Matters Of Religion Research Articles

Public media and public theology: At loggerheads or partners in complexity?

Media criticism, both from inside the journalism and media studies fraternity and outside, such as theology, often depart from reductionist normative functionalist and critical political economy perspectives. Examples from the former perspective include complaints from theologians that the media set the agenda, also relating to matters of religion, and that the content the media provide does not contribute to a healthy, moral and peaceful society. Media researchers who adopt critical perspectives often argue in turn that the media are tied to elite capitalist interests and values and contribute to the marginalisation and suppression of the disenfranchised in the deeply unequal post-apartheid South African society.

Unaffiliated Parents and the Religious Training of Their Children

This article examines how parents who are religiously unaffiliated make decisions about the religious upbringing of their children. Drawing on qualitative data, this study explores the diverse worldviews that are included within the term “None” and how those beliefs are reflected or not reflected in the way parents raise their children. The article identifies four distinct worldviews among unaffiliated parents and identifies five different strategies that parents use to incorporate religion in the lives of their children. The article then analyzes the relationship between parent worldviews and actions, with particular attention to secular unaffiliated parents who incorporate religion in the upbringing of their children and to religious unaffiliated parents who do not. In addition to providing empirical data about unaffiliated parents, the article engages the wider debate about what it means to be religious or secular. It calls for more attention to salience, not just of religion but of secular worldviews, and offers parent actions vis-a-vis the religious upbringing of their children as a concrete measure of how much religion matters.

Religious Origins of Democracies and Dictatorships

In this paper, I argue that religion matters for the emergence of democracies and dictatorships. Religion is defined as demand for public goods. Different types of religious collectives reflect different tradeoffs between centralized resource distribution and market rewards. Religions are defined as collectivist, when their respective collectives facilitate the hierarchical provision of common pool resources toward their members at the expense of market incentives. Religions are defined as individualist, when their respective collectives recruit and preserve their members on the basis of market incentives. Islam, Orthodoxy and Catholicism are treated as collectivist religions, whereas Judaism and Protestantism as individualist ones. I provide a historical overview that designates the Jewish kibbutz as the collective of democracy and the Russian-Orthodox monastery as the collective of dictatorship. Assuming a collectivist economy, I solve the radical government and modernization infinitely repeated games. I find that modernization occurs in a collectivist economy when the threat of a radical government is imminent and when the leader has high extraction rents over the economy. In order to stay in power, the leader credibly commits to provide more public goods in the future, and thus modernization occurs. Underdevelopment occurs at intermediate levels of state enforcement, modernization at low levels and centralization at high levels of state enforcement. The emergence of a radical government is always likely in a collectivist economy.

The Place of Religion in Habermas's Transformed Public Sphere

Our essay reflects on Jurgen Habermas's (1962/1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere from the perspective of recent changes in Habermas's thinking on what kinds of deliberative conditions, warrants, and ought to be part of deliberative claims made and contested in a public sphere. Maybe more than in any other of Habermas's works, Structural Transformation outlined a set of counterfactual expectations for a public sphere. These counterfactual norms were criticized both for their idealism and for the actuality of their perceived exclusionary tendencies; Calhoun (1992) notes that even Habermas himself was less than satisfied with his work. Our purpose in this essay is not to add to the criticisms of this work, but to reflect on an opportunity Habermas opened and prefigured in Structural Transformation but did not pursue until recently: the possibility of integrating religious discourse into the public sphere, predicated on his recent references to a post-secular society as the touchstone for rational deliberative practice (2005, 2006, 2008, 2010). Backing and warranting decisions through religiously based claims has been a defining characteristic of U.S. public and political discourse. Whether one judges this to be a positive or negative aspect of civic discourse in the United States, religious language matters in deliberative practice here, carrying the kind of communicative power Habermas saw operating in and through a public sphere: It carries weight in the legitimization of claims about both character and policy. Yet despite the wide use of Habermas's early works to model, critique, and understand public deliberation in the U.S., Structural Transformation itself makes scant reference to religion. In part, this is due to the historical and political structure of European civil society, on which Habermas's work is based. His historical survey of the origins of European public spheres distinguishes between the State and the Public, with few references to the and religion, likely because matters of state and religion have been more closely connected--formally, if not in practice--in past and present-day Europe than in the United States. Habermas (1962/1989) treats the Church, for example, as just one institutional entity among many under human/civic law: Church itself continued to exist as one corporate body among others under public (p. 12; see also pp. 33, 36, 40, 133). As a consequence, his discussion of State legitimacy and sovereignty emphasizes law over religion in a way that would be different had he located the origins of the public sphere before eighteenth century Europe, when the still occupied significant public roles. The crux of Habermas's thinking about the role of the lies in the notion of publicity and privacy. In Structural Transformation, Habermas (1962/1989) argues that religion had over time transformed into a private engagement (pp. 11, 68, 90, 91), which moved religion into the space of private interest that is to be bracketed in engagements within a public sphere. In his earlier work, religious doctrine did not meet the requirements of good reasons necessary for productive public debate. Religion was, both in its use and in its logic, private; it pertained to private interests and, from a deliberative standpoint, did not make the evidence and warrants behind its claims available to public con-testing. But his recent re-thinking of religion's role (e.g., Habermas, 2005, 2006, 2008) rests, we argue, on this issue of privacy. Habermas tries to demonstrate that his former views create an imbalance in deliberative obligation for citizens of faith. He has pointed to the continued influence of religion, both in the foundational elements of Western democracy and the current U.S. political sphere, as a reason to reconsider the necessity of only secular justifications for religious claims. Asserting that Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization (as cited in Case, 2006, para. …

“Tandrusti Deen ka Kaam Hai”: Health as a Matter of Religion in Book 9 of Ashraf Ali Thanvi’sBahishti Zewar

introduction When scholars have written about health in colonial South Asia, and about indigenous responses to the diffusion of biomedicine through the colonial administration, religious projects that focus on forming pious selves have often been ignored. Below I illustrate how a particular thinker associated with the Deobandi Islamic revival movement used health as a way to make oneself the object of one’s care in order to produce a fortifiedMuslim self. Ashraf Ali Thanvi, a Deobandi aalim (Islamic religious scholar and expert) writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, produced an enduringly influential Urdu religious manual known as the Bahishti Zewar (heavenly ornaments). This

The Emergence of "Freedom of Conscience" in Imperial Russia

The Emergence of "Freedom of Conscience" in Imperial Russia Paul W. Werth (bio) Among the core civil freedoms that Nicholas II granted—or promised—to his subjects in the Manifesto of 17 October 1905 was "freedom of conscience."1 Although the October Manifesto itself was extracted from an autocracy under duress, the imperial government's initial engagement with the idea of freedom of conscience thereafter was striking for its seriousness and depth. The Department of Religious Affairs of the Foreign Confessions, the agency within the Interior Ministry that administered the empire's diverse non-Orthodox faiths and was charged with implementing this new freedom in legislative form, offered a remarkably expansive, liberal, and individualistic definition as its starting point. In an internal memorandum of 1906, the department defined freedom of conscience as the "right of every person possessing a sufficiently mature self-consciousness to declare or proclaim his faith, or even the absence of such, without hindrance and without any legal detriment." The only limitations that the department identified on such freedom concerned the "requirements of state order," which prevented citizens from appealing to their faith in order to violate the state's criminal laws, social order, or morality or to refuse obligations before the state.2 When the Ministry of Justice began to speak [End Page 585] of "conditions" limiting the right of Russian subjects to transfer to the religion of their choice, the department countered that the freedom of conscience granted by the manifesto should "undoubtedly" be understood as "granting to each person complete self-definition in matters of religion."3 And in response to the proposal of 49 liberal Duma delegates explicitly guaranteeing freedom of conscience to each citizen of the Russian Empire, the department noted that its own proposals, though perhaps different in form, would nonetheless embody the "aspiration to establish freedom of conscience in its full scope" (ustanovit´ svobodu sovesti v polnom ee ob"eme).4 The department's embrace of freedom of conscience as a core principle for Russia's further development reflects the broad currency—though not universal acceptance—that this concept had attained in the country by the early 20th century. On one level, this might seem a logical, almost inevitable outcome. The proposition that the human conscience is or should be free strikes the modern Western person as so self-evident that it scarcely requires explicit elaboration. From this standpoint, the emergence of this idea even in illiberal Russia serves merely as a testament to its essential soundness and naturalness. The present article, however, seeks to strip freedom of conscience of its self-evidence by examining the historical process of its emergence in imperial Russia over the course of the 19th century.5 I begin from the proposition that this idea was initially alien to prevailing conceptions about religious consciousness and adherence and accordingly occupied little or no place in either the intellectual landscape or the legal and administrative order of the imperial state. I ask: By what path did the concept "freedom of conscience" come to occupy such a central place in the deliberations of the state and in the discussions of society by the early 20th century? Largely neglected in research before the 1990s, the question of religious freedom in Russia has since been analyzed along several different [End Page 586] but intersecting trajectories.6 One treats religious freedom principally as a problem in intellectual history, more particularly in the history of Russian liberalism. Thus Patrick Michelson has traced the emergence of the idea of religious freedom in Russia and its eventual embedding in the political program of the Liberation Movement of the early 20th century.7 Randall Poole has meanwhile identified the centrality of "freedom of conscience," along with human dignity and rule of law, to the philosophers associated with the Moscow Psychological Society, founded in 1885.8 John D. Basil identifies important proponents of this ideal among the many critics of Russia's "synodal system" of ecclesiastical governance.9 Elsewhere in the present issue of this journal, Victoria Frede examines the case of Russian radicals in the 1860s, who promoted a liberal conception of religious freedom in the context of revolutionary aspirations that were generally hostile toward...

Two Nation Theory: In the Light of the Speeches of Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah

This paper is an attempt to show in the light of the speeches of Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah the meaning and import of two nation theory. The over all impact of this theory is that Muslims and Hindus have different beliefs and their culture develops in the light of their respective beliefs. But as Pakistani citizens they will all be Pakistanis. Hindus will profess their religion and Muslims will profess their religion. There is no ambiguity in the objectives resolution. Pakistan is an Islamic Republic. State religion is Islam and nor law can be passed which is repugnant to the injunctions of Islam. Islam itself says that there is no compulsion in the matter of Religion. All citizens of Pakistan have equal protection of law in respect of their life, honour and property. All citizens are called citizens of Pakistan. As a Pakistani they are all loyal to the State. The law of the land fully protects the rights of minorities or non-Muslims. In this paper I have relied upon the collections of late Khurshid Ahmad Khan Yusufi who was a highly learned person and author of valuable books of which this collection edited by him is a monumental work. Bazm-i-Iqbal deserves the whole credit for having provided so authentic material for the researches which otherwise would have been difficult to obtain. I am to express my gratitude to the most honourable Mr. Majid Nizami, Chairman, Nazariyya-i-Pakistan Trust and the most honourable Dr. Rafiq Ahmad former Vice Chancellor and now Deputy Chairman of the Nazariyya-i-Pakistan Trust for being kind enough to gift me this valuable collection of four volumes. May they live long and may their efforts be the beacon light for the young generation. (Aameen).

Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Reviewed by: Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America Ellen M. Ross Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. By Carol Faulkner. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. vii + 291 pp. Notes, illustrations, and indexes. $45. The radical activist Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) was "a follower of heresy," a prophetic voice, unshakeable in her resolve to bring to reality a society predicated on the equality of all persons. She challenged American "orthodoxies" in matters of religion, politics, and moral practice by championing a myriad of interrelated reforms including abolition, a commitment to the free produce movement, women's rights, Indian rights, prison reform, temperance, opposition to capital punishment, and peace advocacy. Carol Faulkner's biography of Mott is enthralling in its rendering of the power and scope of Mott's reforming vision. Mott, a renowned orator and self-proclaimed non-conformist and follower of Jesus, criticized the "close relationship between American religion and slavery" (109). Proffering moral suasion as the most potent source of personal and social transformation, she fought for the heart of religion, calling for Christianity to come out of "churches and seminaries into daily life in order to transform the morals of the country" (112). Faulkner argues that among white abolitionists, "Mott was perhaps the earliest and most consistent proponent of immediate abolition and racial equality" (217). Sparked by the British Quaker Elizabeth Heyrick's "Immediate, Not Gradual Emancipation" (published in Philadelphia in 1824), Mott's conversion to immediate abolition predated even William Lloyd Garrison's. Mott was, Faulkner argues, "in the interracial vanguard in the anti-slavery movement" (4); her "racial egalitarianism made her unusual even among fellow abolitionists" (218). Consideration of Mott, an original voice in the transatlantic women's rights movement, suggests that the history of early feminism is more complex and racially egalitarian than generally acknowledged (216). Histories of the women's movement too frequently document only the tensions between feminists and abolitionists, while overlooking the views of thinkers like Mott for whom advocacy for women's rights was inseparably linked to other social issues. For Mott, [End Page 37] "feminism must include racial equality" (4) and women's rights were "a logical extension of interconnected humanitarian concerns" (5). A multitude of fascinating subplots are skillfully woven throughout Lucretia Mott's Heresy including the narration of Mott's complicated relationship to the Society of Friends from her first public ministry in 1818 at 12th Street Monthly meeting through her last public appearance at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1880. Among other themes, Faulkner chronicles the thirty-six year history of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society from its founding by Mott and others in 1833 as an organization focused on ending slavery and racial prejudice, to its post-Civil War identity as an organization advocating universal male suffrage and the integration of the Philadelphia railway lines. Faulkner delineates Lucretia Mott's significant role in local and national reform conventions from the late 1830s through the1870s. And she offers an intimate portrayal of the family connections and friendships that shaped and sustained Mott over the years. Faulkner's last chapter chronicles Mott's involvement with the Universal Peace Union and her role in founding the Pennsylvania Peace Society in 1866. Mott emerges as a visionary leader in American peace history. An eloquent orator and indefatigable activist, Mott worked with an astonishing number of organizations and individuals throughout her long life. Narrative encounter with a reformer as radical, influential, and multifaceted as Lucretia Mott may inspire some readers to reflect on their own activism. As this history of American radical social reform becomes part of public discourse, we expand our possibilities as individuals and as communities, to understand, and even to imagine and live out alternatives to our dominant cultural milieu. Carol Faulkner's meticulously researched and elegantly written book is a pleasure to read. It will be appreciated by subject area specialists, social activists, and by general readers, and is an excellent choice for undergraduate and graduate courses in history, peace and conflict studies, gender studies, and religion. [End Page 38] Ellen M. Ross Swarthmore College Copyright © 2012 Friends Historical Association

Ο Ανδρέας Μουστοξύδης, ο Βαρθολομαίος Κουτλουμουσιανός και το Υπόμνημα Ιστορικόν περί της νήσου Ίμβρου

Konstantina Zanou, Andrea Mustoxidi, Bartolommeo Cutlumusiano and the Υπόμνημα Ιστορικόν πeρί της νήσου Ίμβρου The starting-point of the article is the recent reprint of Andrea Mustoxidi’s and Bartolommeo Cutlumusiano’s book Υπόμνημα Ιστορικόν πeρί της νήσου Ίμβρου (Historical memorandum on the Island of Imbros, Constantinople 1845) by the Association for the Protection, Solidarity and Viable Development of Imbros (Istanbul 2010). The article offers an account of the history and significance of this neglected book. In addition, building on an older treatise of K. Th.Dimaras and enriching it with new archival material, it revisits the Mustoxidi-Cutlumusiano relationship and discusses these two intellectuals’ involvement in the reformatory practices of Kapodistrias’ government in matters of religion and education.

Religious Pluralism in Globalised India: A Constitutional Perspective

Indian has recently emerged as one of the leading developing countries basically on strength its Constitutional protection to religious pluralism among its people. The paper focus how Indian civilization has played host to several migrant groups and communities from time to time and these groups as well as communities has been guaranteed fundamental rights in matters of religion. The religious pluralism has been fostered by various decisions of the Indian higher judiciary.

The Western Reception of Buddhism

This article argues that the West’s positive reception of Buddhism from the late nineteenth century to the present has been informed by the continuing influence of three factors: first, popular cultural transmission of information about the religion; second, celebrity patronage and Buddhist celebrities; and third, the manipulation of the image of Buddhism to fit the pressing intellectual and social issues of the time. This has resulted in a distinctively modern form of Buddhism that is deeply imbued with the key cultural and religio-spiritual discourses of secularisation, individualism and consumer capitalism that have resulted in the transformation of Western religion since the late nineteenth century (McMahan 2008: 27-59). Recent scholarship has emphasised that the encounter of Buddhism and the West, mediated in the nineteenth century by popular cultural phenomena including Edwin Arnold’s poetic biography The Light of Asia (1879) and the World’s Parliament of Religions (held in Chicago in 1893 in conjunction with Columbian Exposition, a celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the New World), was a mutual affair in which certain Buddhists engaged with Western discourses in order to exhibit the congruence of Buddhism with modernity and science, and Western Buddhists and sympathisers attempted to incorporate Buddhism into the framework of Western philosophy and the emergent discipline of psychology (Snodgrass 2003: 115-22, 227-30). Central to this was the rhetorical construction of Buddhism as a religion that rivalled Christianity in ethical excellence and outshone it in compatibility with science and thus modernity (Prebish 1999: 6). This articles concentrates on the influence of celebrity and popular cultural forms in the familiarisation of Buddhism in the West to build on and reinforce the intellectualist scholarship of Prebish, Snodgrass and McMahan (among others), because until very recently these factors were rarely admitted to be of significance in matters of religion.

On the market: consumption and material culture in modern Chinese Buddhism

For many Chinese speakers in China and elsewhere, experiencing or connecting with matters of religion often includes mediation through or with material objects. Such mediation is readily accessible to larger and larger audiences and often occurs through the consumption of religious material goods, thanks also to media technologies and the Internet. In this article, the author seeks to complicate the notion that the production and consumption of novel Buddhist religious goods can be analyzed solely in terms of ‘market theory.’ While on the one hand the author shows that Buddhist technologies of salvation are historically associated with materiality, she also contends that the ‘aura’ of Buddhist-inspired modern religious goods – in the spirit of Walter Benjamin's essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1939) – is not so much effaced as it is reconfigured and transformed by technological mediations.

Laicismo y liberalismo como paradigmas de interpretación de los derechos humanos. Reflexiones sobre la configuración de la libertad religiosa a la luz del debate francés sobre el velo islámico

The use of Islamic veil for girls in public schools of France has aroused animportant discussion about laicism, multiculturalism and religious freedom.This debate was under the scrutiny of the European Court of HumanRights, which issued several judgments about the problem. The requirementof neutrality, the fundamental principle of laicism, allows that theState, supposing to protect the freedom of conscience of no religious people,confines the exercise of religious freedom to the strict boundaries ofprivate life. At the same time, while requiring neutrality, the State is tryingto impose in the public arena a sort of civil religion, depriving of the rightof expression in religion matters. These two elements could be found notonly in the fathers and current thinkers of laicism, but in authors that,without this enrollment, are finally supporting the same conclusions. Theprincipal mistake that is under that is a conception of freedom derived fromthe Illustrated liberalism, an error that in the end is derived of a limitedconception of the man. The pretensions of these doctrines are impossibleto perform, because the religion cannot be relegated to the interior of manwithout to force the freedom itself. If some States continue following theseideas, will be no limits in the violation of the individual freedoms. Therefore,instead to see the religion as a “toxic” element in the social sphere,the relationship between State and religion should be marked for a positivelaicism. That implies a legitimate autonomy between them and to recognizethe positive value of religion for the individual and social life, an elementthat is so valuable to the point that is consecrated as a human right.

Was America founded as a Christian nation?: a historical introduction

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)This book makes a subtle and engaging contribution to the on-going public conversation about the nation's religious past and the relationship of church and state in the Republic. Fea a fine historian, as evidenced by his carefully researched and well-argued first book on eighteenth-century Presbyterian diarist. In this second book, Fea prompted by the polemics of the modern-day culture wars to weigh in on the side of responsible interpretation of historical material. One of my goals, Fea says, is to get Christians to see the danger of cherry-picking from the past as a means of promoting a political and cultural agenda in the present (xvii). Fea, chair of the history department at Messiah College, has written an historical primer for students, churchgoers, and anyone else who wants help sorting it all out. He hopes his book will reach historically minded and thoughtful readers and be read and discussed in schools and congregations (xv).This, then, Fea's response to the likes of David Barton's WallBuilders ministry with its blatantly skewed history, and one of the best chapters examines the main concerns and arguments of the contemporary defenders of a America. But despite Fea's measured tone and his presentation of complex historical material, the book not the politically neutral and intellectually disinterested investigation it purports to be. While Fea offers a welcome respite from the polemical tone deployed by culture warriors on both sides of the Christian Nation question, his framing of key issues leads readers to draw certain kinds of conclusions. Fea does not admit to making argument, but his book makes one anyway.Fea opens with a 75-page historical survey of the United States and finds that nationalism has persistently marked popular sentiment. (Non-Christians make no appearance here.) Catholics, mainline Protestants, evangelicals, pro-slavery Southerners, abolitionists--all of them upheld the conviction that the country is, has been, and should be a nation. Fea notes their differences, but by downplaying the strife, by bundling together under a purportedly shared agenda between slaveholders and Civil Rights advocates alike, and by making even Martin Luther King, Jr. a proponent of a new kind of nation (53), Fea rhetorically combines people with starkly different politics into a singular American with a shared religious nationalism. This overarching Christian nation concept so capacious that we lose sight of the deep rifts between people who fought for very different versions of a future America. The result that Fea's intended readers cannot be blamed if, when asked whether Americans have always wanted the United States to be a nation, they answer with a misleadingly simple and homogenizing yes.Part II asks whether the American Revolution was a Christian event and focuses on the founding political documents to find answer. The framers' original intent often called upon to make the argument for a particular reading of the First Amendment, and this especially so because the Constitution itself never refers to God. Fea says two views have been the most popular: 1) that the framers set out to create a secular nation (150) and 2) that the framers believed only states should regulate religious matters. The first position appears instantly discredited, as no politician of the founding era favored (or even discussed) entirely secular nation. The second option remains standing and has the additional advantage of being factually correct: the First Amendment constrained only the federal government in matters of religion, notwithstanding Madison's efforts to have it applied to the individual states as well. …

The Social Gospel and the News

Save our public journals from low standards touching morals and government. Deliver them from sensationalism, untruthfulness, malice, dishonest political measures, personal attacks and parade of details of crime and vice. Make them instruments of good and defenders of justice, mercy and truth. May they respect morality and honor religion, so that wisdom and knowledge may become stability of our times. Amen.1 Chaplain J.F. Sexton's prayer for press before Connecticut Senate in 1911 Introduction At American Congress of Churches in May 1885, an ecumenical gathering intended to promote discussion of the religious, moral, and social questions of time,2 topic of Tuesday evening session was Attitude of Secular Press in America Toward Religion. Speakers included writer, editor, and Episcopal clergyman Rev. Julius H. Ward of Boston and U.S. Senator Joseph Hawley, life-long editor.3 But most prominent was Rev. Washington Gladden, who attracted great audience to listen to him. Indeed, Christian Union observed, Gladden was renowned preacher with long and intimate association with which made him an intelligent interpreter of editorial opinion.4 The New York Times described Gladden's paper as a close, careful review of attitude of press generally, criticizing it sharply at times.5 Gladden later recalled that he joined in chorus of praise for press, citing religion's indebtedness to newspapers for their aid. But, too, his remarks diverted from those of other speakers in also being critical of press. And it was that criticism, he noted, that had sparked some editorializing that ranged from dissent and resentment to outright contempt. Only handful of papers actually admitted some truth to his criticism. This fact is itself significant. Is secular press, then, infallible, or does it think itself infallible? he asked. Gladden noted his critical remarks involved two topics. One was often ill-informed discussion in newspapers about matters of religion. But, Gladden recalled, his other topic of criticism touched much more sensitive spot. It included disapproval of the domination of counting-room over sanctum and the subjection of teaching function to business of money-making, both of which seemed to him statements of common knowledge hardly worth all editorial clamor they had engendered. In fact, Gladden observed, many of leading papers in country were owned by corporations or stock companies that did so for profit. doctrines, political or moral or religious, taught by their journal concern them less than annual balance sheet. ... That is paramount consideration. The newspaper business is, primarily, business.6 Gladden's criticisms went to core of his belief that economic issues did not originate outside ambit of organism known as society. He did not believe they had no connection to morals and that Christian principles should not be taken into account when considering issues of economics. Ln fact, condemnation of classical economics and unregulated competition was constant theme of growing social Christianity movement of era, and one of most important discussions of issue before 1880 was Gladden's Working People and Their Employers [1876), book historian of Social Gospel movement, Charles Howard Hopkins, observed became one of first mileposts set by American social Christianity.7 For pastor of any distinction to criticize detrimental influence secular press had on society was certainly not an unusual occurrence.8 But views of Gladden are especially indicative for two reasons. First, he was one of key founders of reform-minded and influential Social Gospel movement and tireless tractarian9 of movement before and after turn of last century that revamped Protestantism while confronting modernity, capitalism, and growing industrialization most explici? …

Nurturing the Indwelling Protest: Max Horkheimer and the Dialectic of Religious Resistance and Betrayal

AbstractThis article critiques and assesses Max Horkheimer’s lifelong interest in matters of religion and theology. He rehearses a theme throughout his work that strengthens in his later years: an authentic Christianity or Judaism owes its allegiance to and longing for a “totally other” and not any temporal power such as the state. Indeed, in the name of this other – understood in either ontological or temporal terms – Christians would do well to remember the trenchant criticisms of vested power and wealth and Jews would do equally well to remember the basic impulse of not being conformed to this world. In short, such a religious standpoint is one of persistent and incorruptible resistance to the world in every fibre of one’s being. The problem is that religions like Judaism and Christianity have betrayed that resistance in the name of the totally other and made deals with the world – with the state, with wealth, with influence and with the economic systems of the day. This betrayal shows up, for example, in the way Christianity has often become an established religion, in the establishment of a Jewish state and in liberal theology. I am not taken with this grand opposition, which trades on the distinction between authentic and inauthentic, the latter functioning as a betrayal of the former. Far more interesting are the moments when Horkheimer sets his dialectical skills to work on this opposition. When this happens, we find him arguing that the “betrayal” was often a necessary process for the survival of the religion in question, for any religion that followed the precepts of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels would soon have been ground into the dust.

Religion and the Shadow Economy

Religion is increasingly acknowledged to be a cultural dimension which affects economic outcomes in different regards. This contribution focuses on religion’s possible impact on the shadow economy. Different dimensions of the religious markets are taken into account. These dimensions refer to the overall degree of religiosity, the specific impact of different religions, religious competition or the proximity between religion and the state. The empirical test makes use of the largest available cross-section on the size of the shadow economy and matches this dataset with numerous religious indicators. Summary measures of general religiosity or indicators of religious competition do not have a measurable impact. However, robust differences emerge across religions. Countries dominated by Islam or Eastern religions are associated with smaller shadow economies compared to Christian countries. Furthermore, the proximity between state and religion matters. Close ties between both are typical for smaller shadow economies. This is in line with the view that religion uses its normative influence to protect state interests if there is a mutually beneficial relationship.

Гекзаметр в «Таинственной капле» Ф. Глинки (стихотворное переложение молитвы «Отче наш»)

The author focuses on the last large work by F. Glinka "Mysterious Drop" (1861) dedicated to the matters of religion. Special features are analyzed of the poetic version of the apocryphal story about a robber who shrived on the cross and got to heaven. The conclusion is that the semantic core of the poem is Lord's Prayer made in hexameter. This meter is used nowhere else in the polirhythmic structure of the poem. A rhymed prayer with rhythmic accents plays a special harmonizing role in the artistic concept of the universe.

ARGUMENT IN MIXED COMPANY: MOM'S MAXIM VS. MILL'S PRINCIPLE

It is impolite to discuss matters of religion or politics in mixed company. So goes the popular adage which all of us were supposed to have learned as children from our mothers. Let's call it Mom's Maxim. We tend to accept Mom's Maxim. But is it philosophically sound? In this short essay, we raise some objections to Mom's Maxim and make a case for an alternative which we call Mill's Principle.

Christianity and character education: faith in core values?

Character education is important within the Christian tradition but tends to be viewed with suspicion by educators who privilege autonomy as the aim of a liberal education. Equally, Christians may have concerns that character education places too great an emphasis upon good works rather than God’s grace. This article reasons that character education need not be indoctrinatory, in the pejorative sense, on the one hand nor conflated with Christianity on the other. It shows that Christian‐ethos schools can promote the autonomy of their students in matters of religion while also providing character education that enables them to choose well. Research from a case study of character education in a school with a Christian ethos is drawn upon to illustrate the capacity such schools have for sharing values while disagreeing about their sources. This is seen as an important feature of character education that is critical and also fosters a tolerant, respectful and inclusive school and society. It is suggested that acknowledging this complexity demonstrates an appreciation of the value of the Christian tradition in character education and within schooling. It also clearly distinguishes between being a Christian and being of good character.