Protestant Culture Research Articles

Have You Eaten?

Abstract Throughout history, empires have promised perpetual peace and justice for all; however, they have constantly bathed in blood while expanding their colonies and control. This paper intends to explore the theological concept of peacemaking from the experiences of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (uccp) and the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea (prok), both of which suffered from U.S. (neo)colonialism. It also aims to study how we can live faithfully amidst the empire by decolonizing theology and the church. To achieve this, I will begin by reviewing the concept of peace as proclaimed by empires, from the Roman to the American, and contrast it with the biblical concept of peace. This will be followed by analyzing and evaluating the impact of the received colonial American Protestant cultures and the churches’ responses to the colonial gospel. The final part will propose peace as a way of peacemaking amid the empire. This paper suggests that the concept of peacemaking is essential to decolonizing theology, particularly the theology of sallim (life-giving).

Shaming in digital discourses in Nigeria: Performative deliberation and agency in abba Kyari’s corruption allegation

This article examines the use of tweets, humorous texts, and memes for shaming purposes in the corruption case of Abba Kyari, a Nigerian police chief. Using insights from Arabella Lyon’s notions of agency and performative deliberation, the article argues that internet social media platforms such as Twitter have evolved into powerful cultural sites of protests and resistance for Nigerian users. Findings reveal that cultural forms of communication such as memes, humor, and tweets become tools of shaming used by Nigerian netizens to register online protests in the country. Further, the study reveals that social media platforms have made reallocation of power possible for ordinary Nigerians to have their say on political issues and to stage protests against political corruption and marginalization in society. The study orients Nigerians and others to online protest culture rhetoric in Nigeria and its social and political functions.

Queering solidarity: trans-sectional feminism from ‘babe theory’ to trans-masculine protest

ABSTRACT Women and revolutions have always had a thorny relationship. Women’s mere presence in the revolutionary public sphere and within protest culture has been the site of much controversy. More recently, from the Occupy Movement to the Women’s Marches, from Black Lives Matter to Femen, women protests have turned to performative practices to bring to light the material conditions of resistance within a framework informed by queer and trans. theories, transnational feminism, Indigenous resistance, and eco-critical struggles. This article looks at these performative and queering strategies within progressive revolutions today. It also analyses how decolonising solidarity amplifies or deepens our understanding of intersectional feminism.

Профсоюзы: от насильственного социального протеста к мирным акциям

The article discusses the evolution of the activity of trade unions, which is manifested in their desire to give the protest movement not a spontaneous and often destructive character, but to see a peaceful and creative meaning in the expression of the demands of workers, to form not only among their members, but also in society a kind of culture of social protest . This explains the understanding by the authorities of the need to legalize the activities of trade unions. It is also shown that trade unions are assisted in the formation of such a culture of social protest by authoritative international organizations, in particular, the ILO and the UN, and the very activity of trade unions is based on the rights of workers enshrined in the International Bill of Human Rights.

Riches and Poverty in English Protestant Culture, c.1550–1800: Vernacularising the Parable of Dives and Lazarus

Riches and Poverty in English Protestant Culture, c.1550–1800: Vernacularising the Parable of Dives and Lazarus

Warriors of the City-State

This essay outlines how religious ideas and practices shaped the activism of Chin Wan, known as the “godfather of localism” in Hong Kong. While Chin's role in the rise of the localist wave of the 2010s is well known, his role as a religious figure has been completely ignored. As the earliest exponent of “valiant warrior” (yung mou 勇武) and “be water” militant tactics based on Confucian and Daoist narratives, he had a deep influence on Hong Kong protest culture during and after the Umbrella movement of 2014. This case undermines conventional secularist narratives of Hong Kong social movements and offers new insights into the politics of identity in Hong Kong.

“Freedom is not free”: Visual activism and dispersed resistance in Hong Kong’s anti-extradition bill protests

Graffiti is widely used in social movements globally, yet media and communication research disproportionately focus on the role of social and new media technologies in protest movements. In this paper I ask why university students – a tech-savvy generation – resorted to graffiti and why campus graffiti were not widely circulated on social media during the Hong Kong anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) protests. I argue that graffiti enables dispersed resistance and is one way to mobilize, voice dissent, and preserve memory in an increasingly surveilled and evolving repressive media environment. I pursue this argument by analyzing graffiti photographed on university campuses during the anti-ELAB protests. Situating graffiti within protest culture in Hong Kong, I conclude that graffiti are not always circulated on digital/social media to reach a broader audience. In times of crises, not reaching a wider audience is a manifestation of dispersed resistance in a hybrid media environment.

THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR: WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR RUSSIA, UKRAINE, AND THE WEST?

On November 16, 2023, Dr. Ibrahim Muradov presented The Russo-Ukrainian War: What Does it Mean for Russia, Ukraine, and the West? at this year’s West Coast Security Conference. The presentation was followed by a question-and-answer period with questions from the audience and CASIS Vancouver executives. The key points discussed were that Ukrainian society's push for a pro-Western policy has shaped its foreign relations, despite international reluctance to integrate Ukraine into Western structures; Ukraine's strong protest culture, especially in western regions, has significantly influenced its political direction and resistance to Russian dominance; and Ukraine developed a long-term strategy for economic, military and identity strengthening and this long-term strategy precipitated the full-scale invasion and forced the Kremlin to act before the strategy was complete.
 
 Received: 01-07-2024
 Revised: 01-26-2024

The Cultural Significance of Colour in Protestant Missionary World Maps, ca. 1840-1940

ABSTRACT Colour is one of the most powerful tools in the cartographer’s toolbox and can enhance the quality, clarity, and beauty of maps. Both in Protestant culture specifically and Western culture more widely, a visual artistic culture developed from the Middle Ages until the modern age in which colours designated specific, sometimes contradictory, ideals and concepts. Using late nineteenth and early twentieth century Protestant missionary world maps as a case study, this article shows how mapmakers used colour schemes to visualise Protestant world views about the global spread of the gospel as well as Western colonial perceptions of non-European cultures. Discussion of map colours in contemporary missionary reports, fiction and magazines corroborates and contextualises ‘map users'’ shared understanding of the cultural connotations of map colours.

Образ женщины в эпоху Реформации: эволюция взглядов

The paper addresses gender aspect of the history and culture of the Reformation era, highlighting new as well as traditional accents in the perceiving and comprehending the image of woman in countries of protestant culture. The author touches upon understudied issue of evolution in viewing of women and women`s self-perception during one of the key eras for the establishing of the modern Europe. The chosen problematics deserves closer attention in a number of concerns — in terms of history, culture studies and theology — and is noteworthy for a close and subtle interaction between Reformation and women as its important actors. Just as the Reformation affected the condition and comprehension of the woman`s image, women influenced the very course of historic events of this period and its ideological content. Against the backdrop of numerous names of prominent reformers, much more represented in academic studies, we see the clear necessity of a research to detect active female participants of the Reforms and to shed light on their activities to fully appreciate women as actual reformeresses and their contribution into reinvention of the women`s status in society and private life. The author carries out analysis of the women`s position from different social strata and their functions in the field of politics, labor, family life, religious and creative activity and comes to the conclusions about their status amelioration in one cases and about new challenges they had to be dealing with. To this end the paper looks at the estimations reformers gave to the women`s role, which is important for determining certain characteristic features of Reformation — retrograde alongside progressive ones.

Cultural Protest as a Means

Cultural Protest as a Means

Christian discourse of the English series «Robin of Sherwood» (1984–1986) and its reflection in the modern literary internet space of Russia

The subject of the study is the Christian discourse of the English TV series «Robin of Sherwood» (1984–1986). As a methodological basis for the scientific work, a philosophical-hermeneutic approach is used, presented, in particular, in the works of W. Dilthey, H.-G. Gadamer and M.M. Bakhtin. The most important structure of understanding is the principle of the «hermeneutic circle», which assumes that the text as a whole is understood through each of its parts, and the part through the whole. In addition, understanding arises in the process of «dialogical cognition», a dialogue between the author, as well as the text as a subject, and the reader (viewer). The content of the series «Robin of Sherwood» is analyzed in the specific historical conditions of the 1980s. This is a period of growing social and cultural protest caused in Europe and the United States by the policy of neoconservatism and the reduction of social guarantees. Many phenomena previously classified as counterculture are becoming fashionable and becoming mainstream, including the legacy of paganism, pre-Christian mysticism and mythology. The article shows that the creators of the series intended to present Robin Hood not only as a leader of social or national resistance, but also as a defender of the ancient pagan religion against the new, Christian. An analysis is given of episodes from the first two seasons of the film, which trace criticism of the Christian church as an institution, as well as specific monks and clergy. In the third season, the critical pathos towards the church practically disappears. However, the author comes to the conclusion that it is the first two seasons that demonstrate the development of the moral consciousness of the characters from pagan to Christian, and Christian discourse is present in the film text, perhaps contrary to the original intention of its creators. There is also a reception of the Christian discourse of the series in the Russian and, more broadly, Russian-language literary Internet space, which is reflected in discussions on relevant literary and historical forums, as well as in works of fan literature

Religious Materialities, Aesthetics, and Protests in Urban Poland: Religious Icons and the Re-Emergence of Civil Society

In this paper, we reflect on the creativity and social change nexus in urban Poland by focusing on the recent religion-linked materialities in Kraków. Such materialities, or religious icons, are directly involved with transformations and the emergence of a new type of Polish civil society and activism. Therefore, we elaborate on the notion of religious icons involved in the recent re-emergence of the protest culture in Poland. We reframe them in terms of powerful socio-religious mediators that open the way to re-imagining and claiming new (re)configurations between social and religious fields in Poland. We acknowledge the role played by affective, creative, and semantic modalities of aesthetics vis-à-vis social change and suggest rethinking the link between creativity and religion, which we consider emblematic of current epistemologies of post-secular urbanities in Poland. We claim that the religion-creativity nexus should be included in the analytical framework examining contemporary developments of Polish civil society in general and social movements in particular.

Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano: The Songbook of 1968 in Italy

Abstract This article examines how the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (NCI) – a leftist collective founded in Milan in 1962 by Gianni Bosio and Roberto Leydi – used their journal to theorize oral cultures as instruments of class consciousness. By doing so, they contributed to the political movements of the 1960s in Italy. The NCI worked to construct a culture of protest through recorded albums, live performances and field research into oral practices. Despite their prominence as the ‘music of 1968’ in Italy, the NCI first came together as a journal. The ten issues of the group’s journal, Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano, published between 1962 and 1968, provided materialist and ethnomusicological analysis of oral cultures, as well as the repertoires of rural singers like Giovanna Daffini, and nourished the work of young songwriters. I argue that this journal fostered new militant approaches to culture, documented the artistic vitality of the labouring classes and helped foment the revolutionary sentiments of 1968.

“The Great Lesson of May '68 Is That Violence Pays”

Abstract From the après-mai 1968 through the end of the 1970s, successive groups of French radicals legitimized revolutionary violence and developed a militant protest culture that challenged the state's monopoly on violence. Most scholars have presented political violence in 1970s France as bound to the trajectories of organized Maoist and Trotskyist groups and as the product of revolutionary ideology that was overcome by experience. This article traces how a cohort of radicals continued to articulate discourses of self-defense, counterviolence, and violence as revolution of the self well into the 1970s. Activists did so because their experiences of conflict confirmed the salience of violent struggle. The article contributes to the historical study of violent phenomena by tracing an approach that integrates the analysis of understandings of violence and experiences of conflictual politics.

A “Savior of Isolation”: The Interrelationship between American Isolationism and the Idea of “Manifest Destiny” and Its Embodiment in Pre-World War I Diplomacy

Isolationist ideology made the United States at the beginning of its development more of an island encircled by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans than a New World. However, after the formation of the American nation, “Manifest Destiny” became deeply embedded in the national beliefs based on Protestant culture over time. The former laid the foundation for the American position on internal and external affairs, while the latter determined the way Americans interacted with the outside world. At least until they took center stage on the world stage after World War I, isolation seemed to be the golden rule for Americans. Did “manifest destiny” put an end to isolationism, or did isolationism give rise to “divine destiny”? Or did the two complement each other and finally play a role in specific foreign policy decisions? These are the questions that accompany the history of the establishment and development of the United States and are worth exploring.

Teorihistorisk skitsering af den nye protestcyklus

The article proposes a reading of the new cycle of protests that erupted in 2011 with the so-called Arab Spring and the square occupation movements in Souther Europe before moving on to the US with the Occupy movement. The years since 2011 have been marked by a significant rise in the numer of protests, riots and revolts across the world with the years 2011, 2014 and 2019 as preliminary high points. The pandemic and the repressive anti-rebellion measures put in place during the pandemic does not seem to have stopped protests from continuing to take place. The article challenges readings of the contemporary protests that fault them for being desperate, defensive and unpolitical proposing a reading using the notion of refusal put forth by Maurice Blanchot and Dionys Mascolo in 1958 as a prims for understanding the emergence of a new anti-political protest culture.

”Memes uden mål”

Beginning from a major retrospective exhibition at the prestigious Centre Pompidou in Paris in the summer of 2021, this article discusses the German artist-theorist Hito Steyerl’s political aesthetics and, more specifically, the idea of the art strike as a strategy of resistance. Through a historically contextualizing analysis of two key artworks, Strike I (2010) and Strike II (2012), the article argues that the proper theoretical framework for understanding Steyerl’s work is not post-Occupy “strike art” but rather the cultural logic of the “era of riots.” Thus, the article claims that Steyerl’s art strike resonates in form and content with extra-institutional and “memetic” forms of contemporary protest culture.

Nationalism in Globalization

This paper, following the method of systematic balanced thinking, studies nationalism and nation-states amidst globalization, proposing the following main points: First, moving to the center of the world stage, we should correctly understand nationalism and nation-states, and represent the moral, theoretical and technological commanding heights. Second, nationalism is a double-edged sword, the national liberation movement in history was essentially a movement against imperialism, extreme nationalism is the root of world turmoil, and national self-determination and national independence movement is not a fundamental choice for the healthy development of human society. Third, nation-states have universality and particularity of interests, the essence of nation-states is to concentrate national strength to defend national rights and interests, and to maintain social order and the rule of public life. Fourth, the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America are two nation-states with distinctive characteristics in the world. The United States, as the largest emerging nation-state, highlights Protestant culture in its nationality, adheres to power politics and the rule of survival of the fittest, and pays more respect to modern laws and regulations in national governance. China, as the largest ancient nation-state, highlights farming culture in its nationality, adheres to the philosophy of living in harmony with nature, and is greatly influenced by natural forces or traditions in terms of national governance. The cooperation-competition development with “Bipolar Coexistence” of China and the United States results from the law of human social development. Fifth, to cope with the current complex and sensitive international situation, it is necessary to correctly judge and choose the future trend and power of nation-states in the world. The countries in our world are multi-ethnic and multi-religious. Peaceful coexistence, mutual benefit, free choice of residence and mutual respect are the only correct choices for the survival and development of peoples of all ethnic groups around the world. The action and reaction of universality and nationality promote the development process of the Community of Shared Future for Mankind. Sixth, the key to national equality lies in equality of people, and the key to building the Community of Shared Future for Mankind lies in the consciousness of equality, which requires that we adhere to the unity of universality and particularity.

Institutional Inversion and “Demand-Side” Versus “Supply-Side” Views of Culture

Institutional inversion occurs when collective attitudes lead to institutions that in turn lead to behaviors that are the opposite of those attitudes. We illustrate this process with the case of debt, in which antidebtor attitudes in Protestant (vs. Catholic) cultures led to institutions that fostered higher household indebtedness. We describe three factors hypothesized to make institutional inversion more likely: erroneous lay theories (particularly those that take a “demand-side” vs. a “supply-side” view of culture), moralization, and narrow construals (in terms of time, goals, and populations considered).