Secular Discourse Research Articles

Unearthing the coloniality of neoliberalised curricular discourses to promote a public orientation towards secondary science education

ABSTRACT Considering the challenges facing curricula in science education forces a reckoning with neoliberalism and its transmogrification of education, generally. Science, which has contributed significantly to humanity, is exalted in neoliberal secular discourse and forms a key pillar of social policy governance. However, the progress and innovation attributed to scientific education, within the broader STEM agenda, must be read against the rise in societal inequalities wrought by far-right hostilities and the general erosion of democratic principles in the milieu of neoliberal policy making. This is especially prescient for science curricula given the widespread crystallisation of scientism in society and its role in framing anti-equality arguments. This must also be situated against the broad resistance movements that have arisen, demonstrating the resilience and promise from alternative perspectives such as decoloniality. While decolonial theory reckons with the epistemological violence of science, these perspectives remain underdiscussed in STEM fields. This is necessary for contemporary science curricula given the broader neoliberal erosions of public education that champion instrumentalism and mass measurement in the name of capitalism. This forms the impetus for this conceptual article which presents a decolonial consideration of recent curricular discourses in science.

Detached From Humanity: Artificial Gestation and the Christian Dilemma

Abstract The development of artificial womb technology (AWT) is continuing to proceed and raises important ethical and theological questions for Christians. While there has been extensive secular discourse on artificial wombs in recent years, there has been minimal Christian engagement with this topic. There are broadly two primary uses of artificial womb technology: first, ectogestation, which is a form of enhanced neonatal care, where only some of the gestation period takes place in an artificial womb, and second, ectogenesis, where the entire period of gestation occurs in an artificial womb. It is plausible that some form of ectogestation in the latter weeks or months of pregnancy could be possible within a decade or so, while ectogenesis for humans remains far more speculative. Ectogestation is likely to significantly reduce maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality, and so there is a strong prima facie case for supporting its development. Ectogenesis, however, may bring several challenges, including the further commodification of children, and the potential pathologizing of pregnancy and childbirth. Its long-term effects on those created through this process are also unknown. If it becomes ubiquitous, we may also find the central theological significance of pregnancy and birth diminished. The dilemma for Christians is that the development of seemingly unproblematic ectogestation is likely to normalize the use of artificial gestation, and, in time, pave the way for ectogenesis.

Spirituality in debates: Politics, genealogy, and new movements. Introduction

Spirituality has recently taken on new importance on the religious landscape as well as in popular and secular discourse and in the field of social sciences. As a new religious expression, spirituality often intersects with contemporary concerns. What are the political implications of contemporary spirituality movements that are more than often framed under the guise of individualized and distanced religiosity? To what extend do these religious behaviors involve public and political demands? How can these overall changes – including religious expressions, organizations, and networks – affect our theoretical approaches to the notion of spirituality itself? While these questions have been inquired in some specific studies, no international or comparative perspectives have connected these multiple insights together. This is the aim of this special issue.

Antinomic Understanding of the Secular in Georges Florovsky's Works

The present article analyses the approach of Georges Florovsky to the problem of the secular (worldly, earthly, immanent). Georges Florovsky gave the secular tendencies in the Christian world a negative assessment as they led to cultural crises. He proposed to seek their origin in the antinomic (God–human, both earthly and heavenly) nature of the Christian church. He deduced that the origins of secular culture stemmed forth from the medieval attempts to break this antinomy, to create Heaven on Earth. This could be seen in the Byzantine Empire (the subordination of the Church to the Emperor), in the Latin world (the assignment of secular power to the Pope), in the European post-Reformation thought (through the blurring of the distinction between theology and de-Christianized philosophy), and later in the Russian religious philosophy (attempts to formulate the idea of Christian state). Drawing on the concept of the divine-human antinomy of the Church, Georges Florovsky insisted that the Church should neither try to blur the line between the religious and the secular, nor attempt to influence secular politics, but should instead proceed from the fact that culture is intrinsically religious and substantially theologized. In fact, he objected to the ecclesiasticization of politics and offered to proceed from the assumption that Christianity (religion) is universal by default. Florovsky used a dual, dialectical approach in which secular discourse is seen as a religious discourse that aspires to secular power and consequently ceases to be religious, creating a kind of secular culture that threatens Christianity itself. In order to overcome this secular culture, Christianity is called upon to abstain from direct political influence on it. While avoiding limitations of the religious–secular du-alism of the Enlightenment and allowing the Church thought to prevent aggravating relations with secular politics, this approach fails to properly distinguish between the causes and the effects of secular discourse. The conclusion identifies ways of furthering Florovsky's approach and thought.

Analysis of discourse conflict through Turkish television series: Sample of Hacı

Rather than seeing the world as it is, individuals prefer to see it as they wish it to be. Beliefs, feelings, thoughts, and assumptions affect the way they view the world. This situation, according to Althusser, occurs under the influence of the ideological order. Ideologies attempt to describe and interpret the world by making claims or assumptions about human nature, historical events, facts, and future possibilities.Hegemony is all about power relations; which group is dominant and which group is subordinate to the other group. It is indispensable to consider this, as power relations are central to human behavior and where it is.It is not difficult to understand that the tension between ideology and hegemony are not abstract macro forces. It is also possible to see examples from the daily life of people. It helps to explain this tension between the openness and closure of television texts and the practices of coding or decoding. In other words, people engage in hegemonic struggles through common sense in their daily lives and force textual ambiguity.The purpose of this essay is to discuss the relationship between the secular and conservative discourses in Turkey and their representation in one work of popular culture. The research begins to be analyzed by establishing a method from Althusser's perspective, as the media is one of the most effective Ideological State Devices in many parts of the world today. By looking at various branches of the media and the practices used, it is almost possible to understand which discourse is dominant in Turkey and how it is done to prevent the other discourse. In this context, in terms of flexible limitations, the 'Hacı' series, which is one of the examples that explains the difference between RSA and ISA very well for the general and society, was chosen. The limited number of TV series that glorify Islam, such as Hadji, shows that the ISAs of the conservative discourse are not strong enough to outweigh the secular discourse. This is a sign that the dominant discourse in Turkey is almost completely successful in naturally eliminating dissidents. In this context, the study constituted an important research in terms of contributing to the literature on how the dominant discourse is constructed through the media.

Post-Secular Negotiations in Pastoral Care: Models in a Danish Podcast Series

AbstractThis article explores the theoretical and practical importance of post-secular negotiations in intercultural pastoral care. Post-secular negotiations are negotiations between secular and religious discourses within specific activities such as pastoral care. While intercultural pastoral care has established a focus on the encounter between religious others in pastoral care, this article focuses on the encounter between Christian and secular discourses. Analyzing 10 Danish pastoral care conversations, the authors find that such post-secular negotiations occur in a variety of ways (explicit and implicit, initiated by pastor and care seeker), in a variety of settings (not only secular settings such as hospitals but also in ecclesial settings) and with various results (reception, rejection, misunderstanding, and circumvention). Drawing upon psychotherapeutic literature, the authors argue that explicit and respectful post-secular negotiations initiated by the pastor at the beginning of the conversation, either formalized or contextualized, might create better conditions for pastoral care conversations in the post-secular world.

Media and the Sacralization of Leaders and Events: The Construction of a Religious Public Sphere

Abstract This study aims to demonstrate that media can achieve a religious construction of an event or issue and set the public sphere in a religious frame through the sacralization of events and persons. This perspective can be supported empirically by the studies showing the way in which mass media framed different events in a religious imaginary and language and proposed this image as a frame for public sphere debates and theoretically by the concepts of media events, mediatization, ritualization, and sacralization, in order to reveal the processes through which the translation from a secular discourse to a religious discourse is produced. Under certain circumstances, mass media work as an “as if” (metaphoric) religion, and the events are presented through a religious frame – through themes and figures that come from the religious sacred narratives. Journalists accomplish this by setting events and leaders within the symbolic frame specific to religion: within this framework, those who report the facts are using narratives close to hagiographic stories, and by this, they are accomplishing the sacralization of these events. This enables journalists to exert a “ritual mastery” over presenting the events and imposing its significations.

Religious schools in the Netherlands: An analysis of arguments and assumptions in a tense public debate

In the public and political debate about religious schools in the Netherlands, various arguments recur. Those arguments are not isolated or neutral, but are shaped and defined by various normative assumptions. Arguments against religious schools are, for instance, affected by the dominant secular discourse in Western Europe. Unconscious normative assumptions are potentially problematic if they remain unnoticed and if there is a lack of reflection on them. A religious worldview has become a minority perspective in the Netherlands, which makes it important to reflect on the normative assumptions underlying the arguments in the debate about religious schools in order to avoid blindly and uncritically imposing a majority norm on a minority. In this article, the arguments dominating the public and political debate on religious schools in the Netherlands are discerned. Implicit assumptions are brought to the surface and analysed from an interreligious perspective. In order to do so, the social, religious and historical context of the Dutch debate is reflected upon, and the recurring arguments are defined by conducting a qualitative content analysis.

Representations of Light in Western Culture

In physical terms, light is a wave radiating from an energy source, yet different cultures in different periods have also attributed metaphysical properties to light that are outside of nature. Even in today’s secular discourse, we often resort to using imagery of light to symbolise a variety of virtues, whereas ‘New Age’ discourse raises light to a renewed metaphysical status. In this article, we will use the genealogical method to examine the origins of the popular Western conception of light as representative of knowledge, goodness, wisdom and sanctity by looking at the great myths and the foundational texts of Western culture. This understanding of light is a deep structure, originating in religion, that persists in secular culture: from ancient Near Eastern mythologies, to Plato’s parable of the cave, to the Judeo-Christian narrative and the Enlightenment and culminating in the role of light in New Age culture.

Volatile concepts

Abstract This paper demonstrates the value of studying co-occurrence ‘quads’ – constellations of four non-adjacent lemmas that consistently co-occur across spans of up to 100 tokens – for understanding discursive change. We map meaning onto quads as ‘discursive concepts’, which encompass encyclopaedic semantics, pragmatics, and context. We investigate a high-frequency quad with high co-occurrence strength in EEBO-TCP: world-heaven-earth-power. We conduct semantic and pragmatic analysis to generate hypotheses regarding discursive change. The quad’s components are semantically underspecified; thus, although the quad indicates a discursive concept, each instantiation of the quad is variable, contingent, and dependent upon context and pragmatic processes for interpretation. We observe how the vague lexemes that constitute building blocks of religious discourse are employed to generate new, timely secular discourses; and we argue that semantic underspecification is the site and source of discursive change. Indeed, the volatile, unstable nature of the component lexical meanings renders them indispensable to early modern debate.

Seeing like a church: Reconstruction after Typhoon Sendong in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines

In post-disaster situations where there is a weak government, opportunities arise for so-called non-state actors to re-imagine, re-create, and govern portions of society and landscapes. The process of resettling survivors is an improvement project in which certain actors and institutions assume the functions and authority of a shadow state. This paper studies the activities of Catholic trustees in disaster relief and resettlement in Northern Mindanao, Philippines after Tropical Storm Sendong, and asks how and to what ends they engage with purportedly secular humanitarian efforts. It is based on fieldwork in Cagayan de Oro, which used an ethnographic approach and qualitative methods. The intentions motivating trustees’ interventions, and the selection of activities, reveal clear Christian undertones. This unsurprising finding suggests Catholic trustees “saw like a church”; there was a demonstrated intent to govern, in the Foucauldian sense of governmental rationality, guided by the exercise of old and new pastoral power, largely mirroring a Christian social mission. Through their actions, trustees (re)asserted the historical hegemonic position of the Catholic Church in Philippine society. This framing of disaster management challenges mainstream secular discourses and practices of development and disaster management and their treatment of faith-based organizations as just another development actor.

Antinomic Understanding of the Secular in Georges Florovsky’s Works

The article analyzes the approach of Georges Florovsky to the problem of the secular (worldly, earthly, immanent). Georges Florovsky gave the secular tendencies in the Christian world a negative assessment as they led to cultural crises. He proposed to seek their origin in the antinomic (God-human, both earthly and heavenly) nature of the Christian church. He deduced that the origins of secular culture stemmed forth from the medieval attempts to break this antinomy, to create Heaven on Earth. This could be seen in the Byzantine Empire (subordination of the Church to the Emperor), in the Latin world (assignment of secular power to the Pope), in the European postReformation thought (through the blurring of the distinction between theology and de-Christianized philosophy), and later in the Russian religious philosophy (attempts to formulate the idea of Christian state). Drawing on the concept of the divine-human antinomy of the Church, Georges Florovsky insisted that the Church should neither try to blur the line between the religious and the secular not try to influence secular politics, but should instead proceed from the fact that culture is intrinsically religious and substantially theologised. In fact, he objected to the ecclesiasticisation of politics and offered to proceed from the assumption that Christianity (religion) is universal by default. Georges Florovsky used a dual, dialectical approach in which secular discourse is seen as a religious one that aspires to secular power and consequently ceases to be religious, creating a kind of secular culture that threatens Christianity itself. In order to overcome this secular culture Christianity is called upon to abstain from direct political influence on it. While avoiding limitations of the religious-secular dualism of the Enlightenment and allowing the Church thought to prevent aggravating relations with secular politics, this approach fails to properly distinguish between the causes and the effects of the secular discourse. The conclusion identifies ways of furthering Florovsky’s approach and thought.

Abuse, power and discourse in the public trial of Timothy Omotoso

Exposure of gender-based violence (GBV) has recently received attention from both scholars and the public. However, GBV within Christian discourse, and specifically as it occurs among pastors of the new Prophetic Pentecostal Churches (PPC), is yet to be explored in detail. This article begins to address this research gap by highlighting the difficulty of proving sexual and spiritual abuse in a secular court of law, as shown in the public trial of Timothy Omotoso. The study uses critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the methodology to examine aspects of the trial and the social media discourse commenting on the trial. In doing so, the article highlights three different discourses surrounding the Zondi trial, namely the discourse of GBV in Pentecostalism; the secular legal discourse and how it reshapes faith, spirituality and the abuse of believers; and the public trial victims endure on social media if they chose to come forward to testify against a church leader. By examining these discourses, the study shows how each of these need to be taken seriously and should inform pastoral care given to victims who experienced GBV by Christian leaders. Using the findings from Zondi’s testimony, this article proposes a framework of pastoral care that can support people who experience GBV within a Christian context and consider bringing their abusers to trial.Interdisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article is an interface between GBV and Pentecostalism in a public trial of Timothy Omotoso through CDA. The article proposes a pastoral care as a remedy for those undergoing trauma of abuse.

Secularism and the Muslim Women Question: A Critique of Secularism as a Frame of Reference for Gender Equality

The study of the theories of secularization has been marked by extensive debates about the shortfalls of religion and its inability to keep up with theories of gender equality. In these debates, considerably less attention has been given to the theoretical premises associating secularism with gender equality and the implications of their interrelation. The present paper seeks to undertake a re-examination of secularism as an emancipatory frame of reference for women, particularly but not exclusively Muslim ones, by exploring the concept within its complex and changing contexts and in light of recent feminist critiques of its narrative. It also aims to investigate the problematic positionality of Muslim women in the secular discourse as a way of shedding more light on the limitations and ideological contradictions of the premised interdependence between secularism and gender equality. The paper proposes that more effort needs to be made to recasting the secular narrative on gender equality and the place of Muslim women within it. Consequently, it seeks to bring more scholarly attention to the gender dimensions of secularism and its renewed significance as a political, social, and cultural force that impacts Muslim women’s lives in the West and Muslim majority societies as well.

A sociopragmatic account of religiosity and secularity in fictional narratives

AbstractThis paper investigates the religiosity/secularity dichotomy in Naguib Mahfouz’s novels, which is shaped by cultural narratives that convey his ideas. It analyzes a defined corpus of Mahfouz’s narratives that articulate his notions of religiosity/secularity. Through an interdisciplinary methodology combining the application of pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, and contextual analysis, it aims to determine Mahfouz’s potentiality for perceiving and narrativizing religiosity and secularity in twentieth-century Egypt. It discusses how Mahfouz adopts sociopragmatic techniques to give a bright picture of the secularist discourse but a negative one for the Islamist one presented as inevitably incapable, crude, schizophrenic and idiosyncratic. Mahfouz openly destabilizes the religious/secular dichotomy by juxtaposing religious and secular discourses in his early and later narratives, where he scrutinizes secularity, advocating it as the only way out of and uprooting, religiosity. The adoption of an interdisciplinary framework proves to be theoretically and empirically motivated in order to show how Mahfouz’s narratives reflect their originator’s own beliefs and those of the narrated society, including its value systems.

Social Media Discourses Concerning Pope Francis’ Visit to Csíksomlyó/Șumuleu Ciuc

Szeklerland, at the south-easternmost part of historical Transylvania, an ethnic Hungarian enclave in the middle of Romania, lies on the borderline between cultures, on the crossroads of religious denominations where western Christianity meets eastern Orthodox Christianity. Șumuleu Ciuc (Csíksomlyó in Hungarian) is a major historical Roman Catholic – Marian – pilgrimage site of Szeklerland, which has grown into a national holy site of Hungarians from all over the world. This place was included into the official itinerary of Pope Francis’ 2019 visit in Romania. The aim of this article – as part of our interdisciplinary research project titled “Videmus Papam. Social, Economic Aspects of Pope Francis’ 2019 Visit to Șumuleu Ciuc in Szeklerland’s Regional and Wider Contexts” identifying, mapping, describing, and analyzing the socio-religious, socio-demographic, economic-touristic, and media-representation aspects of the papal visit – is to investigate the echoes of the papal visit, with special attention to the personality and the role of Pope Francis, the ethnic identity of Szekler-Hungarians, the significance of the Marian pilgrimage site, the historical importance of the special occasion, the inter-ethnic relations between majority Romanians and minority Hungarians, the role of the church in religious and secular discourses. The investigation focuses, based on key terms, om the public discourses around the papal visit unfolding from the digital media contents, opinions, public comments appearing in social media, but the data obtained from the online questionnaires and interviews performed during the research project offer important insights as well. The texts and auxiliary materials (photos, videos) have been processed through qualitative discourse analysis methods – corroborated with the work and results of the members of the research team.

The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and Its Changing Narrative on Human Rights

Abstract The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (pct) is the Protestant denomination with the longest tradition in the country. The central theological position of the church began to change in the late 1960s, and over the following decade the church became increasingly politically active and vocal in its support for human rights, minority rights, and democratization. This paper addresses the issue of human rights as narrated within the pct, which explained its involvement in human rights with reference to its Christian beliefs. One outcome of the church’s endeavors was that the people of Taiwan accepted the struggle initiated by the church and began to ask for free elections. Using the pct as an example, the paper shows that religious bodies have the potential to be a positive force for change in society and that a Christian perspective on human rights can contribute to secular discourse on the topic.

Religious vs. Secular Discourse and the Change of Political Power in Montenegro

ABSTRACT This paper explores the two opposing ideologies represented in the public discourse of their actors, religious and secular leaders, after the introduction of the Law on Religious Freedom in Montenegro. The paper addresses discourse in a complex social and political scenery that affected Montenegro in the period January–August 2020. There is a standpoint shared by diplomatic bodies that, for the first time in Montenegrin history, the Church has impacted the outcome of secular elections. In this paper, we have examined the linguistic exponents in ad litteram statements of two leaders revealing the peculiarities of the two opposing, yet intertwined, discourses. We have selected readers’ comments to show how part of the Montenegrin people reacted to the events that have permeated Montenegro’s reality. We have used a critical discourse approach, more precisely van Dijk’s we/they opposition, to show how actors achieved a rhetorical strategy of glorifying us and criticizing them. Finally, we interpret abstract notions in the leaders’ statements through the prism of van Dijk’s categories of ideological discourse. The findings of the papers show how abstract notions such as religion and politics in a specific part of Montenegrin history have become linguistically embedded in the two leaders’ discourses.

Names of new saints of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church and commemorative discourse

The article discusses the names of new saints of the UGCC (hagioanthroponyms) as markers of the collective memory of modern society regarding the events of the past, namely the rejection of Russian (in the 19th century) and Soviet (in the 20th century) ideologies in the religious life of Ukrainian Greek Catholics. From the theoretical perspective, the analysis is premised on the ideas and provisions of onomastics regarding the semiotic nature of proper names and their functions of accumulation and translation of the religious sphere, of sociolinguistics regarding the interaction of language and the Church, as well as lexicology regarding the systematisation of units into thematic groups. The papers on religious studies, the history of the Church, the history of totalitarianism in the USSR and the historical memory of socio-cultural knowledge provided the context for the transformation of one of the spheres of collective memory into the linguistic categories of «hagioanthroponyms», «nominative productivity» and «thematic group». The sources of the analysis included the texts of religious and secular discourse, thematically related to the life and activities of the martyrs for the Faith, and the works of the event participants. The units of analysis, namely hagioanthroponyms, have denotations of the divine-spiritual sphere as the object of nomination. The research of the problem was provided by applied correlative and biographical methods, the method of sociolinguistic interpretation, and elements of discourse analysis. They helped to follow the process of creating nominations derived from hagioanthroponyms in modern religious and secular discourse and to determine that they contain formal and substantive components of knowledge about the past. Derivative units create thematic groups «names of prayers», «names of Akathist’s», «names of icons and other sacred images», «names of sacred places of prayer», «names of educational institutions», «names of films» and related to information about the forced conversion to Orthodoxy of Ukrainian Greek Catholics in the Russian Empire and the USSR. The analysis results are relevant for onomastics, sociolinguistics, lexicology and stylistics.

Construction of the Image of Soviet Famine of 1932–1933 in Russian Orthodox Church’s Discourse

The article considers evolution of the Russian Orthodox Church’s (ROC MP) commemorative strategy on the Soviet famine of 1932–1933. Analyzing materials from the ROC’s and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s official website, the author draws main stages of transformation of the narrative about this event and describes the commemorative practices aimed at its implementation. Particular attention is paid to the influence on religious discourse by the secular discourse about the “Holodomor-genocide”, which has become one of the main elements of the “civil religion” in Ukraine.