Notion Of Religion Research Articles

RELIGIJA PRED „SUDIŠTEM UMA“

<p>Na tragu dvaju motiva: <em>nagovještaja </em>kojim se logoički „oglašava“, odnosno naslućuje apsolut te, time, i njegove nužne <em>antropomorfne percepcije</em>, radom se želi religija iznova promisliti kao dominantni supranazor u globalnom svijetu. Pri tome je nužno distingvirati religiju od vjere, odnosno razgraničiti imanentne religijske institucije od pojedinačnih „potreba“ za transcendencijom. Takav zahtjev se u povijesti vazda manifestirao kao otpor protiv kanalisanja individualnih pogleda u nebo koji se ne daju prevesti na ritual i kolektivne statute. Jačanje kolektivizama, pa i ovih religijskih, u pravilu upozora na potiskivanje slobode kao stanja u kojem me niko ne može prisiliti da na njegov način budem sretan (Kant). U raspravi želim, također, upozoriti kako filozofija treba napustiti sve očitiju poziciju glasnogovornika religije kako se oksimoronski ne bi preobratila u religioznu filozofiju. Jer, ukoliko filozofija bude propovijedala, osiromašit će ponude apsolutnog smisla i suučestvovati u nametanju (time i osiromašenju) slika o bogu.</p>

KIDLAT TAHIMIK AND THE DETERMINATION OF A NATIVE FILMMAKER

Studies on Christianity in Asia have been weighed down by a double burden—the commonplace of Christianity as a passive minority and an invading foreign as well as the notions of religion and secularization derived from western experience. The following essays of Forum Kritika shed both burdens by focusing on the “lived religion” of different Christian groups and leaders on the margins of Southeast Asian societies because of religious faith as well as ethnicity, status or location. Their critical analysis shows how these actors interacted with other social and cultural traditions and problematized narratives of identity linked to the dominant sociocultural ethos. These negotiations, far from being private and divorced from the institutional, point to the complex and dynamic nature of Christianity in the Asian landscape and to how Christian groups and individuals manage to hold their ground.

Decolonizing Public Space: A Challenge of Bonhoeffer’s and Spivak’s Concepts of Resistance, ‘Religion’ and ‘Gender’

This paper underlines the surprising ways in which subject formation, agency and human flourishing emerge in counter discourses. As examples I offer a post-colonial critique of Rosa Parks in the USA and Fayza in the film Cairo 678. Economic and epistemic violence of neo-liberalism, neo-colonialism, racism, fundamentalism, nationalism, classism, sexism, homophobia, speciesism, etc. call for a critique of religion with corresponding answers. For such a project, the analysis brings together the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the post-colonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and questions their notions of religion and gender as well as resistance and representation. Spivak’s critique of capitalism, the post-colonial condition and epistemic violence in terms of gender constructions is seminal. However, her understanding of ‘religion’ remains ambivalent, yet influences post-colonial theologies tremendously. Bonhoeffer is interesting for a de-essentialized understanding of religion in the post-secular context, because he keeps the tension between a secularized world, engagement with the world and the appreciation of religious knowledge. His final perspective on gender and representation might be more advanced than expected.

Religion in the Law: The Disaggregation Approach

Should religion be singled out in the law? This Article evaluates two influential theories of freedom of religion in political theory, before introducing an alternative one. The first approach, the Substitution approach, argues that freedom of religion can be adequately expressed by a substitute category: typically, freedom of conscience. The second, the Proxy approach, argues that the notion of religion should be upheld in the law, albeit as a proxy for a range of different goods. After showing that neither approach adequately meets crucial desiderata for an inclusive theory of religious freedom, the Article sets out the Disaggregation approach and defends against the alternatives.

Performing Masculinity Through Christian Devotion

Although the academic research on religion in Fiji and the South Pacific is substantial, there are few examples of studies that connect religion with the larger discourses of Fijian tradition and social life. Even fewer are the ones linking culturally specific notions of gender performances to Christian devotion. By utilizing the theoretical framework of colonial mimicry,11 The theory was proposed by Bhabha (2004). I argue that the Christianization of Fiji, particularly its continued impact on the social organization of modern Fijian society, has been reliant upon its collusion with premodern Fijian notions of gender, power and consanguinity. Based on historical enquiries and ethnographic material, I develop the argument that while conversion may be understood as the conscious adoption and mimicking of the western notion of religion as presented by Wesleyan missionaries in the 1800s, the Fijian understanding of their Christianity, the merging between Christian belief and Fijian social protocol and the consequent development of culturally specific articulations of Christian devotion have produced substantial differences from western theological practice and teaching. A central distinction is the close link between performances of masculinity and Christian devotion found among Fijian Methodists.

The notion of secularization: Drawing the boundaries of its contemporary scientific validity

The notion of secularization as an incompatibility between modernization and religion derives from the analysis of the process of modernization of Western European societies. This process led to a weight loss of religion in society and to a progressive differentiation of social spheres, such as religion, politics, science, etc. Following on from this analysis the category and the theory were extended to take on a universal scope in order to describe the modernization processes that would occur in other societies. From the very beginning, sociology has provided exceptions to the rule of secularization. The first was noted by de Tocqueville: American exceptionalism. Then came the processes of rapid economic growth of some Asian Pacific countries (Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc.). Progressively, the entry of new countries into the field of interest of sociologists is showing the Eurocentric nature of the concept. The case of Western Europe, which was the rule, became the exception. Even the notion of religion as a separate social sphere is considered by some social scientists to be ethnocentric. Despite its previous Eurocentrism, the notion of secularization remains useful for sociologists. It has served to account for European religious change, and its analytical instruments can be applied to other cases and may be useful for interpreting these cases either with regard to how they adhere to the Western European model, or how they differ from it – still further, if we consider the huge extent of contemporary international migration. If sociologists want to understand the new Western European societies, they must reapply this analytical rather than predictive version of the concept.

Secularism in Antebellum America: With Reference to Ghosts, Protestant Subcultures, Machines, and Their Metaphors; Featuring Discussions of Mass Media, Moby-Dick, Spirituality, Phrenology, Anthropology, Sing Sing State Penitentiary, and Sex with the New Motive Power

In Secularism in Antebellum America, John Lardas Modern argues that a broad swath of mid-nineteenth-century American Protestants, although superficially distinct, shared a deeper commitment to the metaphysic of secularism. For Modern, secularism refers not to the retreat of religion but to “that which conditioned not only particular understandings of the religious but also the environment in which these understandings became matters of common sense” (p. 7). Evangelicals, Unitarians, phrenologists, and spiritualists shared an epistemology that asserted humans' capacity for immediate knowledge about the self and the world. By enacting and promulgating their notions of religion according to this epistemology, Protestants were subject to, and co-builders of, a discourse of secularism. This discourse, by excluding challenges to its rationality and neutrality, reassured Protestants of their own rational volition in the face of new technologies that threatened to overwhelm autonomy. Mediated through religious, cognitive, and technological practices, secularism became an effective agent, structuring the permissible world of belief and thought. In antebellum America, Modern sees not proliferating religious options but rather the “resonance between different statements about religion” (p. 15) based on a common secularism.

Poisoned chalice? English at an Islamic university in Kerala

Post 9/11, traditional Islamic educational institutions, better known by their Arabic name ‘madrasas’, have been catapulted into the foreground of heated and at times shrill debates on modernization and reform (Malik, 2008; Noor et al., 2008; Riaz, 2008; Hefner, 2009). Discussions on reforming the madrasa system revolve around, among other things, introducing ‘modern’ education in the madrasas and the role of English in this process. Contrary to popular assumptions, however, such tensions are nothing new. On the contrary, the madrasa has witnessed recurrent attempts at reform in Muslim societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the eleventh century, when it first emerged as the pivotal centre of Islamic higher learning, the madrasa has undergone many changes, adapting in varying degrees to local cultures and changing times (Zaman, 1999). Nevertheless, these changes and reforms may not necessarily conform to the standards set by Western liberalism and it would be a gross mistake to judge the success, merit and relevance of the madrasa through the prism of such a discourse, given that the very raison d'être of madrasas is the production, dissemination, promotion and preservation of Islamic learning in a modern world which has brought into sharp relief the divide between the religious and the private on the one hand, and the secular and the public on the other, a distinction with little precedent in earlier Muslim societies. It is modernity that constructed the notion of religion as occupying a distinct sphere in society. Developments in modern Europe, and especially the impact of the Enlightenment, have led not merely to the subordination of religion to the state or the confinement of the former to the sphere of ‘private’ life but also to ‘the construction of religion as a new historical object: anchored in personal experience, expressible as belief-statements, dependent on private institutions, and practised in one's spare time. This construction of religion ensures that it is part of what is inessential to our common politics, economy, science, and morality’ (Asad, 1993: 207).

Kerala Muslims And Shifting Notions Of Religion In The Public Sphere

This article primarily assesses the articulations of Mappila Muslim identity in the public sphere formed in colonial Malabar, especially after the Malabar Rebellion of 1921. The colonial history of the public sphere in Malabar serves as a backdrop to a better understanding of the construction of present-day Muslim identity in Kerala in terms of power and domination. It is shown that a Muslim community that rebelled against the colonial state in northern Kerala earlier and came to be seen as aggressive, uncivilised and religiously fanatic, still faces strong resentment and distrust today, while the memory of subalternity remains present, too.

Representing, Defending, and Questioning Religion: Pragmatist Sociological Motifs in Plato’s "Timaeus", "Phaedo", "Republic", and "Laws"

Plato may be best known as a philosopher, but his depictions of people’s involvements in religion are important for social scientists not only because of the transcultural and transhistorical resources that they offer those in the sociology of religion, but also because of their more general pragmatist contributions to the study of human group life. Thus, although Plato (a) exempts religion from a more thorough going dialectic analysis of the sort to which he subjects many other realms of human knowing and acting (e.g., truth, justice, courage, rhetoric), (b) explicitly articulates and encourages theological viewpoints in some of his texts, and (c) sometimes writes as though things can be known only as ideal types or pure forms in an afterlife existence, Plato also (d) engages a number of consequential pragmatist (also pluralist, secular) aspects of people’s experiences with religion. In developing his materials on religion, Plato rejects the (popular) notions of the Olympian gods described by Homer and Hesiod as mythical as well as sacrilegious. Still, it is instructive to be mindful of Plato’s notions of divinity when considering the more distinctively sociological matters he addresses (as in the problematics of promoting and maintaining religious viewpoints on both collective and individual levels and discussions of the interlinkages of religion, morality, and deviance). Still, each of the four texts introduced here assume significantly different emphases and those interested in the study of human group life should be prepared to adjust accordingly as they examine these statements. All four texts are consequential for a broader “sociology of religion,” but Timaeus and Phaedo are notably more theological in emphases whereas Republic and Laws provide more extended insight into religion as a humanly engaged realm of endeavor. The paper concludes with an abbreviated comparison of Plato’s notions of religion with Chicago- style symbolic interactionist (Mead 1934; Blumer 1969; Prus 1996; 1997; 1999; Prus and Grills 2003) approaches to the study of religion. Addressing some related matters, an epilogue briefly draws attention to some of the affinities of Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life with Plato’s analysis of religion.

Antropologia na missão: relações entre a etnologia confessional de padre Schmidt e a antropologia acadêmica

Tomando como objeto de análise documentos e/ou textos missionários e observações feitas durante a realização de trabalho de campo, será discutida a noção de religião que perpassa esses escritos, ressaltando-se a influência de concepções veiculadas pelo padre Schmidt, um dos expoentes da Escola Histórica de Viena. Além disso, será feita uma pequena análise sobre as interconexões entre a chamada etnologia confessional do padre Schmidt e a antropologia acadêmica.

Latin Poets and Italian Gods (review)

Reviewed by: Latin Poets and Italian Gods Darja Šterbenc Erker Elaine Fantham. Latin Poets and Italian Gods. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. xii + 229 pp. Cloth, $55. Which kind of gods and religious experience does Elaine Fantham study in her book on Latin poets and Italian gods? Instead of a fruitless quest for the origins of religion, Fantham examines minor gods in Latin literature. The idea for writing a book on “Italian” gods stems from the laudes Italiae in Augustan literature and the range of the discussed passages on gods of Rome and Latium is impressive, from Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Fasti and Metamorphoses to Statius’ Silvae and Carmina Priapeia. This study of religious beliefs and literary representations of the gods reveals a vivid picture of ancient worship of the minor gods, especially as portrayed in Latin literature. In addition, Fantham pays attention to earlier Greek and Hellenistic models of the poetic representations of the gods in her discussions of different kinds of texts (elegies, epics, epigrams, inscriptions). My review will concentrate on the notion of religion and gods presented in this book. The first part of the book (“Honouring the Italian Gods”) consists of three chapters (“Rustica Numina: Country Gods of Italy and Their Reception in Roman Poetry,” “Virgil’s Gods of the Land,” and “Ovid’s Fasti and the Local Gods of the City”), which originally comprised a series of public lectures for a general audience. The second part, entitled “Counter-Examples, and the Triumph of Artistry over Fading Devotion,” consists of three further chapters (“Ovidian Variations: From Friendly Flora to Lewd Salmacis and Angry Acheloüs,” “Gods in a Man-made Landscape: Priapus,” and “Gods in Statian Settings”). Whereas the literary evidence presented in the first part concerns the worship of these gods, the second part with its “Counter-Examples” discusses poetic representations of the gods which according to the author do not have a direct connection to the religious life and worship of the gods; therefore, Fantham speaks of “fading devotion.” In her preface Fantham describes Ovid’s Fasti as “replete with echoes and reconstructions of primitive Roman worship” (ix). Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Fasti depict “the devotion and will to believe,” but non-Roman myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in the second part, stand for “detached fantasy” (ix). Fantham’s stated purpose is to provide “a better sense of what was gained and lost when Rome’s increasingly cosmopolitan culture moved beyond Augustus’ renewal or re-creation of Italian religion to replace piety with fantasy and emotional detachment from Italy’s countryside and its gods” (xi). The underlying idea of the book is that the worship of the agricultural gods, nymphs, and forest-gods was a real, authentic religion of the Latins. But, Fantham’s is a modern conception of what real, authentic religion in ancient Italy was supposed to be. Unfortunately, this notion of religion does not take into account the recent research on Roman religion which concentrates on the epigraphic evidence (as well as many other kinds of textual evidence, including literary) and stresses the dominance of orthopraxy (correct ritual performance) over a close, emotional relationship between the god and the worshipper. Such work, acting as a corrective to the assumption of an [End Page 693] ancient, authentic, emotional relationship with the gods in supposed agricultural rituals as imagined by James Frazer at the end of the nineteenth century, could have been usefully incorporated (e.g., J. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion [Bloomington 2003] and M. Beard, J. North, and S. Price, Religions of Rome [Cambridge 1998]). In the first chapter Fantham outlines the evidence for the survival of cults of rustic demigods and stresses the fact that rivers and springs were conceived by the ancients as gods and nymphs and were worshipped in various cults. Thus, each river or spring was worshipped individually, and the traces of many different local spring nymphs or river gods remain in numerous inscriptions. The inscriptions dedicated to the nymphs presiding over healing springs range from fulfillment of vows to nymphs who healed a person to the defixiones in which the petitioner asks the nymphs to curse a rival. Fantham also presents various...

Religion and Military Conscription

The military benefits from fostering an “us-feeling” among its members. On what basis is this formed? Rooted in the discipline of religion, the following article explores how religion feeds into the selective conscription practices of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Combining legal documents with data gathered through interviews with thirty-four soldiers in a combat battalion, it is argued that the IDF’s conscription practices are sensitive to the contents of religion. The IDF applies a multifarious concept of religion with significant impact on the IDF’s ability to foster a sense of “us.” The IDF recruits draftees on the basis of a twofold definition of Judaism, either as an ethnic group or as a theological concept. Both definitions help determine whether one is drafted. Interviews with soldiers expand on this definition, drawing attention to the integrative as well as disintegrative consequences of this notion of religion within the IDF.

Feminism and cultural and religious diversity in Opzij: An analysis of the discourse of a Dutch feminist magazine

Mainstream western feminism is generally known as secular. Women in this movement have fought religious dogmas and paternalistic gender patterns in religious texts and traditions. However, for many women all over the world religion is also an important part of their lives. Some of them try to combine their religious beliefs and feminist ideals. For a long time, their discussions remained at the margins, but in the last few years, ‘mainstream’ feminists are forced to rethink their standpoint about religion. Many have chosen a critical approach towards the relationship between religion and emancipation, but others express the need to take into account differences between women in the definition of feminism and emancipation. This article analyses a popular Dutch feminist magazine and how it defines feminism in relation to religion and culture. The article undertakes an in-depth analysis of how the notions of religion, culture and feminism are interpreted and discussed in the Dutch feminist magazine Opzij. The concepts of experience, solidarity, emancipation and difference are central in the investigation.

‘Western Learning’, religious plurality, and the epistemic place of 'religion' in early-modern Korea (18th to early 20th centuries)

This paper investigates the history and pre-history of the Korean adaptation of the Western concept of 'religion' through three case studies. Based on the assumption that Koreans were not just the object of Western expansion but subjects in an 'entangled' history, it attempts to demonstrate that the intellectual challenges posed to Korean literati by their exposure to 'Western Learning' and other Others had prompted the emergence of both generic and differentiated notions of religion well before the so-called 'opening of Korea' at the end of the 19th century. Examples culled from the writings of two 18th and 19th-century Korean scholars show both the forces at work to create such notions and the limits of their potential to alter the Confucian epistemic framework within which these scholars operated. A look at an early 20th-century representative of 'religionized' Confucianism serves to highlight the persistent incompatibilities of Confucianism with differentiated religion.

Unstrange Bedfellows: Hip Hop and Religion

AbstractIn the past two decades, an expansive archive of hip hop scholarship has emerged. In response to reductive criticisms of hip hop culture as nihilistic, violent, and inartistic, scholars in a variety of disciplines have endeavored to show the complexities, nuances, and possibilities within hip hop culture. In this article, I trace the connections between broader trends within hip hop scholarship and recent work exploring the relationship between religion and hip hop. Although I look at the impact of Islam and Christianity on hip hop, I am more interested in Anthony Pinn’s attempt to develop a notion of religiosity within hip hop that is not reducible to institutional forms. Although his notion of religion as “the search for a complex identity” does some productive interpretive work, I conclude with some concerns about the ways in which Pinn’s formulation of identity formation is divorced from broader configurations of power.

Religion as communication

From the perspective of social system theory, religion is a label by which it is possible to study the relation between the individual expressions of the sacred, on one hand, and the organized system of meanings to be referred to the sacred, on the other, developing a relatively free chain of communication. Therefore, coherently to this approach, the author suggests to assume the notion of religion as communication: a system of belief challenges the complexity of the world, trying to reduce that, transforming the external differentiation into a internal one. This theoretical approach supports three research strategies: (a) overcoming the disputing question secularization/de-secularization, focusing on the dynamics of the relation between a system of belief and the social change occurring in a social context; (b) going beyond the polarization between tradition and modernity, confuting the assumption that modernity means necessarily the decline of religion; (c) reconsidering religion in the light of the social theory.

The academic study of religions and integrative religious education in Europe

The article provides an overview of the book Integrative religious education in Europe: A study‐of‐religions approach (2007). It introduces the notion of ‘integrative religious education (RE)’, relating to education about different religions in religiously mixed classrooms, as opposed to separative confessional approaches. The article presents some results of my analysis of recent approaches to integrative RE, mainly from England and Sweden. The analysis focuses on aims of integrative RE, the notion of religion and the representation of religions, teaching methods, and the notion of education. Building on recent theory and methodology in the study of religions (Religionswissenschaft) and education, I propose a European framework for integrative RE. The article concludes with a description of recent school‐related initiatives in the study of religions at an international level.

Heidegger’s Notion of Religion: The Limits of Being-Understanding

In the last two decades, the question of religion has become a central concern of many philosophers belonging to the Continental philosophical tradition. As the interest in religion has grown within Continental philosophy, so also has the question of Martin Heidegger’s relationship with religion. This paper poses the question of what religion meant to Martin Heidegger in the development of phenomenology as ontology; how he preconceived the notion of religion and why he eventually denied any authenticity to religion. In engaging with this question, the paper will also attempt to disclose some delimitations of Heidegger’s approach to religion.

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND RELIGION'S COSMOPOLITAN HISTORIES

Matthew Arnold cuts a familiarfigure in narratives of Victorian secularization, although commentators often cast him in contradictory roles. In some accounts we meet him as an elegiac liberal who laments the loss of a no-longer-tenable faith but feels powerless to produce an alternative – “Wandering,” in a famous couplet, “between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born” (Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse” 85–86; see Miller 212–69). Meanwhile other studies portray Arnold as a cautionary example of aggressive counter-secularization, a humanist whose vaunted ideal of “Culture” becomes as absolutist as the religion it is designed to replace (Williams,Culture and Society125–26). What both accounts share, however, is an understanding of secularization as the process whereby a definite thing called religion lost its hold upon European public life, leaving worried intellectuals to search for substitutes. Since the Second World War this view of secularization has come under increased scrutiny from sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and lately some literary critics; yet it remains difficult to imagine nineteenth-century literary history without it, largely because it is a narrative that was first developed by major Victorian writers like Arnold himself. Perhaps the best way, then, to engage Victorian crisis-of-faith writers is to follow the lead of recent commentators like Talal Asad and Michael Kaufmann and reframe the problem in discursive terms. Rather than retrace the rise and fall of two definite things called religion and secularity, Kaufmann argues, we should instead assume from the outset that “[t]here is no idea, person, experience, text, institution, or historical project that could be categorized as essentially . . . secular or religious” and mark how the significance of this opposition gets reordered in “varying discursive contexts” (Kaufmann 608; see Asad 25–26). We can see such thinking at work in recent scholarship that effectively replaces “secularization” with the conceptual emergence of religion as such – that is, the modern redescription of religion as a specific and limited sphere of human life, marked by certain energies (the irrational, the affective), whose role within the public is considered problematic. Anthropologist Timothy Fitzgerald, for instance, suggests that the Enlightenment turn toward regarding religion as the arena of strong personal belief was instrumental in establishing the space of the secular in the first place, insofar as it helped to define by contrast the new public sphere of “this-worldly . . . freedoms, laws, and markets” (Fitzgerald 5). Similarly, historian Callum Brown argues that late eighteenth-century Evangelicalism produced, as a sort of necessary pair, both the sociological idea of religion as an empirically discrete thing and our popular notion of religion as under threat or in decline (C. Brown 1–34).