Religious Criticism Research Articles

The National Lottery, religion, and community in mid-1990s Britain

ABSTRACT Introduced in 1994, the National Lottery quickly sparked debate amongst faith leaders, cautious about the new institution. This article traces the reverberations of religious critiques of the lottery amidst the evidence of religious organisations simultaneously accepting lottery proceeds. Questioning how secular British culture was in the 1990s, it offers a more complex picture than accounts which see the failure of faith leaders to amend the lottery as symbolic of the weakness of religion at the end of the century. Looking in detail at individual lottery players—both believers and those without faith—the article positions lottery play as a surprising instrument of community in the 1990s. Based in large part on an analysis of responses to the Mass Observation Project, it also carries implications for scholars who use this material to unpack popular attitudes at the end of the century.

We are Building Gods: AI as the Anthropomorphised Authority of the Past

This article argues that large language models (LLMs) should be interpreted as a form of gods. In a theological sense, a god is an immortal being that exists beyond time and space. This is clearly nothing like LLMs. In an anthropological sense, however, a god is rather defined as the personified authority of a group through time—a conceptual tool that molds a collective of ancestors into a unified agent or voice. This is exactly what LLMs are. They are products of vast volumes of data, literally traces of past human (speech) acts, synthesized into a single agency that is (falsely) experienced by users as extra-human. This reconceptualization, I argue, opens up new avenues of critique of LLMs by allowing the mobilization of theoretical resources from centuries of religious critique. For illustration, I draw on the Marxian religious philosophy of Martin Hägglund. From this perspective, the danger of LLMs emerge not only as bias or unpredictability, but as a temptation to abdicate our spiritual and ultimately democratic freedom in favor of what I call a tyranny of the past.

Representations of Christianity in Chinese Independent Cinema: Gan Xiao’er’s Postsocialist Religious Critique

Representations of Christianity in contemporary Chinese cinema are very limited, making the scholarship of this subject underexplored. Filmmaker Gan Xiao’er has made three feature-length independent films focusing on Christianity in China. These films, The Only Sons (2003), Raised from Dust (2007), and Waiting for God (2012), are used for case studies, with close analyses of their narratives and formal elements. They are also examined in the social and cultural contexts of postsocialist China. This article argues that Gan’s religious features are significant in the context of postsocialist Chinese cinema. They not only depict the religious experience of Chinese Christians, which has been under-represented cinematically, but also provide a religious critique rarely seen in Chinese films. On the one hand, these films critically engage with the experience of underprivileged people during the Reform period, when economic development and materialism became dominant, while the socialist political system remained. Gan’s religious features provide an alternative perspective that cares for people’s spiritual needs. On the other hand, Gan’s later films interrogate the local religious institution in China, questioning the arbitrary separation of the ‘holy’ and the ‘unholy’, proposing a more inclusive approach to the religious concept of love.

The Public Perceptions of Transgender Identity as 'the Other' in Social Media

Waria also known as transgender women, despite consistent exclusion from society, are becoming increasingly visible in Indonesia during the era of globalization. In recent years, they have gained more popularity by leveraging the rapid development of social media. This study aims to critically examine public perceptions of transgender, using the case of one of Indonesia's most famous transgender figures, Lucinta Luna. The researcher analyses Instagram users’ comments on her account, as a representation of how the public responds to Luna's identity as a transgender. This study utilizes a qualitative approach and thematic analysis as the analytical method. To analyze the data, this research uses Computer-Aided Qualitative Analysis Software (CAQDAS) NVivo 12. Furthermore, this study adopts Hall's theory of 'the other' to critically examine how Indonesians respond to transgenders. This research found that two significant themes emerged from overall Instagram users' comments on Luna's identity, which are negative and positive public perceptions. In both themes, three sub-themes emerged: sarcasm, religious criticism, and sexual harassment in the negative theme, and admiration, comedy, and a supportive attitude in the positive theme.

Christian criticism of pagan religious and magical practices in Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville – an outline

Christian criticism of pagan religious and magical practices in Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville – an outline

KARYA KEMALEDIZINE SEBAGAI REPRESENTASI KRITIK KEBERAGAMAAN MASYARAKAT ISLAM INDONESIA DALAM MEDAN SENI RUPA KONTEMPORER INDONESIA

Artistic expression is a manifestation of cultural phenomena specific to an era and region. That is evident in Islamic visual arts, which present innovative forms with contemporary content. This research focuses on the works of Kemalezedine, who, through the lens of iconography and sociology of art theories, reveals religious and social criticism in the context of the Indonesian Muslim community. His works intensely highlight and criticize the phenomenon of Arabism, often appearing in understanding, spiritual practices, and identity politics in Indonesia. Criticism and discourse exploration in the creation of Kemalezedine's works are closely related to his creative process, formed while participating in the Neo Pitamaha and NU Abstract communities. His "Bloodline series" (2019) marks the pinnacle of religious criticism among the Indonesian Muslim community, especially the fundamentalists. This work questions the laws of symbolic depiction in Islamic visual arts and also sheds light on socio-cultural and identity politics issues rooted in Indonesia. With a critical and analytical approach, Kemalezedine's work serves not only as a medium of artistic expression but also as a deep social reflection medium, reflecting the dynamics and challenges faced by the contemporary Muslim community in Indonesia.

A study of Marx's religious views from the perspective of realistic man

This academic paper explores Marx's view of religion from the perspective of "realistic man". It objectively discusses the historical background and main contents of the formation of Marx's religious view as well as the contents of religious criticism which cannot be ignored in the Marxist theoretical system. In the process of studying Marxism, people always used to combine religion with the words such as ignorance and unwisdom. This paper returns to the original work of Marx, puts forward the realistic value of the existence of religion under the historical background, and holds that religion should be discussed with realistic people based on the real society.

A case for religious criticism

ABSTRACT This essay returns to Edward Said’s juxtaposition of secular and religious criticism in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) to ask what benefits, if any, religious criticism might offer to the study of literature and culture in the twenty first century. Secular and religious, in Said’s catachrestic usage, do not describe specific traditions or historical structures of feeling or any particular set of orthodoxies; rather, they describe distinct thinking practices. The key difference is that religious criticism, in practice, stands on an appeal to some set of foundational principles, while secular criticism does not make any such stand. Looking at examples of criticism with religious valences in the works of Fredric Jameson and Hortense Spillers, the essay argues that religious criticism’s inherent commitment to collectivity and morality place it in necessary dialectical tension with secular criticism and thus render it integral to the work of critique as practiced by scholars of literature and culture today.

Afterword: Beyond Opportunistic Blackness: Reclaiming Victor Anderson’s Religious Criticism Against the Spiritual Evacuation of Blackness

ABSTRACT After nearly thirty years, Beyond Ontological Blackness can and should be used to think about contemporary challenges and avoidable futures in which (racial) representations could further ensnare us due to its inherent entanglement with racial capitalism. In this afterword, I argue that Victor Anderson offers an ethics of representation/blackness through the figure of the religious critic. It reclaims Anderson’s religious critic and shows how such a critic models better forms of social criticism that can be both descriptive and constructive, enlightening and emancipatory, and iconoclastic and utopian, without sacrificing either identity or difference, the individual or the group to oppressive values, norms and structures.

Startup Culture: MLMs, Mormons, and Entrepreneurship

Startup Culture: MLMs, Mormons, and Entrepreneurship

Критика религии в философии софистов

The article deals with the socio-historical conditions of the formation of criticism of religion in the philosophy of sophists. It is shown that there were two directions in the religious criticism of the sophists. The first direction was associated with religious agnosticism. Protagoras defended the idea of the incomprehensibility of the gods. The statements of Gorgias and Xeniades contributed to the strengthening of religious skepticism. The second direction was connected with the development of theories of the origin of religion. Prodicus and his idea of the deification of useful things by ancient people is one of the first attempts at a rational explanation of the origin of religion. Critias’ idea that the gods were invented in order to maintain public order challenged the entire religious consciousness of the Greeks. The theories of Prodicus and Critias contributed to the development of ancient atheism. It is established that the sophists adhered to an ambivalent position on the question of attitude to religion. On the one hand, the sophists did not seek to destroy religious institutions. They recognized the value of religion because they considered it one of the benefits of civilization. According to sophists, religion plays an important role in the life of society. It supports moral norms, laws and order. On the other hand, the views of the sophists posed a great danger to traditional religious beliefs. The views of the sophists contributed to the doubt of the existence of gods and the weakening of religious beliefs. It is established that the Peloponnesian War played an important role in the formation of the religious criticism of the sophists. The destructive nature of the Peloponnesian War led to the decline of moral and religious norms. The plague in Athens, the cases of genocide, the triumph of brute force and lawlessness contributed to the growth of distrust of public institutions and disillusionment with religion. All this created favorable conditions for the development of moral and ethical relativism and religious skepticism in the philosophy of sophists.

The Marble Faunin a Secular Age

ABSTRACTThis essay examines Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun as an early expression of (post)secular imagining. Scholars have tended to frame Hawthorne’s engagement with religion as yet another example of the ambivalence that drives much of his writing. On the one hand, they identify the persistence of religious critique in his novels—his criticism of Puritanism in The Scarlet Letter or Transcendentalism in The Blithedale Romance, for example. On the other hand, they have noted his fascination with such traditions, offering readings that uncover the historical specificity of his Puritan sources and his temporary investment in Transcendentalism. Rich as they are, such readings tend to focus on his engagement with these specific religious traditions rather than note his novels’ oscillation between enchantment and disenchantment. This essay takes up this charge by examining The Marble Faun’s depiction of Catholicism, a depiction that critics have similarly read in terms of Hawthorne’s admiration or criticism of Catholicism. This essay suggests, instead, that both impulses represent Hawthorne’s lasting search for what secular studies philosopher Charles Taylor calls “a third way”; that is, a space between orthodoxy and unbelief. Rather than locate The Marble Faun as another instance of Hawthorne’s chronic ambiguity, then, this essay locates it as a prime example of the spiritual tensions marking our “secular age.”

Briefe wider die Freidenker

Abstract Since the middle of the 18th century, the epistolary form was increasingly used as a means of apologetics. Thereby, theologians reacted to the combination of fiction and philosophy, which gave unexpected success to religious criticism from Britain and France – especially to Voltaire. However, the alliance of apologetics and fine literature had limited viability and only lasted for about a generation. These circumstances will be demonstrated by analyzing Johann H. C. Zahn’s Letters to the Freethinkers (1764–1767) in their wider historical context.

The Jewish Mockery of Suicide: Counterculture in Early Twentieth-Century Hungarian Jewish Literature

This article examines secular Hungarian Jewish writing about suicide in the first third of the twentieth century. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hungary, suicide was a culturally respected and prevalent societal occurrence. Hungarian Jewish writers created a countercultural narrative that criticized suicide through mockery, satire, and irony. I argue that in the diverse political climate of the period, Hungarian Jewish literature was in dialogue with Hungarian suicide culture and formed part of a careful negotiation of Jewish presence in Hungarian society. Both Hungarian suicide culture and the Jewish response to it were cultural trends unaffected by political upheavals. Literature allowed Jewish writers to explore their place in society and to engage with Hungarian culture via the diverse dynamics of mockery expressed in their stories of suicide. They chose satire, their modern literary specialty, as a safe way to articulate secular social criticism. It shielded them from both antisemitism and moralizing religious critiques. To this end, they engaged with their surroundings through narratives of death as a joke.

Sapiens Dominabitur Astris: A Diachronic Survey of a Ubiquitous Astrological Phrase

From the late thirteenth through late seventeenth centuries, a single three-word Latin phrase—sapiens dominabitur astris, or “the wise man will be master of the stars”—proliferated in astrological, theological, philosophical, and literary texts. It became a convenient marker denoting orthodox positions on free will and defining the boundaries of the scientifically and morally legitimate practice of astrology. By combining the methodology of a diachronic historical survey with a microhistorical focus on evolving phraseology, this study argues that closely examining the use of this phrase reveals how debates about the meanings of wisdom, free will, determinism, and the interpretation of stellar influence on human events changed radically across four centuries of Western European cultural and intellectual history. The first half of this article charts the scholastic response to theological criticisms of astrology and the reconciliation of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology with Catholic theology, paying special attention to its implications for astrology as viewed through scholarly uses of the phrase. The second half of the article shows how the phrase developed a multitude of idiosyncratic meanings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fracturing its late medieval scholastic unity, as new forms of philosophical, socio-political, religious, and scientific critiques upended astrological beliefs and practices. Ultimately, this paper argues that examining the theory and praxis of astrology through the changing phraseological meanings of “sapiens dominabitur astris” allows historians and cultural anthropologists to better discern the dialectical (as opposed to binary) relationships between free will and determinism in the West.

AGAMA SEBAGAI ALIENASI MANUSIA (Refleksi Kritis Atas Kritik Agama Karl Marx)

The research aims to inventory, critical evaluation, synthesis, and gain a new understanding of Karl Marx's religious criticism. This research is qualitative descriptive using literature study methods. The finding in this study is that marx actually continued feuerbach's religious criticism. According to Marx, Feuerbach's religious criticism was limited to religious criticism. Religious criticism should come down to the situations and conditions that give birth to religion. According to Marx, those who gave birth to religion were man, the human world, society, and the state. Therefore, religious criticism must reach its root, namely criticism of the social conditions of the people who gave birth to religion. Religion as human alienation because in reality human life is always oppressed by other groups of people who are more powerful. To free himself from this exile, Marx concluded that there needed to be a total revolution of oppressed society against the oppressor. The main purpose of this revolution is to free people, especially the oppressed from various alienation, especially social alienation. This, according to Marx, can be achieved by abolishing the system of private ownership of the means of production controlled by upper society. By removing the system of private ownership of the means of production, there will also be classes in society so that a society without classes arises. From this we know that the main purpose of Marx's religious criticism is not religion in se but rather in the concrete real situation of human social life oriented towards exploiting humans. From this we know that the main purpose of Marx's religious criticism is not religion in se but rather in the concrete real situation of human social life oriented towards exploiting humans. Religious criticism was a demonstration of Marx's mind concerned with the living conditions of the workers of his day. The ultimate goal of this criticism is human sociality. There is no more slavery of the workers by the capitalists. Marx wanted an equal life.

Götz König. “Training in Thinking: Religious Criticism and the Use of Logic in Zoroastrian Theology”

Götz König. “Training in Thinking: Religious Criticism and the Use of Logic in Zoroastrian Theology”

Romanian religious environments and the development of sports in Romania in the 1930s

ABSTRACT One of the features of interwar Romania was a quantitative and qualitative increase in sports. During this epoch, Romania followed a Western pattern, despite the significant differences between it and other European countries, for instance, in the case of its rural and illiterate population. In this context, this article aims to demonstrate how Romanian religious representatives reacted to the development of sport in Romania in the 1930s, when the Orthodox and Greek-Catholic churches were the principal Christian denominations. Moreover, the counter-reactions to religious criticism of sport in Romania will also be examined.

Il sacro, l’evangelo, la fede Un compito per la teologia fondamentale

This article aims to ponder on the relationship between an anthropology of the sacred and fundamental theology. To this end, it starts from the evangelical transformation of the sacred, as carried out in Jesus the Son. He becomes the measure of the sacred, overcoming its religious or irreligious reductions. This instrument allows a discernment of the sacred in a Christian regime, based on the ethical‑theological dimension of the religious. Christianity becomes a religious criticism of the religious, in the dialectic between faith and religion. The irreligious context of secularization requires an exposition of this critical task, in the search for what is common to humans, as justice.

The Idea of Islamic Media: The Qur'an and the Decolonization of Mass Communication

AbstractThe emergence of Islamic television in the Arab Middle East is usually explained as part of a Saudi media empire fueled by neoliberal petro-dollars. This article, by contrast, takes seriously the role ideas played alongside changing political economies in the origins of the world’s first Islamic television channel, Iqraa. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional career of “Islamic media” (al-i’lām al-Islāmī) as a category from the late sixties onwards in Egypt, I argue that Islamic television is part of a broader decolonization struggle involving the modern discipline of mass communication. Pioneering Arab communication scholars mounted a quest for epistemic emancipation in which the question of how to mediate Islam became inextricable from the question of what made media Islamic. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I show how the idea of Islamic media involved a radical reconceptualization of the Qur'an as mass communication from God and of Islam as a mediatic religion. This positing of an intimate affinity between Islam and media provoked secular skepticism and religious criticism that continue to this day. I conclude by reflecting on how the intellectual history of Islamic media challenges dominant framings of epistemological decolonization as a question of interrogating oppressive universalisms in favor of liberatory pluralisms.