Liberating Force Research Articles

Inhibiting or Contributing? How Global Liberal Forces Impact Climate Change Skepticism

Although climate change remains a top environmental threat, significant portions of the global population continue to exhibit climate change skepticism. Currently, an extensive literature identifies the micro-level determinants of climate skepticism, often manifesting as a form of populist “backlash” to the adverse effects of globalization. However, the potential of macro-level global cultural forces—particularly embeddedness in liberal world society—to counter such pushback is unclear. Using multilevel modeling to analyze International Social Survey Program data spanning 37 countries from 2000 to 2020, we find that in general, increased embeddedness is linked to reduced climate skepticism. However, when global liberal forces encounter anti-liberal undercurrents within nation-states, a situation we refer to as cultural dissonance, the impact of liberal world society on tempering skepticism varies. Embeddedness mitigates skepticism at the national level, particularly within authoritarian regimes, but not at the individual level, especially among right-wing individuals. Paradoxically, world society also heightens ideological polarization of individual worldviews on climate change. By illuminating the contradictory role of liberal world society, which simultaneously exacerbates and inhibits anti-liberal, populist attitudes about climate change, we advance existing work examining the post-liberal turn and holds promise for making sense of other issue domains where liberal perspectives are contested.

Civis Americanus Sum: Mythmaking in the Movement to Reclassify Italian Alien Enemies During the Second World War

Abstract: This article analyzes the reworking of a variant of the myth of Rome, the Myth of an American Rome, by the principal reclassification movement actor, Luigi Rocco Antonini, during the Second World War. It explores the discursive origins, establishes historical context, and examines the construction and synthesis of plotlines. The significance as a political myth to mobilize the people of Italian descent in support of a singular loyalty to America and to reconcile the dilemma of fighting against Italy is evaluated. Although intended to function as a liberating force, the analysis reveals the potential was undermined by various constraints.

Mechanics Institutes in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Victoria: Racial Difference and Liberalism in the Settler Colony

ABSTRACT In the second half of the nineteenth century, mechanics institutes proliferated across the Australian colonies at such a rate that, by 1900, they were more widespread, proportional to population, than in Britain. This article examines the first 30 years of their development in colonial Victoria to offer a new interpretation of their deep entanglement with settler colonial liberalism. As in Britain, the Victoria mechanics institutes largely failed to deliver technical education to working-class men. However, the men who propelled their proliferation had much wider hopes for their pedagogic function in the settler colony. This article examines how the twin forces of political liberalism and settler colonialism underwrote and shaped mechanics institutes in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria. Examining the ideas of colonial liberals who propelled their proliferation and the activities that took place within them, it becomes clear that these institutes were imagined to cultivate certain kinds of settler Britons, capable of bearing the freedoms of an emerging settler modernity. At the same time, moreover, they both legitimated and implemented a settler colonial project of dispossession and demographic replacement. Mechanics institutes, I argue, were thus agents of both settler colonial destruction and liberal cultivation.

#BecomingYou: Discourses of authenticity, work, and success in South African consumer culture

Authenticity is now being used to describe things as diverse as politicians, wallets and holiday packages, and claims to authenticity have become increasingly marketable. Media sources from magazines to social media blogs are all inundated with a persisting, recurring message: that tapping into the “real you” will be the liberating force allowing you to live a happy and successful life. This paper draws on a social constructionist theoretical framework and discourse analytic method to critically analyse three interconnected discourses of personal authenticity (as success, change and work) explored in 10 marketing campaigns prominent in South African media. The constructions found in these media are important not just as reflections of current subject positions available in a particular context, but also in the (re)construction of these particular identities and the (re)production of particular social systems. More specifically, in this case, by closely tying authenticity to notions of success, work and change, these discourses produce “good neoliberal subjects”- ambitious, self-regulated, proactive and productive citizens committed to personal progress and contributing to a “functioning” society. In other words, through these discourses, individuals’ personal aspirations (e.g. self-improvement or happiness) become inextricably linked with capitalist modes of being (work and consumption).

The idea of a welfare state in the aspect of state-legal monism and pluralism

The problem of implementing the idea of a social state is considered from the point of view of state-legal monism and pluralism at the level of humanity, that is the possibility of the emergence of a universally recognized model of such a state or the inevitability of the coexistence of various such models due to national, economic, cultural factors operating in specific countries.Attention is drawn to the fact that such a problem is also relevant in relation to the ideas of a democratic and rule-of-law state. In general, the coincidence of formal characteristics of states reflected in modern constitutions is accompanied by statements about the absence of unified concepts of democracy and human rights. To an even greater extent, this is characteristic of the search for a solution to the so-called social issue. The theses underlying the concept of the welfare state by L. von Stein are presented. In particular, it is indicated that, in his opinion, the simple development of the social security system of the poor class is not enough to solve the “social issue”. The further development of the idea of a social state is shown, discussions are touched upon regarding the understanding of its essence and the problems that were revealed during the social reforms carried out by socio-democratic and liberal forces in capitalist states at the end of the 19th and 20th century.The main approaches to the constitutionalization of the social state are revealed (the “simple” proclamation of “social” statehood in the constitution; the clear formation of the goals and objectives of such a state; the absence of an indication of the social nature of the state). The classifications of the welfare state carried out by G. Esping-Andersen, as well as modern researchers of Russia and neighboring countries are analyzed. It is established that the very existence of a “social issue” and the importance of one or another of its solutions are gradually becoming generally recognized. Despite this, the fixation of the social character of the state has not yet received the same universal distribution as, for example, theses about the democratic and legal nature of the state. Both the implementation of the idea of a welfare state where it is legally recognized, and its declared “projects” are very diverse, while the typology of the welfare state is subject to further study. The social model, the framework of which determines the position of the state in relation to society, is, on the one hand, the result of the evolution of a complex of factors specific to each country, and on the other, the result of a conscious choice. Different models of the welfare state are characterized by different degrees of realization of the interests of different social classes, a different relationship between the beginnings of society and the state. Accordingly, these models are “attractive” to representatives of the haves and have-nots to varying degrees, they compete with each other at the international level. It is concluded that the idea of a social state can be reduced to a certain unity, whereas the ways of its implementation are inevitably multiple.

Education and Voter Response to Principled Trade-Offs in Muslim Democracies

We contribute to the policy trade-offs literature by focusing on a principled trade-off that juxtaposes a widely desired objective with a moral belief and by examining how education conditions voters’ responses to this trade-off. Through survey experiments in Indonesia and Tunisia, we examine how voters respond to a liberal initiative to relax alcohol restrictions to raise revenue for social security and a conservative initiative to tighten alcohol restrictions even if it decreases social security revenue. We find that voters opposed the liberal initiative and that more educated voters supported the conservative initiative more than their less educated counterparts. These findings highlight the powerful constraints of moral beliefs even in the context of a trade-off with a common good and support the socialization perspective of education that portrays education as an institution that socializes individuals in the society’s dominant values—whether liberal or conservative—as opposed to simply a force for liberalization.

Infusing theology in changemaking curricula: Engaging justice natives with Christian social thought

AbstractAs “justice natives,” today's undergraduate students are motivated to engage directly with the world around them in ways unseen throughout most previous generations. Interestingly, secular humanistic perspectives on changemaking are in keeping with a wide variety of biblical teachings and principles of Christian social thought. At the same time, educators and practitioners can better engage these students to lessen a disconnect that often seems to emerge between social justice causes and the modern church. This paper applies a praxis‐based approach, Kingian Theology, the Beatitudes from the gospels, elements of liberation theology, Wesley's thoughts about community engagement, and principles of both Catholic and broader Christian social thought to the modern idea of changemaking, positioning Christianity and the gospels as a liberating force for equality rather than as a colonizing or even racist‐associated oppressive ideology.

Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York by David N. Gellman (review)

Reviewed by: Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York by David N. Gellman M. Scott Heerman (bio) Keywords Slavery, Abolition, Jay family, John Jay, John Jay II, William Jay Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York. By David N. Gellman. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022. Pp. 519. Cloth, $36.95.) David Gellman's Liberty's Chain is an elegantly written study of slavery across several generations of the Jay family of New York, which offers an important intervention into several literatures on race and slavery in U.S. history. The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on one generation of the Jay family from the 1770s to the 1870s. Its main subjects are John Jay (1745–1829), William Jay (1789–1858), and John Jay II (1817–1894), allowing Gellman to focus on the history of slavery in the founding generation, through the era of gradual emancipation in the U.S. North, and [End Page 337] ultimately into the Civil War era. Across this long arc Gellman "shed[s] new light on the transitions from the practice of gradual emancipation to the demand for immediate abolition, from the commitment to peace to the embrace of war, and on the waxing and waning of nationalism as a force for liberation" (4). Each of the three sections is a masterful study in its own right, and by putting them together Gellman narrates the history of slavery and emancipation between U.S. independence and its Civil War like only a skilled scholar can, probing complex dimensions of gradual emancipation, immediate abolitionism, and the meaning of race in the nation at large. Gellman opens with the observation that "the enslavement of millions of human beings and the founding of the nation are inextricably bound" (2). He builds on a generation of scholarship on slavery in the founding generation and in the North, but charts new territory by foregrounding both the lives of the Jays and of the Black workers, free and enslaved, in their New York households. Using this framework he shows how relationships across race and gender lines in the domestic sphere shaped, or clashed with, the wider political landscape. His model approaches the history of slavery in the Jay family as a series of "concentric circles" and the "personal relationships with actual slaves and former slaves formed the core," followed by the regional conditions, national policy, and then international forces and intellectual and cultural trends (74). This approach shows that the great national paradoxes were also personal ones, and it reveals how enslaved, indentured, and formerly enslaved African Americans shaped the wider political landscape across generations. Gellman opens his analysis in earnest in the Age of Revolutions, where John Jay stood out as one of the leaders of the Revolutionary generation. He charts both Jay's marriage into the Livingston family, affording him access to a powerful family network, and his rise in New York politics. Jay was an enslaver in these years, and enslaved people helped propel his upward mobility. Gellman foregrounds a paradox between "the moral incompatibility of slavery with the nation's founding ideals" stressing they clashed in ways that "the Jays found impossible to ignore" (5). Readers follow Jay to Paris where he helped broker the Treaty of Paris (1783), which required British agents to return enslaved people to their owners, or to provide compensation. During these critical years, Jay's father died, leaving him an inheritance of enslaved people, which only heightened the tensions between liberty and slavery (51). [End Page 338] That kind of political and personal paradox is not all that remarkable, except for the fact that Jay was a committed abolitionist. Jay was at the leading edge of gradual emancipation, and Gellman unpacks how the war years gave him the language to contemplate and articulate and alternative to a slaveholding world (29). In 1785 Jay became the president of the newly minted New York Manumission Society and supported the eventual passage of the 1799 Gradual Emancipation Law, which freed children of enslaved women after they served a twenty-eight-year indenture. In these chapters, Gellman gives us a picture of how northern...

Religion and educational mobility in Africa

The African people and leaders1,2 have long seen education as a driving force of development and liberation, a view shared by international institutions3,4, as schooling has large economic and non-economic returns, particularly in low-income settings5. In this study, we examine the educational progress across faiths throughout postcolonial Africa, home to some of the world’s largest Christian and Muslim communities. We construct comprehensive religion-specific measures of intergenerational mobility in education using census data from 2,286 districts in 21 countries and document the following. First, Christians have better mobility outcomes than Traditionalists and Muslims. Second, differences in intergenerational mobility between Christians and Muslims persist among those residing in the same district, in households with comparable economic and family backgrounds. Third, although Muslims benefit as much as Christians when they move early in life to high-mobility regions, they are less likely to do so. Their low internal mobility accentuates the educational deficit, as Muslims reside on average in areas that are less urbanized and more remote with limited infrastructure. Fourth, the Christian–Muslim gap is most prominent in areas with large Muslim communities, where the latter also register the lowest emigration rates. As African governments and international organizations invest heavily in educational programmes, our findings highlight the need to understand better the private and social returns to schooling across faiths in religiously segregated communities and to carefully think about religious inequalities in the take-up of educational policies6.

Cyber-Physical Social Media Platforms and Their Market Influence

Based on theories of political economy, this essay will examine existing power structures, which are based on proprietary strategies of industrial capitalism and have been transforming into a proliferating networked information economy, decentralizing individual action [1]. Over this course, the author will explain how infrastructural rearrangements modified markets from a considerably static manifestation towards multi-sided platforms, giving social media platforms power over intellectual property and trading informational goods on a transnational scale. In the second part of the essay, the author argues that, first, living in a neoliberalist system also embraces potential and liberal forces, affirming that technology is not the only influencing force in society [2]. However, the main focus of this part insists on resisting the dominance of platforms by exemplifying the far-reaching cultural, political, and institutional impacts of social networks on society. Finally, the author proposes possible future solutions of resistance to find an ethical and democratic way of balancing institutional, political, and cultural aspects to guarantee human freedom and development.

Educación y conocimiento liberador.

This essay begins with an aphorism on education: "forger of the liberating forces towards the progress of the human condition", in its spiritual, intellectual, moral and convivial connotation in harmony with the planetary ecosystem (dignifying progress). It highlights the coincidence of the highest historical levels of professional education with the extreme degradation of Western culture, which reveals the role of education that favors passivity in the face of knowledge and the prevailing order. The characteristics of passive education are contrasted with those of participatory education based on the development of critical thinking. Critical thinking is defined and the type of educational environment that stimulates and channels it is argued, in particular the complex and integrative thinking alluding to the self projected to who we are and where we are, absent in reductionist science. Liberating knowledge is specified and its purpose defined as "to understand ourselves as fraternal humanity and to find our place in harmony with the infinitely diverse concert of the living world". The theoretical revolutions -now dismissed- being seeds of liberating knowledge that revealed anthropocentrism and ethnocentrisms as "prisons of the spirit" are synthesized. It is concluded that liberating knowledge fulfills the utopian role of signaling the endless walking towards dignifying human progress.

This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism by David Sehat

Reviewed by: This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism by David Sehat Mark Mattes This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism. By David Sehat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. x + 330 pp. Cultural and intellectual historian David Sehat argues that American secularism developed as a way to honor religious pluralism. Secularism is a product of inter-religious conflict in public life. Over decades such disputes helped to carve out a secular public square. While the Bill of Rights allowed no "establishment of religion" some states retained an established church in some cases for decades after the ratification of the Bill of Rights. Sehat distinguishes "negative secularism" in which the state holds no hostility toward a religion but the authority of the religion has no standing outside of its own community, from a "positive secularism" that actively establishes unbelief (4). For Sehat, negative secularism is no abandonment of belief but instead a commitment to the privatization of religious ideas (4). Conservative Roman Catholic thinkers see such a perspective as inherently Protestant, and not acceptable. Sehat responds that this criticism would fail to account for its support by many Jews and its opposition by many conservative Protestants (5). Sehat's work describes how the Supreme Court from the 1880s until today mostly undermined the hegemony of Evangelicalism's influence on public life, an influence due to the Second Great Awakening. Evangelicalism's influence was weakened due to Jehovah's Witnesses securing their right to proselytize and not salute the flag, the overturning of Prohibition, the debate over public subsidies for Catholic schools, the expulsion of religious devotions from public schools, and the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage. Sehat presents a detailed history of each case and how the courts handled them. Even so, the story is mostly one of calling [End Page 122] out Evangelical privilege, overturning it, relegating Evangelical or other religious perspectives to a private realm, thereby creating a pluralistic society. That said, there is no doubt that those committed to creating a secular ethos saw their work in virtually eschatological terms in which the progressive, liberating forces of good triumph over the regressive, repressive forces of religion. For John Dewey, unless the world is governed by a non-religious secularism we have a "systematic stultification of the human mind" (117). Unfortunately, Sehat fails to take up the work of a thinker like Robert H. Nelson in Economics as Religion (2001) who documents that democratic capitalism is thoroughly saturated with postmillennial utopian mythology, indebted to, even an avatar of, a religious perspective. The case can be made that no public space exists that is devoid of myth. A blip in the secularist advance is the challenge by Catholic hospitals to the Affordable Care Act over a requirement that would force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions, a worrisome development for Sehat since it permits private religious sensibilities to gain currency in public life (260). Interestingly, up through the 1960s and 1970s, most court decisions favoring secularism were based on the "right to privacy," arguing for individual freedom in private lives without interference from the government. However, since the 1970s, a different, contradictory focus has advanced: the personal is the political, which believes that only by forcing the question of recognition will certain disenfranchised groups, such as gays and lesbians, gain acceptance (221). Surprisingly, religious conservatives increasingly claim disenfranchisement and entitlement. This reviewer questions whether Sehat's perspective undercuts the value of civil associations. Sehat criticizes groups like the American Bible Society as fronts of Protestant imperialism. The implication is that civil associations, especially ones with a religious flavor, threaten individual autonomy; only the state then can protect individuals from such coercive power. But is this true? For example, would congregations of any confession threaten individual autonomy? Sehat's valorization of "autonomy" ignores the idea that humans find meaning and friendship precisely in associations centered on common goals that promote give and take among their members. Overall, such associations enhance civil behavior. The [End Page 123] quest for autonomy or individual liberty assumes that such civic associations are robust and vital. Sehat's vision of America seems to be one where such civil associations potentially jeopardize individual...

Ensouling Agential Praxis in A Secular World: A Sufi Spiritual Turn in Leila Aboulela’s the Kindness of Enemies

ABSTRACT This article explores Leila Aboulela’s novel, The Kindness of Enemies (2015), in light of its protagonist’s attempt to resolve her predicament of belonging through constructing an agential praxis oriented by Sufism. Aboulela crafts her story in two narratives: the first one is set in present day Britain and thematizes Natasha Wilson Hussein’s quest for identity in a largely Islamophobic environment, whereas the second narrative tells the history of Shamil, the 19th century Sufi leader, who lived in a period when the word ”jihad” had a less a stigmatized meaning. Aboulela offers a revisionist reading of history by juxtaposing Islam and political resistance in non-fundamentalist terms but as a dialectic, which through its manifestation of the principles of Sufism synthesizes in challenging and resisting imperial oppression. Relying on a postsecular perspective, this paper highlights how Aboulela presents Sufism as a galvanizing force of agency through which her female migrants resist and overcome marginality and alienation. I argue that Aboulela’s novel maps out a turn toward spiritual traditions of Islam as transformative and liberating forces which endows her characters with a spiritual spatial horizon to ensoul the concept of agency, and by extension cultivate critical grounds from which hegemonic secular formations can be open to analysis from spiritually oriented praxes.

Deepening apartheid: The political geography of colonizing Israel/Palestine

The paper analyzes the regime in Israel/Palestine using a political geographical perspective. It demonstrates how a combination of colonial, national, capitalist and liberal forces have put in train a process of “deepening apartheid” in the entire territory controlled by Israel—between River and Sea. This undeclared regime has been established to guard the 'achievements' of settler colonial Judaization of the land and the domination of the Jewish minority. As described by the Rome Statute, it has become an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one group over others, with the intention of maintaining that regime. Hence the political geographical analysis shows clearly that the wide description in academic and international circles of Israel as “Jewish and democratic,” is based on a denial of the clear racialized hierarchy of civil statuses. This setting enhances Jewish supremacy (using different methods) it in all regions, while Palestinians are fragmented into lower rungs on the ethnic hierarchy—de facto and de jure—thereby contradicting the tenets of democratic civil equality. Theoretically, the paper draws on the links between settler colonial expansion, the rise of ethnocracy, partial liberalization under global capitalism, and the making of apartheid. It shows that historically Jewish colonization of Palestine—the underlying logic of the regime—has advanced in six main historical-geographical stages, encountering persistent, and at times violent, Palestinian resistance. The paper then analyzes in more detail the emergence of one regime between River and Sea, in which the state uses military, spatial, economic, and legal powers, as well as geopolitical maneuvering (particularly US support) to oppress Palestinians, while promoting democratic rights and economic development among Jews. This has enabled Israel to integrate and “whiten” Mizrahi and other Jewish groups into mainstream Zionism. Rivaling Palestinian political projects have been fragmented, ghettoized, attacked violently, and severely weakened. The paper shows how Jewish colonization, on both sides of the Green Line (which has also included some tactical withdrawals), has led to the establishment of four hierarchical types of citizenship, governed as “separate and unequal”. The relations between the groups resemble the racialized categories used in Apartheid South Africa and include (a) “White”—Jewish Israelis—with full citizenship rights; (b) “Colored”—Palestinian Arabs with Israeli citizenship with partial rights; (c) “Black”—Palestinians under occupation lacking citizenship or political rights; (d) “Gray”—an emerging group, consisting of non-citizen migrants and asylum seekers.

Islam as Critical Practice: Young Muslims Discuss their Religious Development

In modern Russia, religion is seen as a conservative social force aimed at consolidating society on the basis of common values. At the same time, as human history shows, religions often acted as a powerful political force, leading to great social transformations. Such a dual approach to religion was embodied in the views of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (M. Horkheimer and others), as well as a number of Islamic intellectuals of the "left" wing, such as G. Jemal and F. Isak. These thinkers emphasized that religion in certain historical periods could be a liberating force acting in the interests of the most oppressed members of society, while in others, on the contrary, it could promote oppression and support the interests of power elites. The paper presents the results of studies of young Russian Muslims based on the methodology of critical social psychology, which develops the views of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. The results show that a person's religious conversion is preceded by a critical rethinking of his own way of life, which was also noted in earlier studies conducted among representatives of Christianity and Judaism. At the same time, it was found that the critical attitude does not disappear with the adoption of Islam. The antagonism between the former “secular” and the current Islamic way of life is only strengthened by the opposition of the social position of Muslims and the “majority”. Initial dissatisfaction with the conditions of one's own life is transformed into a larger social criticism.

Love in Eileen Chang’s works: Distinctive and ideological

In the realm of literature, the exploration of love has perpetually fascinated both creators and readers, serving as a dynamic mirror reflecting shifts in societal norms, cultural undercurrents, and ideological tides. Across the epochs, the portrayal of love within literary works has undergone a profound evolution. In the tapestry of classical Chinese literature, characterized by draconian dogmas and entrenched male chauvinism during the feudal era, women were often relegated to subordinate roles, their experiences of love marred by silent endurance. However, a literary luminary emerged who infused new vitality into the depiction of affection – Eileen Chang. Her narratives transcended conventions, empowering individuals of all genders to articulate their emotions boldly, resist societal constraints, and challenge the forces that dictated their fates. Within the intricate weave of her prose, love ceased to be a mere sentiment; instead, it emerged as an indomitable force of defiance and liberation. This research article delves meticulously into the exquisite tapestry of love woven by Eileen Chang, casting a spotlight on its enduring essence and providing a contemporary evaluation that harmonizes with modern perspectives.

Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality by Boaz Huss

Reviewed by: Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality by Boaz Huss Jeremy Phillip Brown Boaz Huss. Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality. Translated by Elana Lutsky. Oxford Series in Western Esotericism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 200 pp. Boaz Huss has made original contributions to research on medieval Kabbalah, the long reception of the Zohar, North African Kabbalah, new religious movements, contemporary Kabbalah, and Jewish spirituality. Mystifying Kabbalah, which runs the gamut of Huss's research agenda, is ably translated by Elana Lutsky from Huss's 2018 Hebrew monograph, The Question of the Existence of Jewish Mysticism: The Genealogy of Jewish Mysticism and the Theologies of Kabbalah Research. The title of the Hebrew original drives from a 1906 letter written by Martin Buber, in which the grandson of the Maskil Solomon Buber made a fledgling argument for "the [mere] existence of Jewish mysticism." The letter is an apt point of reference for a book dealing with the "invention" of Jewish mysticism. Synthesizing several articles composed by Huss going back at least as far as 2007, Mystifying Kabbalah examines the discursive formation of Jewish mysticism as a modern category of analysis, an approach that finds inspiration, per the author's express claims, in the work of Talal Asad, Russell McCutcheon, and Timothy Fitzgerald. Huss's project is comprised of five main trajectories: (1) a genealogy of the modern construction of mysticism, which, per Huss, is based upon universalist presuppositions of a theological order, presuppositions congenial to imperialist sponsorship; (2) a reconstruction of how modern Jewish scholars, with Buber and Gershom Scholem in leading roles, assimilated this construction of mysticism [End Page 427] when casting Kabbalah and Hasidism as "Jewish mysticism" to promote Jewish national consciousness; (3) a daring account of how persevering in their use of a putatively uncritical category has served the interests of the author's own teachers and colleagues; (4) an analysis of how the scholarly construction of "Jewish mysticism" has nourished contemporary spirituality; and (5) a methodological indictment of the category, which seeks to liberate research on Kabbalah and Hasidism from its subordination to "Jewish mysticism." The book is structurally analogous to the conceptual genealogies of other scholars who have leveraged foundational interventions in the study of religion, such as Karen King's 2003 What Is Gnosticism?, or more recently, Daniel Boyarin's 2018 Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion. In this sense, the analytical mood assumed by Huss fits, like the modern concept of mysticism itself, within a broader historical moment of scholarly discourse. It is a moment, however, dedicated to exposing how broadly organizational categories of research are constructed in historically and epistemically contingent ways. To further qualify Mystifying Kabbalah's relationship to previous scholarship, the book is much indebted to the methodology modeled by Wouter Hanegraaff's 1998 New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Huss also takes a similar approach to Steven Wasserstrom's 1999 Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade and Henry Corbin at Eranos, but does not invoke this watershed critique of mystocentrism in the History of Religions. One criticism of this otherwise dynamic book is that it operates with a thin concept of theology. While Huss is precise in pinpointing many reasons that the category of Jewish mysticism is wrongheaded (perhaps the most urgent reason being that it generates artificial affinities in the comparative phenomenology of religion), exposing the tacit assumptions of research as "theological" does not in itself articulate the ideological limitations of scholarship. Critical theologians who are certainly practiced in the kind of genealogical analysis offered here may find this line of argumentation inadequate. Similarly, Huss supposes an automatic correlation of theological research commitments with apologetical tendencies. He claims, for example, "The relative lack of criticism toward Kabbalistic androcentrism and misogyny is connected to the theological paradigm of research, which demands an empathetic approach to the research data and glorifies Jewish mysticism as a liberating force in Jewish culture" (96–97). This claim is not just unpersuasive because theology is supposed to determine apologetical outcomes, but also because the research conditions in which the paradigm of "Jewish mysticism" prevailed have produced...

Deus ex Poiesis: A Manifesto for the End of the World and the Future of Art and Technology

In 2020, the Doomsday Clock advanced to just one hundred seconds before nuclear midnight, the hour at which atomic armageddon would end the world as we know it. Using the Greek theatrical device of deus ex machina and Heidegger's reliance on poiesis as a liberating force from technological enframing, I propose the concept of deus ex poiesis as a potential model for addressing the seemingly insurmountable challenges of the anthropocene, an era in which industrial technologies have instigated global climatic changes on the scale of Earth's five mass extinctions. Drawing on additional theoretical insights from Gregory Bateson, Jack Burnham, Donna Haraway, Alva Noë, Rita Raley and others, my essay discusses two aesthetic approaches: 1) digital artworks that explicitly engage in forms of (h)activism through tactical media; 2 artworks that develop and apply ways of knowing that lie outside of rational scientific models and that explore hybrid forms of perception and expanded states of consciousness. Artists considered include Electronic Disturbance Theater, rTMark, Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev, Roy Ascott, Pauline Oliveros, and Kim Jeong-Han.

Pentecostalism: A democratizing, liberating force for black women?

ABSTRACT Historically Pentecostals have used Galatians 3:26–28 to validate the equality between believers, regardless of a person’s sex. The scripture that states there is neither ‘male and female for you are all one in Christ Jesus’, seemingly promises a new community of people functioning equally and in unity. But if this is so, why have black women who historically occupied prominent places within Pentecostal revivals like Azusa Street had their influenced curtailed by denominations that evolved from the movement? And why do Pentecostal denominations like the Church of God (COG) and the British branch the New Testament Church of God (NTCG) deny women the highest rank of office as Bishops? This paper examines the impact of the black woman Lucy Farrow and suggests her prominence within Azusa created a precedent for black women leaders. The paper will contrast the policies of COG and NTCG with Farrow’s ministerial freedom and offer reflections on the position of black British Pentecostal women and consider whether Pentecostalism has been a liberating force.

From media events to my events: Chinese mediated festivals in the digital era1

Much has been written about how digital technologies transformed contemporary festivals, yet the festival participants’ perceptions and experiences are less examined. Understanding mediated festivals as events of intertwined mediation processes, this paper explores the perception and practices of mediated festivals in contemporary China. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 Chinese young people to understand their motivations and experiences of festival participation. The paper finds that emerging mediated festivals provide a space for individuals to explore their interests. Further, mediated festivals are perceived as a liberating force for young people through choice-making and self-presentation in convivial and hybrid festival environments. Developing Dayan and Katz’s conception of ‘media events’, we argue that contemporary Chinese mediated festivals can be understood as ‘my events’ through hybrid and networked self-representations. Our study contributes to understanding the Chinese mediated festivals, emphasizing how networked individuals (re)negotiate the festival production.