Clerical Authority Research Articles

Iran, Religious Agents, and the People: Voices from Khuzestan

ABSTRACT This article explores the significance of popular religious agents in Iran, focusing on the maddāḥān (eulogists) and their role in the Ashura processions, in the context of Iran’s ethnic minorities, looking into the unique case-study of Khuzestan. To comprehend the contemporary relevance of Ashura, this study utilizes social media, employing a hermeneutical approach to videography. The maddāḥān played a pivotal role in promoting a unifying Shiʿi and revolutionary ethos through their meticulously crafted videos and their widespread dissemination, fostering a sense of solidarity with the Islamic republic and its message of resilience. Their contribution was significant among ethnic minorities, given their numerous grievances toward the regime. The maddāḥān also played a vital role in creating space for local expressions of mourning, enhancing a unique Khuzestani identity deeply tied to its Arab tradition, but also open to multiple influences. Their emotionally charged sessions and direct engagement with the people contributed to a strong sense of connections between the maddāḥān and their extensive online audience. This popular appeal complements the established clerical authority structure but also poses a significant challenge to the formal religious hierarchy, as the maddāḥān’s approach resonates more closely with the lived experiences and cultural realities of their followers.

Motorcycles, minarets, and mullahs: a multimodal critical discourse analysis on Pakistan’s journey to rebrand Islam

Abstract This study addresses the issue of how religious authority is negotiated and redefined in the age of digital media, focusing on the case of Raja Zia ul Haq, a Pakistani Muslim cleric. Utilizing Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, the study posits that Zia ul Haq’s strategic semiotic choices in attire and symbolism serve as calculated maneuvers to navigate complex dialogues of power, identity, and cultural capital. The findings reveal that his appropriation of biker club symbolism disrupts traditional paradigms of Islamic clerical authority in Pakistan. These choices resonate with a younger, digitally savvy audience and function as a form of religious rebranding. The study argues that Zia ul Haq’s semiotic choices challenge monolithic interpretations of Islamic authority, thereby opening new avenues for religious engagement and interpretation. The significance of this work lies in its transnational implications, offering a counter-narrative that challenges prevailing stereotypes about Islamic scholars and suggests new paradigms for understanding religious authority in a globalized world.

Schools of clerks, schools of knights: John Grandisson and Hugh de Courtenay’s French correspondence, 1329–40

Abstract The private letters within the Register of John Grandisson (bishop of Exeter, 1327–69) provide a fascinating insight into the intellectual climate of his episcopate, and attest to his strained relationship with the immensely important local magnate Hugh de Courtenay. Based on a re-examination of the manuscript Register (now held at the Devon Heritage Centre), this article offers the first modern edition and translation of a series of exchanges between the two men during Grandisson’s episcopate. Grandisson’s replies represent an assertion of clerical authority, as the two men fought over what was – in one case, literally – contested terrain.

Islam nuanced: transcending Shi’a clerical authority among Iranian Americans in rural Kentucky

Islam nuanced: transcending Shi’a clerical authority among Iranian Americans in rural Kentucky

Diskursus Tentang Ulama Perempuan di Sumatera Barat: Transformasi Gagasan Kesetaraan Syafii Maarif


 
 
 
 The discourse about female Ulama is part of a social movement that is currently developing in Indonesia. The authority of the ulama, which for centuries has been dominated by men, experienced turbulence with the presence of this idea, especially after the holding of the KUPI (Congress of Indonesian Women Ulama) and the training of Female Ulama Cadres on various social media platforms. The agenda of the women’s ulama movement is also in line with Ahmad Syarii Maarif’s ideas about egalitarian attitudes in religion and the importance of awareness of gender equality to encourage social change. The research for the article is intended to see how Buya’s progressive ideas can be transformed into the religious dynamics of society in West Sumatra. Reading of this phenomenon is carried out using critical discourse analysis methods. Attention is focused on the discourse of female ulama as part of the transformation process of the idea of equality championed by Syafii Maarif. It was found that support from the government and various elements of society for the existence of female ulama still needs to be fought for because awareness of the importance of clerical authority for women has not been developed.
 
 
 

The Bishop, ‘Magic’ and Women: Episcopal Visitation of the Diocese, Laywomen and the Supernatural, and Clerical Authority in the Central Middle Ages

AbstractTexts that prohibit laywomen from accessing the supernatural appear in the Libri duo of Regino of Prüm (c.906 CE) and the Decretum of Burchard of Worms (c.1020 CE). Regino and Burchard designed their handbooks for bishops to use as they visited their diocese. The handbooks forbade laywomen from accessing the supernatural through informal practices, which the texts contrasted to the male clergy's ritual access to supernatural authority. This article highlights that Regino's and Burchard's texts created a gendered hierarchy, one which associated women with illicit access to the supernatural and emphasised male clerical authority.

Буддийская конфессия в Российской империи во второй половине XIX в.

Introduction. The mid-to-late 19th century was witnessing transformations that had begun during the reign of Alexander II, and the former were to affect virtually all aspects of Russian public life — including those relating to the then religious situation. Goals. So, the article attempts analytical insights into religious affairs of Buryats and Kalmyks throughout the mentioned period, examines archival documents and legislative acts of the Russian Government to identify the legal status of the Buddhist Church, reviews some essentials pertaining to control over the Buddhist clergy. Materials and methods. The work considers a variety of archival documents, including statistical data and materials of the First General Census of the Russian Empire of 1897 and the Regulations on Lamaist Clergy (1853). Theoretically and methodologically, the study employs the principles of scientific objectivity and historicism, such general research approaches as structural and systems ones, including methods of historical and religious investigation. The study covers actual historical contexts, describes positions of the Buddhist denomination among Mongolic peoples of Russia, i.e. Buryats and Kalmyks Buddhists, the latter’s legal status, numbers of believers, monks and temples. Special attention is paid to specific features of Kalmyk and Buryat Buddhist communities, their relations with Russia’s authorities in 1855–1897. Results. The completed analysis concludes that in domestic religious affairs the Government was guided not only by confessional issues proper but also by the then foreign policy agenda. The latter factor was directly related to Russia’s economic interests in Asia — the maintenance of the status quo in advantageous trade with China. The examined documents attest to these were primarily aimed at isolating Kalmyks and Buryats from Buddhist centers and hierarchs of Mongolia and Tibet; secondly, at limiting the rapid spread of Buddhism; and thirdly, at establishing control over the Church and regulating economic and administrative activities of Buddhist monasteries. Conclusions. Despite all the restrictions, the examined period in the history of Buddhism across the Russian Empire was characterized by that Buddhist monasteries would consolidate Kalmyk and Buryat peoples and become centers of cultural interaction with neighboring countries and communities. By the late 19th century Buddhism became a remarkable religious and political force that had its impacts on lives of Buryats and Kalmyks — and largely shaped their ethnic identities. As for Buryats, the period was marked by a strengthening of the unified Buddhist church system that grew independent of foreign centers and developed individual governance tools completely concentrated in the hands of a single executive — Pandita Khambo Lama. The Regulations on Kalmyk People’s Governance (1847) established some undivided clerical authority of the Lama of the Kalmyk People over the bulk of the ethnic community, except for the local group of Don Kalmyk Cossacks clerically headed by Senior Bakshi Lama of theirs.

Clericalism and the Problem of Leadership in Africa: Reimagination as Praxis

Abstract The praxis of reimagination explores the dynamic relationship between imagination, story, and praxis. Colonialism has greatly impacted the African church’s imagination of clerical authority. The African church needs to reimagine church authority. This requires a greater attentiveness to the story of God’s redeeming love in the person and ministry of Jesus. It also requires we recognize the equal dignity and co-responsibility of laity and clergy in the church’s mission. While the story of Christ’s sacrificial love, the climax of God’s ongoing involvement in human history has priority in the Christian imagination, the ongoing Synod on Synodality is an opportunity to tell and listen to fresh stories of hope, development, and responsible leadership in contemporary Africa.

Scholars, Secrets, and Sultans: Clerical Authority in West Africa, 1450–1650

AbstractAvailable historical sources for West Africa's Middle Niger c. 1450–1650 reveal that the ‘indigenous’ (non-Arab) Islamic scholarly class was already a self-conscious, independent social entity long before the clerical revolutions of later centuries. The influence of Muslim scholars was not limited to urban environments like Timbuktu, and clerical elites claimed a number of mostly independent communities throughout West Africa by the end of the sixteenth century. Mostly based on a reading of Arabic texts such as Muḥammad al-Kābarī's Bustān al-fawāʾid (‘Garden of Beneficial Prayers’) in dialogue with the Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār and Tārīkh al-Sūdān (‘Timbuktu Chronicles’), this article argues that Muslim scholars were engaged in a spiritual war for independence clearly on display since the beginning of the Songhay empire. Scholarly texts display deep concern for tempering unjust political power and the protection and attraction of women, discourses that reveal a perilous clerical struggle to assert community independence. Later armed jihads were thus not so much a break from earlier traditions of clerical pacificism, they were the natural evolution from this earlier spiritual jihad.

Holy Harlots in Medieval English Religious Literature: Authority, Exemplarity and Femininity, by Juliette Vuille

Juliette Vuille investigates the figure of the holy harlot in medieval English literature: those female saints who, following a sinful (read: sexual) youth, repent in favour of a particularly ascetic spirituality. Vuille’s ambitious project encompasses English literary history from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries and considers works in three of England’s vernacular languages: Old English, Middle English, and Anglo-Norman. She argues that the holy harlot offers a ‘much more inclusive and overarching presentation of femininity’, one that allows womanhood to symbolise both the best and worst in humanity (p. 223). Medieval English literature constructs the holy harlot with such capaciousness, she contends, that she comes to represent Everyman, a symbol of humanity writ large as both fallen and redeemed. The first chapter investigates the earliest Old English lives of holy harlots from the ninth and tenth centuries. Vuille posits that pre-Conquest England provided particularly fertile ground for lives of holy harlots to flourish, given the multiplicity of non-traditional paths for women to religious life, and the pre-existing literary traditions for heroic women. She argues that, contrary to their Latin sources, these Old English texts represent the holy harlot’s conversion to sanctity as a queer transcending of gender, allowing any reader to ‘move beyond trajectories set by one’s gender’ (p. 56). These queer possibilities were closed off, however, after the Norman Conquest, as Vuille discusses in her second chapter. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Vuille contends, hagiography had been deeply affected by the rises of romance and affective piety. As both harlot and lady of romance, the saint could therefore represent the worst and best of femininity, transforming from prostitute into bride of Christ. Rather than transcend femininity, the harlot saint embraced it, thereby aligning herself fully with Christ’s feminised humanity. In her third chapter, Vuille demonstrates how the lives of holy harlots changed following the advent of Wycliffism. In response to Mary Magdalene’s prominence in the Wycliffite defence of lay preaching, she argues, John Mirk wrote a version of the Magdalene’s life that minimised her radical preaching, while Osbern Bokenham, more sheltered by the influence of his powerful patroness, instead presented a Magdalene who retained her persuasive speech but worked in harmony with clerical authority. The multivalent possibilities of the holy harlot come into full bloom in Chapter Four’s discussion of the Digby Mary Magdalene. In rendering the Magdalene as simultaneously fallen and sanctified, Vuille argues that the play ‘stages the universality of the holy harlot mode to represent Everyman’ (p. 141). Vuille demonstrates the availability of that mode to women in particular in her final chapter, which focuses on how Christina of Markyate, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Elizabeth Barton took inspiration from Mary Magdalene in order to sanctify and justify their public spiritual lives.

‘The Zeal with which Christ was Inflamed’: The Irascible Power and Clerical Authority in the Writing of Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216)

Abstract The writing of Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) contains multiple references to the irascible power of the human soul, the purpose of which was to repel evil. In Si dormiatis, Innocent’s sermon on the ideal priesthood, the violent emotional behaviour produced by the irascible power is proof that the priest was carrying out his office correctly. Analysis of the sermon in the context of Innocent’s own corpus, contemporary commentaries on ‘angry emotions’, and the intense period of ecclesiastical reform in which Innocent was writing reveals that Innocent intended this aggressive response to instantiate correct order, shore up clerical and papal authority over the spiritual, and protect this authority as the exclusive preserve of men.

Religious Authority beyond Domination and Discipline: Epistemic Authority and Its Vernacular Uses in the Shi‘i Diaspora

Abstract“Religious authority” remains a ubiquitous but controversial term of comparative analysis. In Islamic studies, authority is generally personified in the form of the ulama and most often viewed through Weber’s lens of charismatic, legal-rational, and traditional types of legitimate domination. Our particular interest, Twelver Shi‘i Islam, seems a paradigmatic case, where the relationship between “the Ayatollahs” and state power has dominated academic discussion since Khomeini. Through ethnography of a Shi‘i diaspora community in the UK, we argue for a radical shift in perspective: away from forms of clerical power and towards non-specialist uses of clerical authority as expert opinion. Far from such “epistemic” authority being opposed to ordinary agency, here they are inextricably linked. Inspirational work in the anthropology of Islam has understood ordinary Muslim experiences of authority in non-liberal ways, as (Foucauldian) ethical discipline and self-care. We maintain the need to transcend not only domination but discipline too, refocusing the comparison between (Shi‘i) Islamic legal and liberal thought, in the form of Raz’s classic “service conception” of authority. Both stress the rationality of following authoritative opinion and its role as reason and justification for individual action. Our ethnography of ordinary practice then shows the sheer diversity of ways that such epistemic authority can be taken up, including, but not limited to, projects of personal piety and adversarial community politics. In our context, as surely also in others, domination and discipline should thus be seen as potential uses of “religious” epistemic authority, rather than as its privileged form.

The Church Needs the Laity: The Wisdom of John Henry Newman by Michael W. Higgins

Reviewed by: The Church Needs the Laity: The Wisdom of John Henry Newman by Michael W. Higgins Andrew J. Hoy The Church Needs the Laity: The Wisdom of John Henry Newman BY MICHAEL W. HIGGINS Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2021. xxi + 89 pages. Paperback: $14.95. ISBN: 9780809155217. Who are the laity, and what, if any, role are they to play in the present church?, asks Michael Higgins. Looking to the work and life of St. John Henry Newman through the lenses of his mentor James M. Cameron and Thomas Merton, Higgins answers these and many more questions throughout this essay by bolstering the role of the laity in the present church. His essay is squarely aimed at rallying “believers around the reclamation of the lay charism as the corrective to the sin of clericalism by drawing on the wisdom and witness of Newman” (xvii). Although Higgins exhibits a vocabulary well beyond that of a novice theologian, this work is deliberately approachable in tone and length and is clearly written for popular audiences. At times adopting a style similar to that of Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Higgins details his own formation, specifically recalling the time in his life in which he first seriously encountered Newman under the tutelage of James Cameron at the University of Toronto. Higgins repeatedly credits Cameron’s formation for his own interpretation of Newman throughout the essay, specifically recalling how his own rhetorical development shaped his career path as a Catholic public intellectual. Higgins continues, discussing the merits and necessity of the reemergence of Catholic public intellectuals in the images of Merton and Newman. In this analysis, Higgins offers his own diagnosis of the signs of the time, which are admittedly bleak. His read features an orthodox but thinking Catholic lay center caught between individualism produced by unchecked liberalism on one hand, and a hypersensitive Catholic hierarchy on the lookout for any apparent indication of divergence from magisterial teaching on the other. As a senior scholar, it is clear that Higgins does not fear naming these powers, which continue to converge on an ever discerning and orthodox laity. In his own words, “This ain’t good” (64). In looking to Newman, and subsequently Merton, Higgins sees a well-formed laity helmed by balanced contemporary Catholic intellectuals (in the images of Newman and Merton) as the only antidote to the ongoing compression of Catholic intellectual dialogue. Higgins specifically looks to two periods in Newman’s life to further elucidate his point: his work in establishing the Catholic University of Ireland (1854) and The Rambler affair (1859–1860), both of which include episodes of episcopal overreach in legitimate Catholic dialogue among the laity. [End Page 91] By drawing on these points in the life of Newman, Higgins illustrates the power of Catholic public intellectuals who see the value of lay voices in the present church. Highlighting Newman’s inclusion of the laity in the academic structures of Catholic University Ireland coupled with his unwavering focus on the formation of lay students, Higgins illustrates the point of Catholic education, namely the fostering of a well-informed laity. With the foundations of their Catholic education, this well-informed laity can (ideally) subsequently contribute to the life of the church, no more as spectators in an otherwise clerical realm, rather as active and knowledgeable participants. This lay check on clerical authority, although clearly present in the works of Newman, has yet to be fully realized, as Higgins repeatedly exhibits. He boldly points to two recent papacies wherein censures and censorship were frequent measures aimed at reigning in academics and lay people who dared dialogue and arrive at conclusions about matters magisterial. Higgins does not shy from condemning members of the episcopacy for acts of censorship, especially in matters of Catholic intellectual importance involving academic dialogue and truth-seeking. This type of Catholic intellectualism, modeled by Newman, is characterized by its persistent pursuit of the truth as well as its unceasing rediscovery of a “humble Catholicism— neither restorationist nor recidivist. Just ever-regenerating, ever-revivifying” (84). While Higgins does well to keep this essay to a readable length, and readable it is, this quasi-memoir of a man’s time...

Hidden in Plain Sight: John Cotton's Middle Way and the Making of the Cambridge Platform of Church Discipline

AbstractThe 1648 Cambridge Platform, Congregationalists’ first, guided New England Congregationalist church practice well into the next century. Yet the synodical deliberations that shaped the platform remain largely a closed book. Were the contents of all three preparatory platform drafts known, a baseline could be established for inferring those deliberations. But it has long been taken as a given that John Cotton's draft is missing.The now-recovered draft was, among other things, Cotton's vehicle for working reforms restraining Congregationalism's democratic and fissiparous tendencies into the Cambridge Platform. He had first laid out those reforms in Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644), a book that attracted widespread attention, including at the English Westminster and Savoy Assemblies. Yet the slender amount of scholarship on the Cambridge Platform has offered, at most, generalized acknowledgment, if any, of Cotton's considerable and complicated impact on it. That neglect leaves a large gap in our understanding of the platform, the synod, and Cotton himself, as well as of the unstable dynamics of clerical authority in an awkwardly peripheral emergent puritan church movement that emphasized lay empowerment.

Justice and vilayat in post-revolutionary Iranian Shiʿism

Justice and the guardianship of the jurist ( vilayat-i faqih ) have been the two ideological pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran ever since the 1979 Revolution. Unlike vilayat-i faqih , the meaning and essence of justice in post-revolutionary Shiʿi-Iranian thought has not received due attention in the scholarly debate. The hegemonic Shiʿi discourse in Iran defines justice as based on three principles: awarding every person their due rights according to the law; ‘setting everything in its place’, and the elimination of tyranny and oppression. It maintains that true justice can be realized only within an Islamic system ruled by the ‘fully qualified jurist’. This formula has elicited additional debate, especially since 2011, over the reciprocal status and dependence of the two concepts. The debate was triggered by intra-elite tensions, and subsequently by the need to respond to public disaffection over the deficiencies in the implementation of social justice in Iran. It culminated in subordinating the ideal of justice to clerical authority and to the principle of expediency as determined by that clergy. Thus, vilayat-i faqih has been transformed from the means to implement justice to the ultimate self-serving end-goal of the regime’s ideology.

The Seizure of the Mosques as Public Spaces Between Dayah and Salafi-Wahabi Ulamas in Aceh

This research examined the contestation of Islamic clerical authority in the struggle for religious public spaces in Banda Aceh City, which occurred between dayah ulamas and Salafi-Wahabi group. A field-library-typed research was employed with qualitative analysis approach. The data was collected by means of interviews, as well as documenting and observing the phenomenon of contestation occurred between religious authorities. The data was then analyzed with a sociological approach combined with the social theories; discourse-power relations, public spaces and religious authorities. This study found that the contestation of religious authorities in public spaces between the two groups aims to seize and maintain the facilities of the religious public spaces; mosques, musallas (Muslim’s prayer rooms) and other da'wah spaces. Three constructions of socio-religious authority were found to build synergies in seizing the religious public spaces. First, the cosmological construction of religious doctrine and authority; Ahlussunnah wal Jama'ah and Ash'ariyyah as a doctrine and identity; Second, religious rituals and efforts to standardize the religion; Shafi'iyyah and Salaf ash-shalih; and Third, Places of Worship to confirm the existence of the movement of the two contesting groups. These three pieces of evidence stated that the contestation of religious authorities in fighting over religious public spaces in Banda Aceh City is not only concerned with the confirmation of doctrine and belief, but has expanded to fighting over access to social and economic facilities.

Reclaiming an Authority: Women’s Ulama Congress Network (KUPI) and a New Trend of Religious Discourse in Indonesia

The struggle of the Indonesian Women Ulama Congress Network (KUPI) to reclaim the authority of female ulama in Indonesia has facilitated the emergence of a new trend in a religious domain that has traditionally been male-dominated and marginalized women. This paper aims to explore three methods of struggle adopted by the KUPI network to reclaim women's religious authority and socio-political recognition of being an ulama. These include reconstructing the concept of ulama, developing an alternative non-patriarchal and gender-inclusive epistemology, and issuing fatwas on strategic issues. Data for this study has resulted from observations, interviews with ten (10) leading activists and members of the KUPI network, and readings on the publications of the KUPI and its network. This study reveals that KUPI reinterprets the concept of ulama by giving new gender-inclusive meanings in terms of definition, agency, and roles. The KUPI network also criticizes the existing epistemology that has enabled masculine domination and patriarchal bias in producing religious knowledge. The network develops a new epistemology in interpreting religious texts contextually. It brings up the true-justice perspective and hermeneutics of reciprocity. KUPI issued fatwas related to three major issues, including sexual violence, child marriage, and ecological crisis. The fatwa also functions to establish KUPI's position of legitimacy on a par with the Indonesian Ulama Council (MUI) and symbolizes public recognition of Muslim women's clerical authority. The study recommends the need for a more massive-quantitative study to map social acceptance and recognition of women ulama's authority on a national and international level.
 
 Received: 12 January 2022 / Accepted: 19 March 2022 / Published: 5 May 2022

The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire by Katherine D. Moran

Reviewed by: The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire by Katherine D. Moran Anne M. Martinez The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire. By Katherine D. Moran. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 330 pp. $48.95. Katherine Moran's The Imperial Church joins a growing body of literature that challenges the late nineteenth and turn of the twentieth century narrative of uniform suppression of Catholicism in the United States. Beyond national Catholic narratives, The Imperial Church expands American Catholic history alongside American empire to the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War. Moran analyzes narratives used by local boosters and officials about Jacques Marquette in the Upper Midwest, Junípero Serra in California, and Spanish friars in the Philippines to show that Catholic figures represented a historical order than could be inherited and promoted by Protestants in establishing their own deeper imperial roots to justify and sustain American Empire. The Imperial Church seeks to show that "American Protestants … integrated Catholic missionaries and explorers into their efforts to commemorate a meaningful past" in the face of a rapidly changing U.S. present (7). Moran challenges historians to rethink how American empire and religion are assumed to interact in this era. The book is divided into three sections, with two chapters each. Section one centers commemorative culture honoring Marquette, "the first white man" in the Upper Midwest, whose gentle braveness civilized indigenous peoples (18). Marquette's peaceful conquest leant Midwesterners a bloodless imperial domination to guide their growing [End Page 63] economic strength and identity. Section two casts Serra and the California missions as a civilizing influence built around hospitality and labor management, reimbodied in the contemporary tourism industry. Moran rightly notes that this narrative erased Mexicans claims on California and, of course, the Mexican bodies that remained in the region. Section three focuses on the ways Spanish friars of centuries past were embraced by Americans seeking to harness those civilizing forces in support of an American imperial future in the Philippines. "Americanized Catholicism was embraced by Protestants and Catholics alike as a potential carrier of Christianity and American civilization," Moran writes (200). The book is well-organized and well-argued. Each section analyzes the commemorative culture of the relevant site and then considers the shifting discourse from anti-Catholicism to imperial foundations. Each section is strong and sections one and two work well together in reframing Marquette and Serra as "founding fathers" in their respective regions. For me, there is a bit of slippage between these sections based in the United States and the final section on the Philippines. The first two sections correlate more closely with the idea of founding fathers, while the third section more closely adheres to the notion of an American Imperial Catholic Church. Moran notes that the "buffer" between lionizing local Catholic historical figures "without fully embracing the idea of Catholic clerical authority" collapsed in the Philippines case; "Americanized priests and prelates were envisioned as replacements for the friar" (174). The "local" element of the Philippines case does not correlate well to the self-promotion projects carried out in the Upper Midwest and California. The transition between these different forms of Catholic reclamation might be better articulated in the text. In spite of this friction, this is a compelling study, firmly based in diligent archival research. This would be a fine contributor to courses on U.S. colonialism and empire, as well as American and U.S. Catholic history. [End Page 64] Anne M. Martinez Rijksuniversiteit Groningen Copyright © 2022 American Catholic Historical Society

Truth in Many Tongues: Religious Conversion and the Languages of the Early Spanish Empire

Truth in Many Tongues examines the Spanish empire's language policies in the first century of Iberian colonization of the Americas. Daniel Wasserman-Soler compares language policies and practices in Granada and Valencia with those in various regions of New Spain throughout the sixteenth century. He argues that the empire's language policy was not particularly consistent and was much more hands-off compared to other policies related to colonization. He effectively demonstrates that Spanish language policy was much more adaptable than the historiography has tended to describe it.The first chapter examines how the Inquisition dealt with the use of language. Following the rise of Protestantism and the Council of Trent, inquisitors throughout the sixteenth century were leery of exposing the laity to complicated biblical texts and theological content in the vernacular because they believed that the untrained were likely to misinterpret scripture and theological concepts without pastoral guidance. Thus, the Inquisition tended to prohibit the use of vernacular language in Spanish Iberia. Wasserman-Soler states that recent studies have paid attention to inquisitors' individual and often self-serving motivations, and he argues that it is also important to account for more religiously based motivations such as pastoral concerns (p. 37). The remaining chapters outline the official royal language policy in various contexts and then explore how clergy interacted with those official policies, how they thought about language, and, finally, how they implemented language policy on the ground. Applied language policy usually meant that the friars made ad hoc decisions depending on local language factors and the level of language proficiency of the individual friars assigned to specific localities.Chapters 2 and 3 concentrate on language policy in Granada and Valencia. In Spanish Iberia, royal policy tended to be more restrictive toward Arabic, which the clergy were less likely to learn, and the Muslim population was less likely to convert to Catholicism. In Granada, Wasserman-Soler notes, Philip II prohibited Arabic in 1547 because he thought that its use had prevented the Islamic population's full evangelization, yet broad policies prohibiting Arabic were not readily enforced. Wasserman-Soler shows a broader spectrum of attitudes and policies toward Arabic use within the church locally. Wasserman-Soler proves that there was a wider range of attitudes and policies among church leaders and particular regions than has been portrayed in the historiography. He shows that policies were often implemented according to the attitudes and proclivities of individual decision makers in the church. While there was a range of attitudes and policies among the clerical authorities in both Granada and Valencia, Wasserman-Soler reveals a greater propensity to ban Arabic in the latter region.Chapters 4 and 5 provide a rich examination of language attitudes and practices by early Mexican church fathers as they sought to convert the Indigenous populations. While Wasserman-Soler refers to the first three Mexican provincial church councils as sources for official church language policy, the strength of these chapters is their close examination of the language skills, attitudes, and practices of individual clergymen when it came to the relationship between language fluency and effective conversion of the Indigenous populations in various geographic and linguistic regions of New Spain. Chapter 4 lays out the issues that clergy in the early sixteenth century had to grapple with as they began the process of Indigenous conversion. While initially the crown encouraged the clergy to learn Indigenous languages in order to effectively evangelize, there was also an explicit expectation that the Indigenous population would learn to speak Castilian (p. 98). Wasserman-Soler demonstrates that the early friars approached learning Native languages to teach Christian doctrine in a variety of ways. Thus the church councils increasingly encouraged the clergy to learn Native languages to communicate Christianity throughout New Spain and increasingly recognized the merits of those friars who did so effectively. Chapter 5 digs into what language learning looked like for clergy on the ground throughout central Mexico. The chapter closely examines specific religious texts written by friars in order to interpret their attitudes toward Indigenous languages and their usefulness in Indigenous conversion. The chapter also describes the wide variety of clerical bilingualism and how effectively, or not, clergy communicated with the communities that they served.Throughout the book, the more hands-on prohibitive language policy taken by the Castilian crown toward Arabic in Iberia stands in stark contrast with the much more flexible, complex, and adaptive approach toward Native languages in New Spain. While this monograph's focus on the clergy's perspective leaves it open to the potential criticism that it lacks the Indigenous perspective, it does provide a rich reading of theological texts by early Mexican church fathers. It provides a nuanced and welcome interpretation of clerical attitudes toward languages, theology, and indoctrination that enriches the field.

Pluralities of Power in Indonesia’s Intellectual Property Law, Regional Arts and Religious Freedom Debates

ABSTRACT This article re-analyses historical Southeast Asian power concepts and practices to interpret contrasting positions on two contemporary Indonesian legal debates. The first debate concerns the use of intellectual property models to regulate regional arts or ‘traditional cultural expressions’. The second debate concerns a 2017 constitutional court ruling that advocates citizenship parity for ‘belief practitioners’, meaning those who maintain ancestral or non-orthodox practices and do not list one of Indonesia’s six official religions on their identity cards. I argue that contrasting positions on the laws held by state and clerical authorities versus regional practitioners are better explained by reference to distinctively Southeast Asian ideas about unilateral versus decentralised ‘power’ than by standard globalisation, human rights, or modern state versus indigenous resistance explanations. Disentangling two features of Benedict Anderson’s classic model of Javanese power, fluid cosmic force and the concentration of ‘oneness’ by rulers, illuminates how the Indonesian minority and majoritarian legal perspectives fit within a common repertoire of regional power concepts. Framing religion, tradition, arts and law as prescriptive and normative rather than analytic categories, the article draws on historical and comparative Southeast Asian evidence to delineate tensions among differently positioned groups grounded in diverse modalities of power, ancestral authority and customary institutions, even as some now selectively adopt imported legal rights-based and heritage preservation discourses.