Religious Impulse Research Articles

Home, History, and the Postsecular: A Literary–Religious Inquiry of Disgrace

In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the postsecular emerges as a critical framework to understand the characters’ search for home amidst the remnants of South Africa’s colonial legacy. This essay proposes an exploration of how the novel’s engagement with the postsecular scriptures and moments offers a nuanced perspective on the religious impulse within the literary form. I focus on the protagonist, Lurie, whose journey from a sexual scandal to a commitment to animal welfare symbolizes a broader quest for redemption and atonement. Contrasting Lurie’s postsecular odyssey is his daughter Lucy’s steadfast attachment to her farm, which becomes a battleground for historical racial tensions. Through a mythological critical approach, I interpret Lucy’s experience as a contemporary iteration of the scapegoat, embodying the sacrificial role in a society seeking reconciliation and healing. My analysis extends to the novel’s esthetic and ethical dimensions, examining how Coetzee’s narrative challenges and reframes traditional religious narratives. By situating my discussion within the fields of the sciences of religions, theology, and mythology, I contribute to the understanding of literature as a vital medium for engaging with religious and theological themes. The essay concludes with a reflection on the implications of Coetzee’s postsecular discourse for the individual’s search for home and belonging in a post-apartheid context.

Chapter 1. THE INTERNATIONAL ASPECT OF THE SYNERGY OF RELIGION AND POLITICS UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF DIGITALIZATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGES

The first chapter reveals the international aspect of the synergy of religion and politics in the digital age. The author analyzed the specifics of various manifestations of religious beliefs in the environment against the backdrop of extreme events associated with revolutions and the COVID-2019 pandemic. Digital platforms serve as regulators of the religious impulse, which can both stabilize the social situation and transfer it to a state of bifurcation. The author paid considerable attention to the study of the impact of the digitalization of religion on young people. We are exploring the problem of how religious digital practices today find broad support from the international community, how they manifest themselves at the everyday level, and cause the formation of new traditions and rituals based on online myth-making.

A Pentecostal Reflection on Christianity and Extremism: Christianity and Book Burnings in the Late Antiquity

This historiographical research sought to cognize why religious extremism has thrived globally through an enquiry into Christian book burnings in the late antiquities. The study posited that the ritual of book burning is a form of oppression and persecution exerted by intolerant religious fundamentalists in their pursuit to shape reading habits, exhume idolatry, and magic, and censure philosophical ideologies that challenge a religious belief through prohibition, control, and sanctions. The discussion established that Book burnings in the twenty-first century are religious radicalism and immoderation skewed towards a myopic dimension. Christian Book burnings throughout four historical periods were graphed to deduce the implications of the ritual in the historic-socio cultural setting. The study through historical, philosophical and critical analysis of the ritual attempted to demystify religious opinions which levy sanctions on others who have deviating ideas. The study acclaimed that the use of violence to drive a religious opinion in any context must be despised. The philosophical supposition of this study was founded on these principles: If God is indeed peaceful as His followers uphold, then he will act peaceably and fairly by deterring his devotees from brutishness purportedly intended to censure, chastise and obliterate nonbelievers and their belongings: Nonetheless, if some religious group uses violence to propel their religious impulses, it is barefaced that, they have lost touch with the God of peace, or have malevolently ignored the values of the God of peace. The study contributes to knowledge by probing into a primordial Christian ritual that is detrimental to the peace and sustainability desired in the twenty-first century to serve a piecemeal notice to all religious extremists to denounce excesses. Keywords: Religion, Extremism, Book Burning, Censorship, Late Antiquity, Pentecostalism.

The Kaiser’s Silver: German Nationalism and the 1913 Nationalspende for Christian Mission

Abstract In 1913, in honour of the kaiser’s silver jubilee, a group of secular colonial advocates organized a national fundraising campaign to raise money for Germany’s missionary societies. The nationalist motivations of this campaign ran counter to the theological and ideological self-conception of the missionaries, especially the leadership of Germany’s Protestant missions. Despite the ambivalence of the campaign’s declared beneficiaries, the Nationalspende zum Kaisersjubiläum für die christlichen Missionen in den deutschen Kolonien und Schutzgebieten proved to be a definitive success. Organizers mobilized national sentiment and generated a significant infusion of resources into Germany’s mission movement. The Nationalspende’s ulterior motive, drawing the internationalist and independent missions into a secular, nationalist colonial program, was also successful. In the aftermath of the Nationalspende, Germany’s formerly anti-nationalist Protestant mission movement came under new leadership, which began linking the missions more closely to Germany’s secular colonial movement. This article traces the history of the Nationalspende and places it in the context of competition between secular and religious impulses (and their organizational advocates) within Germany’s colonial movement before the First World War.

Questions We Share

Abstract For my Victorian literature course of autumn 2022, I set myself a goal of not privileging either the secularisation thesis or a potential sacramentalisation thesis, but of helping students see that serious writers almost always address the same set of foundational questions—even as, given their individuality and context, they respond to them differently, as we all do. In the Reformed Christian tradition, such foundational questions are understood to inform all academic inquiry, making all teaching and research neither religiously neutral nor radically relative. Within this context, I consider with my students the question ‘what foundational questions does the religious impulse at the heart of humankind ask?’ through a renewed reading of Genesis 1–3.

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Enabling Oblivion: Global Activism and the Erasure of Middle Eastern Christians

The relative ignorance of Armenian narratives in the analysis of current affairs in the Middle East raised by several authors in this roundtable is symptomatic of a larger problem facing ethno-religious minorities in the region. Until the 1990s, Western exposure to Middle Eastern Christianity in both academic and popular contexts was minimal at best. Outside specific studies of notable groups, scholars largely ignored non-Muslim religious sects. At the level of popular discourse, political Islam had illuminated the majoritarian religious impulses of the region, contributing to common Orientalist stereotypes of Arab and Muslim political culture.1 The presence of several million indigenous Christians, the vast majority of whom represented ancient indigenous communities, was largely ignored among academics and journalists. The notable exception was Lebanon, where Christian participation in the drama of the civil conflict of the 1980s was often noted in the press and occasionally scrutinized in academia.

Surprised by Sin: Medical Metaphors and Secular Eschatology in Ian McEwan’s Saturday

Critics have tended to read Saturday through the lens of ­rationalism, or its failings thereof. This article suggests, perhaps counter-intuitively, that it may be read as an allegory of theological yearning in a world bereft of magic. It is not to cast aspersions on McEwan’s commitment to reason, but to make a case that deep-rooted religious impulses adapt to the dictums of secular materiality and that, instead of abandoning metaphysics, Saturday secularizes it.

Prisoners of a Metaphor: Secularization as a Deicidal Epidemic

Abstract The article discusses the first reactions of many distinguished commentators to the impact that the CoViD-19 pandemic had on people’s religious life globally. Such across-the-board response is investigated against the background of Peter Sloterdijk’s exemplary reinterpretation of the religious vertical impulse in terms of anthropotechnics and is found defective. A more nuanced and ambivalent account of secularization is offered in the end as a viable alternative to the standard thesis of the disenchantment of the world.

POSTCOLONIAL MINSCAPES AND CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN REGGAE

That Caribbean music forms and their sonic influences are steeped in a vibrant culture of social awareness and ethereal consciousness is incontestable. Roots reggae’s protest appeal, rhythmic syncopations, and deeply religious impulses attest to a rich, aware and reactive tradition forged from post-slavery legacies to engage the rotary realities of mid–late 20th century West Indies. Contemporary Caribbean reggae follows in this tradition. With a very deep root in the religious beliefs of the people, Reggae music developed as the medium for the masses to cope with the social, economic and political realities of the day in Jamaica and many other Caribbean communities. Consequently, the Reggae music has proven to be relevant as long as there is suffering and injustices among the masses, this is not to say Reggae music does not reflect some other aspects of life. The emphasis in this paper is to trace the history and development of Reggae, especially its connection to the Rastafari lifestyle. The paper considers some key pillars of Reggae music, which includes but not limited to the believe by the Rastafarians that Haile Selassie is the black Jesus which Marcus Garvey had prophesied about and that he is bringing salvation to the black community in Jamaica.&#x0D; &#x0D; &lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt; Article visualizations:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0791/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner (review)

Reviewed by: Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner Matthew VanWinkle Winter Jade Werner. Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Ohio State UP, 2020. 210p. A substantial strand of recent scholarship on nineteenth-century literature and culture contests the secularization hypothesis, the claim that religiously oriented worldviews are becoming less pervasive and influential as more rationalistic perspectives increasingly drive cultural priorities and decisions. This hypothesis depends on, and often merely assumes, a simplistic binary opposition between these two organizing visions of reality. Werner’s study counters this hypothesis by focusing on texts from the first half of the nineteenth century that find an emergent religious impulse not only compatible with but also contributing to a more inclusive view of intercultural encounters. An 1837 introduction to John Williams’s A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Seas confidently proclaims that “the Christian is the only true cosmopolite” (1). Few in Britain would have aspired so explicitly to such an appellation at the close of the eighteenth century. To call oneself a citizen of the world in the immediate wake of the French Revolution was to risk being suspected of an incendiary disregard for nation and family. Werner’s first chapter traces how the rhetoric and practice of the early nineteenth century missionary movement contributed to the rehabilitation of cosmopolitanism as a concept. In describing their aims as cosmopolitan, missionary societies returned [End Page 140] to an earlier Enlightenment conception of universally shared values “born of Christian belief rather than from an explicit political agenda” (49). By focusing on saving individual souls and largely abstaining from the local politics of the places they visited, missionary efforts plausibly advanced the possibility that one could be cosmopolitan and at the same time reassuringly British. While emphatic critique of missionary priorities persisted—Werner’s first chapter concludes with a discussion of Bleak House as an example—for the most part these priorities and their fundamental view of the world became more acceptable over the first half of the nineteenth century. Because missionary societies frequently described their efforts in terms of revived and rehabilitated Enlightenment ideals, their work frequently proved especially appealing to those seeking “reasonableness” in religion. Werner’s second chapter examines how one such admirer, Robert Southey (Britain’s poet laureate from 1813 until 1843), both popularized and crucially misrepresented this aspect of the missionary perspective. Although their travels frequently coincided with British colonial expansion, missionaries were often opposed to the more overtly coercive features of the imperial project: “the political and cultural benefits of Christianity would only be realized by changing individual hearts […] Social good followed individual spiritual salvation” (91). Southey’s literary representations of missionary work, in contrast, “tries to appropriate missionary cosmopolitanism to suit his own nationalist ends” (93). Werner shrewdly emphasizes this contrast through a reading of A Tale of Paraguay (1825), a long poem that construes the logic of posthumous salvation as an exculpation of imperial brutality: “colonial disease and native deaths work ultimately work for the greater good” (99). What might be seen as common ground in a rhetorical tendency toward pragmatism overlooks deeper theological and ideological divides in practice. The first two chapters of Missionary Cosmopolitanism, then, highlight the ways in which early nineteenth-century missionary work entered a mainstream that it sometimes subtly strove to redirect. The final two chapters illuminate the fissures that opened up in the movement in the 1840s and 1850s. The third chapter reads St. John Rivers’s proposal to Jane Eyre in connection with the increasingly vexed debate over missionaries and interracial marriage. Because the missionary movement was predicated on the idea of universal [End Page 141] human kinship, interracial marriages were accepted and even to some degree encouraged well into the 1820s. Yet precisely because these marriages proceeded from this assumption of equality, they also disrupted other assumptions about cultural superiority that tacitly informed missionary work. St. John’s insistence that he marry someone like Jane, someone as much like himself as possible, betrays an anxiety about a disruptive desire for the other by pre-empting it as emphatically as possible. Werner’s final chapter explores a turning point in the way that missionaries...

Driven by the ‘Indefinable Something’: How Religious Perceptions Motivate Political Protests

ABSTRACT Over the past decades, scholars have given increasing attention to the religious impulses for political activism. Such research has focused primarily on collective elements – mobilization resources, religion as social capital, rites and communal practice. At the individual level, religious salience and belief (e.g. faith in God, belief in heaven, hell, or life after death) have mostly been studied in relation to protest behavior. Little attention has been paid to the effects of religious perceptions – i.e. the threat upon onès belief, viewing the society as sinful and believing that one is contributing to accomplishing God`s plan in the world. With respect to the Orthodox Christian tradition, there is virtually no evidence on this subject. The article addresses this gap in the literature and verifies the significance of the above mentioned religious perceptions in the Eastern European Orthodox setting. Additionally, it suggests the awareness of the divinity as a source of encouragement, as a motivational factor. The qualitative study focuses on the 1989 anti-communist revolution in Timișoara, Romania, and relies on 45 semi-structured interviews with former participants to the demonstrations. Results point to the perceived personal encouragement from God as the main inner-religious incentive for the decison to protest.

Scott Calhoun, U2 and the Religious Impulse: Take Me Higher

Does the world need another edited collection on the Irish rock band, U2? Maybe not. After all, the band have gained enough commercial success and garnered enough attention already. They have received so much visibility that it has gone to their collective rock star heads. Bono, the band’s lead singer and, arguably, the biggest ego of the group, has used (and perhaps abused) his cultural capital to mingle with those with political capital (not to mention monetary capital) to try to affect cha...

Calhoun, Scott (ed.) 2018. U2 and the Religious Impulse.

Calhoun, Scott (ed.) 2018. U2 and the Religious Impulse. London: Bloomsbury.

Erotic Absence and Sacramental Hope: Rowan Williams on Augustinian Desire

Both church and culture seem perplexed by desire and what it says about us as human beings. Amid the increasing freedom to identify with our desires, there remains the perpetual problem of insatiety, coupled with the increasing isolation of a digitalized age. Our cultural and religious impulses become blurred as we seek always a little more, in our hopes that we might finally quiet our ontological restlessness. Rowan Williams, drawing from Augustine, identifies this restlessness as central to understanding ourselves and our relation to God and others. This erotic absence that disallows any premature closure offers not satiety but sacrament, and a place in a body larger than our own.

The Testimony of the Spirit, the Decline of Calvinism, and the Origins of Restoration Rational Religion

The mid-seventeenth century turn to moralism in English Protestant theology – exemplified here by ‘Ignorance’ in Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress – involved a clear rejection of the Calvinistic doctrine of the ‘internal testimony’ of Scripture. The upshot was the emergence of a religious impulse that emphasised the salience of a ‘rational account’ of Scripture's credibility. The shift is conventionally traced through Richard Hooker, William Chillingworth and the Cambridge Platonists. Hooker was, however, more Calvinist and Chillingworth more Laudian than has been recognised. The Cambridge Platonists and their ‘latitudinarian’ successors emerged from and were shaped by puritan culture.

Beyond oneself: the ethics and psychology of awe.

Awe and wonder appear to be powerful emotions that can inform and shape our attitudes toward ourselves and others, especially in relation to the larger meaning and purpose of our lives. What are the psychological underpinnings of these universal emotions? How does awe, for example, relate to self-knowledge, and more generally to understanding the enigmatic contradictions of human nature? Is it possible to cultivate and develop this emotion as an ethical incentive in our relationships with others? Are awe and wonder capable of awakening and engendering moral transformation? Does the emotion of awe lie at the root of the religious impulse in humans? and Is there any room left for a sense of the miraculous in today's increasingly scientific and secular world? Professor of religious studies Lisa Sideris joins psychologists Jennifer Stellar and Piercarlo Valdesolo to explore how awe shapes our perspectives and views on everything from science to morality.

Scotland's Lost Colony Found: Rediscovering Stuarts Town, 1682–1688

Historians on both sides of the Atlantic have failed to appreciate the significance of Stuarts Town, Scotland's short-lived colony in Port Royal, South Carolina. This article challenges the current view that Stuarts Town was primarily a business venture, focusing, instead, on the religious impulses that lay just beneath the surface of the Carolina Company. These concerns came to the fore as presbyterian persecution intensified in 1683 and the colony was reimagined as a safe haven for the true church, where the saving remnant of God's people could escape the terrible judgments befalling Scotland and where the gospel would be secure. Its purpose was collective, corporate, social and historical. On the ground in Carolina, however, colonisers behaved more like imperialists than religious refugees. Like Scotland, the Anglo-Spanish borderland was a violent and unstable place that bred fear of displacement and enslavement, but unlike Scotland it lacked a centralised power, giving the Scots an opening to make their bid for empire. They moved aggressively into this power vacuum, seeking in particular to capitalise on the perceived weakness of Spanish Florida to extend their reach into coastal Georgia, the south-eastern interior and as far west as New Mexico. Their actions created great anxiety in the region and, although the collapse of the Stuart regime finally put an end to their hopes, their short-lived colony transformed the borderlands, reorienting English, Spanish and Indian relations, sparking the coalescence of the Yamasee tribe and the Creek confederacy, and giving new life to the Indian slave trade that eventually shattered indigenous societies in the American south-east.

Paradox between Religion and Biotechnology in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

In the modern world, biotechnology plays a vital role to help improve human lives and the health of the planet; and, similarly, we cannot deny the significance of religion that helps to shape the human’s mind and spiritual growth. Both are equally important even though many secularists and nonbelievers tend to regard religion and science (technology) as vitally incompatible. This incompatibility is also imagined to extend the relationship between religion and biotechnology. We cannot envisage the present world without technology, which is often rooted, sometimes unknowingly in religious myths and ancient dreams and it is unfortunate sometimes technology has proven itself capable of causing terrible problems in the name of humanity and one of the reasons for this may be the religious impulses people are ignoring. This research article tries to analyze the paradox between religion and biotechnology based on humanity raised by Kazuo Ishuguro in the novel Never Let Me Go. It tries to examine the scientific credibility and the religious values for humanity in the futuristic world.

U2 and the Religious Impulse: Take Me Higher, ScottCalhoun (ed.), Bloomsbury, 2018 (ISBN 978‐1‐5013‐3239‐5), xiv + 242 pp., hb £85

Reviews in Religion & TheologyVolume 26, Issue 1 p. 46-48 Review U2 and the Religious Impulse: Take Me Higher, Scott Calhoun (ed.), Bloomsbury, 2018 (ISBN 978-1-5013-3239-5), xiv + 242 pp., hb £85 Mark S. Medley, Corresponding Author Mark S. Medley mark.medley@bsk.edu Baptist Seminary of KentuckySearch for more papers by this author Mark S. Medley, Corresponding Author Mark S. Medley mark.medley@bsk.edu Baptist Seminary of KentuckySearch for more papers by this author First published: 30 January 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/rirt.13449Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume26, Issue1January 2019Pages 46-48 RelatedInformation