Modern Faith Research Articles

Reconciling Religion, Reform and Modernity: A Study of Early Muslim Women’s Periodicals from South India

This study analyses the women’s periodicals that were in circulation among the Muslims of Kerala, South India, during the early twentieth century. They were published by small-scale print houses and Muslim women associated with these periodicals as writers, editors and publishers, shaping a highly porous public sphere unlike the nationalist and colonial homogenous imaginations of the public. These early writings from Muslim women expose the entanglement of imagined rights and community identity embodied in faith and piety in colonial modernity. They ought to be studied to understand how social identity drew considerably from the domains of religion and community, if not region, and that gender and nation played less significant roles in their imagination of modernity. Moreover, their engagement with the West was not determined in the context of resistance to colonial administration alone, but also in a deeper and more complex history of Islam’s encounters with it.

Henrik Ibsen, Emperor Julian, and the crisis of faith in modernity

AbstractAlthough it is one of his lesser known and performed plays, Henrik Ibsen considered Emperor and Galilean to be his Hovedverk—his ‘main’ or ‘pivotal’ work—in which he finally presented his positive worldview. It remains comparatively little studied in scholarship, though one scholar has recently argued that it is the key to unlocking his entire corpus. The present study builds upon past scholarship uncovering the works Ibsen drew upon in writing the play but goes beyond the mere question of its historical sources and accuracy to consider Ibsen’s purpose for including the specific and precise pieces of historical texture he chose in the particular order and configuration he devised. In short, we aim to identify the creative purposes for his curating of the historical details he took from his sources. What emerges from our analysis is that, even when Ibsen is following the sources, his protagonist stands out as a strikingly modern figure, more at home in the nineteenth century than the fourth. Ibsen portrays his Julian struggling with doubt and uncertainty of a distinctly modern caste; he puts in his mouth criticisms of Christianity that stem from modernity rather than the historical figure; and he suggests that, just as Christianity had to prove victorious over paganism in late antiquity, so Christianity itself must be superseded in the modern era, though perhaps some aspects of it are worth preserving in the yet-to-arrive third empire.

THE OLD AND NEW OF DIGITAL HISTORY

ABSTRACTThis article reflects on the expectations and changes that digital technologies have brought to history, activities that are increasingly codified as digital history. Because of the breadth of digital technologies and communicative media, the contours of a digital history are still unclear, so I frame my discussion with two potential narratives that begin from different ideas that emerged from World War II weapons research. One narrative begins with Roberto Busa and the application of a computer to find concordances in the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The emphasis here is on the application of computer technologies to the practice of history. The second narrative begins with Vannevar Bush's essay “As We May Think” and focuses on digital technologies as a key element in an information system. This beginning invites a parallel between inscription technologies (especially the movable‐type press) and knowledge systems. Both narratives imbibe the modern faith in technology to improve; the “new” is better, but the latter better involves humans and societies. Despite important differences between them, both narratives lead to an inquiry into the foundations of our modern knowledge system. In the case of history, the question is whether a knowledge system that was developed in the nineteenth century and designed to encompass and order the world into one system is still apposite in our digital world. I close by suggesting that one such presumption that needs to be reconsidered is the idea of the past as a prior and distant time‐form. A shift from “the past” to “pasts” opens history to a broader field of previous happenings and a reconsideration of chronological time, of change, and to other modes of transmission, such as storytelling.

Risk, faith and religious tourism in Second Modernity: visits to Mount Athos in the COVID-19 era

ABSTRACT This study examines the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the decision of people to visit the Mount Athos monastic community. It traces the immediate reaction of pilgrims and visitors to a world religious/ heritage place vis-à-vis the global health risk. The questionnaire-based methodology investigates the respondents' attitude towards faith, as well as their socio-cultural background to contextualize their stances and preferences on the aspects of their past and future visits. Moreover, the terms ‘Risk Society' and ‘Second Modernity' provide a theoretical background in relation to the COVID-19 influence on visitors and pilgrims' motivations. The results of this research point towards the resilience of religious destinations in the face of looming health risks such as the current epidemic.

John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue by Michel Feith

Reviewed by: John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue by Michel Feith Robert Butler Michel Feith. John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2019. 269 pp. $45.00. Since the appearance of A Glance Away in 1967, John Edgar Wideman has published over twenty important books of both fiction and nonfiction. Scholarly interest in his work has remained strong, particularly in recent years, as is evidenced by the appearance of four important book-length studies since 2010. The latest of these books, Michel Feith's John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue, by submitting Wideman's work to a meticulous critical and cultural analysis, will draw added attention to the fact that Wideman is a major American writer who has charted new directions in African American literature with his bold fictional experiments and his unique vision of Black experience. Thematically rather than chronologically organized, Feith's book focuses intensively on Wideman's lucid critiques of certain aspects of modernity that date back to the rise of capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism, and stresses their rootedness in various structures of racial oppression. Feith argues persuasively that Wideman's [End Page 260] response to modernism is kaleidoscopic, providing multiple perspectives that "decenter" narrative (244) and give voice to marginalized people. Viewed from one angle, modernism provides a "harmonious, organized universe ruled by universal, mathematical laws" (207) that promise progress and justice. But when Wideman's kaleidoscopic vision tips and is viewed from "a minority perspective," it reveals "a nightmarish culture of death" (23). Modern rationalism, far from releasing humanity from ignorance and superstition, has created structures of social and political oppression, beginning with slavery and later developing into colonial dominance and ghettoization. Seen from this perspective, "Prison becomes a metaphor for modernity as a whole" (46); Feith persuasively argues from this view that "a continuous thread in Wideman's œuvre" (69) is an intensive scrutiny on how literal and metaphoric prisons function as a way of defining a carceral society. Wideman, like Michel Foucault, envisions the modern prison system as originating with the humanitarian project created by the Philadelphia Quakers, whose progressive reform deteriorated quickly into a brutal means of social control and political repression. Feith's brilliant analysis of Brothers and Keepers discusses Wideman's treatment not only of his brother's unjustly prolonged incarceration but also his vision of prison as "a total institution" (46), which serves as a model of the modern state that is centered in "an enclosed, formally administered life" (47), a "rational plan" (48) designed by a dominant group to control marginalized people. (In this sense, Feith claims that Brothers and Keepers, published in 1984, prefigures Michelle Alexander's landmark 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.) Feith's highly original structural analysis of The Cattle Killing explores another central metaphor in Wideman's books: disease. Wideman's kaleidoscopic imagination is a critical instrument also in this work, as he triangulates Philadelphia during the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic, South Africa during its era of slavery, and the contemporary United States. Challenging the modern faith in linear time's unerring ability to produce a steady development of "progress," Wideman draws revealing parallels between a disease devastating eighteenth-century Philadelphia, a "plague" (146) raging through eighteenth-century Africa, and various forms of cultural sicknesses afflicting modern America—urban violence, drug abuse, racial segregation, and family collapse. Ironically, the disease of American racism is traced back to a period when such Enlightenment thinkers as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were laying the foundation for American democracy while inscribing slavery into the Constitution. Like Paul Gilroy, Wideman makes "a strong connection between the Enlightenment and slavery" (16). Feith traces a clear line of development in Wideman's work from modern alienation and isolation in works such as A Glance Away (1967) and Hurry Home (1970) to a search in his later works for roots in African American history and communal life. He regards the short story "Fever" and the Homewood Trilogy as pivotal texts because they redirect Wideman toward "a recovery of community and oral culture" (41) to which he devoted the remainder of his career. Brothers...

Between faith and scepticism: Nicholas Rengger’s reflections on the ‘hybridity’ of modernity

In this essay, I offer a brief assessment of Nicholas Rengger’s engagement with arguments arising from the theological critique of modern politics and of his take on the relationship between faith and philosophy in modernity. Rengger’s scepticism, a peculiar mix of naturalism and philosophical idealism, combining insights from Oakeshott, Santayana and Augustine, did not cordon off faith but sought to work out its tensive relationship with practical forms of reasoning in modernity, a condition he described as a ‘hybrid’. Rengger’s critique of the hybridity of modernity rests on assumptions that expose some of the unresolved tensions of his anti-Pelagian scepticism.

Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins, by David F. Garcia

Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins , by David F. Garcia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. xii, 360 pp. Listening for Africa explores Afro-modernism between the 1930s and the 1950s, critically assessing why the African origins of black music and dance mattered during this period of rising racism and fascism in Europe and the Americas, colonialism in Africa, and the onset of the Cold War. Garcia focuses upon key individuals who investigated the African origins of New World Negro music and dance in order to refute erasure of Africa as an obsolete past within the context of a modern world. He asks, “When black music and dance sounded and embodied its African origins … exactly how, why, and for whom were those soundings and embodiments materializing?” (p. 5). He pursues answers to this question in five diffuse chapters that present an array of archival material and draw on theories and methodologies in anthropology, sociology, comparative musicology/ethnomusicology, folklore, African diasporic studies, and dance history. The book argues that for some “academics, performers, and activists, listening to, analyzing, sounding, embodying, and even resisting black music's and dance's African origins enabled their holding modernity's promises of freedom and equality to the fire[,] usually as their acts of faith in modernity but also as acts of stepping inside and outside of its regimes of truth” (p. 6). Chapter 1, “Analyzing the African Origins of Negro Music and Dance in a Time of …

The ‘glass ceiling’ of the environmental state and the social denial of mortality

ABSTRACT Despite the development of the environmental state, climate change is accelerating. The concept of the ‘glass ceiling’ – denoting an unexplained barrier, impeding the state from using its powers effectively to mitigate threats that it acknowledges should be addressed – has been put forward to account for this. Here, a structural account of this phenomenon is advanced, which suggests that environmental policies are generally outcompeted among government priorities wherever they threaten the capitalist growth imperative. In addition, social/cultural factors, based on the psychology of denial, provide a necessary contribution to our understanding. A three-fold denialism is at work: of climate change itself, the measures required to tackle it (where these contradict a modern faith in material progress), and the potential incapacity of the state to protect society (discouraging close attention to the effectiveness of its climate policies).

Ernst Bloch as a Non-Simultaneous Jewish Marxist

The paper attempts to reassess the fundamentally paradoxical position of Ernst Bloch in 20th century philosophy in the light of the Marranic condition. Indebted, among others, to Jewish heritage and Christian tradition, Bloch considered himself primarily a Marxist. Bloch’s uniqueness consists in the stunning equiponderance of the currents he drew from. Contrary to a classic model of modern Jewish philosophy, inaugurated by Hermann Cohen, Bloch’s thinking does not allow of easy juxtaposition of “sources” with languages into which they were translated. In this sense, Bloch cannot be easily compared to Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Levinas or even Walter Benjamin (although he bore some striking similarities with the latter). His position at least partly stems from a specific form of directness with which he often used these languages, composing his philosophy in quite an anachronist manner. For this reason his thinking—in itself “die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen”, as one of his key concepts theorises—is a very modern, internally incoherent space of cross-fertilising inspirations. The paper demonstrates two levels on which Bloch’s indebtedness to Judaism might be analysed and then re-assesses his Marxist affiliations as a kind of modern faith which, in a specifically Marranic manner, seals the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous.

Challenge to Bureaucracy: The Contemporary Alternative School

As a result of a study of forty alternative schools spread across the eastern half of the United States, the author concluded that contemporary alternative schools represent as much a rejection of how conventional public schools are organized as an indictment of teaching methods and curricular offerings in these schools. While educational history records a variety of "alternatives," few of the precursors of recent alternative schools attempted to alter the administrative structure of schooling. Only in the past decade has the modern faith in the bureaucratic management of education been challenged. The author suggests that the "organizational" dimension of contemporary alternative schools might be more significant historically than their radical pedagogical practices or unusual learning opportunities.

Tragedy in Ian McEwan’s The Children Act

This essay reads Ian McEwan’s Children Act (2014) as a literary tragedy that is in dialogue with the classical form and the philosophical discourse that surrounds it. Of particular relevance is George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s definition of tragedy as a collision between two valid but limited articulations of justice. The essay argues that McEwan’s contemporary tragedy enacts such a collision by intensifying the polarization between two competing systems of values: modern reason and religious faith. The novel depicts a complex entanglement between the two paradigms while exploring the limitations of modern reason and its unresolved tensions with faith. Moreover, in highlighting where the clash between reason and faith turns destructive, McEwan also implicitly points to other possibilities, to paths not taken. The Children Act indicates that conflict turns to tragedy when the two sides attempt to disentangle from what seems like threatening “otherness.” Throughout there are hints that if the adversaries could instead endorse their essential interlinkage, could admit to the irresolvable contradictions of each position, then the tragic denouement could be avoided. The novel thus calls for a more holistic response to cultural conflicts while inviting readers to reflect on the contradictions and repressions of modern reason.

Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism eds. by Heath W. Carter and Laura Rominger Porter

Reviewed by: Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism eds. by Heath W. Carter and Laura Rominger Porter Mark J. Dixon Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism. Edited by Heath W. Carter and Laura Rominger Porter. Grand Rapids: Eerd-mans, 2017. 297 pp. "Some Lutherans in America don't like the word 'evangelical' because it has been monopolized by biblical fundamentalists." [The New Church Debate: Issues Facing American Lutheranism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983, 2] Carl Braaten's imprecise use of terms did not invalidate his assessment of Lutheran attitudes, which still rings true today. In fact, Lutherans in America have been skeptical of evangelicalism (and closely related movements) long before it came to be associated almost exclusively with the modern Religious Right. This skepticism implies that evangelicalism is easily defined, and unworthy of serious or respectful engagement. This collection puts these assumptions to the lie. Here readers encounter evangelicalism as "the single most powerful explanatory device adopted by academic historians to account for the distinctive features of American society, culture, and identity," and see the folly in pigeonholing a tradition without a universally accepted "consistent historical referent" (xvi). Carter and Porter open their introduction by summarizing the evangelical influence on modern American life—from the Bakkers to the Osteens, The Total Woman to The Purpose Driven Life, Nixon to [End Page 118] Trump. Despite evangelicalism's obvious contemporary significance, its history was neglected until the "historiographical revolution" of the 1980s, which emanated largely from Wheaton College's Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (founded 1982). This surge in scholarship located the modern faith associated with Billy Graham within a tradition "extend[ing] all the way back to colonial revivals led by the likes of George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and Sarah Osborn." It also led to a growing recognition that "no other faith had so powerfully shaped the nation's course" (xv). Despite (or because of) this increased critical attention, a satisfactory historical definition for evangelicalism has proved elusive. Carter and Porter intentionally refrain from offering a comprehensive definition, and instead frame this collection of essays as "a variety of historical approaches to a term that … points to a set of family resemblances that spring from a shared genealogy" (xvi). Decisive moments in the history of several branches of this family tree are laid out in twelve essays spanning from the Great Awakening to the 1974 Lausanne Congress. Every essay is worth your time. I regret that I can only mention a few. Some, like Harry Stout's on the Great Awakening or George Marsden's on fundamentalism, conveniently repackage field-shaping theses from these authors' own monographs to fit the "turning points" device. Catherine Brekus' essay is notable for treating a classic theme (the relationship between evangelicalism and the Enlightenment) in a new way, in this case by approaching the issue through figures like Sarah Osborn and Newport Gardner instead of, for example, Jonathan Edwards. Edith Blumhofer's essay on the origins of Pentecostalism in Chicago is so highly detailed that it almost functions as a very brief introduction to the subject. This reader particularly appreciated Luke Harlow's chapter, "The Civil War and the Making of Conservative American Evangelicalism," and its convincing argument that the slavery debate and its effective resolution in the Thirteenth Amendment created the narrower, more conservative evangelicalism that would go into the twentieth century prepared to devote tremendous energy to a range of issues that would come to define fundamentalism. [End Page 119] I craved at least one more chapter after Daren Dochuk's on Lausanne, or at least an explanation for the absence of an essay dedicated to the modern evangelical culture with which Carter and Porter chose to open their introduction. Of course a scholarly critique of evangelical Christianity in the context of the 2016 presidential election is most to be desired, but that history almost certainly unfolded too close to publication. In any event it is difficult to know what this turning point means yet. Where will evangelicalism go from here? I also would have liked more from Carter and Porter on their intriguing "genealogical" definition of evangelicalism. What are the family resemblances between figures like George Whitefield...

Romantic Catholics: France’s Post-Revolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith, by Carol E. Harrison

Romantic Catholics: France’s Post-Revolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith, by Carol E. Harrison

Introduction to Section II: Dewey's Living Ideas

Introduction to Section II: Dewey's Living Ideas

Han Chinese “drifters” in Lhasa: the ambivalent cultural politics of Tibetanness amidst China’s geographies of modernity

As rampant modernization profoundly reshapes the economy, culture and ideologies of post-reform China, Han Chinese have encountered directly the malaises of modernity, and are gradually losing faith in modernity’s promises of reason and progress. Numerous small towns and cities, consequently, have become anchors of alternative identities and lifestyles. This article examines the group of ‘drifters in Lhasa’, namely Han Chinese who have migrated to and settled in Lhasa, Tibet, in pursuit of slow-paced lifestyles, communal belonging and assumedly more authentic social relations. Drawing literature on the critiques of modernity and modern subject’s invocation of othered places and peoples as a means of self-criticism, this article argues that the constructed Tibetanness offers the drifters critical cultural resources to counteract ordering endeavours of Chinese modernity. At the same time, however, the modern subject in search of otherness tends to reproduce the modern modality of cognition which results in the objectivation of the other. The article investigates the effects of objectivation from two perspectives, namely the rendering-silent of the others’ voices and interests; and re-inscription of boundaries of difference between the self and the other, against broader contexts of socio-economic transformations in Tibet.

Listening to Rights Talk in Damascus

Ferguson reads a 2009–11 debate over the proposed reissue of Syria's Personal Status Code in the Syrian feminist journal al-Thara to highlight the role women's rights discourse plays in disciplining and producing political subjects. She draws on Talal Asad's observation that “languages of justice do not simply justify political acts, they help to shape political actors.” In the case of al-Thara, Ferguson argues, “women's rights” functions as one such language of justice, helping shape the political subjectivities of those who speak in its name. She shows how invocations of women's rights help fashion subjects who share a faith in modernity and progress and an aversion to tradition, a distancing from what is deemed religious in favor of what is considered secular, and a confidence in the promises of the nation, the universal, and the international. This debate also demonstrates how invocations of women's rights are inflected by the history and political specificities of the contexts in which they are deployed. The article asks how formulating arguments around women's rights serves to influence and delimit political claims and possible alliances.

Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith by Carol E. Harrison (review)

Late Modern EuropeanRomantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith. By Carol E. Harrison. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 328. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-5245-1.)Carole Harrison explores the lives and significance of a small cohort of Catholics in France who belonged to a generation that was born in the first two decades of the nineteenth century and whose religious devotion was shaped by a desire to reconcile faith and modernity after the upheaval of the French Revolution. They include Pauline Craven, Charles de Montalembert, Amelie and Frederic Ozanam, Leopoldine Hugo, Maurice de Guerin, and Victorine Monniot. These enfants du siecle, as Alfred de Musset described the generation who came of age without a firsthand memory of the French Revolution, were progressive and, according to Harrison, romantic in their aspirations. Her overarching goal is to resurrect this group of men and women whom historians have allegedly neglected and who were in many cases linked to one another through kinship, friendship, and marriage, in order to challenge a historiography that she argues oversimplifies the heterogeneous nature of French Catholicism in postrevolutionary France.The book, which is divided into six chapters and an epilogue, charts the coming of age of the principal protagonists, with the opening chapters devoted to how they became part of the Catholic faith as boys and girls through ritual and education. Chapters 3 to 6 examine how they entered adulthood and reacted or adjusted to the tumultuous events around them, which included the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the Second Empire, as well as to political issues, such as the Roman question. She ultimately concludes that the hopes and aims of this generation of romantic Catholics were frustrated by intransigent anticlericals, conservative Catholics, and a reactionary church hierarchy, which forced them to retreat, even if they were not wholly defeated.Although some of the central figures in this book have long been the subject of scholarly attention, including Felicite de Lamennais and Henri Dominique Lacordaire who were not technically enfants du siecle, as well as Charles de Montalembert and Frederic Ozanam, others have been largely forgotten. The most powerful parts of the book are those that rely on their written work as well as on a rich trove of private papers and correspondence that Harrison has culled from archives that range from the Archives du College Stanislaus, Musee Victor Hugo, the Institut Catholique de Paris, and the Assumptionist Archives in Rome. …

Why do we believe in competition? A historical-sociological view of competition as an institutionalized modern imaginary

The article attempts to identify the particular type of competition that is at the heart of the modern faith in competition and develops a sociological research perspective on this type of competition. The first section builds on Georg Simmel's formal sociology to suggest a basic understanding of competition as a social form. The second section offers a sociological review of the modern discourse on competition since the mid-to-late eighteenth century that leads to two major insights: it shows how competition has developed into an institutionalized modern imaginary, i.e. a taken-for-granted part of our modern world-view; and it highlights that this imaginary is concerned with a particular type of competition, where suppliers are supposed to be disciplined and motivated by competition for an audience. The third section develops a sociological concept of, and an empirical research perspective on, this particular type of competition. Combining a Simmelian understanding of ‘pure’ competition (i.e. competition as a struggle for the favor of third parties) with recent constructivist insights on publics/audiences and comparisons as social practices, it defines modern forms of competition as competitions for the favor of an audience that are (re-)produced by public comparisons of performances. It then uses this concept to distinguish and explain a number of research questions that may guide empirical studies on prerequisites and effects of the expansion of this type of competition in different societal fields. The article concludes that, rather than believing in competition or criticizing it as a recent product of neo-liberal ideology, we should study the long-term institutionalization of modern forms of competition in various societal fields in more detail.

Carol E. Harrison. Romantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith.

Carol E. Harrison. Romantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith.

Romantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith

Romantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith