lens that now characterizes historical studies more generally. It has been some two decades since the so-called transnational turn in historical studies. What exactly distinguishes the transnational from other supranational historiographical frameworks (such as global, world, compara- tive, or international) is still the subject of ongoing debate (Bayly, Eckert,

British-Born Pakistani and Bangladeshi Young Men: Exploring Unstable Concepts of Muslim, Islamophobia and Racialization

Much recent academic work on making sense of the changing public profile of the Muslim community in Britain operates within an explanatory framework that assumes a shift from ethnicity to religion and an accompanying shift from racialization to Islamophobia. A key limitation of this work, often grounded in media representations, is that it tends to be disconnected from contemporary lived social relations. In response, this paper critically engages with these debates, drawing upon qualitative research that explores a changing cultural condition that is inhabited by British born, working-class Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men. It is argued that this emergent cultural condition cannot conceptually be contained within a singular category of religion as the contours of the young men’s cultural condition are embedded within a range of intensified and ambivalent rapidly shifting local, national and international geo-political processes. Therefore in contrast to recent theorizing and research on Muslim communities and identities, the young men in this study critically engage with the contextually-based local meanings of Muslim, Islamophobia and racialization to secure complex masculine subjectivities. Alongside this, the article highlights that young men recognize that Islamophobia, displacing a notion of racialization, is a danger for their community because of the attendant invisibility of the current impact of social class within conditions of socio-economic austerity, which for them is a central element of their social and cultural exclusions.

From Practical Theology to Practice-oriented Theology

The article claims that PT needs to change as a discipline in three directions. First, we cannot longer lump every person in our category of religion based on the normative conceptions of our own (Christian) religion. We need criteria to distinguish between normal experiences, spiritual experience and religious experience. Secondly, the process of opening up the material object of PT has decentred the (all-knowing) theological scholar who builds theory on lived spirituality and / or religion. Thirdly, we need to develop a new form of methodology to build theory on practical reasoning, namely practice-oriented methodology.

Editors' Introduction

Editors’ Introduction Judith Plaskow and Traci West This issue of JFSR marks the completion of a remarkable thirty years of feminist publishing. We celebrate this anniversary with a special section on comparative feminist hermeneutics, a roundtable reflecting on the history and future of the Journal, and a general focus on boundary crossing and innovative methods. Each section of this issue makes a unique contribution to broadening how feminist and womanist studies in religion intentionally constructs scholarly conversations that include diverse voices and theoretical perspectives and benefit a wide range of constituencies. In twenty-first century women’s and gender studies scholarship, one expects that to some degree multiple and/or intersecting understandings of sex, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and nation will be incorporated within most field-specific analyses. But too often in fields other than religious studies the category of religion is neglected as a primary, intersecting axis of women’s and gender studies, and of women’s lives, that deserves careful interrogation. JFSR has contributed to filling this lacuna. This issue advances the discussion of a need for diverse voices and theoretical perspectives in feminist and womanist studies in religion with critical reflections on how to include them and what methodological difference it makes to do so. The Journal’s deep commitment to such discussions across differing faith traditions is manifest in this issue’s inclusion of articles on gender in the study of Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, and Islamic traditions. The critical perspectives from differing global locations found here, including Mexico, the United Kingdom, and Japan, represent an important commitment and direction for the journal that we hope to develop and expand in the next decade. The articles in the opening section of the issue explore new methods for theorizing gender and religion in historical studies, theology, and cultural studies. In her study of narratives about Saint Thecla, Susan Hylen challenges standard scholarly views, including feminist ones, in the field of Christian historical studies. Hylen’s argument counters the notion that the later Thecla is “domesticated” or watered down in order to be acceptable to the church. Hylen develops a more expansive understanding of Thecla as a radical female leader whose acceptance of Paul’s call to virginity frees her to live an active life of ministry. Susannah Cornwall interrogates the implications of boundary-crossing sexuality in her discussion of sex, intersex, and the maleness of Jesus in Christian theology [End Page 1] and church life. Cornwall’s essay interweaves the views of theologians with testimonies by intersex persons about their faith from interviews Cornwall conducted. Cornwall daringly considers the difference it would make for Christian theology if Jesus had had an intersex condition and what it would mean for theological arguments that assume Jesus’s maleness is obvious and incontrovertible. Robert Patterson’s essay is concerned with a paradigm-shifting conceptualization of gender and religion in popular culture filmmaking. He works on a method for envisioning wellness within black communities in the United States that can transform oppressive stereotypes of black women yet also maintain the liberation of all black people as its aim. Utilizing womanist theology in an effort to interrupt traditional masculinist paradigms of popular discourse, Patterson focuses on Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman. We are delighted to mark our thirtieth anniversary by publishing a ground-breaking set of essays on comparative feminist hermeneutics that brings to the fore the complexities involved in discussing hermeneutical methods across the boundaries of religious traditions. As Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza explains in the introduction, one of the goals for organizing the panel discussion out of which the essays emerged was to “explore the contours and trajectories of feminist comparative studies of sacred texts across the confessional, historical, cultural, and communal boundaries of diverse male-dominated religions” (57). Karen Derris, a scholar of Buddhist traditions, examines the ethics and politics of knowledge production in her articulation of the liberating potential of feminist interpretation, specifically in the representations of motherhood and mothering. Rachel Adelman demonstrates methodological innovation when utilizing rabbinic midrash to construct a method of reading the story of Esther that extends an invitation to “dare to laugh at the role of gender in the...

Defining Secularism in the Particular: Caste and Citizenship in India, 1909–1950

AbstractDrawing on recent debates on secularism, this article addresses the methodological problem of writing histories of secularism in context. It considers the experience of India. I argue that a study of the issues from which secularism emerged historically offers a way out of the secularism-religion binary which, in India, has obscured contemporary problems related to democracy. These issues had to do with ensuring the public representation of minorities, both religious and caste, regardless of their relative size or social power. Scholarship on the minority question has begun with the constituent assembly and that on secularism centered on the category of religion. In contrast, this article argues that caste was central to the formulation of Indian secularism and requires a longer historical perspective. It maintains that secularism reified the religious minority and, in so doing, denied both its potential to overcome marginality and the legitimacy of the community in the nation.

Buddhist, a Christian, and an Atheist Walk into a Classroom

Although none of the articles in this issue on the topic of religion and humor are explicitly about teaching, in many ways all of them in fact share this central focus. In the examples discussed by the four authors, humor is used to deconstruct the category of religion; to comment on the distance between orthodoxy and praxis; to censure religion; and to enrich traditions in ways that can be quite self-critical. My response to these articles addresses each of the above lessons in specific relation to experiences I have had in, and strategies I have developed for, teaching a first-year introductory religion course at the University of Toronto.