Religious Transformation Research Articles

I’m Somali and I’m Christian: A dilemma for religion and identity in the context of migration in Southern Africa

This contribution is one of a series that aimed at publishing significant findings from the research conducted for a PhD study where emerging themes were isolated and discussed. During one of the focus group conversations, Abdul (not his real name) explained how his Somali-Christian identity presented a dilemma whilst he lived with fellow Muslim Somali nationals when he was displaced during the 2015 xenophobic violence in Johannesburg. Firstly, this contribution discusses a general overview of the situation of migration and then his situation is explored from the themes, which emerged from this study from the lens of bicultural and acculturation processes of identity formation. Although this was not a representative sample of male foreign migrant experiences, analysing Abdul’s situation within a post-colonial and bicultural acculturation paradigm revealed the ‘embedded’ trajectories at the interface between religion, identity and migration in social and economic processes of transformation. Sketching Abdul’s experiences through these lenses also generated contested processes on the interface of religion and identity that reflect the significance of the role played by religion in identity constructions which are open to change (and sometimes present a dilemma), as life circumstances fluctuate with complex interactions in search of survival strategies to ward off any potential threats to a flourishing life. Such survival strategies highlight how these encounters generate hybrid identities and discourses with new boundaries, which, although fluid, volatile and situational, are reminiscent with historical and odious notions of colonialism that present African migrants as undesired foreigners whilst portraying other western and Asian migrants in cosy terms such as expatriates and tourists.Contribution: Exploring the relevance of migrant expressions within the context of identity constructions and socio-economic framework demonstrates how contested processes of socio-economic and religious transformation reflect the significance of the role played by religion on identity constructions. These constructions are articulated through fluid and complex encounters, which fluctuate to generate hybrid identities and migrant survival discourses.

Introduction: ‘Religious Transformation in the Middle East: Spirituality, Religious Doubt, and Non-Religion in the Middle East’

The political impact—or rather the lack thereof—following the revolutionary uprisings in the Middle East has been well documented [...]

When Abangan Embraces Sufism: Religious Phenomenology to Counter Radicalism in Contemporary Java

Abangan is one of the socio-religious groups regarded as a marginal community among the trichotomy of santri and priayi. It has been known that abangan were not religious Muslim, and they are poor farmers as well as workers, backward and less educated people. Meanwhile, santri are more religious and priayi among Javanese society are middle-class people practising syncretic Islam. The thesis on “The Religion of Java,” by Clifford Geertz, was more than a half-century indicated religious and social classification in Javanese society. In the midst of political polarization of Indonesian reformation, transnational Islamic groups began to establish their movement widely. Transnational Islamic groups that promote radicalism and violent extremism clearly avoid local wisdom and mysticism. As a result, abangan has experienced dramatic religious and social change. This study aims to see how to face radicalism after reformation in the social and religious transformation of abangan in Java. Previous studies have shown that the phenomenon of radicalism affects religious intolerance addressed to minority groups like abangan. This research paper aims to examine how abangan reacts to radicalism and engages with Sufism and their devotion to tarekat. Abangan recently appears to convert and join the tarekat movement as an alternative discourse to encounter modernism and religious radicalism.

Africanising the Four-self-leadership Formula in the Church of Christ in Zimbabwe

The Church of Christ in Zimbabwe (COCZ) has adopted Western philosophies of Euro-American cultures originating from the Victorian age during the Restoration Movement (RM) of the American Second Great Awakening (SGA). This exclusive, divisive and oppressive culture denied women, the poor, and the young, the opportunity to lead. The RM emphasised going back to the founding charism of the New Testament Church, with Christian unity and ecumenism as central elements. Its doctrines became rigid, denying female leadership, constitutions, central headquarters, and further ministerial formation as worldly. This study raises these aspects as indispensable to the contextualising, inculturating and incarnating framework of the gospel in an African context. This reflection takes account of the four-self-leadership formula, as inspired by Magwidi’s PhD study (2015–2021), as well as other sources like the minutes of church board meetings and contextual writings by COCZ’s local clergy. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews that were collated with written sources and heuristically interpreted by the African Cultural Hermeneutics Approach (ACHA) (Kanyoro 2002; 2001). A synthesis of missionary ideology with African narratives of the Christian faith (using ACHA) interpreted the data to understand the “how” of contextual, cultural and religious transformation in the COCZ. The study recommends new, inclusive and transformative modes of leadership empowerment for an authentic African Church.

Faith, liberty, destiny, and the shaping of early American identity

The discovery of America, which was in itself a fateful event in European history, coincided with the crucial transformations taking place in the religious sphere. The development of printing technology, the creation of national translations of the Bible, the rethinking of the established forms of religiosity — all these innovations contributed to the creation of a special religious and religio-political climate of the era. England, which became one of the most successful colonial powers, was at the same time a country experiencing these religious transformations in an especially profound manner. Having proclaimed its ecclesiastical independence from Rome earlier than many other countries, England became a space for an intensive search for a new religious identity and a melting pot of various proto-messianic concepts. In addition, the competition of these new religious doctrines, existing in the shadow of potential and actual state-sanctioned oppression of dissidents, has created a specific environment that makes the issue of political freedom especially relevant and pertinent to the context of Christianity. Having received additional development in America and combined with an increased spread of the anti-colonial nationalist message, all these ideological streams could give a start to one of the most remarkable aspects of early American socio-political thought and identity, within which liberalism, republicanism, providentialism, messianism, and Christian religiosity are woven into a single composition. The debate about the influence of this ideological complex on the development of American identity and statehood continues to this day, sometimes leading to conflicting assessments. However, it seems that this phenomenon is, in one way or another, a remarkable factor in American history, which, to some extent, remains a relevant topic of discussion for modern America.

Religion in times of crisis: Innovative lay responses and temporal-spatial reconfigurations of temple rituals in COVID-19 China

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about massive changes in religious landscapes across the world. Recent research has focused on whether religions create problems or are sources of solution or support in these extraordinary times. Although some studies document religious leaders’ and institutions’ innovative responses to preserve ritual practices and foster members’ sense of belonging, they fail to highlight lay practitioners’ bottom-up religious transformations. Noting this, this article draws on the case of Lufeng city in south China to examine how local residents inventively reconfigured the temporal-spatiality of their ritual practices during temple lock-downs. Through an ethnographic-style exploration, we reveal multi-faceted spatial changes in the ritual performance, including the reconfiguration of home spaces, the performance of worship practices outside temple doors and the mobilization of digital spaces of communication to accumulate good fortune. Apart from these spatial strategies, local ritual transformation also produces temporal adaptations. Through these temporal-spatial reconfigurations, local residents innovatively cope with new social circumstances and articulate religion’s continual significance. This study foregrounds an agentive and flexible understanding of religion in times of crisis.

The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World

This book has been an intellectual adventure to read, all 600-plus pages of it. The Scientific Revolution, Ralph Bauer argues, carries a connotation of “the discovery of new worlds” in nature. In historiography, the early modern revolution in cosmology has long been connected to the Age of Discovery in cosmography. Yet the two things remain conceptually distinct. We can indict Christopher Columbus for the violence of conquest but not Galileo for the discovery of spots on the sun. Yet what if discovery and conquest were conceptually intertwined from the very beginning? The Alchemy of Conquest completely reframes the concept of the Scientific Revolution by taking medieval nominalism and alchemy seriously.Bauer traces the origins of the categories of discovery and conquest back to the thirteenth-century Renaissance, particularly to the rise of Franciscan nominalism, artisanal alchemical experimentation, and the late medieval spiritual conquest of pagan and heathen souls. Both the alchemical-atomistic conception of matter and the nominalist interpretation of nature led to a voluntarist understanding of divine and human creation. Nature and thus God could be understood not through Aristotelian logic and Scholastic syllogism but through a painstakingly empirical exploration of randomly assembled matter. Universal law could only be known though the careful empirical codification of myriad local laws. The discovery of the secrets of nature happened through violent artisanal extraction and alchemical fire. Artisanal tinkering, in turn, could improve nature.Such a voluntarist understanding of God's power and human knowledge of nature led to a voluntarist understanding of religious conversion and to Franciscan global chiliastic religious missions of spiritual conquest. The empirical conquest of both nature and souls (religious transformation) began with William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Ramon Llull, Arab Aristotelians, and dozens of other artisan alchemists.By remapping the medieval conceptual history of discovery and conquest, Bauer's The Alchemy of Conquest does a number of things. First, it shows the deep alchemical, Franciscan, Llullian roots of Columbus's ideas of discovery as the artisanal conquest of the occult. Second, it presents New World missionary Franciscan notions of conversion as tied to alchemical notions of material and spiritual transformations and to demonology and apocalyptic chiliasm. In colonial Spanish America, there was a science of conversion. Religious reducciones (the congregation of Natives in towns and missions) did not merely mean social reengineering, as the scholarship on colonial missions and Indian cabildos seems to suggest. Reducción meant a craft, artisanal, and alchemical transformation of the soul via an empirical science of ethnography. Third, it radically reframes the origins of early modern Epicurean atomism. As Bauer shows, atomism as a commentary on the structure of matter and as a moral-religious discourse of disorderly teleologies first began as a commentary on American cannibalism. Fourth, the book squarely connects English discourses of colonization to Spanish Franciscan and Spanish Neoplatonic humanist ones (not Spanish Scholastic Dominican ones). English and Spanish interpretations of conquest were connected to alchemical nominalism, demonology, and the natural right to reshape American humans and religious landscapes through craft and conquest. The similarities arose despite the obfuscating English rhetoric of negative contrast (the Black Legend) and England's outright denial of conquest (the White Legend). Finally, Bauer completely reframes Francis Bacon's new revolutionary empiricism as a deliberate project of applying Spanish alchemical discourses of American colonialism not to peoples but to objects.This book will remain an enduring accomplishment of scholarship and erudition.

Reshaping the World: Debates on Mesoamerican Cosmologies

Mesoamerican cosmology is characterized by three concepts: a universe consisting of layered realms, the sacred 260-day calendar, and the reciprocal relationship between gods and people. The concept of a multilayered universe has dominated modern scholarship, which has often depicted the cosmos as three separate, multilayered tiers. The authors of Reshaping the World: Debates on Mesoamerican Cosmologies challenge this long-standing pan-Mesoamerican model. This compelling collection of essays revises our understanding of the connections between the earth, sky, and underworld by emphasizing the fluidity and dynamic interplay between these spaces. As suggested by the volume subtitle's use of the plural (“cosmologies”) and the cover image (a muwieri, a relatively unexplored Wixarika object), Mesoamerican cosmological systems were varied and ever evolving.Within the evangelization process of New Spain, ancient cosmological structures were reconfigured by the Spanish in an effort to render them comprehensible within preexisting and dominant worldviews. In the early twentieth century, Eduard Seler proposed that the Mexica cosmos were composed of thirteen celestial layers and a nine-layered underworld, an interpretation that became the standard for the entirety of Mesoamerica. Using this historiographical context as a point of departure, Reshaping the World contains nine chapters split between three thematic parts, spanning from the Classic period (250–900 CE) through the twenty-first century. Ana Díaz's insightful introduction distills the volume's three objectives: redefine ancient Mesoamerican cosmological structures as put forth by the colonial documentary record, reevaluate the prevailing notion that the universe is composed of thirteen and nine vertically structured levels, and propose new cosmological models for this diverse region (p. 5). The authors support their arguments by skillfully connecting archaeological, anthropological, ethnohistoric, epigraphic, and iconographic evidence from across Mesoamerica. This refreshing approach to a long-debated topic reinforces and elaborates on existing insights into the processes of religious transformation in the Americas.The volume's first part explores central Mexico through the lens of early modern texts, both Indigenous manuscripts and European books. The first essay, by Jesper Nielsen and Toke Sellner Reunert, asserts that the prevailing interpretation of the Mesoamerican cosmos was heavily influenced by the Dantean worldview of Franciscan and Dominican friars in the sixteenth century. Sergio Botta's contribution transports readers to Italy by exploring the beguiling character who incorporated the Codex Vaticanus A's religious iconography into existing Renaissance works, in an effort to craft a global religious history. Ana Díaz's essay highlights the incongruities of cosmological descriptions in Nahua manuscripts. Díaz's most compelling point is her characterization of the Nahua cosmos as a living, dynamic entity with corporeal qualities.The inextricable connections between calendar systems and cosmological spaces are next discussed, with a strong emphasis on ritual structure. Gabrielle Vail's contribution disentangles the confluence of cosmological terminology and the shifting classification of deities in Postclassic Maya codices and colonial Yucatec sources. David Tavárez, addressing the extant corpus of Northern Zapotec material, identifies a direct correlation between the 260-day calendar and the three-tiered cosmographical structure. In direct opposition to previous essays, Tavárez argues that the celestial realm and underworld have nine fixed layers, which further underscores the variance of cosmology in Mesoamerica. (It is worth nothing that many studies on Mesoamerican conceptions of time are dominated by discussions of Aztec and Maya calendar systems; this makes Tavárez's work a necessary and welcome inclusion in the volume.) Kerry Hull's essay employs a linguistic and ethnographic methodology to produce an emic understanding of contemporary Ch'orti’ Maya cosmovision. Hull highlights how the Ch'orti’ Maya's ritual and daily activity is influenced by their cosmological structure.The final section features three distinct case studies. Pivoting from the time frames of the preceding chapters, Alexandre Tokovinine's contribution is the only one firmly rooted in ancient Mesoamerica. Through analyses of Classic Maya hieroglyphic texts, Tokovinine charts narratives of travel to mythic (“deep-time”) and historic locales in order to demonstrate how pilgrimage to these locations was often intertwined. Katarzyna Mikulska's essay, which zeroes in on Nahua worldviews of the Late Postclassic and early colonial era, argues that Nahua cosmological imagery only differentiates between primordial space and a human world, which is in diametric opposition to medieval cosmological schema. The volume concludes with a timely essay by Johannes Neurath. In urging readers to critically approach the relationship between cultural continuity and acts of resistance, Neurath suggests that the Wixaritari's cosmological structures are concurrently forming and formed by sacred acts.Like all well-coordinated edited volumes, these essays resonate with one another, especially in their attention to language and ritual performance. With its rich body of evidence and sharp analyses, this work breaks down the rigid boundaries between cosmologies, chronology, and cultures in Mesoamerica. We may never fully comprehend the totality of Mesoamerican cosmologies and worldviews; such reconstructions require material that has yet to be unearthed or has since been destroyed. The authors of this volume, however, considerably advance our current understanding.

Local-Social Wisdom in the Nyadran Tradition as a Means of Gathering

Since ancient times the Javanese people have been familiar with the belief system. Before Islam came the beliefs of Animism and dynamism as well as Hindu and Buddhist religions had already developed in Javanese society. Islam is accepted in Javanese society with youth and peace, because preachers have a high tolerance for Javanese culture. One of the forms of cultural acculturation or inherent in the soul of Javanese society is the Nyadran tradition. The Nyadran tradition is a symbolic ritual that is full of meaning Nyadran traditional ceremony includes partially oral folklore because in it there is a form of oral fochlor, namely the prayers used in the ceremony and there is also a form of non-verbal folklore in the form of uba rampe in the ceremony. In socio-cultural terms, the implementation of nyadran tardisi is not only limited to ceremonial cleaning of ancestral burials , salvation (kenduri), making apem cakes, compote, sticky rice, and various snacks from the market which are used as elements of "offerings" as well as being a prerequisite for the ritual prayer procession. However, the nyadran ritual in a socio-cultural context has also become a medium of friendship between families and communities, as well as a social, cultural and religious transformation. Nyadran is an expression and expression of social piety in a society where a sense of mutual cooperation, solidarity, and togetherness is the main pattern of this tradition.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Religious Entrepreneurship

Islamic and Christian societies in Africa are at the heart of thriving religious developments amid challenging economic and political transformations. This article introduces the special issue by laying out the current state of the literature on religious entrepreneurship and religious transformations and demonstrates how our contributors position themselves vis-à-vis this literature. It explains how, by analyzing select individual trajectories of Islamic and Christian religious entrepreneurs, contributors to this special issue shed light on logics of upward social mobility whereby these individuals seize the new opportunities provided by social and political liberalization. But beyond the notion of individual success, these entrepreneurs are deeply embedded within various social networks, without which their trajectories would be impossible to decipher.

CHURCH CALENDAR, GOSPEL AND LITURGICAL TEXT IN THE NOVEL THE RAW YOUTH AND A WRITER'S DIARY (1876) BY FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

F. M. Dostoevsky's novel The Raw Youth (1874-1875) and A Writer's Diary (1876) were created in the tradition of Christian calendar prose, which is aligned with sacred time. The two works are united by the idea of the religious transformation of personality, the salvation of the soul and unification around the Gospel Truth, the search for ideal foundations in the Russian people, and reflections on their purpose. Dostoevsky introduces Easter narratives into the novel and into A Writer's Diary in 1876: the story of Makar Dolgoruky about the merchant Skotoboinikov, the opera by Trishatov, the story The Peasant Marey. The plot and storyline motives of these works and the novel go back to the parable of the Prodigal Son and the Book of Job. They share the motives of suffering, redemption and resurrection. A Writer's Diary of 1876, which utilizes a system of references to the novel, starts from January and contains a reference to the celebration of the Nativity (the Christmas story The Beggar Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree, quotes from a Christmas worship service), and ends in December, at the beginning of advent. A Writer's Diary contains an appeal to Christmas and Easter as the most significant dates of the church calendar and the writer's personal biographical time. In the chapter More on a simple but tricky case (December), Dostoevsky recalls how he survived the December 22 execution on the Semyonovsky parade ground and a revival on Christmas Eve; in the Easter story The Peasant Marey (February), he tells the story of how he acquired faith in the Russian people in penal servitude during Easter. The author's position in the novel The Raw Youth and A Writer's Diary of 1876 can’t be comprehended without referring to the gospel and liturgical text. The Gospel parable of the Prodigal Son and the Book of Job, which are referenced in the novel and A Writer's Diary, are read in church before and during Great Lent.

Moral Ambivalence, Religious Doubt and Non-Belief among Ex-Hijabi Women in Turkey

This article investigates religious transformations in contemporary Turkey through the case of women’s unveiling. Drawing on 10 in-depth interviews with university-educated urban women who have recently stopped wearing the veil, the article examines their experiences and their motivations for unveiling. It asks to what extent and in what ways Muslim women’s decisions to unveil are a reaction against the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) shift towards electoral authoritarianism and Islamic conservatism. Some practicing Muslims, particularly youth, have withdrawn their support from the government because of its political authoritarianism and its abandonment of Islamic ideals relating to justice. Since the 2013 Gezi Park protests, the AKP has come under critical scrutiny, both economically (e.g., increasing youth unemployment rates, widening income inequality, the shrinking middle class, clientelism) and sociopolitically (e.g., gendered social welfare policies, pro-natalist campaigns, the discourse on creating a pious generation). However, although the current political atmosphere plays a significant role in women’s unveiling, the article also discusses women’s personal and theological motives. The article elaborates on how ex-hijabi women contest both Islamist politics and Islamic orthodoxy regarding female religiosity and how these women reinterpret dominant gender norms.

Latin America

‘Latin’ America is a region constructed in a context of imperial rivalries and disputes about how to build ‘modern’ nations that made it an ‘other America’ distinct from ‘Anglo’ America. Bringing together people without previous historical contact, the diversity of its societies and cultures was increased by the transatlantic slave trade and later global immigration. Building on the constructive relationship that characterises the ties between socio-cultural anthropology and history in the region today, this entry discusses differences in colonial relations and cultural interaction between European, indigenous, and Afro-Latin American people in different countries and the role of anthropologists in nation-building projects that aimed to construct national identities around ‘mixing’. It shows how anthropologists came to emphasise the active role of subordinated social groups in making Latin America’s ‘new peoples’. Widespread agrarian conflicts and land reforms produced debates about the future of peasant farmers, but new forms of capitalist development, growing urbanisation, and counter-insurgency wars led to an era in which indigenous identities were reasserted and states shifted towards a multicultural politics that also fostered Afro-Latin American movements. Anthropology has enhanced understanding of the diversity, complexity, and contradictions of these processes. Latin American cities are characterised by stark social inequalities, but anthropologists critiqued the stigmatisation of the urban poor as ‘marginals’ and used their ethnographies to produce novel insights into the nature and determinants of urban violence and the role of criminal organisations. Other areas in which Latin American anthropology has been innovative are analyses of transnational relations and new social movements, including women’s movements and feminism, although issues of gender, religious transformations, and cultural mixing run through this entry’s entire discussion, which concludes with Latin American debates about the decolonisation of anthropology itself.

Defoe’s Unchristian Colonel: Captivity Narratives and Resistance to Conversion

Daniel Defoe’s fictional autobiographies often contain a puritanical conversion narrative, but Colonel Jack’s narrator is unique in his problematized relationship to Christian conversion. Alert to the negative implications of mercenary conversion, Defoe presents in Colonel Jack a hero who not only revels in his complex ploys to evade the law, but explicitly rejects conversion to Christianity at several points in the narrative. By reading Colonel Jack alongside narratives of European enslavement and incarceration, I suggest that in this text Defoe deliberately reproduces the form of the popular Barbary captivity narrative. This subgenre of narrative portrays conversion as a force to be resisted, informs Jack’s reluctance to embrace Christianity, and ultimately suggests that living in a Christian nation may actually be a hindrance to conversion, making Catholic South America a milieu more conducive to the protagonist’s religious transformation than Protestant Virginia.

Facing Post-Communist Religiosity: Questioning And Shifting Religious Identity Among Yezidi Women From Armenia and Georgia

This paper aims to understand the post-Communist religious transformations that determine the process of questioning and shifting religious identity among Yezidi women from Armenia and Georgia. We discuss gender and religiosity in relation to the internal and external social and political context as influenced by Soviet atheism. The status of women among Yezidis is constructed by traditional religious norms and societal structures, which are influenced by the ideological politics (Communism, post-Communism) of the state of residence. Our findings show that Yezidis, like other religious communities in post-Soviet Armenia and Georgia, are actively involved in the institutionalization of religious norms. The institutionalization of religion within transitive society seems to have the potential to lead to a decline in trust, resulting in the establishment of new institutions, the separation of personal attribution and religious normative practices, and serves as a catalyst for questioning and changing religious identity. In particular, the article aims to understand how post-Communist religious transformations have re/shaped the identity of Yezidi women from Georgia and Armenia, as well as how the internal and external social contexts impact this course of action. We argue that changing political ideologies (Communism, which granted rights to Yezidi women), the pluralization of religiosity, and the systematization of religious norms pushed Yezidi women to question their religious identity, which was permitted after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and circulates the social norms (caste system, religious restrictions, the status of women) of Yezidism.

State of the Field: The Animating Tensions of Canadian Jewish Historiography

State of the Field:The Animating Tensions of Canadian Jewish Historiography David S. Koffman (bio) and Pierre Anctil (bio) On November 7, 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered an apology for Canada's 1939 federal government decision to deny entry to the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner that had carried 937 Jewish refugees. The ship would eventually return to Germany and 227 of its passengers would ultimately be caught in the Nazi death dragnet. The refusal of multiple countries to accept these refugees (Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands each accepted asylum seekers) helped solidify the Nazis' confidence that the western world didn't care much for the plight of Jews, already apparent at the Evian Conference a year prior. In Canada, the MS St. Louis became shorthand for the country's abysmal wartime record regarding Jewish refugees. Canada accepted the fewest Jews of any refugee-accepting nation in the world: all told, a meager 7,400 souls.1 Credit for the fact that Canadians remember the St. Louis episode and that Canada's prime minister would acknowledge its dismal Naziera policies on immigration and refugees, is largely due to the scholarly work of the Canadian Jewish historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper.2 None is Too Many became and remains essential reading for Canadian political leaders, academics, and public intellectuals. The book has been credited with influencing humanitarian and immigration policy decisions [End Page 403] since it was first published in 1983.3 (Curiously, it has not yet been translated into French.) Rarely have historians of Canadian Jewish life reached so far into Canadian national public consciousness, but the case allows us to see something of the impact that Canadian Jewish historical scholarship has had on Canadian life.4 This essay aims to introduce readers to the literatures of and debates within the field of Canadian Jewish history, a field we characterize as maturing, if segmented, and one that has remained publicly engaged since the 1980s. WIDE-ANGLE LENSES For a relatively small field, Canadian Jewish history has received an outsized share of attention. There have been several attempts to capture, qualify, and quantify output within the field. A 1992 annotated bibliography by Stuart Schoenfeld and Dwight Daignault5 was soon followed by Morton Weinfeld's sociological analysis of the features that distinguish Canadian Jewry from its American counterpart.6 Weinfeld predicted that the two Jewish communities would ultimately converge into one indistinguishable, continental Jewry. These two works complement Gerald Tulchinsky's 2008 Canada's Jews: A People's Journey, a synthesis of his two previous volumes.7 Until his death in 2017, Tulchinsky was widely [End Page 404] recognized as the preeminent historian of Canadian Jewish life. His long-standing interests in political, labor, and business history shaped his view, and that of others, of the Canadian Jewish past as a history that focused on the social life of Jews as the community developed an institutional grounding for self-preservation and defense. According to this view, immigrants and their descendants worked to integrate into local and national cultures, and to safeguard their interests in the realm of politics, both domestic and international. Other historians have treated areas that Tulchinsky's work ignored or deemphasized, including religious transformation and accommodation; developments in Jewish culture, language and letters; and the histories of non-Ashkenazi, non-Orthodox Jewries. Richard Menkis and Ira Robinson have published important studies on the history of Judaism. Menkis has worked on the history of Conservative and Reform Judaism;8 Robinson has published on the Eastern European rabbinate in Canada;9 and the two together cut an innovative path using sermons as sources for interrogating the ideological, contextual, and circulation of religious ideas.10 Yolande Cohen has published extensively on the Sephardi experience in Canada11 —a sub-field that remains understudied—and Rebecca Margolis, Pierre Anctil, and others have published works on the history of Yiddish culture in Canada.12 [End Page 405] Tulchinsky's efforts in writing wide-angle work have been emulated by others over the past decade and a half. One collection foregrounded studies of Canadian Jewish subjects from disciplines largely foreign to Tulchinsky's social history, including visual arts, literature...

Transformation of the City in the Byzantine Period: Reuse of Bath and Bath-Gymnasium Buildings

Antik Çağ kentlerinde yerleşim karakterinin tanımlanmasında kamu yapıları önemli yere sahiptir. Kentlerin önem ve kapasitesi hamam, hamam-gymnasium, tiyatro ya da agora gibi kamusal yapılar ile birlikte değerlendirilmektedir. Ancak 4. ve 7. yüzyıllar arasında toplumsal yaşamda ve ekonomide görülen değişimler, kamusal yapıların işlevlerinin devamlılığının sonlanmasına neden olmuş, bu durum da yapıların dönüşümlerine ve yeniden kullanımlarına ilişkin sonuçlar doğurmuştur.
 
 Bu çalışmanın konusunu oluşturan hamamlar ve hamam-gymnasium kompleksleri, kentlerde halkın yıkanma gereksinimini karşılayan, ayrıca eğitim, spor etkinlikleri ve kültürel gereksinimlerine de cevap veren kentsel birimlerdir. Arkeolojik kanıtlara dayanarak hamamların ve hamam-gymnasium komplekslerinin kentsel işlevlerinin 5.-6. yüzyıllarda değişmeye başladığı gözlenir. Özellikle Hıristiyanlığın yayılmaya başlaması ile birlikte kilisenin ruhsal temizliğe önem verilmesi gerektiğini vurgulaması söz konusu işlevlerin zamanla azalmasına neden olmuştur.
 
 Bu çalışmada hamamların ve hamam-gymnasium komplekslerinin Geç Antik Dönem’de başlayan dönüşümünün yanı sıra Bizans Dönemi’ndeki konumu ve kullanımı incelenmiş; Geç Antik ve Bizans kenti morfolojisinin hamam ve hamam-gymnasium komplekslerinin dönüşümü üzerinden analiz edilmesi amaçlanmıştır. İnceleme kapsamında söz konusu yapılarda meydana gelen dönüşümün nasıl oluştuğu ve sonuçta yeni işlevin ne olduğu sorgulanmaktadır.
 
 Bu doğrultuda Aizanoi, Amorium, Aphrodisias, Arykanda, Assos, Elaiussa Sebaste, Ephesos, Hierapolis, Miletos, Myra-Andriake, Olympos, Patara, Priene, Rhodiapolis, Sagalassos, Sardes, Side ve Tralleis kentlerinde yer alan hamamların ve hamam-gymnasium komplekslerinin dönüşümleri incelenmiştir. İşlevsel nedenlerle kentte geniş bir alanı kapsayan bu yapılarda özgün işlevini devam ettiren örnekler olduğu gibi, özgün işlevini kaybedip kullanımdan çıktıktan sonraki dönüşümleri, yapının bir bölümünün ya da yapılardan geriye kalan arsanın kullanılması şeklinde gerçekleştirilmiştir. Arkeolojik kazı raporları sonucu hamamların ve hamam-gymnasium komplekslerinin dinsel amaçlı dönüşümün yanı sıra, konut amaçlı, endüstriyel, savunma ve yönetsel amaçlı olarak farklı kullanımlarının olduğu saptanmıştır. Söz konusu yapıların dönüşümünde dinsel örgütlenmenin değişimi başta olmak üzere, kentsel alanın daralması sonucu arsa yetersizliğinin oluşması ve ekonomik hayatın yeni mecralarda gelişmesi gibi etkenlerin rol oynadığı dikkat çekmektedir.

THE WORK OF PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS OF THE CHUVASH ASSR ON STRENGTHENING THE FAMILY (on the materials of the Chuvash regional council of the Militant Atheists League)

The article is devoted to the activities of the public organization of the Chuvash ASSR, which launched its intense activity in the territory of the national region in the 30–40s of the 20th century. On the basis of unpublished sources contained in the State Historical Archive of the Chuvash Republic, the article analyzes the work of the Chuvash Regional Council of the Militant Atheists League (1927–1941) in the direction of anti-religious education in the family. The author notes that religious dogmata which for many centuries had been defining the marital sphere were subjected to criticism and persecution by the proletarians, which could not but affect the family values and principles in undereducated workers’-and-peasants’ families of the Chuvash.
 
 According to the results of the study, the state policy of the Soviet power concerning marriage and family is determined; the conclusion is made about a significant influence of this public organization on the family; attention is drawn on its positive aspects of work in lower class families of workers’ and peasants’ families of Chuvashia. At the same time, the article notes discontent with the cultural and religious transformations which were carried out among some of undereducated inhabitants of the Republic, especially female workers and peasants, who were afraid of possible families breakdown due to their equalization in rights with men, increased female political activity (the work of female sectors of the ACP(b) Women’s Department and territorial organizations of women’s movements as well as due to the social policy for protecting motherhood and infancy carried out by the Soviet power.

‘It is now in your hands’: South Africa’s dilemma for religion and governance in the changing COVID-19 context

This article examines how coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) impacted on religion–state relations in South Africa. By examining the models of religion–state relations the article highlights the implications of these relations in the context of the South African government’s national response to COVID-19 and critically engages a public theology of ‘immense trust and authority’ assigned to leaders. The article identifies ‘separation with interaction’ as a model, which informs the South African government’s state–religion engagement. Although this model is constitutional and promotes religious freedom, the article identifies the government’s failure to act decisively on religious leaders who exploit the poor as a major obstacle to socio-economic and religious transformation. The article contends that the dark part of South African history presents a dilemma to church–state relations in South Africa and suggests that life-affirming practices of political and religious leaders should be tested through the values of goodness, kindness, justice and obedience as a demonstration that they are essential workers who have an important transformational role to play in the context of COVID-19. Contribution: This article represents a systematic and practical reflection within a paradigm in which the intersection of philosophy, religious studies, social sciences, humanities and natural sciences generates an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary contested discourse.

The Women Activism in Pakistan: An Analysis of ‘Aurat March

In Pakistan, although women’s activism was initiated since the country came into existence, but a diverse activism was observed by the nation in the form of ‘Aurat March during 2018-2020. The current study examines the Western feminism, what it was initiated for and its accomplishments in the current time. By employing a discourse analysis approach to the ‘Aurat March event, this study highlights the women’s activism in Pakistan, ‘Aurat March and the antipathy faced by organizers and supporters from the public because of its strange slogans and ridiculous placards. It also observes the relationship between western feminism and ‘Aurat March activism from the perspective of the social, cultural, and religious transformation of society. The study finds the need to raise a constructive and logical voice for women’s rights with support of the public to eradicate social evils instead of focusing on insignificant matters. It has further recommended that there is a need to build a framework in which one may be able to differentiate women’s rights in the context of western feminism and the limitation of women’s emancipation in Islamic context.