Postsecular Approach Research Articles

Why the European Union Needs to Clarify and Codify its Engagement with Religion

Religion was outside the European Union’s original remit and the classic secular paradigm predicted it should remain there. However, the opposite happened: religion gradually seeped into the EU legal order. The 2009 Lisbon Treaty created a legal basis and political mandate for EU engagement with religion. This article shows the new treaty provisions represent a shift towards the post-secular paradigm, but implementation of this legal obligation lack coherence and has had mixed success. The case is made for a more systematic and orderly post-secular approach to EU policy and law making, which could help the EU reach certain key objectives.

Every Wholly Other: Postsecular Pluralism in Isabel Rocamora'sFaith

In this article, I undertake a close reading of Isabel Rocamora's 2015 film installation Faith, which shows, on three separate screens, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim men simultaneously performing their morning prayers in three distinct, historically significant sites in the Judean desert. Setting the cinematic and installation properties of the work into dialogue with a number of philosophers (Levinas, Derrida, Cavell), film theorists (Bazin, Deleuze, Chion), and art theorists (Fried, Elkins), I argue that it adopts a postsecular approach to religious pluralism. That is, without being a religious artwork, Faith nevertheless deconstructs the conventional liberal secular approach of universalist neutrality towards inter-religious relations and instead configures the relations between the human figures in the work according to an alterity that requires not cognitive certainty but inter-human faith. The work is thereby consistent with Derrida's notion that tout autre est tout autre (every other is wholly other).

Back to Exile: Current Jewish Critiques of the Jewish State

This article reviews recent books by Jewish thinkers that critique the idea of a Jewish state from the perspective of Jewish exile. It outlines two main approaches. The first, secular approach, rejects the Jewish state in favor of a secular state, seeing Judaism itself as the problem, whether arising from biblical violence or collective identity. The second, post-secular approach, rejects the Jewish state as secular, and finds resources in Jewish tradition for an alternative political vision centered on exile, understood as resistance to sovereignty and violence. This article argues that Jewish opposition to the Jewish state aims to limit sovereignty, integrate Jews into the Middle East space, and recover an exilic Jewish tradition of social ethics and pluralism. The idea of exile thus provides resources for envisioning decolonization and coexistence in Israel–Palestine.

A Post-Secular Approach to Managing Diversity in Liberal Democracies: Exploring the Interplay of Human Rights, Religious Identity, and Inclusive Governance in Western Societies

This article delves into the pressing challenges confronting liberal democracies in Western Europe as they grapple with managing religious diversity, with a specific focus on Muslim minorities. Historically, the secularization paradigm has been at the forefront of managing such diversity; however, its intrinsic limitations become increasingly evident in the context of super-diversity, underscoring the need for a paradigmatic shift toward post-secularization. Central to this discourse are the nuanced concepts of “culturalization of religion” and “religionization of culture”, which illuminate the disparities in treatment between majority and minority religious groups. The article identifies three endogenous limitations intrinsic to liberal democracies: the contested nature of state neutrality vis-à-vis religion and belief, the implementation of this principle through non-neutral judicial tools, and the historically and culturally laden context within which the principle of neutrality is enacted. Drawing on the seminal contributions of Jürgen Habermas to post-secularization theory, the article posits that fostering genuine inclusivity and pluralism in managing religious diversity necessitates a departure from the rigid division between the religious and the secular. Instead, it calls for an acknowledgment of the dialogical relationship between the religious and secular dimensions as they manifest in the public sphere by religious minorities.

The Reactions of Orthodox Churches to Russia’s Aggression towards Ukraine in the Light of the Postsecular Approach to IR Studies

Russia’s war against Ukraine, in which the aggressor has been making use of religion, including theological rhetoric, to achieve its aims, has sparked reactions from Orthodox Churches all over the world. This has led to a revitalisation of social teaching, including discussions on war and peace within the Orthodox tradition. This may well become a further impetus for more in-depth research on religion and international relations, and possibly for more reappraisals of the secular identity of IR studies. An analysis of the attitudes of Orthodox Churches towards this war indicated that the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church, which considers itself the most important centre of Orthodox culture and civilisation, is waning. The reaction of other local churches showed that it is difficult to recognise the Russian Orthodox Church as such an authority. These revaluations may have a significant impact on Russia’s place in the new international order, although much depends on the final outcome of the war it has started. We explain the different reactions of the churches, and we refer to the social teaching(s) on war of the Russian Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate according to their official synodal documents. In this teaching, we can see two different approaches—Russian and Constantinopolitan. In the world of the Orthodox tradition, the former, whose practical expression was the atrocities committed during the ongoing war, seems to be rejected in favour of the latter, Constantinople. Finally, there is the question of how the reaction of the Orthodox Churches (analysed below), which have clashed with secularism in a different manner than the Western Churches, might contribute to the development of a postsecular awareness and, consequently, a postsecular identity for IR studies.

Biblical and Theological Literacy and Victorian Studies Today

AbstractThis article explores the current state of biblical and theological literacy in the discipline of Victorian studies. It observes the ordinarily strong, careful, and impressive work done in recent decades, especially since some scholars have become interested in a postsecular approach to the field. It also, however, presents some egregious lapses in basic biblical and theological literacy that mar otherwise meticulous contemporary scholarship. This article hopes to open a conversation on how such glaring errors and misunderstandings have found their way into peer-reviewed work over and over again and to invite Victorian scholars to commit to finding ways to prevent this in the future.

Paradoxes of an Image: A Pictorial or Postsecular Turn?

The article discusses the interaction between religion and art, focusing on contemporary visual theories, especially on the concept of vitality of image, formulated by such authors as David Freedberg, Thomas William Mitchell and Horst Bredekamp. The article states that the aspect of immediate fate (in the sense of pathos), which is emphasized in the concept of vitality of image, opens up the possibility to discuss the postsecular approach of the pictorial turn (Mitchell). The article recalls a recent situation in one of the Vilnius (Lithuania) churches, when the original sculpture of St. Virgin Mary, created by Lithuanian artist Ksenija Jaroševaitė, was replaced by the copy of widely circulated sculpture of St. Mary of Lourdes, originally created in 1864 by French sculptor Joseph-Hugues Fabisch, at the request of the churchgoers. In the article the latter situation also serves as a representative model, revealing the paradoxicality of an image, when the aesthetic judgement is changed by the unreflected recognition of the power of the image. The article discusses the problem of the ontological status of an image, admitting that the condition of emancipation of the image implicated in the concept of its vitality leads to the condition of the uncanny and questions related to such fundamental controversies as distinctions between creator and image or vitality and artefact.

Mapping Post-Secular Islamic Liberation Theology

This article argues that the post-secular turn is the new social analysis that shapes the politics of the impoverized2 in Islamic liberation theology. In this article, I suggest that, given the essentialism and determinism characterizing much of the contemporary studies of religion and secularism, a direct articulation of a post-secular approach from an Islamic liberation theology perspective is both inevitable and necessary. Such an approach can offer new meaning for both religion and secularism by engaging with the hegemony of secularism in relation to the state and society to envision a politics of the impoverized.

Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James by Ashley C. Barnes

Reviewed by: Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James by Ashley C. Barnes Shirley Samuels ASHLEY C. BARNES Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. 240 pp. For Ashley Barnes, to read the American novel carefully, or, perhaps, deeply, is to employ elements that resemble worship. Developing this idea further as she explores nineteenth-century reading practices, Barnes claims that interpreting literature can invoke communion: "Communion … stands as an alternative to the apparently deeper love of mutual revelation that might be figured by the heart-swapping merge Melville imagines" (2). By her title, Barnes invokes and rephrases the classic work by Leslie Fiedler, and she explains it this way: "The great American love story that was canonized by Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel is a tale built on the frustrated longing for revelatory union" (5). Using a broad set of interpretive goals—"what does it mean to know and love a text?"—the book sets out to weave a story in between what have been read as the opposite poles of interpretive strategy, namely the poles of ethical and historicist critical practice. It is that gap between an attachment that she celebrates and an approach that folds ethics into historicism that the book repeatedly attempts to bridge; yet, even as it argues for an expansion of possibilities, an intriguing resilience keeps these elements apart. While the author attempts objectivity, the book proposes to guide "a literary ethicist who wants to avoid the bad interpretation of colonizing sympathy or of ideological unveiling" (7). Even as the book argues for a "literary-ethical historicism," a "hybrid of historicism and formalism," it does not quite hide its discomfort with presentations that remain in the camp of historical readings (7). According to that discomfort, historicism might be excused for being somewhat random, but its "crime" lies in the "aha" moments of "ideological unveiling" that do not promote community. In the attempt to assuage what often appears literally as an ideological difference between the histories of Catholic and Protestant ideology in the United States, the book allows value to historicism when it announces that "historical contextualizing can forge real intimacy with literature" (8). Under the influence of [End Page 97] such critics as Rita Felski, the author might be seen to present such a statement as a major concession. I'm sympathetic with the desire for bridge building, even as the title of the book indicates its ambition. Further, the careful use of chiasmic statements indicates the oppositions that the book seeks to unpack and that it investigates through a detailed account of critical perspectives in its first and last chapters. If found neither through the "spirit that vivified a historical text" nor the "historical motor that animated a spiritualized text," then it proposes to describe what remains within the opposition: "the idea that the text's deep power must be either exposed or submitted to" (9). Drawing on nineteenth-century belief practices, the "ideology of transcendence finds its emotional justification in the Protestant standard of revelation" (11), which Barnes finds deeply flawed even as she retains some desire for it. Since "the idea of transcendence has served to extract a text from history" (11), she wonders if it is possible to re-embed texts within their histories and still find a form of communion that invokes, without solving, the fraught relations that continue to divide such Protestant yearnings from the doctrines of Catholicism. Interestingly, the novel becomes the necessary battleground for describing a "historicist literary ethics" that fuels what the author also describes as a "postsecular approach" (11). In her elaboration of this position, Barnes invokes the "familiar genres of the sentimental, the romantic, and the realist" novel (13). The didacticism of the oppositional constructions continues as she comments that the "scholarship on sentimentality … can be reductive and high-handed" (21). Such scholarship especially confounds her because it "treats as naïve the view that reading is an encounter with otherness." The concept of communion, for Barnes, "avoids the potential aggression of revelatory reading" (22). The book's paired juxtapositions include some surprising choices as...

Postsecular Style

Abstract In Culture and Redemption (2007), Tracy Fessenden argues that the development of postsecular critique requires a more thorough reckoning with the secular assumptions that so durably structure the categories and grammars of critical thought. As Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman have since elaborated, such a reckoning entails the radical reinvention of postsecularism’s critical style. But what might these more pointedly situated and styled voices of postsecular critique sound like? Recent books of Americanist criticism by Coviello, Lindsay V. Reckson, and Phillip Maciak suggest new possibilities by coupling alternate cultural histories of the nineteenth century with instructive experiments in critical style. Each of these studies begins with a similar conviction: that stepping outside the immanent frame of secularism is impossible. Yet Coviello, Reckson, and Maciak all work to locate and create meaningful cracks in this frame. By flagging the hegemonic secular presumptions inherent to their own critical authority, by thinking, feeling, and writing from an unusually intimate proximity to their subjects, these three critics model how others might similarly evolve and enliven the postsecular approach.

The Problem of Representation of Religious in Contemporary Art. Secular and Postsecular Perspectives

The article deals with the relationship between religion and contemporary art, discussing their configurations from two different perspectives – the one of secularization and the postsecular one. The author mantains that in the perspective of secularization the fields of religion and art are treated as autonomous and separate, therefore the passage to postsecular condition implicates the destruction of principle law of autonomy, by this opening the possibility of the interlaying of the contexts of religion and art. The article comes to the conclusion that postsecular approach supposes that the relationship between religion and contemporary art becomes possible only by accepting the refusal of the direct representation and this means that religious implications can be recognised not as the representations of religious contents, but rather as the track of them, which can assume the forms of profanation or reflection on the experience of secularization.

Postsecular Plurality in the Middle East: Expanding the Postsecular Approach to a Power Politics of Becoming

Embedded in a critically adapted version of Jürgen Habermas’ postsecular approach, this article analyzes empirically and evaluates normatively the role of religion in the Middle East. Integrating and adapting William Connolly’s understanding of political change as power politics of becoming, the argument is that an authoritarian pluralism is evolving that, in contrast to secular nationalism and Political Islam, can be called postsecular insofar as it attempts to integrate more strata of the population into the public discourse, regardless of their religious creed but based on interreligious plurality. The Document on Human Fraternity, signed 2019 in Abu Dhabi, is a prime example of that postsecular trend embedded in power politics. The article concludes that the turmoil of the Arab Spring did not pave the way for democracy but for authoritarian and partisan versions of a postsecular public that try to accommodate the plurality of the Middle East.

POST-SECULARITY AS A SUBJECT OF RESEARCH: PROBLEMS OF CONCEPTUALIZATION AND PLURALITY OF APPROACHES

Today, in many countries around the world, the role of religion in the public sphere is strengthening. This causes the methodological problems of the theory of secularization, which claimed the gradual and irreversible decline of religion. At the same time, the processes of religious revival in societies that have undergone secularization do not lead to the restoration of religion in the forms that preceded it. To denote this state of society, which occurs after secularization, Jürgen Habermas proposed to use the term "post-secular". A number of both foreign and domestic scientists became interested in this issue. But the purposeful study of postsecularity is still in its infancy and is mostly descriptive. In the scientific works devoted to its research, insufficient attention is focused on specific characteristics of postsecular societies. Therefore, there is a need to generalize these characteristics in order to better understand post-secular society. To achieve this goal, the article analyzes some conceptual approaches to the study of postsecularity. These approaches argue that the "return" of religion does not preclude the preservation of a powerful (or even dominant) secularization cluster in society. Post-secularization is a move forward and the creation of a new system characterized by religious freedom, pluralism, competition between different denominations, rather than a return to the traditions of the pre-modern era. In a post-secular society, as the authors of the works analyzed in the article prove, religion has all the opportunities from secular power for its development. At the same time, there is a reduction in the role of religious institutions and the individualization of religious practices, ie the "privatization" of religion, which is an element of secularization. But this "privatization" is significantly different from secularization, because it is not due to coercion, but to pluralism of choice. According to many researchers, a post-secular situation is possible under the condition of ideological pluralism and parity between religious and non-religious people, when each party has the opportunity to propagate its opinion, but does not impose it, when there is no place for privileged and discriminated, but awareness of mutual coexistence. That is, post-secularity is possible only in democratic and legal societies. The post-secular situation is also characterized by religious competition, intensification of missionary work, manifestations of fundamentalism, globalization of religious piety, transformation of religion into a commodity and the emergence (mostly in the West) of the phenomenon used to refer to the term "spirituality". The situation of post-secularism is a situation of uncertainty, when it is not known how the processes of interaction between the secular and the religious will take place in the future, and it is impossible to make any predictions about how stable this situation is. As the analysis carried out in the article shows, the post-secular approach has not become a full-fledged theory, but is perceived mostly as a program of what should be paid attention to, as a certain correction and continuation of the secularization approach. But with its help, scientists are trying to describe religious processes in modern societies.

Quebec’s Act Respecting the Laicity of the State and the Demise of Religion: Scandal or Trial?

On June 16, 2019, Quebec’s National Assembly voted and adopted an Act respecting the laicity of the State, which prohibits a wide variety of government and civil officials, including public school teachers, from wearing religious symbols at work. The act also establishes laïcité as a fundamental principle superseding the exercise of certain rights and freedoms and prevailing over the provisions of any subsequent law. The proposed bill was debated heatedly in Quebec and encountered stiff opposition in the rest of Canada. This article analyzes five factors that were interwoven in the debate: identity, modernity, demise of religion, laïcité activism, and gender equality. The act reflects the difficult journey of a society trying to enforce and protect its unique cultural, social, and political profile within an overwhelmingly English-speaking and multicultural continent. However, the debate and the act itself reveal modern assumptions shared by both the proponents and the opponents regarding the private nature of religious beliefs and practices. From a theological perspective, the article argues that a post-secular approach to contemporary politics would be better suited to a society that, like many others, is facing major local and global issues. Such an approach would entail the possibility for religions and other symbolic sources of meaning to contribute to public debates. Jürgen Habermas and others have defined conditions for the implementation of this approach and called for a “complementary learning process.” The opponents to Quebec’s laïcité act and advocates for religion should see beyond scandal and understand this event as a trial proving religion’s capacity to make positive and fruitful contributions to public life.

Divinely significant: towards a postsecular approach to the materiality of popular religion in Asia

ABSTRACT The material embeddedness of the divine in the objects and sites of popular religion in Asia establishes the grounds for a conflict between devotees and heritage practitioners – the same objects are central to the practice of each but each hones in on them via a radically different ontology. While in principle offering an even-handed consideration of all aspects of a thing’s meaning, the secular-rationalist underpinning of the practice of significance-assessment in heritage management acts to marginalise or even efface the eruptively miraculous qualities of divine sites and objects. It serves, in other words, as a regime of insignificance. Against this background, I argue that the posthuman turn in the humanities and social sciences, and in particular its openness to forms of agency, vibrancy and vitality in the object world, offers prospects for a kind of heritage practice newly comfortable with the vibrancy that belief in the supernatural lends to the things of popular religion. There has, I suggest, never been a better time for heritage practice to get over its problem with the supernatural.

The Making of a Literary-Theological Mind in China

Yang Huilin is famous for his pioneering work in integrating theology with literary studies in China. To fully elucidate the significance of his work, in this article I analyze the early thought of Yang against the cultural context of his time. I submit that there are profound similarities and interesting differences between the American post-secular approach and the Chinese theological approach in literary studies.

Postsecular return of religion: Jewish and Zen elements in Zadie Smith’s The autograph man

This article elucidates the substantial value of Jewish and Zen elements in The autograph man (2002) by approaching the novel through the lens of postsecularism. Postsecularism herein indicates the return of religion in contemporary literature, pointing to the co-existing and co-creative relationship between the religious and the secular in a modern context. Such a postsecular approach provides a pertinent framework to account for Smith’s productive adaptation of some religious motifs, which shape the identity of its protagonist Alex-Li Tandem and construct the narrative with their meanings and significance. This article accordingly demonstrates the book’s postsecular theme by analyzing Alex’s negotiation with his Jewish and Zen traditions, and the novelistic adaptation of the ten sefirot of Kabbalah in Judaism and the Zen classic The pictures of ten bulls. It concludes that Smith’s postsecularism provides insights into a modern religious identity as well as the substantial role religion plays in a contemporary discourse.

Post-secular accommodation and Catholic health care: corporate identity and the public good

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the relevance of Jurgen Habermas’ ‘post-secular’ perspective in fostering inclusive conditions for a reasonable accommodation between the secular state and a Catholic facility in the provision of health care. It discusses the ethical merits and contradictions represented by the merger of a public psychiatric hospital with a Catholic rehabilitative hospital. The paper recognizes merits in the Catholic approach to health care, particularly its emphasis on social justice and the common good. However, it argues that from a post-secular perspective, the ‘official’ status given by this merged organization to Catholic healthcare ethics is wrong. That formally identifying the ethical priorities of a publicly funded hospital with a particular belief system limits possibilities for the reasonable accommodation of normative differences. Thus, the paper argues that re-framing Catholic health ethics within a more inclusive, non-denominational, post-secular approach toward the interpretation of health care, more fairly represents the public good.

Postsecular Jewish Theology: Reading Gordon And Buber

Considerable scholarly research has been conducted in an attempt to determine whether A. D. Gordon and Martin Buber are to be categorized as religious or secular philosophers. This study seeks to characterize them as postsecular theologians who propound a hybrid theology, rejecting traditional religion on the one hand and atheism on the other. Opening with presentation of the postsecular approach that developed in the social sciences in recent years, with emphasis on secular spaces in Israel, this interdisciplinary study proceeds to a postsecular reading of Buber’s and Gordon’s works, proposing that such a reading reveals the possible relevancy of their works to present postsecular discourses in Israel.