Religious Virtuosi Research Articles

A Critique of Philosophical Shamanism

A Critique of Philosophical Shamanism

Solidarity at Issue: Pandemics and Religious Belief

A global pandemic such as that of the 2020 Covid-19 corona virus, causing great suffering and loss of life, brings home the difficult conditions that make for our fragile human life. But the question that religious belief poses, about “natural evil” in a world created by a loving God, satirised by Voltaire in the 18th century, masks the more existential problem, the possibility of greater human solidarity. In the background is the Deist view of God complementing the “polite society” of mutual benefit and guaranteeing the latter’s benevolent outcome. It is a worldview, as Charles Taylor (2007) explains, that has put aside the premodern idea of human transformation, that was symbolised by religious virtuosi, saints, theophanies, and so on, now looked upon with suspicion by modernity. But the possibility of transformation, of a generous human response to suffering, is what is called for in a pandemic. In Camus’ novel, The Plague, we see the more authentic response that resists being boxed in by religious enthusiasts to a constricted and ideological affirmation of a cosmic picture that obscures the fault-lines of bourgeois society.

Traces of Female Voices and Women’s Lives in Tibetan Male Sacred Biography

ABSTRACTScholars have tended to overlook information about female religious specialists in thousands of biographies written about Tibetan male masters, as well as the multiple authorship of many of these texts. This article discusses normative gender portrayals and women's lives as they are described in the sacred (auto)biography of the nineteenth century Nyingmapa master, Trülzhik Tongdröl Dorje (1862–1922), composed by a contemporary male disciple. In the crazy yogin's life story, we find substantial information about his mother Tashi Tsomo, who the narrator(s) oscillates between glorifying and debasing, but in addition, we discern Tashi Tsomo's direct voice in the detailed descriptions of her suffering, the birth of her son and her role as tantric consort and mother. Tashi Tsomo did not become a religious virtuoso but sought spiritual transformation by nurturing and supporting male talent and the religious authority of her tantric partner and son. Piety and the quest for spiritual deliverance as means for self-affirmation and expression are still not fully understood in feminist scholarship, yet it was Tashi Tsomo's embodiment of Buddhist virtues that exalted her personal traits, the very same that constituted her agency, gave her life meaning and made the biographer describe her as an advanced female bodhisattva.

‘Religious virtuosi’ and charismatic leaders. The public authority of mystic women in nineteenth-century Italy

ABSTRACT This article analyses the fama sanctitatis of three mystic women who lived in Italy in the nineteenth century. Through their exceptional phenomena, they earned celebrity and notoriety, becoming charismatic leaders in their communities. These women had an impact on contemporary society by providing innovative models. For the nuns locked in monasteries, Maria Rosa Serra (1766-after 1806) was a model of an active nun. To the ‘angels of the hearth’, Elisabetta Canori Mora (1774–1825) proved that holiness could also be achieved in the domestic sphere. In contrast to the image of the secluded virgin, Maria Domenica Lazzeri (1815–1848) was a model of the ‘victim souls’ in a semi-public place. The analysis of these women allows us to learn more about the charismatic power in the construction of religious celebrities; the women’s role in the nineteenth century; the creation of new models and the autonomy granted them by the Church.

Max Weber on Russia: Between Modern Freedom and Ethical Radicalism

The Weberian writings on the Russian Revolutions have been mostly overlooked by scholars, and treated as secondary within the large corpus of Max Weber’s sociological and political texts. Nonetheless, they deal with a central question in Weber’s work: the destiny of freedom in late modernity. While questioning the chances of success of the liberal struggle in Russia, Weber turns back to the moment in which modern freedom emerged in history, singling out the specific conditions that made it possible. Among these, a very central (although also very neglected) role is played by what Weber calls “a particular religious viewpoint.” Instead of being a result of economic development (Weber refuses the thesis according to which capitalism is necessarily emancipatory and bounded to democracy), or of an idea of tol-erance grounded on indifference (as a certain interpretation of liberalism would suggest), modern freedom has its cen-tral birthplace in religious radicalism, in particular in the puritan one. Weber seems to suggest that modern (that is, negative) freedom is born in a position of ethical intransigence, when religious virtuosi refuse to obey to political (i.e. worldly) authority in order to follow their own conscience, that is God’s voice. In order to better comprehend this pecu-liar link, the article investigates the Weberian conception of modern freedom as it emerges from his writings on Russia, seeking to deepen the relationship between modern freedom and ethical radicalism.

Marriage, the Islamic advice literature and its women readers

ABSTRACTThis article draws from the author’s study of marital breakdown in South Asian Muslim families in Britain, in which she found women engaging with an Islamic advice literature about marriage, much of which develops themes which were established in the reformist literature from colonial India, but redirects these themes to stem a recent tide of divorce. In the long haul of difficult marriages, she found women to be educating themselves about and working themselves into the mould of this literature, but also using these teachings in ways that diverge from the stated intentions of the authors, taking this literature as a benchmark of what a wife should expect from a husband and considering their infraction just cause for ending their marriages, or finding legitimacy for remarriage, rather than reversing the contemporary swell in divorce. Engaging debates over the work of Saba Mahmood and her critics, the everyday here appears to be resistive, in contrast with the patient submission of the religious virtuoso. It becomes clear, however, that women inscribe their moves towards divorce and remarriage within, rather than in opposition to, Islamic norms and values.

Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages: Richard of Saint-Vanne and the Politics of Reform by Steven Vanderputten

Reviewed by: Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages: Richard of Saint-Vanne and the Politics of Reform by Steven Vanderputten Greg Peters Steven Vanderputten, Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages: Richard of Saint-Vanne and the Politics of Reform (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press 2015) xiii + 244 pp. Steven Vanderputten is a productive scholar, publishing a spate of books and articles over the past decade, most of which deal with questions of monastic history in medieval Flanders and the surrounding areas in the tenth and eleventh centuries. With Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages Vanderputten turns his attention to a monastic figure, who he argues has been oft misinterpreted: Richard of Saint-Vanne. Vanderputten gives us the most thorough investigation of the life and actions of Richard to date, and does so in an impressive manner. At the heart of the book is Vanderputten’s sense that Richard was not, contrary to much existing scholarship, “the principal figure in the ‘Lotharingian reform movement’ of the early eleventh century” (ix). Rather, Richard’s “actual agency as a reformer in the traditional sense of the word appears to have been very limited” (123). Vanderputten arrives at this conclusion through five tightly [End Page 357] argued chapters, many of which rely directly on medieval source material. Vanderputten begins the book by laying out the extant medieval and early modern/modern texts that discuss Richard. He then spends the remainder of the volume analyzing these conclusions in great detail, carefully unpacking the conclusions of others and offering his own analyzes and conclusions. And it is in these details where Vanderputten shines. There are a number of reasons given over the centuries for why Richard is considered a saint and a great monastic reformer. After patiently walking us through these explanations, Vanderputten challenges them one by one. He first demonstrates the ways in which Richard understood himself as a “religious virtuoso,” using Richard’s Life of Roding to show that this vita says more about the way that Richard understood himself and his mission than it likely says about St. Roding. This spade work is necessary in order to establish the “real” Richard. In chapter 1 Vanderputten considers the ways in which medieval and modern scholars have understood Richard, whereas in chapter 2 he attempts to set the record straight, if you will. In chapter 3 Vanderputten establishes that the abbey of Saint-Vanne was not greatly changed as a result of Richard’s abbacy. It was changed but not in ways that would suggest Richard was a great reforming architect. Instead, Vanderputten adopts the perspective that Richard reimagined the monastery but did not reform the monastery because it was not in need of reform in light of any past decadence. Vanderputten seems to think that reform is only necessary if there has been previous decadence, but I do not think that is the case. Nonetheless, the author’s insistence that Richard reimagined the community seems to be more accurate than to say that he reformed it. In chapter 4 Vanderputten turns his attention to whether or not Richard was a “founder and head of many monasteries.” Throughout his lifetime Richard was made abbot of no less than eleven monasteries though this does not mean that he spent meaningful time at all of them. This plethora of abbacies, in past scholarship, has been interpreted as evidence of Richard’s reforming agenda. That is, he became involved in all of these monasteries in an effort to create a Lotharingian network of reformed institutions. Vanderputten argues to the contrary that Richard was motivated more by his own “self-imposed mission as [a] member of the ecclesiastical elite to contribute to the creation of efficient and secluded communities of ascetic monks” (106) and to influence his superiors to support his own mission. In the final chapter Vanderputten shows the extent of Richard’s concern to convert the world (i.e., laity) and how he did so not by operating as an “apostle of reform” but as a cleric educated in the cathedral school at Reims. Vanderputten reveals that Richard preached a message that he did not always implement, and that he was not always as...

Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière, Guillaume Rozenberg, and Alicia Turner, eds. Champions of Buddhism: Weikza Cults in Contemporary Burma. Singapore: NUS Press, 2014, xxvii+261p.

Champions of Buddhism: Weikza Cults in Contemporary BurmaBENEDICTE BRAC DE LA PERRIERE, GUILLAUME ROZENBERG, and ALICIA TURNER, eds.Singapore: NUS Press, 2014, xxvii+261p.Exciting things are happening in study of Burmese Buddhism. Recent years have seen publication of very important contributions to our understanding of this field. In particular, investigations of roots of mindfulness meditation phenomenon as Burmese reaction to colonialism have garnered attention far beyond scholarly audience concerned with Burma exclusively (for example, Braun 2013). Though fascinating, this focus on origins and spread of so-called vipassana meditation movement has neglected what Kate Crosby, in preface to Champions of calls the Other Burmese Buddhism, by which she means popular yet politically marginal set of practices belonging to so-called weikza-path. It is to examining this path that Champions of Buddhism is devoted, both as an introduction to this under-investigated phenomenon and as stimulus to further inquiries into nature of Buddhism in Burma and global modernity in general. In both respects, it succeeds marvelously.Unless they are experts in Burmese readers may at this point wonder what exactly is meant by term weikza. In foreword to volume, editors give good idea by describing weikza as a religious virtuoso (p. ix). Because of his behavior, meditation skills, and expertise in magical arts, weikza attains ability to live very long, with purpose of being present when next Buddha, Maitreya, appears in our world. Though usage of magic with explicit purpose of lengthening one's life may not sound very Buddhist to some, one argument that this volume forcefully makes is that such practices are as as monks singing sutras or meditating in temples. In her preface (the book has both foreword and preface, but-puzzlingly-no introduction), Crosby explores this alternative Burmese Buddhism by sketching practical, political, and ideological motivations that have kept it in obscurity for so long. Together with Steven Collins' postscript, Crosby's piece connects materials in volume to larger context, context that is sometimes lost in detailed accounts collected here.The main body of volume is divided into three thematic parts. In first, weikza phenomenon is further defined by contrasting it to number of other Burmese and non- indigenous practices. In chapter 1, Patrick Pranke distinguishes weikza from another, better known ideal, that of arahant (Sanskrit: arhat). Whereas latter are ultimate goal of practitioners in vipassana tradition, former belong to different, esoteric path. Nevertheless, both arhats and weikza are revered after their physical body has disappeared (which does not mean that they are considered dead). In course of his description, Pranke provides useful history of Buddhism in colonial and postcolonial Burma, serving to orient reader for chapters to come. In next chapter, Juliane Schober expands this comparison between vipassana and weikza practices by affirming that, although weikza are certainly marginalized politically (not having strong connections with Burmese leaders), doctrinally they are firmly Theravada Buddhist. In last chapter of first part, Benedicte Brac de la Perriere introduces final distinction, namely between different types of spirit mediums: on one hand, there are nat gadaw, who contact spirits of dead Burmese kings. On other, there are bodaw or medaw, who contact spirits of physically departed weikza. Brac de la Perriere's discussion is interesting for several reasons, not in least because division she describes is gendered: whereas weikza mediums tend to be male, nat gadaw tend to be female.The second part of book then details role of weikza as protectors of Buddhism. …

Abstinence halls (zhaitang 齋堂) in lay households in early medieval China

Most of what we know of religion in early medieval China concerns religious virtuosi, the spiritual and intellectual elite. But often, in texts focused on them, we glimpse the activities of some of the surrounding laypersons whose responses to virtuosi are in many cases the reason we have the texts in the first place. We possess normative writings of various kinds prescribing how laypeople should or should not practice religion. Evidence of how they actually did practice religion is harder to find. This modest article attempts to fill a very small part of this gap. I argue that, from at least the late third century, some households in China were furnished with a special room reserved for Buddhist observances, in effect a domestic shrine. I will show what these rooms were used for and something of the significance they were thought to have.

The renouncement of possessions according to Matthew 19:16–30

This article focuses on the renouncement of possessions in Matthew 19:16–30 in terms of three related questions. Firstly, it asks if the renouncement of possessions was, according to Matthew, a general requirement for following Jesus or for membership of the Matthean community. Secondly, it investigates if this requirement did not lead to a distinction within the Matthean community between those who adhered to a stricter ethic of Jesus and those who did not (i.e. between religious virtuosi and non-virtuosi)? Finally it enquiries as to what would have compelled followers of Jesus or members of the latter Matthean community to comply with it? The article concludes that at least some of the followers of Jesus are depicted by Matthew as having renounced their possessions as a sign of their unconditional commitment to him. The Matthean community could thus have been a two-tiered community comprised of virtuosi who had renounced all their possessions, as was demanded of the rich young man, and those who had not. The renouncement of their possessions could have been part of their initiation into the Matthean community and have been motivated by the promise of an incomparable eschatological reward. It further appears that while not all who were considered to be followers of Jesus had surrendered their possessions, all would share in God’s eschatological reward if they provided hospitality to those who did.

Doubt as Methodology and Object in the Phenomenology of Religion

The Holy Grail in the phenomenology of religion (and, to a lesser extent, the sociology of religion) is a definition of religion that actually works, but, so far, this seems to have been elusive. Classical definitions of religion—substantive (e.g. Tylor) and functionalist (e.g. Durkheim)—fail, in part because they attempt to be in three places at once, as it were: they attempt to distinguish religion from non-religion; they attempt to capture what religions have in common; and they attempt to grasp the 'heart', or 'core', of religion. Consequently, family resemblance definitions of religion replace certainty and precision for its own sake with a more pragmatic and heuristic approach, embracing doubt and putting forward definitions that give us a better understanding (Verstehen) of religion. In this paper, I summarise some 'new' definitions of religion that take this approach, before proposing and defending another one, defining religion as non-propositional and 'apophatic', thus accepting that doubt is central to religion itself, as well as to the analysis of religion.

L’invention du Mont Athos des Rhodopes

Since the mid-19th century and until the First World War the town of Stanimaka, today Assenovgrad, was the centre of the area north of the Rhodopes mountains called “little Hellas”. It was also reputed as the ‘small’ or ‘second Jerusalem’ - a reputation that evolved in time to embrace a larger area called the ‘small’ or Rhodopes’ Mount Athos. This paper is meant to explore the articulation of the three denominations, and more precisely the making of the ‘Mount Athos’ in the Rhodopes during the interwar period.We first delineate the unique religious landscape of Stanimaka and its area, paying attention to the ways in which the rivalry between Bulgarians and Greeks impacted on local religious life. Then we examine the activities of religious virtuoso ‘Brother Jordan’ in the area of Stanimaka, and analyze a devotional image he had designed in the 1950s. This image, we claim, is a depiction of the ‘Mount Athos of the Rhodopes’ as it was imagined and brought to life through the activities of the religious virtuoso.

Transgressing the Self: Making Charismatic Saints

Previous articleNext article No AccessVestigial RemnantsTransgressing the Self: Making Charismatic SaintsSimon ColemanSimon Coleman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 35, Number 3Spring 2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/598817 Views: 94Total views on this site Citations: 15Citations are reported from Crossref © 2009 by The University of Chicago. 0093‐1896/09/3503‐0003$10.00. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Bruno Reinhardt A relacionalidade da ruptura pentecostal: conversão, natalidade e parentesco espiritual em Gana, Religião & Sociedade 41, no.11 (Jan 2021): 49–75.https://doi.org/10.1590/0100-85872021v41n1cap02Bruno Reinhardt Desagregando a mediação: tecnologias e atmosferas religiosas, Mana 26, no.22 (Jan 2020).https://doi.org/10.1590/1678-49442020v26n2a203Ingie Hovland Beyond Mediation: An Anthropological Understanding of the Relationship Between Humans, Materiality, and Transcendence in Protestant Christianity, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 86, no.22 (Nov 2017): 425–453.https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfx054Patrick McKearney Receiving the Gift of Cognitive Disability, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 36, no.11 (Jan 2018).https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2018.360104Naomi Haynes Learning to pray the Pentecostal way: language and personhood on the Zambian Copperbelt, Religion 47, no.11 (Oct 2016): 35–50.https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2016.1225906Bruno Reinhardt Praying until Jesus returns: commitment and prayerfulness among charismatic Christians in Ghana, Religion 47, no.11 (Nov 2016): 51–72.https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2016.1225907Dina Matar Hassan Nasrallah: The Cultivation of Image and Language in the Making of a Charismatic Leader, Communication, Culture & Critique 8, no.33 (Jan 2015): 433–447.https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12089Bruno Reinhardt Flowing and framing, Pragmatics and Society 6, no.22 (Jul 2015): 261–287.https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.6.2.06reiAndreas Bandak Exemplary series and Christian typology: modelling on sainthood in Damascus, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, no.S1S1 (May 2015): 47–63.https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12165Bruno Reinhardt A Christian plane of immanence?: Contrapuntal reflections on Deleuze and Pentecostal spirituality, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5, no.11 (Nov 2017): 405–436.https://doi.org/10.14318/hau5.1.019Roberta Bivar C Campos Sharing charisma as a mode of Pentecostal expansion, Social Compass 61, no.33 (Jul 2014): 277–289.https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768614535694Bruno Reinhardt Soaking in tapes: the haptic voice of global Pentecostal pedagogy in Ghana, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20, no.22 (Apr 2014): 315–336.https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12106Roberta Bivar Carneiro Campos, Cleonardo Mauricio Junior, , As formas elementares da liderança carismática: o verbo e a imagética na circulação do carisma pentecostal, Mana 19, no.22 (Aug 2013): 249–276.https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-93132013000200002Simon Coleman ‘Right Now!’: Historiopraxy and the Embodiment of Charismatic Temporalities, Ethnos 76, no.44 (Dec 2011): 426–447.https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2011.580354Simon Coleman Material religion a fruitful tautology?, Material Religion 5, no.33 (May 2015): 359–360.https://doi.org/10.2752/175183409X12550007730101

Varieties of Moral Beliefs in the "Sociology of Religion"

The article analyses the distinction in Weber's writings between conviction ethics and other types of ethics. Schluchter has situated this distinction in a sociological manner rather than religious meanings, as that between heroic (elite) ethics and mass religiosity. I argue that an ethic of conviction, in the Sociology of Religion, belongs to Weber's analysis of both ethical and exemplary prophecy; his analysis of priests and laity tends to obscure this point. Evil is overcome by an effort of inner conviction not priestly ritual. Contra Schluchter, ethical norms are not internalized and routinized into the convention of duty. Instead ethics are demonstrated by exemplary action of heroic individuals as religious virtuosi. The second half of the article pursues the difference between ethical sanctification through institutional grace, on one hand, and a virtuoso conviction ethic, on the other. The former is attained by duty, the latter through the will of the individual and the belief that salvation is attained through faith alone. One important conclusion is that conviction ethic, prominently displayed in Politik als Beruf, is an outcome of a religious conviction ethics. Faith is pursued through will and exemplary deeds and action. This places the argument on Nietzschean rather than Kantian grounds. In choosing to act in an exemplary way out of conviction, the consequences of actions and one's responsibility for them do not come into consideration. This renders conviction ethics consequential in their own right. Nietzschean moral autonomy puts the individual at moral risk. Weber demanded of these heroic moments intellectual honesty in place of self-deception. In rising to these moments, conviction ethics offer dignity to the modern individual.

Vanga, la «Pythie bulgare»: idées et usages de l'Antiquité en Bulgarie socialiste

Galia Valtchinova, Vanga, the « Bulgarian Pythia »: Ideas and Uses of Antiquity in Bulgaria, DHA 31/1, 2005, p. 93-127. Abstract: Taking cue from a case study of a seer celebrated as national prophetess, in socialist Bulgaria, this paper is dedicated to the political [abjuses of ancient history in the 20th century Balkans. Its first part is an exploration of the social and cultural construction of the seer Vanga in the context of post-Ottoman Macedonia, successively dominated by three nation-States Bulgaria, and the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), as well as in Bulgarian Macedonia under socialism. The second part starts by a glance to the political uses and abuses of Greek Antiquity in various Balkan national historiographies, and concentrates on the developments of « thracology » - the dominating trend in the recent Bulgarian historiography of Antiquity - in the 1970s and 1980s. This examination highlights the construction of Vanga as the "Bulgarian Pythia" by outstanding thracologists as a strategy of use and appropriation of the symbolic capital related to Greek Antiquity for political purposes. The paper outlines how, by recourse to a certain comparative approach, a branch of the historiography of Antiquity has made for the positive and prestigious image of a contemporary Balkan religious virtuoso under communism, in the same time veiling its cultural background and its social dimensions. It also argues for a critical réévaluation of historiography of ancient Greece, which, loosing the innocence of « objectivism », is increasingly caught between nationalist discourses and the politics of national (or imperial) grandeur.

American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism

American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism. By Dean Grodzins. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xiii, 631. Illustrated. Cloth, $39.95.)As Peter Berger once reminded us, the root word for heresy is haerisis, which literally means choice. (Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural [1969], 45). He notes: Every religious community in the pluralistic situation becomes a 'heresy,' with all the social and psychological tenuousness that the term suggests. Berger was speaking of the modern world in general and especially of the twentieth century, but his insight seems even appropriate to the United States in its infancy. Heresy has been, in principle, the coin of the American religious realm since the approval of the Constitution and has brought a steady flow of creativity as well as an unprecedented inflation of choice to United States religion. These days, it is in the realm of politics or intellectual life that heretics delight in slamming positions or methodologies. As for the American topography of faith, it has become so crowded with heresies that one hardly ever uses the word to distinguish one turn from another.All the more reason, then, to find a certain poignancy in the title of Dean Grodzins's deeply researched, elegantly written, and altogether convincing portrait of Theodore Parker (1810-1860). The antebellum era encompassed the first great creative moments of heretical challenge to established and recently disestablished orthodoxies and often retained in its religious battles at least the aroma of apocalypse and martyrdom. Theodore Parker, the once famous Transcendentalist colleague of Emerson and Thoreau and minister to Boston's abolitionist community, was a warrior among warriors, a passionate believer who sought to rekindle the power of liberal faith in what he viewed as a moribund Unitarian community. For some decades lost on historians' long list of American reformers, good for a quote or caricature but dependent for continued existence on Henry Steele Commager's lively but dated Theodore Parker (1936), this complicated soul has finally found his consummate biographer. American Heretic, the first of two volumes, takes Parker from birth to 1845, the year before he founded Boston's Free Church and decisively entered into the political controversies of the day.At the center of this era was Parker's dark and complicated journey of the soul, one that drew him to the ministry and transformed him from a Biblically-based Unitarian to an almost frighteningly creative Transcendentalist religious virtuoso. he began at Harvard's Divinity School in April 1834 and, following some of his teachers, soon began to imbibe early historical approaches to the Old Testament and prophecy. he also found models of inner religious commitment in Henry Ware Jr. and William Ellery Channing, whose moderate abolitionism also shaped Parker' s social vision. Yet it was the religious radicalism of Transcendentalism that brought him from apprenticeship to the full blossoming of his intellectual and religious powers. …

Women Religious Virtuosae from the Middle Ages: A Case Pattern and Analytic Model of Types

Five women religious exemplars representative of the variation in religious expression within and outside the fold of the thirteenth-century ecclesia were selected for analysis. Narratives were constructed for each case. Each narrative focuses on the distinctive features judged significant in the constitution of a case pattern or prototype. From these an array of analytic concepts was selected and applied to each exemplar. The methodological approach enables preservation of the empirical character and historical setting of each religious virtuoso yet provides for the selection of abstract distinctive features present or absent in each exemplar or ideal type. The analysis demonstrates that for the virtuosae, classic Weberian categories are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive. Different exemplars express different orientations at different times and in different places. And the analytic elements recombine empirically to produce a wider variety in typology than envisioned by Weber

Omnia instaurare in Christo?: verzuilingstheorie en maatschappijtheorie

Since the end of the 1950s, pillarization has become a core concept in research about societal developments In a few small European countries, notably Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria and Switserland. The concept is used to refer to an internal differentiation of their resp. populations, typically understood as a wholesale division of these countries into blocs of different religious and political persuasions, effectively isolated from each other by innumerable institutions and organizations exclusively serving members of their own community (viz. catholics, protestants, liberals, socialists). While focusing on catholic pillar formation, this article indicates that the pillars did not have to struggle primarily against the other pillars, but against the pattern of functional differentiation which characterizes modern society. Pillarization was and is a secondary principle of social differentiation, whose possibilities were determined by the logic of the different functional subsystems. The ideological movements were able to parasitize on professional relations of educational, psychological, relational or medical care; their success was limited to the functional subsystems whose operations are dependent on face-to-face contact between professional and client, on the personal commitment of the role-inhabitants. This also explains why "religious virtuoso's" (Weber), and especially the numerous active congregations of brothers and sisters, were able to fulfil such a prominent role in the catholic pillar.

Sexual morality of christianity

After discussing the origin of religion, functions of religion, and the construction of meaning by religion, the author focuses on the connection between religion and anxiety. The permanent anxiety in religion is determined by guilt feelings that arise for example from the violation of norms in the area of sexuality. In a religion at enmity with sexuality, such as Christianity, the satisfaction of sexual desires is considered bad and sinful; the permanent production of anxiety and a guilty conscience are the result of it. Christian sexual suppression leads to the propagation of asceticism as the taming of corrupt sensuality that only religious virtuosi can maintain. One result of asceticism is celibacy, although passages from the Bible demand monogamy for bishops without prohibiting celibacy. In Catholicism, celibacy institutionalizes the enmity with sexuality and causes a permanent depreciation of real sexuality in favor of one projected onto the mother church and the Virgin Mary. A further consequence of asceticism is the reduction of sexuality to reproduction. In the section about the factual consequences of Christian sexual morality, the author connects sexual instinctual gratification with religious affiliation on the basis of an analysis of the sexual behavior of Germans. The weekly frequency rate of sexual intercourse amounts to 3.1 with male and female nondenominationals, 2.6 with Protestants, and 2.3 with Catholics; 39% of nondenominational men, 20% of Protestant men, and 12 % of Catholic men in Germany use condoms. The connection of religion and aggression is empirically significant as well. The religiously most active men feel more inclined to use aggression to reach sexual goals than religiously indifferent ones.

Myth, magic and religion in secular literature: The Canadian case

Abstract Investigation of culturally significant English‐Canadian literature suggests a pervasive and persistent preoccupation with the themes of personal, collective and national identity. Detailed exploration of Canadian writers’ treatment of these topics reveals the presence, not only of familiar Judaeo‐Christian elements, but of a pantheon of exotic hidden gods and bizarre supernatural phenomena. It is evident that, to a remarkable degree, Canadian novelists, poets and critics are preoccupied with the sacred and supernatural. Discerning signals of transcendence in a wide variety of unconventional contexts, they encounter the ultimate in the mysterious depths of personal experience no less than in the cold indifference of nature. The self‐definition of Canadian literati in terms more commonly applied to religious virtuosi raises the familiar theme of aesthetes and intellectuals as the contemporary heirs of the priests and prophets of the past. This insight, in turn, suggests a potentially profitable re...