Religious Impulse Research Articles

MARK S. WEINER. Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2004. Pp. xvii, 421. $26.95

In this very impressive and important work, Mark S. Weiner uses “legal cases” from America's colonial period up until modern times to “depict the changing status of black Americans within the American national identity” (p. xi). For Weiner, these legal conflicts—the “black trials” of the book's title—also reveal important truths about America's “national identity itself.” We are the things we struggle over, and the civic status and social position of black people have been the subject and object of unremitting struggle throughout American history. Weiner sees these struggles as having taken place within the framework of “three visions of law and civic life” in America: “liberal individualism,” “racial caste,” and “Christianity” (pp. 17–20). Weiner's project is to show, through his analysis of fourteen legal cases, how these three, often contradictory, visions have helped shape black Americans' quest for “civic belonging” (pp. 5–9). The book unfolds chronologically in five parts whose titles convey the author's view of the “rituals of citizenship” that have marked blacks' progress across the four centuries surveyed. “Colonial Visions, 1619–1773” presents the “birth of black trials” (p. 27) as blacks and whites on both sides of the Atlantic grappled with contradictory religious impulses, the values of the Enlightenment, and white supremacy in legal proceedings well known and almost unknown. One of the book's many strengths is that Weiner, in this section and others, employs the obscure—the case of Joseph Hanno, accused of killing his wife—along with the very famous—Somerset's Case—to illustrate the problematic nature of blacks' civic status.

Parties, ideology and social composition

Este artigo discute a formação da cultura brasileira. Como outros países ibero-americanos, o Brasil apresenta a peculiaridade de ser um país nascido de idéias e de projetos. Nasceu de um complexo medieval de motivos que incluiu ganância de riqueza e poder, além de impulsos religiosos, precedendo o capitalismo comercial. Uma sucessão de projetos acompanha a história do país desde os primeiros planos da Coroa para a colonização, vindo depois os dos jesuítas e de Pombal, com a questão central dos índios; no Império, os projetos da formação de um Estado e de um povo (para o "país sem povo"); na Republica Velha se inicia, com Canudos, a descoberta do povo que se realiza, finalmente, na "era de Vargas". As grandes idéias e os projetos de sua história deixaram marcas em sua cultura política.

Turning to Earth: Stories of Ecological Conversion by F. Marina Schauffler

B o o k R e v ie w s Turning to Earth: Stories of Ecological Conversion. By F. Marina Schauffler. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. 161 pages, $49.50/$ 14.95. Reviewed by John Tallmadge Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, Ohio Conversion, in the religious sense, means turning away from one set of beliefs to embrace another. It connotes a major change, not only in attitude and creed but in life and practice. We generally imagine conversion in terms of two great models. For St. Paul, struck blind and admonished by Christ’s disembodied voice on the road to Damascus, conversion was a sudden, cata­ clysmic event. For St. Augustine, whose years of philosophic and emotional struggle had wound his soul to an unbearable tension, all it took was a chance encounter with scripture: conversion was the tipping point in a long process of maturation, like a ripe pear dropping from a tree. For Marina Schauffler, a writer and scholar who lives on the coast of Maine, conversion offers a Kay Hornick. ALTERED BOOK IN GREENS. 2004- An old children’s board book served as the base for collage techniques. The artist sanded the pages of the original book and gessoed each. Then she applied collage techniques to create a new book. 7" x 6 Vi". Courtesy of the artist. B o o k R e v ie w s 2 0 7 fascinating lens through which to interpret the lives and works of important environmental writers. Like many scholars, including historian Stephen Fox, Schauffler discerns a religious impulse in American environmentalism, something deeply personal and spiritual yet independent of churches, established creeds, theology, or the supernatural. She views environmental problems arising from our values and beliefs, the “inner ecology” that affects our actions and thus our engagement with the “outer ecology” of the places we inhabit. To achieve a sustainable future, we must bring the two into harmony. For examples ofhow that can be done, she looks for patterns in the life writing of six notable authors: Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, N. Scott Momaday, Scott Russell Sanders, Alice Walker, and Terry Tempest Williams. On their writing, she finds something different from either the Pauline or the Augustinian models: conversion as an ongoing, cyclical pro­ cess. “The turn to Earth is rarely a straight trajectory from old life to new,” she writes. “More commonly it involves a cycling back, a re-turning [that] creates a spiral of growth” (7). Conversion becomes a life practice rather than a dramatic historical moment, and Schauffler finds six aspects ofenactment: remembrance (of formative encounters w :ith nature), reflection (contemplation of memories to elicit meaning), revelation (transformative, epiphanic experiences), reci­ procity (I-Thou encounters with other creatures), resistance (political action), and ritual (celebration or witnessing through performance and writing). Because Schauffler is less interested in the literary qualities of these works than in the experiences and choices they report, her book aligns itself more with ecopsychology than with ecocriticism. Her concept of ecological conver­ sion recalls Mitchell Thomashow’s “ecological identity” as both a quality ofmind and a reflective practice (Ecological Identity, 1995). In the manner of narrative criticism, she offers her own experiences in modest but resonant counterpoint to those of her writers, which adds a refreshing note of sincerity. This lucid and quietly illuminating book will appeal not only to scholars of literature, psychology, or religion but to anyone seeking guidance toward a deeper and more wholesome relation with nature. Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk across Victorian America. By Linda Lawrence Hunt. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 2003. 301 pages, $16.95. Reviewed by Brandon R. Schrand University of Idaho, Moscow “Private chronicles can corroborate public ones,” Elizabeth Hampsten once told us in Read This Only to Yourself (1982). That phrase, which reads more like a mantra now, is central to recovery projects that illuminate the lives and voices of those often forgotten or marginalized. In Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk across Victorian America, Linda Lawrence Hunt recovers the ...

Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk across Victorian America by Linda Lawrence Hunt

B o o k R e v ie w s 2 0 7 fascinating lens through which to interpret the lives and works of important environmental writers. Like many scholars, including historian Stephen Fox, Schauffler discerns a religious impulse in American environmentalism, something deeply personal and spiritual yet independent of churches, established creeds, theology, or the supernatural. She views environmental problems arising from our values and beliefs, the “inner ecology” that affects our actions and thus our engagement with the “outer ecology” of the places we inhabit. To achieve a sustainable future, we must bring the two into harmony. For examples ofhow that can be done, she looks for patterns in the life writing of six notable authors: Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, N. Scott Momaday, Scott Russell Sanders, Alice Walker, and Terry Tempest Williams. On their writing, she finds something different from either the Pauline or the Augustinian models: conversion as an ongoing, cyclical pro­ cess. “The turn to Earth is rarely a straight trajectory from old life to new,” she writes. “More commonly it involves a cycling back, a re-turning [that] creates a spiral of growth” (7). Conversion becomes a life practice rather than a dramatic historical moment, and Schauffler finds six aspects ofenactment: remembrance (of formative encounters w :ith nature), reflection (contemplation of memories to elicit meaning), revelation (transformative, epiphanic experiences), reci­ procity (I-Thou encounters with other creatures), resistance (political action), and ritual (celebration or witnessing through performance and writing). Because Schauffler is less interested in the literary qualities of these works than in the experiences and choices they report, her book aligns itself more with ecopsychology than with ecocriticism. Her concept of ecological conver­ sion recalls Mitchell Thomashow’s “ecological identity” as both a quality ofmind and a reflective practice (Ecological Identity, 1995). In the manner of narrative criticism, she offers her own experiences in modest but resonant counterpoint to those of her writers, which adds a refreshing note of sincerity. This lucid and quietly illuminating book will appeal not only to scholars of literature, psychology, or religion but to anyone seeking guidance toward a deeper and more wholesome relation with nature. Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk across Victorian America. By Linda Lawrence Hunt. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 2003. 301 pages, $16.95. Reviewed by Brandon R. Schrand University of Idaho, Moscow “Private chronicles can corroborate public ones,” Elizabeth Hampsten once told us in Read This Only to Yourself (1982). That phrase, which reads more like a mantra now, is central to recovery projects that illuminate the lives and voices of those often forgotten or marginalized. In Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk across Victorian America, Linda Lawrence Hunt recovers the W e s t e r n A m e r i c a n L i t e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 5 story of this remarkable woman and her daughter, Clara, who walked coast to coast for a $10,000 cash prize to save their family’s Spokane homestead from foreclosure. The challenge, issued by an unknown sponsor in the East, came during the Panic of 1893. Fearing the loss of their home, Helga Estby and her teenage daughter, clad in Victorian dresses and carrying little more than a pis­ tol, struck out across the country. The story itself is remarkable. I found myself racing through the pages, gripped by the narrative. Helga and Clara wade through swollen rivers, cross open deserts, and plod over hardpan plains. Along the way they meet politi­ cians, dignitaries, and a host of seedy drifters. The drama and adventure alone are enough to draw a wide audience. But how Hunt has rendered the story, and how she has pieced it together from fragments, foxed newsprint, grainy microfiche, and exhaustive fieldwork, adds an invaluable dimension to this tantalizing story. Cast against the backdrop of a country struggling with the tides of economic disaster, outbreaks of diphtheria, and social unrest, Bold Spirit tells more than the story of a woman’s tenacity. It tells the story of an America coming to terms with its changing identity. Underlying Helga and Clara’s walk across...

All That's Holy: A Young Guy, an Old Car, and the Search for God in America

Reviewed by: All That's Holy: A Young Guy, an Old Car, and the Search for God in America Timothy P. Muldoon (bio) All That's Holy: A Young Guy, an Old Car, and the Search for God in America. By Tom Levinson. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2003. 308pp. $23.95. Tom Levinson's engaging book is a journal of his road trip/pilgrimage across the United States, in search of an understanding of what drives the religious impulse of people from very different backgrounds. His decision to undertake this journey is a thoroughly postmodern commentary on the phenomenon of religion. For while the journey bears resemblance to the classic formula of the pilgrimage ad extra that becomes a pilgrimage ad intra, the journey itself is expressly pluralistic. Instead of visiting the more traditionally-understood holy places, talking with the authoritative holy people, reading the holy books, and performing the de rigueur holy rituals, Levinson chooses an often haphazard "fling" into the pedestrian, colorful mishmash that is the lived practice of religion in America. He does not confine his visits just to those Catholics, Jews, Evangelicals, Muslims, mainline Protestants, and Buddhists whose religious views would fit neatly into the boxes offered by the Gallup polls. He also talks with a recovering Mormon seeker whose coffee shop/theater has become a kind of post-religious haven for those seeking salvation; a remnant of the Branch Davidian group, whose numbers were decimated by the FBI raid in 1993; a social activist Wiccan who petitioned for recognition by the U.S. Army chaplain corps; a young Hare Krishna devotee; and an older woman who left New York and traveled to Seattle to live as a homeless woman devoted to the practice of divination using the I Ching. Levinson's journey illustrates how elusive any attempt to define religion is. Perhaps the most fascinating element of Levinson's book, which combines both narrative and personal reflection, is how this postmodern pilgrimage nevertheless bears striking resemblance to the traditional literary genre of spiritual autobiography. There are parallels in this book to more famous texts like Augustine's Confessions or Merton's Seven Storey Mountain: specifically, the theme of coming to understand oneself more deeply through the experience of coming to know others. Levinson makes occasional reference to one work which has deeply influenced his own perspective on the human condition and spirituality, Martin Buber's I and Thou. This book undoubtedly contributes to his appreciation for the art of dialogue. While Levinson's conversation partners are, in most cases, from backgrounds radically different from his own, he nevertheless is able to find something basic, something deeply human, through which to connect with the other. He is able to gain the confidence of a death row inmate just days away from execution; and later, he is able to speak meaningfully with the man's mother, an AME Zion Church minister, about her faith and her grief. For Levinson, the religious is fundamentally the human, and is thus matter for conversation and mutual enlightenment. Levinson's presuppositions about religion are both provocative and disturbing, and raise questions about the nature of the spiritual search and about its relationship to religion. It has become common to speak of the uncoupling of personal spirituality and institutional religion in the postmodern world, and so it is no surprise that Levinson chooses to address the former of these more prominently in his conversations with people. In a way, this focus on personal spirituality was necessary for him, given that he was speaking to individuals about their faith, their [End Page 233] perspective on basic questions of finding meaning in the world. He was not, in other words, on a mission to find the "institutional voice" of religious traditions, but rather he sought to understand why people believed and practiced what they did. What emerges from his conversations and reflections is an important point: that both those who choose to affiliate themselves with an established religious tradition and those whose spiritual searches take them outside more recognizable religious boundary lines must struggle to find that balance where the desires of the heart and the yearnings for meaning connect with doctrine, theology, and...

Thanatology and Economics: The Behavioral Economics of Death

Death is an integral part of life. Yet the economic modeling of death is perfunctory, with most of the controversy focused on whether people's planning horizon ends with their own life or extends beyond that. In contrast, one might expect that, of all aspects of life, decisions that require facing up to one's own mortality engender unique fears and psychological reactions.1 That we are forwardlooking and can anticipate death distinguishes human beings from other species. Sigmund Freud's student Otto Rank (1941) argued that mortality anxiety was the fundamental human fear, and he attributed the genesis of man's religious impulses and the source of humanity's construction of meaning and order to the awareness of one's personal finitude. Rank's ideas were revived and popularized in Ernest Becker's (1973) book The Denial of Death. The idea that many people live in denial of their own mortality is common in literature and philosophy, perhaps best summarized in the words of the 17th-century French epigrammist Francois La Rochefoucauld: One cannot look directly at either the sun or Many central issues in economics, such as the intertemporal pattern of consumption, are at stake if people systematically deviate from the predictions of standard models with regard to decisions concerning their own death. Assessing whether this is true requires enriching the models of how people behave in the face of death and testing them against observed patterns of behavior.

From Yahweh to Yahoo!: the religious roots of the secular press

Presenting religion as journalism's silent partner, From Yahweh to Yahoo! provides a fresh and surprising view of the religious impulses at work in the typical newsroom by delving into the largely unexamined parallels between religious and journalistic developments from the 'media' of antiquity to the electronic idolatry of the Internet. Focusing on how the history of religion in the United States has been entwined with the growth of the media, Doug Underwood makes the case that American journalists are rooted in the nation's moral and religious heritage and operate, in certain important ways, as personifications of the old religious virtues. Journalists believe they are serving a cause higher than the commercial goals of their news organizations, Underwood contends.He traces the influence on the press of the biblical prophets' complaints about moral corruption, the calls for reform arising out of the Protestant Reformation, and the principles that drove the muckraker and Social Gospel campaigns of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. Underwood argues that one must see the profession of journalism in terms of its religious character to understand the tensions at work in today's media. He explores the forces that have pushed journalists away from identifying themselves with religion, yet notes the reverential way in which they approach such secular topics as science, technology, and psychology. His wide-ranging discussion includes the press' formulaic coverage of spiritual experience, its failure adequately to cover new and non-Christian religions in America, and the complicity of the mainstream media in launching the religious broadcasting movement.

Institutional and Legal Responses to Begging in Medieval England

A great many factors other than philanthrophy influenced social policy in England during the Middle Ages. Although political thinkers steadfastly acknowledged the importance of received tradition, especially the religious command to help the poor, many lawmakers were profoundly ambivalent about begging. It is true that the opinion of the nineteenth century implied that medieval almsgiving was so “reckless” that English “beggars had an easy life,” but more recent research has challenged this perspective, bringing the parameters of medieval mendicancy into sharper focus. Seen individually, beggars were pathetic and vulnerable, but if viewed collectively they were thought to be dangerous and willfully idle. Parliament's decision to regulate begging in the years after the first appearance of the Black Death (1349–50) compelled the king's subjects to rethink the claims of the needy, even though almsgiving had long seemed a positive aspect of community life. Obviously by the close of the fourteenth century something had happened to broaden the story of casual relief, extending its boundaries beyond religious impulse to include the frustrations and passions that animated the political arena. Here contentious voices sounded, although parliamentary argument and debate were often tempered by the conviction that men of affairs could legislate a more orderly realm. Even so, efforts at social planning were by no means limited to statutory decree or confined to the late medieval world.

Men, Muscles and Zombies: A Partial Response to Michelangelo Signorile

This article reflects upon the way in which religious paradigms are used to analyse the cult of masculinity in Michelangelo Signorile's ‘report’ on gay culture. Boisvert argues that the discourse used by Signorile reduces religion to cultic behaviour and confirms stereotypes of gay culture as unhealthy and hedonistic. The sort of gay self-critique employed by Signorile seeks to contain the religious impulses Boisvert believes are inherent within gay sexuality; an eroticism that in its defiance and excess opens gay men to the touch and kiss of the ‘ineffably holy’.

The silent cry: mysticism and resistance

Exploring the religious impulse known as - the silent cry at the heart of all the world's religions. Mysticism, in the sense of a longing for God, has been present in all times, cultures, and religions. But Soelle believes it has never been more important than in this age of materialism and fundamentalism. The antiauthoritarian mystical element in each religion leads to community of free spirits and resistance to the death-dealing aspects of our contemporary culture. Religion in the third millennium, Soelle argues, either will be mystical or it will be dead. Therefore, Soelle identifies strongly with the hunger of New Age searchers, but laments the religious fast food they devour. Today, a kind of democratized mysticism of those without much religious background flourishes. This mystical experience is not drawn so much of the tradition as out of contemporary experiences. In that sense, each of us is a mystic, and Soelle's work seeks to give theological depth, clarity, and direction. This, her magnum opus, conjoins Soelle's deep religious knowledge and wisdom with her passion for social justice into a work destined to be a classic of religious literature.

Is God All in the Mind?

Why God Won't Go Away Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili, and Vince Rause. Ballantine, New York, 2001. 234 pp. $24.95, C$37.95. ISBN: 0-345-44033-1. Emphasizing their interpretation of the neurophysiology of mystic experiences, the authors argue that the religious impulse is rooted in the biology of the brain.

The Talmud and the Internet: a journey between worlds

From the Publisher: Not long after my grandmother died, my computer crashed and I lost the journal I had kept of her dying. So begins this powerful personal consideration of modern technology and ancient religious impulses by a celebrated young novelist and essayist. Jonathan Rosen blends religious history, memoir and literary reflection as he compares the fortunate life of his American-born grandmother to the life of his European-born grandmother, who was murdered by Nazis. The Talmud and the Internet explores the contradictions of Rosen's inheritance and toggles between personal paradoxes and those of the larger world. Along the way, he chronicles the remarkable parallels between a page of Talmud and the home page of a Web site. In the loose, associative logic and the vastness of each, he discovers not merely the disruption of a broken world but a kind of disjointed harmony. In the same way that the Talmud helped Jews survive after the destruction of the Temple by making Jewish culture portable and personal, the all-inclusive Internet serves a world that is both more uprooted and more connected than ever before. In this profound, ultimately hopeful meditation, Rosen charts the territory between doubt and belief, tragedy and prosperity, the world of the living and the world of the dead. Jonathan Rosen is the author of the novel Eve's Apple, which The New York Times praised as an absorbing, intelligent tale of love and the mysteriousness of the other. He created the Arts & Letters section of the Forward, which he edited for ten years. His essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The American Scholar and several anthologies. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter. Rosen carries out the most bracing sort of, exploration, using the lens of the new An engaging, superbly written meditation. (Sven Birkerts) ... I'm still turning this gemlike little volume Rosen's wise and heartfelt book is a home page with links to infinity. (Anne Fadiman) ... it has the quality of permanence Its wisdom is in its mixture of rapture and elegy and honesty and reverence ... (Cynthia Ozick) It's extremely rare and exciting to read something that links ancient and modern sensibilities both impressively cerebral and highly personal. (Ron Rosenbaum)

The Reluctant Witness: What Jean Toomer Remembered from Winesburg, Ohio

Ohio and Triumph of the Egg are elements of my growing. It is hard to think of my maturing without them. --Jean Toomer to Sherwood Anderson, December 18, 1922 Sherwood Anderson whom Toomer said he admired was the Anderson who affirmed the value of existence despite the painful loneliness, isolation, and existential angst experienced by his characters. As he told Anderson, Your acute of the of life could easily have led to lean pessimism in less abundant soul. Your Yea! to life is one of the clear fine tones in our medley of harsh discordant sounds. Life is measured by your own glowing, and you find life, you find its possibilities deeply hopeful and beautiful. It seems to me that art in our day, other than its purely aesthetic phase, has sort of religious function. It is religion, of the immediate. And ever since I first touched you, I have thought of you in this connection. As we know, the religious impulse and the affirmation of life did find their way into Cane (1923), the brilliant hybrid short-story cycle that helped inspire the Harlem Renaissance, but Anderson's real influence is hinted at in complaint Toomer made to Waldo Frank: Anderson, Toomer said, only saw in Cane themes commensurate with his own, a of the tragic separateness, the tragic sterility of people. In actuality, what Toomer did was to take Anderson's sense of ... tragic separateness and put that theme in horrific sociological context. Toomer who wrote of the collapsing house in Becky as the South in ruins, or who described brutal lynching in Portrait in Georgia in terms of Petrarchan conventions, or who identified with Kabnis's paranoia in Kabnis, was the Toomer who changed Anderson's nightworld of human personality in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) into the nightmare of racial in Cane. That is, Anderson's real influence on Toomer's Cane was not the spiritualization of the immediate, but Kabnis's realization that things are so immediate in Georgia, for Toomer understood that the South's intangible oppression reshaped the lonely grotesques of Winesburg into the anguished souls in Halsey's cellar. Despite his wish to see himself as The First in which his six blood minglings represented synthesis in microcosm of the utopian future predicted by Frank in Our America (1919), Toomer would recontextualize Winesburg's small-town's psyche into southern Gothicism that underlined his own social position in the American scene as an African-American.(1) A common theme in Anderson's stories is the clash between an inchoate inner life and the all too tangible facts of human experience. In Winesburg, Anderson uses words like adventure and hands not only to link stories but also to express man and woman's desperate attempts to break through the finite world of social and physical limitation to some hidden truth or vital connection. attempts, however, almost always fail, as doors, walls, and houses become Anderson's metaphors for the barriers placed between the shadowy world of desire and human fulfillment. As he has character say in the story Seeds in Triumph of the Egg (1921): To be sure she is grotesque, but then all the people in the world are grotesques. We all need to be loved. What would cure her would cure the rest of us also. disease she had is, you see, universal. We all want to be loved and the world has no plan for creating our lovers. For Anderson the Incarnation means that the flesh (canis) of the world creates more or less permanent veil between self and other, expression and feeling, desire and fulfillment, that is overcome only at rare moments.(2) Thus, while often grounded in social and/or historical context, Anderson's grotesques are not always foregrounded in that context. They appear to the old storyteller in dream in The Book of the Grotesque, as they pass in procession, one by one, devoid of all context except the context of dream. …

Engendering a People: Soviet Women and Socialist Rebirth in Russia

1 The October Revolution was merely one victorious battle in the Bolsheviks' lengthy struggle for socio-economic and political change. The Bolsheviks expected their victory to be a step toward worldwide revolution and the socioeconomic transformation of Russia. When the international working class revolution failed to develop, the Bolsheviks knew that they could not overcome the breakdown in transportation, industry, communication, and administration unless they mobilised the people for reconstruction. They offered literacy courses, educational literature, as well as training in technological and administrative work. Even more importantly, they encouraged the people to identify with the Bolshevik Party as the newly-established symbol of socialism in Russia. Their revolutionary struggle was not merely over social and economic forms, but over human hearts. To realise their political, social, and economic programs, the Bolsheviks needed the people to identify themselves with the Revolution and with the Party that defined it. They needed the Russian people to become Soviet socialists. What did it mean for a Russian worker or a peasant to be socialist? Two women's journals put out by the Bolshevik Party in the 1920s-Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman) and Rabotnitsa i Krest'ianka (The Working Woman and the Peasant Woman-taught Russian women that socialists were not merely diligent workers who happened to study the works of Karl Marx. They were not merely obedient Party members; according to these journals, a man or woman had to be filled with a sense of personal dignity and power. Pursuing scientific and technological knowledge, a true socialist was supposed to oppose ignorance, illiteracy, greed, apathy, religion, drug addiction, and alcoholism. Manipulating the biblical images and stories familiar to Orthodox Russians, these journals insisted that the teachings of Marx and Lenin had spiritual significance. In the new community of revolutionary saints, Marxism-Leninism would not only transform society, but also the human person. In other words, to be a Russian woman had to allow Marxist ideas to transform her thought and her behaviour; she had to undergo a spiritual, Marxist rebirth. The spiritual and intellectual rebirth envisioned by those who contributed to Rabotnitsa and Rabotnitsa i Krest'ianka reflected a dimension of Russian Marxism which was profoundly religious and utopian. Their vision of human intellectual and spiritual development gave Marxism-Leninism a deeply personal and emotional appeal. By giving a mystical and religious depth to socialism, they sustained the religious Marxism which Lenin had condemned and prevented the religious impulses of the early revolutionary movement from dying away.' When writing to Russian women, Party journalists and propagandists turned Marxism into a language of belief and hope--that is, a language which could fill Russian women and their children with a faith in the Party and in the full socialism which it promised to bring. The bogostroiteli (god-builders) represent the most unrepentantly religious group found within the Russian revolutionary tradition. Although many of them were members of the Bolshevik party (whose leader condemned god-building ideas), these pre-revolutionary Marxists envisioned the Revolution in moral and spiritual terms. Like the pre-revolutionary god-seekers (bogoiskateli), these godbuilding revolutionaries hoped that Russia would be spiritually revitalised. But whereas bogoiskateli believed that this spiritual renewal would be achieved in and through Orthodoxy, bogostroiteli called for the formation of a new religion of humanity. Led by such influential figures as Maksim Gor'kii and Anatolii Lunacharskii, bogostroiteli (god-builders) proposed that the great men of science and technology be held up for veneration and imitation in much the same manner as Christ and the saints are upheld by the Russian Orthodox Church as models for the people to image, or imitate, in their own lives. …

Business and Naturalism

Bill Frederick’s work calls on business ethicists to consider religion as well as nature. Because there are naturally wired religious impulses in human beings and because of the fairness of including normative approaches meaningful for business people, Frederick suggests that the “R” in CSR4 should represent religion. This article takes up the theme in terms of the emerging field of naturalist theology, particularly (although embryonically) as stated by theologian Paul Tillich. Doing so creates (a) connections between “God as Life” and nature and (b) linkages of the notions of symbol, culture, and transcendence. In addition to avoiding the socalled “naturalistic fallacy,” this integration can foster ethical business behavior.

A Critique

Religion ineluctably gravitates to center-stage as a determining issue, perhaps the determining issue, in the delineation of Israeli national identity. Herzl's "Jewish State" was intended and was understood to mean the state of the Jews; that is, of Jewry, not of Judaism. Ever since the emotional "Uganda" debate in the Zionist Congress of 1903 allowed the religious impulse into play by an ideological back door, Zionism has lived as a marriage of incompatibles. Israel itself inherited this fate through its ideological legacy. Secularist and universalist in origin and purpose, the ideology must also be religious and particularist at the same time. This is not accomplished through synthesis, since there is none available--it is not possible to synthesize democracy and theocracy (unless there is an overwhelming religious majority, conceivable only in a far distant future). Nor, as the brief career of Canaanism suggests, can a divorce be negotiated between the two opposites. They are in fact tethered in dynamic matrimony, the very discordance of which constitutes, rather than merely characterizes, the Israeli identity.

Educated doubt: women, religion and the challenge of higher education, c. 1870-1920[1

The advent of higher education for women, with its emphasis on reason, on scientific thought and on critical approaches to knowledge, constituted a potential threat to religious belief. The stories of male ‘doubters’ are legion but what happened to thoughtful women, confronted with challenges to their belief systems? This article shows that educated doubt was not only a male affliction. Women responded to the challenge in a variety of ways. Some rejected belief, turning their religious impulses to aesthetic or social ends. Others brought scientific reasoning to bear on religious phenomena, hoping to ‘prove’ the existence of spirituality. Some saw in science and reason a further manifestation of the spiritual impulse; in education further possibilities of the life of the spirit. A common thread unites the responses, the search for a voice, an authority which women sought in the new secular institutions of higher learning.

The Protestant Ethic and Rockefeller Benevolence: The Religious Impulse in American Philanthropy

This paper is an application of Max Weber’s thesis about the “elective affinity” between Protestant religious impulses and the rise of capitalism, and rationalization of benevolence. Exploring the history of organized philanthropy in the United States, using the life and work of John D. Rockefeller, the paper presents the power of the religious motive in Rockefeller’s commitment to philanthropy, especially towards support for scientific university based research in medicine. Presenting historical evidence, the paper argues against those who see U.S. philanthropists as giving out of guilt or for selfish motivation, and those who critique philanthropic foundations as producers and reproducers of cultural hegemony

Moskou, Het Derde Rome

Moscow, the third Rome: The emergence of a religious-political myth Although the beginning of Russian history lies in Kievan Rus’, it was during the post-Kievan period that the Russian national consciousness became explicit. It was expressed in the vitae of Russian princes such as Aleksandr Nevskij and Dmitrij Donskoj who fought against catholic neighbours in the West, Lithuania and the Teutonic Order, and against the heathen and islamic Tatars from the East. After the church union of Florence had failed and after the fall of Constantinople the Russian national consciousness got new political and religious impulses and developed into a kind of official ideology, the ‘third Rome’ doctrine. It was expressed in beautiful legends of Tver and Novgorod origin, but eventually became a Moscow doctrine in the letters of the monk Filofej. It reached its highest status under Ivan the Terrible but this tsar also undermined the myth by his politics of terror. The doctrine is an eastward variant of the translatio imperii and has interesting parallels with the Western variant.

Worshiping at the altar of Oz

Worshiping at the Altar of Oz A. Waller Hastings (bio) Paul Nathanson. Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America. Albany: State U of New York P, 1991. MGM’s 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz enjoys an unusual, if not a unique, status among the artifacts of American popular culture. Even now, nearly sixty years after The Wizard of Oz was released, images of the oddly mixed quartet of adventurers traveling down the Yellow Brick Road, of the Wicked Witch of the West plotting her revenge on the innocent girl, of the fraudulent wizard ensconced in his glistening castle appear repeatedly in the most unexpected contexts. When something strange and unexpected happens in the otherwise mundane world, someone is sure to say, “Toto, we’re not in Kansas any more”—and everyone within hearing will know precisely what is meant. Comic strips, print and television ads, movies and television shows, novels and poems both serious and slight, all make visual or verbal references to scenes, characters, and dialogue from the movie, secure in the knowledge that the allusion will have its desired effect, and everyone will know the full context of the quoted reference. The Wizard of Oz and other icons of popular culture (Disney films, Casablanca, Gone with the Wind) have thus usurped the place in our collective imagination that long ago was occupied by Bible stories and mythology—that is, pop culture has become the source of our verbal and visual shorthand. As one of my professors once observed, authors of previous centuries could assume that their readers were familiar enough with the details of the Bible that the mention of a name or two—Dives and Lazarus in speeches by Victorian social reformers, say, or Jael and Sisera in a Charlotte Brontë novel—could evoke a host of narrative and ethical associations. Today, it is necessary to provide footnotes for such offhand references, but no one, it seems, needs to be told where the yellow brick road comes from. [End Page 281] Why The Wizard of Oz should be so ubiquitous in our cultural discourse is the question that Paul Nathanson proposes to answer in Over the Rainbow. He argues that this film—certainly the most significant children’s movie and arguably one of the most influential American films—has assumed the role formerly occupied by religious myth in our national consciousness. Only quasi-religious status can account for its remarkably persistent popularity, its omnipresence in popular culture, its appeal across social divisions. In Nathanson’s reading, The Wizard of Oz mediates between the religious and secular realms, becoming a quintessentially American myth by incorporating elements of religious and narrative traditions associated with an idyllic national past. Nathanson appears to have a point, but his evocation of the religious impulse as an explanation for the film’s popularity falls flat. Secular myths have always coexisted with holy myths; the same nineteenth-century authors who assumed familiarity with the Bible also assumed familiarity with the Arabian Nights, which clearly did not have a religious association for Western readers, and with a host of other texts and legends. American cultural mythology is full of stories about George Washington and the cherry tree, Lincoln and the log cabin, etc., which embody various national aspirations without taking on the status of religious discourse, and which flourished alongside a very active religious discourse during the nineteenth century. In reading Over the Rainbow, I was constantly tantalized by the possibilities it suggested but frustrated by the book’s unevenness. This study began as Nathanson’s doctoral dissertation (McGill, 1991), and it still shows the signs of its origins. That is, each scholarly reference is meticulously summarized and analyzed, even if it is present only to make one minor point and could be dealt with better in a paragraph rather than a page (or more often, several pages); in a number of instances, the summary of someone else’s argument occupies almost as much space in Nathanson’s book as it did in its original form. Were the arguments presented in this way of crucial importance to Nathanson’s thesis, there might be some justification; but...