Modern Religion Research Articles

Het evangelikalisme als de toekomst van een ‘illusie’?

I conclude a) that the stage of religion Bellah in his evolutionary classification dubbed modern religion has resulted in secularization, unchurching, and unbelief, and b) concurring with Bellah that the soteriologies of both historic and early-modern Christianity are not satisfactory any longer to post-industrial Christians, as the belief in both salvation by a bookkeeping godhead and the pre-destination by a sovereign one has eroded. Instead of Bellah’s modern religion Evangelicalism appears to be truly modern: the believers’ voluntary decisions to accept Jesus Christ as their redeemer satisfies. Evangelicalism is seen as a family of denominations and congregations with a shared hard core consisting of a) the acceptance of Jesus Christ as saviour; b) personal conversion; c) to reach out to the world, and d) the bible as God’s word (‘inerrant in matters of faith and practice’). Apart from Evangelicalism, a ‘reformative’ reaction in historic and early-modern Christian denominations and congregations is observed; these ‘reformatives’ purport to restore the ancient orthodoxis and orthopraxis. Although Evangelicalism is supposed to be more instrumental to modern religious men’s needs for well-being than earlier variants of Christianity, i.e. has the greater adaptive capacity, we cannot yet foresee the consequences of further institutionalization and/or oligarchy formation in Evangelical denominations/congregations; neither can we predict the effects of the coming generations of evangelic academics and academic evangelical theologians.

Sozialisationsforschung und religiöse Sozialisation im 20. Jahrhundert aus historischer Sicht. Ein Forschungsaufriss

The article analyses problems of historical research into socialization with special regard of the field of religious socialisation. is issue attracts growing interest because transformation processes of religion in modernity express themselves − among others − in terms of socialisation. Yet, a consistent theory of socialisation does not exist. Socialization research is an interdisciplinary branch of study with each discipline focusing on its own key aspects of activity. is applies to historical socialization research, too, which initially roots in historical pedagogy. However, to assess changes in religious socialization a social historical perspective is required. is implies that both objects and agents of socialisation – primarily family and church – are considered carefully.

RELIGION AND POLITICS

The article analyzes in the work of two leading 18th-century thinkers' two dominant strategies to decide the relationship between religion and politics in modern thought as it has been derived from the 18th-century Enlightenment: exclusion and/or inclusion subject to the requirements of politics. It begins by setting out how the underlying problem was experienced from the Enlightenment's historical moment, taking stock as it does so of how their take on it compares with our own. It then juxtaposes the two thinkers: one who sought to exclude religion from politics, Voltaire; and one, Rousseau, who was willing to include it. Voltaire's radical exclusion maps to a certain organization of the concepts of truth/knowledge/belief, all separated from power and government. Rousseau departed from the Enlightenment view of truth and knowledge, and focussed instead upon the personal and social function of belief, including as a key to membership of the political community. This led him to construct a socially useful version of religion to set within the political arena. In each case, I also argue that the difficulties of realizing the given resolution have become greater with time, and that, were it to be realized, each would give rise to a fatally limited conception of politics. Notwithstanding the continuing temptation to adopt solutions along Enlightenment lines, it finally appears from these paradigm cases that neither the exclusion nor the functional inclusion of religion are promising ways to tackle the problem of its relationship to politics.

Exorcism and Its Texts: Subjectivity in Early Modern Literature of England and Spain by Hilaire Kallendorf (review)

MLR, ioi.i, 2006 307 especially as many of the essays which would be the most obvious candidates for inclusion in such a volume do not appear in the very helpful bibliography of Ivanov's works in English translation?like the essays included in this selection. In his translations Bird succeeds in remaining as faithfulas possible to terms given very specific meanings in the context ofthe debate in which they are used: not an easy task, as many are calques of terms borrowed or developed from other philosophies or traditions. He also conveys Ivanov's syntactically complex yet elegant style most effectively,thus giving non-Russianists a further incentive to acquaint themselves with the considerable riches of Ivanov's thought. New College, Oxford Adam Fergus Exorcism and its Texts: Subjectivity in Early Modern Literature ofEngland and Spain. By Hilaire Kallendorf. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2003. xxi + 327 PP- ?48. ISBN 0-8020-8817-1. Hilaire Kallendorf's investigation into the representation of exorcism rituals in the literatures of early modern England and Spain looks at a range of texts, from Shake? speare and Cervantes to rarer material. Perhaps the key virtue ofthe book lies in what its author describes as a 'basic respect' (p. 187) forearly modern religion. Kallendorf does not bring an overbearing modern scepticism to her topic, but allows religious beliefs from the past to speak to us in their historical alterity. Her book marks a welcome departure from much of the politicized criticism of the past two decades, has which often treated religion as little more than a smokescreen for the supposedly more real concerns of ideology and power. Kallendorf focuses on genre as a key to the representation of exorcism in early modern literature. This is legitimate and illuminating, but also leads to a relative disregard for the historical and cultural contexts of literary exorcism. Hence there is a lack of serious engagement with contemporary prose treatises on exorcism, and no in-depth analysis of exorcism in relation to Reformation controversies. There is also an imbalance between Kallendorf s focus on generic conventions on the one hand, and her large historical claims about the 'early modern self on the other. Indeed, in spite of the book's subtitle, her observations on early modern subjectivity are often curiously gestural. More serious, however, is the number of inaccuracies that result in strained, even plainly erroneous, readings of especially the English and Latin sources. Kallendorf writes, for instance, that Hamlet appears to Ophelia 'with his garters crossed', like Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and claims, without offeringevidence from early modern demonology, that this is 'a typical feature of demoniacs' (p. 153). However, Hamlet's stockingsare 'wwgartered' and 'down-gyved' {Hamlet, 11. 1. 81), that is, 'fallen round his ankles'. Equally dubious is Kallendorf s reading of 'Who calls me villain, [. . .] | gives me the lie i' th' throat?' (11. 2. 549-51). She maintains, again without support? ing evidence from contemporary demonology, that Hamlet here lists 'classic signs of demonic possession' (p. 153). Yet these lines are part of a meditation on revenge; as G R. Hibbard comments in his edition, the actions listed by Hamlet 'were deadly insults that would meet with immediate retaliation from a man of honour' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 234). Kallendorf's reading oiKing Lear is similarly awkward; she goes rather too far,forexample, in maintaining that in 111.6. 20-22 Poor Tom 'attempts to east out [Lear's] demons, who appear in the shape ofhell-hounds or demonic familiars' (p. 137). As Jay L. Halio explains in his edition of the play, 'Lear imagines that even his lapdogs, possibly bitches as their names [Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart] suggest, have turned against him' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 194), and Poor Tom, without disrupting Lear's imaginings, simply 308 Reviews chases the dogs away. Some of Kallendorf's interpretations rely on metaphors of her own invention, as when she offers a 'political interpretation' of exorcism in Volpone which assumes that 'Volpone and Mosca represent a threat to the social order' that must be 'expelled or "exorcized" through the vehicle ofcomic drama' (p. 31). This sits rather uneasily with the fact that...

"There Won't Be Any Rich People in Heaven": The Black Christ, White Hypocrisy, and the Gospel According to W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois despised white supremacy, economic exploitation, and European and American colonialism. The pillaging and partitioning of Africa angered him no end, especially since they were legitimated by the erasure of Africa and its peoples from the authorized histories of the world. M[T]here has been consistent effort, he wrote in The World and Africa in 1946, to rationalize Negro slavery by omitting Africa from world history. Fundamental this historical amnesia was the neglect of Africa's crucial role in the development of modern religions. White Europeans and Americans, Du Bois insisted, whitened their religious faiths in order justify the oppression and dehumanization of people of color. This was nowhere more apparent than in whites' conceptions of Jesus of Nazareth. Roughly two millennia ago, Du Bois observed, there was born in the Egypto-Syrian area, with its Mongoloid and Negroid elements, a social reformer called Jesus Christ. Hypocritical white Europeans and Americans, however, refused acknowledge that he was anything but white. As Du Bois maintained, Nordics who have never accepted his doctrine of submission evil, repudiation of riches, and love for mankind, have usually limned him as Caucasoid. Of course, the biblical Jesus was not white. He was a Syrian Jew, one whom Du Bois described as perhaps bearing a hooked nose and curled hair. Christ may have even inherited Ethiopian blood. Du Bois, in short, seemed think that if the association of whiteness with godliness provided a rationale for racial oppression, then recognizing the blackness of Christ, or at least his nonwhiteness, might equip African Americans with another set of tools counter exploitation and hatred.1 Du Bois's attack upon the Caucasoid Christ and his consideration of a nonwhite Jesus in The World and Africa and in a host of poems and short stories presaged a theological and religious revolution that occurred in the United States during the late 1960s. As champions of civil rights and Black Power assaulted the citadels of white supremacy during the second half of the

On the Heuristic Value of the Concept of Political Religion and its Application

The thesis here is that the concept of political religion (PR) is useful as a heuristic device or model to explore certain unique features of modern secular revolutionary and/or ultra‐nationalist movements and regimes which develop elaborate ideologies and public rituals. It depends on a broad or ‘Durkheimian’ definition of religion and is not to be confused with the politicisation of traditional religion, which can be found in varying forms in nearly all historic polities. The differences between modern civil religion (CR) and PR are examined, and some of the principal regimes and movements for whom PR may be a useful concept are analysed with regard to their similarities and differences. The conclusion is that both the politicisation of religion and the cultic forms of PR continue to characterise in varying ways some of the major radical new forces of the twentieth century, while much of the Western world tends toward an inchoate kind of incipient, not fully coded PR most simply characterised as Multicultural Political Correctness.

Book Review: Eastern Christianity: Studies in Modern History, Religion and Politics

Book Review: <b>Eastern Christianity:</b> Studies in Modern History, Religion and Politics

Notes toward a Loos-ian Theory of Religion in Modernity

AbstractThis work is concerned with developing a theory of religion in modernity using the work of the architect and critic Adolf Loos. It is an inter-textual re-reading of Loos and critical readings of Loos, seeking to posit a developing Loosian theory as a possible new methodology for re-reading the tensions toward religion evidenced in modernity.

The place of religion in modernity

The place of religion in modernity

Kemetic Orthodoxy: Ancient Egyptian Religion on the Internet: A Research Note

In a recent essay, Dawson (2000) has called for empirical studies of religion in cyberspace. This article contributes one case study toward this larger project, an examination of Kemetic Orthodoxy, an Egyptian revival religion that has developed a following largely through communication on the Internet. Most of the people who become members of Kemetic Orthodoxy learn about this faith, meet other believers, convert and worship online. As Dawson (1998) expects of religious compatible with the Internet, Kemetic Orthodoxy is monistic, tolerant, organizationally open, and experientially oriented, but contrary to his expectations, Kemetic Orthodoxy is based on ritual authority and stresses tradition more than individualism. Like Wicca, Kemetic Orthodoxy is a religion of late modernity

Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (review)

Reviewed by: Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited Ralph Weber Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. By Charles Taylor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. 127. In 1999, the Canadian philosopher and political scientist Charles Taylor delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh. He dedicated them to the question of what it means to call our age secular. While preparing these lectures he engaged with William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience—which itself had been based on the Gifford Lectures presented by James in 1901 and 1902. Taylor was inspired by the continuing argumentative force and contemporary relevance of James' work and felt impelled to ask himself, in confrontation as well as conversation with James, where the locus of religion is today. Taylor's Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisitedis the short yet very rich result. In taking account of the complexity and richness of James' book as well as of the broad range of meaning that is covered by the term "religion," Taylor is engaging in [End Page 103]a difficult task. Here one can decide either to write a commentary on James' text or else devote oneself to an interpretation of religion in the contemporary world. Those who try to do both are indeed pursuing an ambitious project, running the risk of either not doing justice to James' book or not telling much about the role and position of religion in society today. Taylor opts to do both in Varieties of Religion Today. He begins by discussing James' conception of religion as an individual experience. He emphasizes the distinction that James makes between what happens to individuals (designated as religious geniuses) who undergo a religious experience that is both original and powerful and the religious life of communities and churches that transmit this primary experience to believers. It is in this context that Taylor quotes the defining passage from James: Religion therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. 1 Taylor concludes from this that James ascribes to religious institutions at most a secondary role by limiting them to transmitting and communicating the original inspiration, while the real meaning of religion is to be found in the individual experience and not in corporate life. It is not surprising, considering Taylor's philosophical position, that he takes issue with James' interpretation of religion. Taylor believes that criticism is necessary here because there seems to be an affinity between James' take on religion and certain aspects of modernity. One could interpret James' description of religious experience as the only possible form that religion today can assume. But this, according to Taylor, is not the case. His criticism involves several points. First, James is so deeply influenced by a "Protestant" self-understanding that he has trouble getting beyond a certain degree of individualism and accepting a broader, more "Catholic" view. James misses the point that the essential connection between the believer and the divine is cultivated mainly through communal life as it is practiced in churches. He ignores the phenomenon of a collective religious life that consistsof individual religious connections rather than being the resultof them. Second, by focusing on the inner life of the person who has a religious experience, James excludes theology from the center of religious life. Yet, there is a need for at least a minimal articulation of that for which belief and hope are striving. Taylor sees empirical evidence for his argument in the many important and widespread religious forms found in society today that do not resonate with James' concept of religious experience. On a conceptual level, he raises further criticisms. Referencing Hegel and Wittgenstein, he defends a position that asserts an experience is without content if nothing can be said about it. Moreover, it is society that provides us with...

The Role of the Local in the Doctrine and Discourse of Religious Liberty

Much of the Supreme Court's modern religion clause doctrine has been forged in conflicts that directly implicate the traditional powers of local governments: primary and secondary education, land use, police powers. Constitutional theorists have rarely treated this jurisdictional fact as significant because the post-incorporation Court has never made a distinction among levels of government - local, state, or federal - when considering Establishment or Free Exercise Clause challenges. This Article argues that courts and commentators should make such a distinction. More specifically, it argues that local regulations that burden or benefit religious belief, conduct, or exercise have different institutional effects than do similar state or national regulations, and that these differential effects should be taken into account when determining the contours of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses. The usual parochialism story is that local political institutions are often hostile to religious minorities and therefore particularly in need of central oversight - judicial or otherwise. I argue against this conventional wisdom. I contend that local government - and more generally the decentralization of power - is a robust structural component of religious liberty. On this account, the chief threat to religious liberty is the exercise of centralized power generally, either to benefit religion as a class or to burden it. The Court's religion clause jurisprudence should therefore be more skeptical of federal statues and regulations that touch on religion than similar local statutes and regulations. On this argument local governments are appropriate sites - not the only sites, certainly, but central and overlooked sites - for the negotiation of church-state relations.

L'individualisation Constitue-t-elle Encore Le Paradigme De La Religion En Modernité Tardive?

Research on beliefs has generally substantiated the theory of individualization of religion. By reducing, nolens volens, religion to a belief, it has contributed to that interpretation advocated by the media. Without totally denying that view, let us herewith explore the hypothesis of the dualization of religion in late modernity. It seems better to be aware of a complex process of change that sets out traditional religion and popular religion without forcibly opposing them. With the help of data taken from our research in 1989 and 1999, we will try to show how culture works in the field of religion in the sense described above.

The Social History of the Reformation: Recent Trends and Future Agendas

and early twentieth centuries.3 No longer were scholars solely interested in the official and prescribed religious doctrines of the established churches and their religious leaders, as lay religious practices seemed to offer new and in some cases alternative readings of the Reformation. Moreover, no longer were social histo? rians prepared to accept the teleological and simplistic interpretations of earlier periods, which stressed that the Protestant Reformation offered up more modern and forward looking religions to replace a superstitious and outdated religion. With an emphasis on religious practices and the social relationships imbedded in those practices, social historians ofthe Reformation shifted attention away from older questions of why men such as Luther and Calvin left the Roman Catholic Church or questions about the doctrinal differences that most separated Protes? tants and Catholics. In their place social historians of the Reformation began to explore more sociaily infused questions such as who made the Reformation. That is, which social groups or cohorts?by estate, class, sex, occupation, family, etc.?actively sought to promote or to sustain the new religious movements, where, when and why? These questions also led to others, such as to whose ben? efit and to whose detriment did the Reformation serve?4 A whole host of new studies soon emerged to answer Bob Scribner's early query in the affirmative: there clearly was a social history of the Reformation after all. My purpose in this article is to summarize some ofthe most significant findings of social historians of the Reformation in the last twenty years or so, as well as to offer some thoughts on future areas of research. I make no attempt to be comprehensive here, so I cannot possibly mention every single contribution. What I shall try to do in the limited space afforded me is to indicate how the larger interpretations and narratives of the Reformation have changed or been revised as a result of the scholarship of social historians. I see several significant areas where social historians have made a difference, and I shall briefly describe the contributions of each of these: lay piety, or what some call popular religion; rituals; gender, marriage, and the family; confessionalization, a term coined by some German historians to describe the dual process of social disciplining and

The Communication of Friendship: Gasparo Contarini's Letters to Hermits at Camaldoli

The modern idea that to converse means to talk, to exchange ideas with another person, emerged between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Before that time, and throughout the Middle Ages,conversatiowas a state of being or a way of life. To converse was to commune with God or other people, particularly in the context of religious communities. John Bossy says that this definitional shift from conduct to dialogue is one indication of how Christianity changed from a medieval system that promoted communal solidarity into a modern religion that emphasized morality and civility. John O'Malley similarly underscores the importance of the new meaning of conversation by pointing out that one of the Jesuit innovations was to make conversation a “ministry of the word” practiced in and through confession and spiritual exercises. But how did contemporaries experience the transformation of conversation from “togetherness” to “dialogue”? Apart from the Jesuit practices, do we have any way of discerning whether sixteenth-century Christians experienced conversation as a religious praxis?

Religion in late modernity

Religion in late modernity

The English “Post‐Reformation”?

A new term is infiltrating the lexicon of historians of early modern English religion. What was once neutral shorthand for an indeterminate period after the English Reformation is acquiring greater significance. Its initial uses were adjectival: “the patchwork of beliefs” to be found in England by 1600 “may be described as distinctively ‘post-Reformation,’ but not thoroughly ‘Protestant,’” concluded Tessa Watt; “we are beginning to see the outlines of a religious culture which if not thoroughly protestant by exacting clerical standards, was distinctively post-Reformation,” agrees Alexandra Walsham. But occasionally this quality of English religious culture has hardened into a noun—as in the title of John Bossy’s Peace in the Post-Reformation—for in Bossy’s view this term has the “benefit of putting due weight on the state of affairs, on both sides of the confessional fence, as the seismic upheavals of the sixteenth century settled down into everyday continuity.”1 The Post-Reformation, then, is all about living with the Reformation; it is a label to describe the quotidian business of rubbing along with Protestantism. We are, however, still living with the effects of the Reformation. So when did the “PostReformation” end? And when, for that matter, did it begin? When was England “post” the Reformation? Those who favor the term tend to work on the decades

A Religião que a Modernidade Produz: Sobre a História da Política Religiosa na França

This article discusses several aspects of the history of religious policy in France, focusing on realities from the 16th to 20th centuries involving the ways by which the state deals with The objective is to show that far from simply being overlooked, takes on meanings that make it a significant criterion for social ordering from the state perspective. One can thus affirm that the French state has promoted several successive forms of recognizing religious identities. French history appears here in light of a more general discussion on the place and statute of religion in modernity. Reflecting on certain points in the secularization thesis, the article concludes by highlighting aspects that indicate a positive relationship between modernity and religion.

Psychoanalysis, individualistic value shaping, and social ethics

Refuting the view now prevailing in social anthropology, the article seeks to offer a new outlook on relations between psychoanalysis and the individualistic shaping of values that characterizes modern Western society. According to current social anthropology, psychoanalysis embodies the promise of recouping a wholeness lost as a result of the world's process of de-sanctification. The self is seen as constituting this new wholeness value, while psychoanalysis, insofar as it proposes redemption through the self, is viewed as a modern religion with individualistic effects. In questioning this vision, the article offers as a counterpoint the idea that the Lacanian formalization of the subconscious through symbolic structure overcomes the dichotomy between subject and society. This leads Lacan to assert that analysis should lead the subject to dedicate his or herself to guaranteeing the workings of the great Other, which is understood to mean that psychoanalysis should lead the subject to assume his or her responsibility for the workings of the symbolic structure.

Witchcraft today: an encyclopedia of Wiccan and neopagan traditions

A clear, concise overview of the origins and history of the Wiccan and Neopagan movements, with A-Z coverage of concepts, rituals, practices, and practitioners. * Thorough introduction explains the origin and history of contemporary Wiccan and Neopagan beliefs * Provides A-Z coverage of Neopagan concepts, rituals, practices, and practitioners ranging from African Religions and Celtic Tradition to Numerology and Theosophy * A documents section reprints texts important to the central belief system of Wiccans and Neopagans, including the text of Charge of the Goddess * Thorough chronology detailing the development of these modern religions