Religious Past Research Articles

"¿Y memoria?": Larra y la resistencia al olvido

This study highlights the role of the past in the work of Mariano José de Larra, and in so doing addresses a contradiction in the traditional view of the writer as both anachronistically "modern" and the exemplary Spanish Romantic. While displaying an artistic sensibility in line with the German Romanticism of A. W. Schlegel, which is characterized by an emphasis on the interdependence of the literary past and present, Larra refuses to limit his conception of good art to the chronological category of Romanticism, and fights against the forgetfulness that such a narrowing of scope would imply. This "resistance to oblivion" is analyzed as it appears in several of Larra's writings, beginning with articles on the arts in Spain such as "Conventos españoles," "Literatura," and "You quiero ser cómico"; then moving to the political vision he expresses in his introduction to his translation of a visionary text by F. R. Lammenais; and finally turning to the social criticism of the author's last writings, with particular focus on the article "Fígaro dado al mundo." In all of these texts, Larra makes reference to Spain's political and religious past, as well as to literature from a variety of time periods, in order to include that past in a better understanding of the present. Thus emerges a view of art and criticism as mnemonic and, thereby, restorative forces in society—along with a sharp critique of modernity's forgetfulness and, implicitly, the selective memory of the Romantic Movement.

Three geographers in an archive: positions, predilections and passing comment on transient lives

Despite the existence of research conducted by geographers eschewing or professing religious faith, the influence of researchers and their methods have yet to receive critical attention within the study of religion. The experience of three geographers working on a three‐year research project suggests that it is vital to reflect upon the inter‐subjective relationships and methodologies used to reconstruct the religious past. How do different subject positions influence our selections from historical records? We also consider whether the spatialities of putatively ‘religious’ archives, whether formally or informally constituted, make a difference to the construction of historiographical knowledge. In attempting to answer these questions, the paper argues that developing an awareness of different types of positionality, vis‐à‐vis religious faith and practice, combined with reflexivity, vis‐à‐vis methodology, can enrich the interpretative reconstruction of the religious past.

We Might Know What to Do and How to Do It: On the Usefulness of the Religious Past

We Might Know What to Do and How to Do It: On the Usefulness of the Religious Past

Religion: beyond a concept

What do we talk about when we talk about religion? Is it an array of empirical facts about historical human civilizations? Or is religion what is in essence unpredictable-perhaps the very emergence of the new? In what ways are the legacies of religion-its powers, words, things, and gestures-reconfiguring themselves as the elementary forms of life in the twenty-first century?Given the Latin roots of the word religion and its historical Christian uses, what sense, if any, does it make to talk about religionin other traditions? Where might we look for common elements that would enable us to do so? Has religion as an overarching concept lost all its currency, or does it ineluctably return-sometimes in unexpected ways-the moment we attempt to do without it? This book explores the difficulties and double binds that arise when we ask What is religion? Offering a marvelously rich and diverse array of perspectives, it begins the task of rethinking religionand religious studiesin a contemporary world. Opening essays on the question What is religion?are followed by clusters exploring the relationships among religion, theology, and philosophy and the links between religion, politics, and law. Pedagogy is the focus of the following section. Religion is then examined in particular contexts, from classical times to the present Pentacostal revival, leading into an especially rich set of essays on religion, materiality, and mediatization. The final section grapples with the ever-changing forms that religionis taking, such as spirituality movements and responses to the ecological crisis.Featuring the work of leading scholars from a wide array of disciplines, traditions, and cultures, Religion: Beyond a Concept will help set the agenda for religious studies for years to come. It is the first of five volumes in a collection entitled The Future of the Religious Past, the fruit of a major international research initiative funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

Een godvechter wordt voorvechter

A godfighter becomes a fighter for God 
 
 The Pastoral Letters refer twice, in biographical notes, to the religious past of the apostle Paul. In 1 Timothy 1 he is qualified as “a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man” (NIV). These qualifications are the stereotypes of a “godfighter", as they are known in secular and early Jewish literature of antiquity. Nevertheless, Paul did not become a recipient of divine vengeance, but of the grace of the Lord. He thus became a fighter for God: the advocate of Christianity. Against this background, how can 2 Timothy 1 state of the same Paul that he, like his Jewish ancestors, has continued to serve God with a clear conscience? This could be seen as a strange discrepancy. Exegesis of both statements in context makes clear, however, that the Pastoral Letters draw a consistent picture of Paul. He had to redefine his faith, but in doing this he did not engage in the worship of any other God than the God of his forefathers.

Clothing of Piety, Clothing of Poverty: Object Lessons in a Convent School

This paper focuses on the ways in which memories of the religious habits worn by Catholic teaching sisters prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) came to circulate in Atlantic Canada in the 1990s. At that time, people living in an impoverished rural settlement in northern New Brunswick recalled ominous dark and shrouded figures when discussing the religious past. However, the significance attached to the clothing of piety diverged considerably when the teaching sisters who once worked in that settlement recalled their past. They focused on the very materiality of their clothing as an object that had sensuous properties, constricting and enveloping, limiting and enabling their work. But they also recalled the clothing of others, the clothing of poverty in which their students came to school. One's deictic perspective, as either perceiver or wearer, altered the significance attached to the religious clothing of piety, or the threadbare clothing of poverty. This paper examines the ways in which the memories of objects from the past came to articulate broader grievances.

‘Ancient Astronaut’ Narrations. A Popular Discourse on our Religious Past

In their typical explanatory and unveiling gesture, the narrations about Ancient Astronauts have become a popular myth about our religious past. Nowadays, these narrations are often contained in a specific genre of literature on the alternative bookshelves, and a gigantic theme park in Interlaken (“Mystery Park”) is staging some of its basic ideas. This Ancient Astronaut discourse owes much to Swiss-born Erich von Daniken, to be sure, but it can be traced back to the earlier impact of Charles Fort and his iconoclastic books about “damned data” – anomalistic sightings and findings which an ignorant science deliberately seemed to “exclude”. Since then, the “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in Ancient Times” (Paleo-SETI or PSETI) has become a popular “research” subject, leading not only to various publications in many languages of the world, but also to lay-research organizations and conventions. – The paper tries to identify the major themes, motivations and argumentative strategies in the Ancient Astronauts discourse, as well as its typical oscillation between an ‘alternative science’ and manifest esotericism. With its ‘neo-mythic’ activity (ufological Euhemerism, re-enchantment of heaven, foundation myth for modernity, etc.), it resembles a secular and ‘ufological’ parallel to creationism, displaying a strong belief in the ‘hidden’ truth of the religious traditions. This ‘broken’ myth with its technological explanations of religion has influenced many New Age or ‘esoteric’ strands – especially UFO-religions like the “Raelian Religion”. The Ancient Astronaut narrations knit together our specific late-modern mode of beingin-the-world with a lay people’s attempt at a new search for the fundamental truth of the myth: The protagonists still “want to believe”, and they find it plausible that a pre-astronautic “truth is somewhere out there”: But in the end, the seemingly self-evident technological possibilities of our age are projected back into a remote past, on the surface of ancient texts and artifacts, – and the result is nothing but a shining mirror of us, and of our time.

Parents and Teachers' Perceptions of Mother-Tongue Medium of Instruction Policy in Nigerian Primary Schools

Many inadequacies of Nigeria's schools derivec from their religious and colonial past. One in particular is studied in this paper, namely opposition to the use of the mother tongue as the medium of instruction. Questionnaires on the subject were administered to samples of 1000 primary school teachers and 1500 parents of primary school children. Results show that both parents and teachers appreciate the advantages of mother-tongue education, but that parents would not subscribe to their children being taught in the mother tongue. The two biggest obstacles to mother-tongue teaching are (1) the push for a language of wider communication and (2) lack of suitable teaching materials. Recommendations made include the need for a reorientation of parents and the public on the place of mother-tongue education.

Shifting Paradigms and Mediating Media: Redefining a New Religion as "Rational" in Contemporary Society

Japanese new religions sometimes undergo a radical alteration in doctrine or orientation during the course of their development. This article focuses on the politics of representation within the deliberate transformation of a Japanese new religious movement known as GLA or God Light Association from a popular shamanistic neo-Buddhist form of religiosity to an increasingly "rational" and psychological religion. This paradigm shift revolved around the contested practice of past-life glossolalia promoted by the religion's founder as proof of reincarnation. Direct or mediated representation of this phenomenon, serving initially as a locus of power, came to be viewed negatively as expressive of GLA's roots with Japan's folk religious past. Unsuitable for the new secularized target clientele in an age of globalization, representations of this behavior and the man who fostered it were gradually suppressed and history was re-inscribed.

Nietzsche, Democracy and Transcendence

Socialism, utilitarianism and democracy, are according to Nietzsche secularised versions of Christianity. They have continued the monomaniac one-sidedness of the Christian idea of what a human being is and should be, and they have even strengthened this monomania through its ‘immanentisation’. The article shows that this ‘immanentisation’ has a crucial importance for Nietzsche’s critique of democracy. This critique may suggest that Nietzsche’s alternative for the disappeared Christian faith is not only a more radical nipture from the religious past, but also a re-interpretation or recreation of the notion of transcendence that was implied in that faith.

Catholic and French Forever. Religious and National Identity in Modern France (review)

Catholic and French Forever. Religious and National Identity in Modern France. By Joseph F. Byrnes. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005. Pp. xxiv, 278. $50.00.) Joseph Byrnes argues that has played an essential role in French self-identity even during republican periods when state institutions forcibly erased the nation's religious past. In the ancien regime, religion was the nation's foundation; during and after the Revolution it served as antithesis; since the Great War it has been a parallel force. Byrnes pursues his argument by means of seven chapter-long case studies (five previously published) arranged under three chronological headings: the Divorce between nation and religion during the revolutionary period; the Defense of religion from 1802 to 1914 (i.e., Concordat to wartime Sacred Union); and a postwar Detente enduring into the present. Each chapter stands on its own and may be read as such. The overaE narrative is unified by an extended historical overview preceding each of the three chronological divisions. The combination allows readers to access the material in different ways: it offers unique micro-histories (some based on rare archival sources) allowing voices of the time to speak; and, for those who want or need more, a large narrative are under which to situate those smaller stories. In the first section, titled Divorce, the first (and perhaps strongest) chapter presents first-person testimonies of revolutionary-era priests who signed the constitutional oath, those who later abdicated the priesthood entirely, and those who in the end retracted their oaths and returned to the fold.In 1772, wrote one abdicator of his ordination, I was forced to appear before a man who was dressed as a woman (p. 30). A second chapter, utilizing documents expressing the frustration of authorities, argues that revolutionaries' attempts to transfer Catholic sensibilities of the sacred to festivals of Reason and Nature were completely thwarted (p. 55). A third chapter highlights Chateaubriand and Destutt de Tracy as binary prototypes of the conflict between post revolutionary neo-Christian intellectuals and rationalist Ideologues. In Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity (1802) we have the first attempt at making cultural Catholicism palatable for a non-believing audience. As with Napoleon himself, although the nation might not practice religion, France could not be divorced from its religious patrimony. In the second section, titled Defense, chapter four narrates the mid-century invention of Chartres as a pilgrimage destination. It is striking to see just how political the religious pilgrimage was: a democratized form of travel made possible by trains and leisure, it was viewed as an act of public and national reparation in expiation for public and national crimes such as the Revolution (p. 96). Chapter five, one of the less successful studies, contrasts the effects of using (or not using) regional languages for catechesis in Alsace (German) and Roussillon (Catalan). …

Heresy, Authority and Filial Piety: The Universities and their Reformation Past

The universities played a pivotal role in the shaping of English religious consciousness during the seventeenth century. Their own religious identity was, however, subject to considerable flux and factiousness. As some scholars have recently observed, the theological debates' emotional charge was increased by attempts within them to create and manipulate a national Reformation 'past'. This was, however, also the period in which the universities began intensely to investigate and reflect on their own history. This essay will explore how the early investigators of the universities' medieval relgious life and part in the Reformation were effected by the crises of the Jacobean and Caroline Church. The exploration is focused on the contrasting approaches of Thomas Fuller's History of the University of Cambridge (1655) and Anthony Wood's History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford (1675). The piece also explores how influential on these contrasting writers was John Foxe's 'authoritative' depiction of the universities' religious past in Acts and Monuments.

Universalising Rhetoric and Particularist Identities: Pluralism and the Future of Our Religious Pasts

Universalising Rhetoric and Particularist Identities: Pluralism and the Future of Our Religious Pasts

Reconstructing China's Religious Past: Textual Criticism and Intellectual History

Reconstructing China's Religious Past: Textual Criticism and Intellectual History

Integrating Different Pasts, Avoiding Different Futures?

In several European countries there have been judicial decisions relating to the religious practice of Muslim immigrants: Law suits about headscarves in public schools and ritual slaughter are prominent examples. When issues of religious difference are being treated at the Supreme Court level, this indicates a problem of social integration in a growingly multicultural society. In this article such decisions are interpreted as an effort to integrate references to a foreign religious past while avoiding references to a future that might arise from it. Through this, the unstructured and conflicting simultaneity of different religious pasts and presents is shaped into a structured ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’.

Les synagogues dans l'Algérie coloniale du XIXe siècle

Secluded places of worship under the Turkish rule, often tiny and decaying, mainly private, but most of the time full of a rich religious and historical past and thus actual places of memory, the Algerian synagogues after the French conquest were victims of huge destructions because of road works needed by the French administration, military as well as civilian. When Algerians consistories were created synagogues became ideological and political stakes for the consistorial administration and the rabbis coming over from France, and the problem got more complicated because of the appropriation of the places of worship by the State which provided grants and had the right to inspect the works. Building synagogues was then submitted to the ambiguous look of the colonial administration upon the Jews. The great many new synagogues did not appear sufficient to keep up with the demographic burst of the Jewish population, the rules were far from being obeyed, and, on the spot, worshipping remains in the hands of the indigenous rabbis. Even if, by the end of the century, a new trend is initiated because of the constitution of a middle-class aiming at assimilation, the ritual practices remain widely traditional.

Orthodoxie, ketterij en consensus, 1670-1850. Drie historische vertogen over religie en openbaarheid

Orthodoxy, heresy and consensus, 1670-1850. Three historical discourses on religion and the public sphereThe idea of a ‘religious consensus’ hardly seems applicable to the religious history of the Netherlands during the ‘long’ eighteenth century (1670-1850). It appears to contradict such religious phenomena as ‘tolerance’ and ‘pillarization’, which are considered to be typical features of Dutch history. Consequently, church historical accounts tend to project a form of confessional apartheid on the Dutch religious past. Religious history is rarely interpreted in terms or concepts that are not derived from the Christian church or from Christianity. Moreover, Dutch church history has a strong tendency to focus on biographical, archival or philological research. This article contains a sketch of three interconnected intellectual discourses on orthodoxy, heresy and consensus. Together, they provide a conceptual framework which allows us to interpret religious ideas in a light not informed by religious ideology. During the long eighteenth century, a period that marks the transition from the ancien regime to the nation state, each of the three discourses contributed to the formation of a religious public sphere. Focusing respectively on politics, history and culture, the three discourses fit into the more general development of the religious public sphere from ‘confessional’ to ‘pedagogical’. This article is part of the special issue 'Godsdienst in Nederland'.

Faith, freedom, and the future: religion in American political culture

Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Introduction: The Kaleidoscopic Dynamics of Faith and Freedom Chapter 3 Christianity and History Chapter 4 How the Religious Past Frames America's Future Chapter 5 Christophobia and the American Future Chapter 6 Ideas that Bring Down Empires: An Evangelical Case for Scholarship Chapter 7 When Faith Meets Politics: What Does It Mean to Take Washington, D.C., Seriously? Chapter 8 Reason, Freedom, and the Rule of Law: The Political Significance of Man's Spiritual Powers Chapter 9 Darwin's Black Box Chapter 10 And the Wall Came Tumbling Down: Pope John Paul II and the Collapse of Communism Chapter 11 Selected Bibliography

Harry Potter and the Disenchantment of the World

Educators and reviewers have credited J. K. Rowling's mega-hit children's series with introducing a new generation of readers to a magical world of wonder; Rowling is regularly compared to C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien. At the same time, some Christians have decried the books as portals to the New Age, Wicca, and diabolical magic. Through an examination of the Christian rhetoric on both sides of the debate and a comparison of the Harry Potter books to historical examples of magic, I hope to show that Rowling's work presents magic-as-technology. The disenchanted magical world of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry reflects secularity in the same way that Tolkien's work reflected his romantic nostalgia for an imagined religious past. Harry Potter's brand of magic thus shows the degree to which wonder has been standardized and commodified in 21st-century consumer society.

Skepticism and American Faith: Infidels, Converts, and Religious Doubt in the Early Nineteenth Century

In the spring of 1839, Abner Kneeland left Boston for good. The infamous freethinker, a former Baptist and then Universalist minister who had renounced Christianity, had spent sixty days in jail for blasphemy the previous summer. In that same year William Miller, formerly a skeptical deist and now a Baptist preacher, gave his first Boston lecture, arguing that Christ would return to earth in 1843. As Kneeland shook the dust of Boston from his shoes and Miller proclaimed that the end was near, Boston lawyer and politician Horace Mann extended his public crusade for education reform and struggled privately with religious doubt. By 1839, another Bostonian, Orestes Brownson, had already been a Presbyterian, a Universalist, and a freethinking socialist. The thirty-six-year-old editor of the Boston Quarterly Review was by now a staunch Democrat in a Whig city and a Unitarian in the orbit of New England Transcendentalism. Few writers of the period wrote with more sustained attention to the problem that concerned all four men: the challenge of religious skepticism to the grounds of American faith.1 In an era we have come to associate with evangelical revivalism, religious reformers, Emersonian optimism, and the consolidation of the Bible belt, Brownson argued that is not much open skepticism, not much avowed infidelity, but there is a vast amount of concealed doubt, and untold difficulty. Those religious doubts have remained hidden because of the stories we tell about the country's religious past. Scholars who have applied the secularization thesis to American religious history, a model that often assumes a waning significance of religion in the modern world, have always struggled with the American case, where religious affiliation and belief in God have remained very high compared to other industrialized nations. Secularization in the United States, some scholars explain, has been structural rather than psychological. Non-religious institutions and discourses have taken over functions once performed by churches and God talk, but this has not been accompanied by a significant rise in the proportion of the population that doubts or rejects religious truth claims. According to this modification of the secularization thesis, religious belief and practice have not withered away in the face of modem rationality and secular agnosticism; religion instead has been privatized. Structural change, not religious skepticism, is at the center of this story.2 Since the early 1980s, other scholars have moved from the secularization model to narratives stressing American religious vitality. The religious doubts of people like Brownson, Miller, Kneeland, and Mann are not especially important to these interpretations either. By the 1830s, most religious histories tell us, the radical implications of Enlightenment thought had been discredited by the French Revolution, David Hume's skepticism had been answered by Scottish Common Sense Realism, and the popular religious infidelity of rabble-rousers like Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine, and Elihu Palmer had been crushed by Christian polemics and evangelical activism. Visionary freethought reformers like Robert Owen and Frances Wright were foreign hothouse plants unable to bear fruit in God's American Canaan. If the origins of later unbelief can be found in some of the religious debates of this period, the great age of religious doubt lay ahead, in the post-Darwinian era of William James and Henry Adams. From this perspective too, it is not surprising that the few skeptics and freethinkers who did speak out earlier in the nineteenth century are consigned to the footnotes in studies of revival and reform.3 To pay more attention to both open infidelity and concealed doubt is not to argue that either is more important than the surging, protean religiosity in early nineteenth-century American life. Perhaps critical deists like the early Miller, closet skeptics like Mann, and vocal freethinkers like Kneeland and (briefly) Brownson do not deserve more space in surveys of American religious history. …