Religious Agenda Research Articles

Communication of Linguistic Idioms in Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini’s Letters

<?page nr="213"?>Abstract Eneas Silvius Piccolomini was a prolific writer in all phases of his life. His writing, influenced by the devotion to classical style of Renaissance humanism, has nevertheless been described as “falling below the highest humanistic standards” and even as “frequently incorrect.” Piccolomini’s style, moreover, includes lexical and syntactical practices of the medieval scholastics that have at times been thought to be the collective object of banishment by the humanists. Those negative assessments acquire more validity when Piccolomini’s style is judged strictly by the exaggerated standards of classical purity which many humanists claimed. Piccolomini’s hybrid style, however, was effective and at times even necessary; and nowhere better can the effectiveness of his merging of Latin idioms be seen than in the letters he wrote between his early secular career and brief reign as Pope Pius II. This essay examines the Latinity of Piccolomini’s detailed epistolary reports on the Council of Basel composed in 1450, and on his mission to Bohemia in 1451. Just as his actual mission that year blended secular and religious agendas, the style of his letters that reflect on the Council and its aftermath skillfully achieves not only a combination but a communication between classical and ecclesiastical Latin vocabulary, sentence structures, and concepts.

THE NATURE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF A MUSLIM WOMAN’S CONTEST FOR MAYOR OF LUSAKA, ZAMBIA

Demonstrating the use of the media as a conduit for communicating religious messages within the political domain, this article interrogates the religion, gender, and media interface through an analysis of the nature and signifi-cance of Sirre Muntanga, the only Muslim woman candidate for mayor of Lusaka during the 2016 Zambian general elections. Scholarly engagement on the 2016 elections has focused on the Christianisation of the elections to the neglect of other religions such as Islam and its related gender discourses. Theoretical and empirical studies on religion as well as the media are still lagging in the Zambian context. Since selected members of the Muslim community used the opportunity provided by Muntanga’s campaign to promote religious literacy on Islam, this article proposes that the mediatisation of Muntanga’s participation in the elections provides a platform for exploring the interaction between religion and the media. The article argues that, while the interface between religion and the media is often ascribed to the growth of media technologies and a religious agenda to convey religious messages, Muntanga’s contest for mayor of Lusaka signified how religion, gender, and the media could be linked through the religionisation of politics as shaped by public curiosity and the declaration of Zambia as a Christian nation.

Boko Haram, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al-Shabaab – Similarities and Differences

The authors offer an analysis of the genesis, evolution, and strategies of three Islamist extremist groups in three parts of Africa: al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in the borderland of Algeria and Mali; Boko Haram in the borderland of Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon; and al-Shabaab in Eastern Africa. Through examining the three comparative case studies they argue that the religious agenda of these groups plays the role of a façade only. The most important reasons of the spread of terrorism in all three regions are related to the political and economic conditions, feelings of relative deprivation, low level of trust in government authorities and the frustration of marginalised groups.

Defining the edge of legal personhood: A history of recent campaigns for recognition of pregnancy loss in two Australian states

This article examines recent events in Australian politics at the center of which were two bills seeking recognition of pregnancy loss. These bills were proposed by socially conservative politicians in the two distinct jurisdictions of South Australia and New South Wales. While both these bills ultimately failed, I argue that their origins and trajectories exposed tensions in the Australian community and highlighted a number of issues. These included the co-option of secular means of redress by those promoting a religious agenda and seeking to Americanize Australian laws pertaining to pregnancy; the role of legislation in legitimizing experiences of loss; and the complexity of the task of pro-choice feminist engagement with expressions of pregnancy loss that seek acknowledgement of the fetus.

Danger, Moral Opacity, and Outrage

This article explores hostile narratives and moral outrage in the context of rising conflict in urban Mali, with a specific emphasis on religious and spatial politics in Bamako. Based on ethnographic observations, interviews, and group discussions, the article examines the specific forms that moral outrage may take in contexts of insecurity and an imminent threat of violence. It argues that moral outrage concerns the transgression of values that are intrinsic to moral being. In the Mali setting, moral outrage emerges as justifiable when people fail, or refuse, to make visible or prove their moral being. Suspected ill-doers are ascribed economic, political, and religious agendas that threaten what it means to be Muslim and that violate the value of the mutual solidarity of the Muslim community and of the nation. At the same time, the public expression of moral outrage contributes to a broader negotiation of identities and state-society relationships.

Rethinking the representation of Gustavus Adolphus: the case of William Watts and The Swedish Intelligencer, 1630–33

ABSTRACTBetween 1630 and 1633, English newsbooks resounded with tales of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden’s victories against the “popish” armies of Emperor Ferdinand II. Such literary praise has been widely associated with Calvinist disapprobation of Charles I’s pacific foreign policy. This article throws new light on the alternative, non-Calvinist sources of enthusiasm for Gustavus Adolphus in the newsbook, The Swedish Intelligencer, which portrayed the Swedish king as the figurehead of a broad, confessionally flexible, pan-Protestant cause. This has important implications for our understanding of the relationship between English and European Protestant nations in the context of the Thirty Years’ Wars. News from the military camp of the Lutheran King of Sweden offered a subtle way of promoting and normalising non-Calvinist forms of worship in England, and thus provides evidence that a range of Protestants were utilising the London news presses to advance their religious agenda in the early 1630s.

“The Immortal Traveler”: How Historiography Changed Judaism

Abstract:The historiography of Judaism as a scholarly enterprise primarily developed during the nineteenth century as the byproduct of a number of historical conditions that influenced Western culture at large. First and foremost, European society at the time was shaped by the dynamism and social change brought on by industrialization. Moreover, the nineteenth century’s culture held on to a romantic image of the past in its multifarious guises – the ancient or the medieval, and in some cases the age of the Renaissance – to which various currents of European thought had contributed. The past, and therefore history as a cultural practice, was particularly important in the age of nationalism and empires. In this article I analyze how certain religious topics such as the ‘historical Jesus’ and the relevance of the Kabbalah were elaborated in the early modern period and readdressed, with different religious and cultural agendas, in the nineteenth century.

Reception

With Killing Hercules, Richard Rowland has produced a wide-ranging trans-historical discussion of re-workings of the relationship between the mythical Hercules and Deinaira, from Sophocles’ fifth-century bceTrachiniae to Martin Crimp's 2004 play, Cruel and Tender, and a 2014 staging of Handel's operatic Hercules. Impressive for the breath-taking variety of receptions of the story of Deianira's killing of her husband, the volume devotes as much attention to medieval, post-Reformation, and eighteenth-century versions as to ancient texts (including, as well as Sophoclean tragedy, receptions in Latin – for example, the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus and Ovid's Heroides – which lie behind many post-classical re-workings of the story) and contemporary retellings; the study touches on several Italian, French, and German versions as well as those in English. As a scholar who has direct experience of theatre practice, Rowland draws on his involvement in staged versions of both Trachiniae (his own verse translation, which he includes as an appendix) and Cruel and Tender in order to provide fresh insights on both of these texts. The resulting volume, which illustrates the complex and varied reflections on masculinity and sexual identity prompted by the characters of Hercules and Deianira, has at its heart questions relating to the gendered role of violence in retellings of the myth both on a domestic level and in relation to international politics. Hercules has been seen as everything from the epitome of masculine virtue and heroic self-sacrifice to abuser and serial adulterer, ‘sexual deviant and disastrous husband’ (115); in her turn, Deianira – in some versions denied a voice altogether – has been variously portrayed as duplicitous or insane, or as a victim whose killing of her abuser is deserving of sympathy. The chapter on the Middle Ages illustrates well the re-appropriation of the story to serve a range of political, religious, and social agendas – from condemnation of Hercules’ lack of self-control by Augustine to valorization of his sexual violence, as well as the misogynist and misogamist interpretations of Deianira which were marshalled in service of debates on the role of marriage. Elsewhere, Rowland shows how the tale could be used simultaneously on both sides of a single political conflict – during the Civil War period, both regicides and royalists used lines from Seneca's Hercules Furens to insist on the rectitude of their respective stances (153–4). Even those already familiar with the reception of the figure of Hercules will find something new in this rich exploration of the pliability of one mythical story.

Constantine and the Cities: Imperial Authority and Civic Politics by Noel Lenski

Reviewed by: Constantine and the Cities: Imperial Authority and Civic Politics by Noel Lenski Rajiv K. Bhola Noel LenskiConstantine and the Cities: Imperial Authority and Civic Politics Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016 Pp. 416. $79.95. The quest in modern scholarship for the true Constantine has been something of a tug-of-war between two main camps: those who contend that the emperor’s policies were guided entirely by his religious beliefs, and those who view instances of political pragmatism as evidence of religious insincerity. In his Constantine and the Cities, Noel Lenski attempts a middle-ground to these positions. In keeping [End Page 671] with the prevalent twentieth-century image, Lenski portrays Constantine as a man on a mission to effect on an empire-wide level the same transformation that he himself underwent. However, he considers “Christian” and “politician” as coexistent (not mutually exclusive) identities and sifts through the contradictory evidence using a primarily sociological framework to arrive at a “more genuine reading of the emperor” (12). Lenski’s approach is grounded in an essential political reality. Drawing from Stuart Hall’s adaptation of Reception Theory for systems of mass communication and Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration of Speech Act Theory, he underscores the fact that the emperor’s ability to exercise authority in any given domain required the complicity of his subjects. As such, the study focuses largely on how Constantine engaged his subjects through traditional means of civic discourse, in particular the system of petition and response, in order to gauge their receptiveness to his religious agenda and widen his sphere of authority. The reactions of various communities—and, in turn, Constantine’s reactions to them—contributed to the fashioning of both his image and his policy. The book is divided into four parts, each consisting of three to four chapters. Part One, “Constantine’s Self-Presentation,” surveys the various representations of the emperor that were being officially circulated. Some he identifies as occurring in phases (Chapter One), whereas others appear consistently throughout Constantine’s reign (Chapter Two). Finally, in Chapter Three he highlights Constantine’s unambiguous self-identification as a convert in communications directed at Christians. Although such an overview might be regarded as par for the course, the organization of this material (including as yet unpublished sources, such as the Misurata hoard) effectively establishes for subsequent chapters that there was a variety of official personae available for Constantine’s subjects to contemplate. Part Two, “The Power of Petitions,” assesses Constantine’s use of the system of petition and response to execute his religious policy. Lenski makes his case largely on the examples of Orcistus (Chapter Four), whose citizens aligned themselves with the emperor’s Christianizing agenda and were granted their request for civic autonomy; and Hispellum (Chapter Five), a deep-rooted “pagan” community that was granted both an imperial name and permission to establish a cult to Constantine’s dynasty, but with a crucial prohibition on sacrifice. Thus, in the process of fulfilling expectations as a civic leader, Constantine was able to elevate Christian polities and avoid alienating “pagan” ones even as he began the long-term process of converting them. The further examination of cities in the West (Chapter Six) and East (Chapter Seven) that received imperial names and/or civic status indicates that Christian polities were more likely to receive a favorable response if they were removed from the control of non-Christian neighbors. In Part Three, “Reconstructing the Ancient City,” Lenski explores Constantine’s efforts to make Christianity a part of normative urban life, beginning in Chapter Eight with the transfer of temple goods and their revenue-generating estates to the res privata, which was used to patronize Christian communities via their local leaders. These financial resources, together with grants of imperially controlled land, provided the funding—often in response to petitions from bishops—for Constantine’s extensive church building programme (Chapter Nine). In Chapter [End Page 672] Ten Lenski details the rise of bishops as the principal civic leaders through the bestowal of privileges such as the right to judge civil cases, immunity from curial service, and authority to manumit. The majority of Part Four, “Alternative Responses to Constantine...

Inequality measures for wealth distribution: Population vs individuals perspective

Economic inequality is, nowadays, frequently perceived as following a growing trend with impact on political and religious agendas. However, there is a wide range of inequality measures, each of which pointing to a possibly different degree of inequality. Furthermore, regardless of the measure used, it only acknowledges the momentary population inequality, failing to capture the individuals evolution over time. In this paper, several inequality measures were analyzed in order to compare the typical single time instant degree of wealth inequality (population perspective) to the one obtained from the individuals’ wealth mean over several time instants (individuals perspective). The proposed generalization of a simple addictive model, for limited time average of individual’s wealth, allows us to verify that the typically used inequality measures for a given snapshot instant of the population significantly overestimate the individuals’ wealth inequality over time. Moreover, that is more extreme for the ratios than for the indices analyzed.

A macroscopic perspective on translation of knowledge in China

AbstractThe translation, dissemination and reception of knowledge has served as an excellent indicator of changing ideologies and the major catalyst for institutional changes, language reforms and social transformation in China. However, English representations of the Chinese tradition of translation (e.g.Hung 2005;Hung and Pollard 2009) have not incorporated research findings from Chinese studies (e.g.Cohen 1995;Amelung, Kurtz and Lackner 2001;Elman 2005) and tend to provide unsubstantiated generalizations and hasty conclusions. This article uses a combination of “cultural tool” (Even-Zohar 2005) and “culture planning” (Even-Zohar 2008) as a frame of reference to provide a macroscopic perspective on knowledge translation in different Chinese historical periods as “a means of planning” (Toury 2002: 166) to promote religious agendas, modernize traditional Chinese natural studies, Westernize educational and academic systems, facilitate modernization of the state or participate in global knowledge production.

Failed Legacies of Colonial Linguistics: Lessons from Tamil Books in French India and French Guiana

AbstractThe archives of French India and French Guiana, two colonies that were failing by the mid-nineteenth century, elucidate the legacy of colonial linguistics by drawing attention to the ideological and technological natures of colonial printing and the far-reaching and longstanding consequences of the European objectification of Indian vernaculars. Torn between religious, commercial, and imperialist agendas, the French in India both promoted Catholicism and advanced the scientific study of Tamil, the majority language spoken in the colonial headquarters of Pondicherry. There, a little known press operated by the Paris Foreign Missions shipped seventy-one dictionaries, grammars, and theological works printed in Tamil and French to Catholic schools undergoing secularization in French Guiana, a colony with several thousand Tamil indentured laborers. I analyze the books’ lexical, orthographic, and typographical forms, metalinguistic commentaries, publicity tactics, citational practices, and circulation histories by drawing on seldom-discussed materials from the Archives nationales d'outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence, France. I propose a theoretical framework to investigate how technology intersects with the historical relationship between language and colonialism, and argue that printing rivalries contributed to Orientalist knowledge production by institutionalizing semiotic and language ideologies about the nature of “perfectible” and “erroneous” signs. My comparative approach highlights the interdiscursive features of different genres and historical periods of Tamil documentation, and underscores how texts that emerged out of disparate religious and scientific movements questioned the veracity of knowledge and fidelity of sources. Such metalinguistic labor exposed the evolving stances of French Indologists toward Dravidian and Indo-Aryan linguistics and promoted religious and secular interests in educational and immigration policies.

ISIL's Execution Videos: Audience Segmentation and Terrorist Communication in the Digital Age

ABSTRACTThis article offers a bottom-up understanding of the media strategy employed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) as it relates to the production and dissemination of its hostage execution videos. Through an empirical analysis of sixty-two videos of executions produced by ISIL in the year following its establishment as the “Islamic State” in 2014, this study examines the videos as a major component of ISIL's media strategy. Through these media products, ISIL seeks to spread a political message aimed at both local and global, ingroup and outgroup consumption through audience segmentation, while striving to influence both local and global audiences through the use and production of graphic violence. This article also discusses the strategy governing the production and release of ISIL's execution videos; how it relies on the global media to transmit its intertwined political and religious agenda in the digital media age.

Promising redemption. Science at the service of secular and religious agendas

Promising redemption. Science at the service of secular and religious agendas

Freedom of Religion, Tolerance, and Security in Central Asia

Young people from the Central Asian countries are being recruited by terrorist groups, leading their governments to further reduce the scope of religious freedom in their countries—by banning religious groups which have allegedly religious or extremist agendas, by tightening regulations governing the registration of religious groups, by banning the import of religious literature, by restricting access to internet sites, and by giving state-sponsored Islamic hierarchies increased authority. The effectiveness of these kinds of socialization oriented measures is questionable, and these policies are expensive, diverting resources that could be used to improve social conditions and enhance security training of officials.

‘In what orbit we shall find ourselves, no one could predict’: institutional reform, the university merger and ecclesiastical influence on Irish higher education in the 1960s

AbstractThis paper explores the persistence of ecclesiastical influence on higher education in Ireland during an era of far-reaching policy change in the 1960s. The extensive interaction between political and official elites and the Catholic bishops offers a fascinating insight into the complex and contested process of policy formulation during an era of transformation in higher education. This study offers a re-interpretation of Whyte’s thesis that the Irish bishops displayed a ‘new flexibility’ in their response to governmental policy initiatives during this period, especially the initiative for university merger launched by Donogh O’Malley in 1967. Catholic prelates, notably John Charles McQuaid, the influential archbishop of Dublin, were pursuing a traditional Catholic religious and socio-political agenda in higher education, which sought not so much to accommodate new official initiatives as to shape such reforms in the ideological direction favoured by the bishops. McQuaid in particular enjoyed exceptional access to policy-makers and was an indispensable partner in launching the initiative for the university merger. The eventual failure of the merger, which was influenced by the successful resistance of academic elites and the declining significance of religious divisions in higher education, underlined the limits of ecclesiastical power in a rapidly changing society.

Leopold Zunz and the Meanings of Wissenschaft.

When Jewish historians narrate the history of their field, they often point to Leopold Zunz (1794-1886) as its founder. My article challenges the notion that Zunz's early understanding of Wissenschaft was primarily historical. Reconstructing the meaning of Wissenschaft for Zunz in its context, I argue that it was more philosophical than historical and closely linked to an ideal of character formation. Zunz's view of Wissenschaft reveals the ways in which German idealist philosophy, neo-Humanist manifestos, and a Romantic religious reform agenda could produce a scientific interest in the human past that seems at odds with central tenets of historicism.

THE FUNDAMENTALIST DILEMMA: LESSONS FROM THE ISRAELI HAREDI CASE

AbstractThis article explores the “fundamentalist dilemma,” or how fundamentalist movements participate in secular political systems, especially when they gain prominent political positions that allow them to impose their extreme ideology on the entire society. After analyzing prevailing responses to this dilemma, ranging from political integration to aggressive takeover, the article turns to the case of Israeli Haredim. It explores three models of political integration through which Haredim have applied religious practices in the public sphere: protest, consolidation, and takeover. The study's main finding is that, opposite to a commonly accepted assumption that fundamentalists’ integration into secular politics causes them to moderate, the more political power that fundamentalists accrue the stronger is their tendency to promote their religious agenda. Yet the Israeli Haredi case also reveals the limitations of this tendency: fundamentalists often restrain their expansionist instinct when having to take nonfundamentalist reactions into consideration.

The Radical Right and Religious Discourse. The Golden Dawn, the Lega Nord and the Sweden Democrats Compared

The paper investigates whether there is a link between the main radical right-wing parties in Greece, Italy and Sweden and the pre-dominant church institutions within these countries. The focus lies on the interaction between the party’s ideology and the church‘s political discourse. We distinguish between the ‘internal supply side’ (the party’s discourse on the religious agenda), the ‘external supply side’ (the Church’s current discourse), and the ‘demand side’ (the Church’s traditional discourse). The research aim is to determine whether religious voters (who are formal church members, who believe and who practice regularly) might constitute a potential electorate for radical right-wing parties. This assumption builds on the ‘pathological normalcy’ thesis that radical right-wing parties promote an extreme version of the mainstream values in society (Mudde 2010). The method for elaborating the official church and party documents is based on the theorization of the so-called Essex school of dis- course analysis. The findings of the paper are that the religious electorate is a potential pool for the radical right party family to the extent that the internal supply side and the external supply side overlap. This applies to the largest extent in Greece, to a medium extent in Italy and to a low extent in Sweden.

Urgensi Peta Dakwah

The existence of religious activity in society can not be separated from activities that are the rituals, routines are conducted in accordance religious agenda each and there are social activities that are more flexible with the time scheduled by the will of the people. The function of religious activities is to realize the servitude of man as a creature to his Lord by running various rules and religious guidance. The position of religion must be understood as the representation of the will of God revealed in scripture through the intermediary of the Prophets and Messengers as a messenger of God. The function of these religious activities which in turn drive the human civilization both worldly materialistic nature (world view) and the nature of eschatological things .