Reality Of Religion Research Articles

Real Violence and Real Religion in Latin America

Real Violence and Real Religion in Latin America

Gift Giving and Power Perspectives: Testing the role of statue devotion in England and Spain

This paper addresses the problematic nature of religious materiality in Western discourses, illustrated by its typical relegation to being representational instead of sensual, embodied or tangible. Two ethnographic accounts highlight the prominent role that materiality plays in vernacular religious contexts in contemporary England and Spain. With a focus on offerings and gift giving, the practices and performances that take place in relation to statue forms of Our Lady of Avalon (the Glastonbury Goddess) in her temple, and the Virgin of Alcala de los Gazules, Andalusia, in her shrine, exemplify an aspect of the lived, everyday reality of religion. In these contexts, in tension with religious doctrine, the relationships that take place between statues and devotees show that instead of being mere objects, statues of the Goddess and Virgin are subjective, relational participants in ceremony, rites and ritual, and they play central roles in how human relationships with the divine are maintained and negotiated. Using the discourses of animism and fetishism to test the role of materiality, this paper further considers how making offerings to statues exemplifies a form of Western animism where objects and subjects bring each other into co-inspired, co-relational being through encounters. Here, ‘subjecthood’ is achieved through relationships and relational encounters, and a multiplicity of ontological possibilities emerge which challenge commonly accepted modern dualisms, i.e. subject/object, mind/matter.

“SEE MOM IT IS REAL”

Lewis (2003) identifies three strategies of legitimation used by New Religions: rationality-tradition-charisma. Using the case of Jediism and the uk Censuses of 2001 and 2011, this article refutes the argument that the invented-ness, or self-conscious creation, of some New Religious Movements prevents their strategic reference to tradition for legitimation. Instead, this article explores a more contemporary understanding of tradition that takes into account how it can work online. Virtual ethnographic methods are used to examine the e-mail campaigns prior to the Censuses, as well as subsequent discussions about Jediism on Twitter and forum boards. This research shows how social media provides new sources of “tradition” that individuals and groups can reference to “prove” that Jediism is a really real religion. More formal, external, mechanisms of legitimation such as the uk and usa tax laws, charitable status and the uk Racial and Religious Hatred Act are explored as providers of “tradition” and authority – even when it is shown that they are negatively commenting on Jediism’s status as a legitimate religion. The “snowball” -like accumulation of legitimacy through interactions between informal and formal mechanisms shows that tradition is still referred to, even by “Invented Religions”.

Precepts v/s Praxis: Ambedkar‘s Navayana and its Practices among the Dalit-Buddhists of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India

“Buddhism is the only real religion and those who do not accept this must revise their definition of religion”

Religion, Spirituality and Health Care: Confusions, Tensions, Opportunities

This paper raises some issues about understanding religion, religions and spirituality in health care to enable a more critical mutual engagement and dialogue to take place between health care institutions and religious communities and believers. Understanding religions and religious people is a complex, interesting matter. Taking into account the whole reality of religion and spirituality is not just about meeting specific needs, nor of trying to ensure that religious people abandon their distinctive beliefs and insights when they engage with health care institutions and policies. Members of religious groups and communities form an integral part of the structure and fabric of health care delivery, whether as users or in delivery capacities. Religion is both facilitator and resistor, friend and critic, for health care institutions, providers and workers.

Speech and the Sacred

Some scholars have argued that religiously injurious speech poses a serious problem for secular liberal thought. It has been suggested that secular liberal thought and political practice often misrecognize the nature of the injury involved in speech that violates the sacred and that much secular thought about religious injury (and free exercise more generally) is premised on unacknowledged Protestant conceptions of what real religion is. In this essay, I argue against the ideas that secular liberalism tends to treat religion only as a matter of freely chosen belief and that the unchosen, habituated nature of much religious experience raises a problem for the defense of speech that violates the sacred. I argue that secular thought and practice should remain very concerned about the social and political harms of speech directed unambiguously at social groups but need not eliminate the gap between religious attachments and religious persons.

On affirmations of the realities of religion and atheism

On affirmations of the realities of religion and atheism

The debate within: a Sufi critique of religious law, tasawwuf and politics in Mughal India

This essay is an effort to understand the position taken by the celebrated seventeenth-century Chishtī Sufi ‘Abd al-Rahmān Chishtī in his Mir’āt al-Asrār, a hagiographical dictionary (tazkira) of past Sufi holy men. I have read this tazkira together with ‘Abd al-Rahmān’s other writings but focused in particular on his long preface to this work in which he elaborates his definition of tasawwuf and asks what the real religion of the Sufi should be. ‘Abd al-Rahmān also undertakes a far-reaching reassessment of key elements in the wider traditions of Indian Islam. Drawing on a range of Indian and Middle Eastern influences, he rejects the narrow law-centred formulation of the Naqshbandīs and offers a distinctive vision of Chishtī spiritual support at the heart of the Mughal political order. His work opens up for us the wider landscape of religious debate and contestation that characterized Indian Islam during the Mughal era, which later generations of historians have overlooked in their preoccupation with more ‘conservative’ strains of Muslim thought.

“My” Bonhoeffer: Discipleship, Peace, Freedom

“My” Bonhoeffer: Discipleship, Peace, Freedom

Doubt as Methodology and Object in the Phenomenology of Religion

The Holy Grail in the phenomenology of religion (and, to a lesser extent, the sociology of religion) is a definition of religion that actually works, but, so far, this seems to have been elusive. Classical definitions of religion—substantive (e.g. Tylor) and functionalist (e.g. Durkheim)—fail, in part because they attempt to be in three places at once, as it were: they attempt to distinguish religion from non-religion; they attempt to capture what religions have in common; and they attempt to grasp the 'heart', or 'core', of religion. Consequently, family resemblance definitions of religion replace certainty and precision for its own sake with a more pragmatic and heuristic approach, embracing doubt and putting forward definitions that give us a better understanding (Verstehen) of religion. In this paper, I summarise some 'new' definitions of religion that take this approach, before proposing and defending another one, defining religion as non-propositional and 'apophatic', thus accepting that doubt is central to religion itself, as well as to the analysis of religion.

Religion as Sedition: On Liberalism’s Intolerance of Real Religion

Abstract‘Political liberalism’ claims to manifest the real meaning of democracy, including crucially the toleration of religion – it is through the history of this toleration that it acquired its current form and power. Political liberalism is however, I argue, more hostile to religion than was ever dreamt possible in the philosophy of avowedly anti-clerical Enlightenment Liberalism. For it refuses point-blank ever to engage in serious debate with religion. It considers it of no consequence. It allows religion only to be ‘outward forms’, meaningless ceremony. Political liberalism annihilates religion.The time has come for Western intellectuals to re-assess their allegiance to a tacit (or indeed explicit) secularism, and to overturn the annihilation of religion. Religion or spirituality that brings forth the best of humanity may well in fact be essential to addressing the cultural crisis of our times. Political liberalism is the most extreme fundamentalism of them all, in its insistence upon every politica...

Religion, Truth, Mystery and Morality

In spite of protestations to the contrary, mere ideology is a large part of what is usually presented as a religion. Members of the faith group are told that they are obliged to acknowledge these ideas, hypotheses, conjectures and definitions, and perhaps even recite them in public. Such a state of affairs can lead, at best, to cosy feelings that spring from a supposed unity of belief, and, at worst, to appalling intolerance of anyone or any idea that threatens this unity. Other grave moral problems also arise when hypotheses are presented as ‘the faith.’ What follows is an attempt to confront some of the problems and to note how they arise, while, at the same time, arguing that real religion is about trust in Mystery.

Constitutional Maintenance and Religious Sensibility in the 1920s: Rethinking the Constitutionalist Response to Progressivism

Observers of American politics often have noted and usually derided a so-called “cult of the Constitution” or “Constitution worship.” Supposedly benighted participants in it, especially those of the early twentieth century, are typically treated as Babbitt-like, simple-minded “professional patriots” who “fetishize” the Constitution and need not be taken very seriously.1 To be sure, conscientious believers would not confuse the earthly city with the heavenly city, nor an American “civil religion” (if there is one) with a real religion.2 And we should be ever alert that what is deemed constitutional at any given moment is not necessarily just or pious. Still, the modern condescension toward religiously informed defenders of the Constitution is too easy and too quickly alleges idolatry. It contrasts sharply with the long-established view that maintenance of a political regime involves ideas and sensibilities associated most readily in the Western tradition with religion. Religious ideas and sensibilities were prominent in the 1920s' response of American constitutionalists to the two previous decades of Progressivism. Constitutionalists recognized Progressivism as a major turning point because it attacked or dismissed long-established principles of American thought and politics, including natural rights, limited and representative government, federalism, and the separation of powers. In doing so Progressives prepared the way for the modern liberal order that came to fruition in the New Deal of the 1930s and was elaborated in the Great Society of the 1960s. Those who resisted this trend in the 1920s recurred to religious ideas, some of which can also be described as sentiments or virtues, that included most prominently fidelity (or faithfulness), reverence (or piety), and the conception of man as a created but fallen being in need of restraint.3 Of course scholars have long acknowledged the importance of religion in American political culture. However, its role in early twentieth-century constitutional discourse is only beginning to attract attention,4 despite the revisionist claim that the era's thought was more substantive and principled than allowed by generations of Progressive historiography. This article first briefly surveys some well-known texts in American political thought to call to mind influential figures' emphasis on the connection between religious ideas and the maintenance of American constitutionalism. The analysis then shows in more detail that this connection persisted in the neglected 1920s' discourse of constitutional maintenance that responded to Progressivism and cohered around the journal Constitutional Review. Defenders of the Constitution in this period retained the established, religiously informed perspective and regarded it as a key aspect of their work.

How the Internet Shapes Religious Life, or the Medium Is Itself the Message

The Internet has become a resource for everyone for everything. It is accordingly now also a source of sermons and much more for pastors of churches in the USA. In consequence, the Internet shapes and alters how pastors and parishioners practice their religion. Because “the medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan observed, Internet sermons necessarily reflect and convey something of their Internet source. So, too, the nature and content religious life changes and takes on the characteristics of its new source of inspiration, the Internet. As the dominant expression of technology today, the Internet reveals technology ultimately and in the words of Jacques Ellul as “the real religion of our time.”

Virtual Religion and Duality of Religious Spaces

AbstractTo present a relatively apparent communication picture from the virtual religion and its features in “the current virtualized world” or in the ground of “dual-globalized” processes requires the discussion of four basic questions in relation to the virtual religion. Although it is not possible to provide detailed and analytical answers to these questions, aspects of the questions and facets of the answers will be analyzed. As Martin Heidegger (AP 1373:1)* has suggested, a question itself possesses leading features and opens ways of thought: 1) What is the virtual religion? 2) Which ontology can offer a presence of religion in virtual-real space — vireal space? 3) Is there any fundamental difference between a virtual and the real religion? And eventually, it is important to answer the question: 4) What are the outcomes of duality space and what is the place of religion's existence? To answer these questions we will look at ongoing literature on “the virtual religion” and on religious typology in virtual space from an “ontological” view and we will analyze structural differences between these two spaces. And finally we will address the representation of religion in two spaces through a “dual globalization paradigm” and “communication paradigm of dual spacization”.

On the Function of the Epoche in Phenomenological Interpretations of Religion

This essay presents an inquiry into the phenomenological epoche, specifically with a view to the function of the epoche in efforts to interpret sacred or religious meaning. Reflecting on contributions from phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction, with particular attention to the phenomenology of religion developed by Gerardus Van der Leeuw, I argue that the epoche can be defined in terms of hospitable restraint. By holding the presuppositions of one’s unique historical horizon in abeyance (e.g., presuppositions regarding the historical development of religions or the ontological, theological, or scientific reality of religion), such restraint facilitates dialogue and diplomacy through an understanding of the alterity of the sacred and the alterity of others’ experiences of the sacred.

‘The Clergy who Affect to Call Themselves Orthodox’: Thomas Secker and the Defence of Anglican Orthodoxy, 1758–68

The spectre of the seventeenth century loomed large in the eighteenth century. The Anglican orthodox were particularly aghast at the radical assault on the religio-political order during the previous century and feared a reprise during theirs. In 1734, for instance, Thomas Seeker (1693–1768) warned his audience at St James’s, Westminster, that Charles I’s execution was ‘a most peculiarly instructive example of divine judgments, brought down by a sinful people on their own heads’. In all his providential interventions in human affairs, God teaches ‘an awful regard to himself, as moral governor of the world; and a faithful practice of true religion’. And what drew his divine wrath upon Britain during the 1650s was the abandonment of’real religion’ for ‘hypocrisy, superstition, and enthusiasm’. Certainly Laud and his followers might have displayed ‘an over warm zeal, and very blameable stiffness and severity’, Seeker acknowledged. ‘But there was also, in the enemies of the church, a most provoking bitterness and perverseness; with a wild eagerness for innovation, founded on ignorant prejudices, which their heated fancies raised into necessary truths; and then, looking on them, as the cause of Christ, they thought themselves bound and commissioned to overturn whatever was contrary to them.’

The Disciplinary Vocabulary of Modernity

THE KEY WORDS OF THE CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL SCENE-secularization, modernization, globalization, fundamentalism, pluralism, and so on-present themselves to us as a descriptive vocabulary for what is really out there in the world, for what has happened and what is happening. They purport to tell us that this is the way the world is. But in fact these are prescriptive terms: they make up a disciplinary nomenclature that tells us how the world must be, or as some part of the world's population wants and insists that it be. This vocabulary gives normative, politically authorized accounts of the way things are.Take pluralism, for instance. This word pretends to describe the straightforward reality of many contemporary urban societies, from New York City to Cape Town, in which people who differ from each other ethnically, linguistically, and religiously live together in shared spaces, in mutual respect and toleration, and in harmony. But the fact of population diversity is better called plurality. Pluralism'' as a prescription, which is what it is, includes embedded and unarticulated norms of what is and what is not tolerable in this common space, and in particular what or real religion is and what is not. It assumes a common foundation of values and belief that all diverse peoples are said to hold, down deep, whatever might appear to separate them outwardly (this distinction between inner/outer is key to the organization and authority of this modern nomenclature); it consequently minimizes differences (differences that are in fact essentially important for the various groups involved, about how to raise children, for example, or how to arrange relationships between men and women, or religious leaders and their followers); and it puts high, but rarely explicit, strictures on what can and cannot be said and done in the public space. So pluralist harmony really means the mandated absence of differences that liberal modernity finds intolerable. The modern secular state was born not out of the success of pluralism but out of the sharp and dreadful awareness of the dangers and risks of plurality, specifically out of the Christian wars of the 16th and 17th centuries.Such key words of the modern world mask their authority behind this claim of being unproblematic descriptions of the way things are. They assume a certain naturalness, but the very naturalness of the terms results in the invisibility of ways of life we do not wish to see; this, in turn, results in a bad conscience, and this is where fundamentalism arises. Fundamentalism as an idea, a supposedly descriptive account of certain ways of being religious, is the expression of the deep political, moral, and religious fears of moderns. Fundamentalism is the presence that takes shape in the absences secured by the prescriptive language that pretends to describe the world. To borrow from the theorist Slavoj Zizek, because we are unable to integrate certain ways of being into our account of modern reality we are therefore compelled to experience these ways of being as nightmarish apparition[s].1 The vocabulary of modernity occludes the political decisions, the exercises of power, and in particular the exclusions that went into making the modern world the way it is, and the consequences of these decisions and acts of power. Especially troublesome for those of us who accept the urgent responsibility of finding or making new ways to peace, these naturalized words that hold within themselves fear and denial (secularization, modernization, globalization, fundamentalism, pluralism) constitute the normative space of what will be deemed tolerable, acceptable, safe and good, on the one hand, and what will be declared intolerable, unacceptable, unsafe and bad, on the other.I too want to live in a safe and good world, in which people respect each other's rights to live as they see fit, and in a peaceful world. But as a scholar of religion committed to empirically (with all due caveats) engaging religion in the modern world and trying to understand itand very much trying to understand now how we live in a very dangerous world in which men and women with competing visions of how humans best live inflict serious damage on each other-I find these words to constitute a thicket through which it becomes almost impossible to see clearly. …

"THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. FREDERICK": THE FRIENDSHIP AND SHARED BELIEFS OF FREDERICK W. TAYLOR AND SCUDDER KLYCE.

This article focuses on the friendship and shared beliefs of Frederick W. Taylor and Scudder Klyce. During his lifetime, both friend and foe noted Frederick W. Taylor's tireless efforts to dissemin...

Habitat for Humanity: Building Private Homes, Building Public Religion

Preface Acknowledgments 1. The Voluntary Sector and American 2. The Founding Vision of Habitat for Humanity(R) 3. Habitat's Organizational Structure and Growth 4. Citizenship and Its Class-Based Distortions 5. Citizenship and the Instrumental Logic of the Market 6. Habitat's Construction of Real Religion 7. Religious Pluralism and Spiritual Selves within Habitat 8. Building Upon a Sturdy Foundation Appendix A: Affiliate Covenant: A Basic Covenant between Habitat for Humanity(R) International and an Approved Habitat Affiliate Project Appendix B: Steps to Affiliation Appendix C: Habitat's Local Affiliate Structure Notes Selected Bibliography Index