Religious Imagination Research Articles

Religionis et societatis, la mirada arcaica de la razon

In these times of generalized neoliberalism that we are living, as totalitarian gazes are falling, it seems relevant to discuss the social role of religion from the critical-social perspective of modernity and especially, from the humanism of the future. Of course, I will drastically limit the scope this analysis being the topic so broad and complex. Thus, with rigorous humility, I will look at only one basic aspect of Max Weber’s religious thought, framing it and contrasting it with the critical vision of the Mesoamerican tradition. Max Weber argued that all religions form part of a historicaluniversal process whose evolution can be explained as driven by an inner logic constructed by the relentless urge toward the rationalization of ideas and life, especially in the case of salvation religions. This line of thought, with its universalist pretensions, leads us to question the validity of deterministic schemata that should be limited to the Western world and to European concerns -given their reductionism not only when compared to religious visions such as Kierkegaard’s with respect to Christianity (for him rationalism was not enough)- but also inasmuch as they leave out polytheistic projects and syncretic combinations such as the traditional conceptions of colonized peoples (where religions are monotheistic in name only, not having followed the steps of the Weberian protocol), or the ancient civilizational horizons such as China, India or Mesoamerica, whose evolution does not necessarily lead to the sort of final-stage rationality the German thinker had in mind

The Religious Imagination and Contemporary Public Theology

Proces sekularizacije, poznat i kao proces privatizacije religije, odnosno njezino uklanjanje iz javnog i društvenog života, predstavlja baštinu modernizma. Ova je realnost u značajnoj mjeri utjecala (i još uvijek utječe) na kršćansku teologiju. Zbog toga postoji hitna i značajna potreba za obnovom kršćanske teologije, posebno kad je riječ o potrebi za obnovljenom kršćanskom porukom u suvremenom društvu. Premda se činilo kako je javna teologija normalna posljedica potrebe za obnovom kršćanske teologije, ne znači da je obnova zapravo prisutna u mnogim njezinim metodama. Nefleksibilnost njezinih teoloških metoda i terminologije i dalje predstavljaju problem za javnu teologiju. U ovom članku sugeriramo da, pri konstruiranju održive javne teologije, valja uvažiti ovaj novi pomak u antropologiji. Kategorija „religijske imaginacije“ od vitalnog je značaja jer uvažava novu definiciju ljudskog bića koja je bliža postmodernizmu nego modernizmu. Zato u članku prikazujemo mogući značajan doprinos koji religijska imaginacija može pružiti u svrhu revitalizacije suvremene javne teologije. Nadalje, u članku spominjemo nedavna rumunjska istraživanja o ovoj temi u kojima se stavlja još veći naglasak na bogatstvo skriveno u njemu i njezinu moguću svrhu u konstruiranju održive javne teologije.

Religijska imaginacija i suvremena javna teologija

The process of secularization, known as the process of the privatization of religion or its denial from the public square, is a heritage of Modernity. This reality had (and continues to have) important consequences for Christian theology. Hence, the renewal of Christian theology is urgent, and has a lot at stake, especially regarding the need for a renewed Christian message within contemporary society. Though public theology appeared as a normal consequence of the need for the renewal of Christian theology, this renewal is not necessarily present in many of its methods. The rigidity of both of its theological methods and language remains a problem for public theology. This article suggests that the new shift in anthropology should be taken into consideration when constructing a viable public theology nowadays. The category of “religious imagination” is of utmost importance since it takes into consideration the new definition of the human being, which is in line more with postmodernism than modernity. Thus, the article sketches the possible substantial contribution the religious imagination brings towards the revitalization of contemporary public theology. Moreover, the article mentions recent Romanian studies on the imagination, which stresses, even more, the richness hidden within it and its possible usage for the construction of a viable public theology.

Religion, Law, and Politics in Ghana: Duabɔ (Imprecation) as Spiritual Justice in the Public Sphere

Abstract This paper examines the reasons for and consequences of the resort to traditional spiritual justice in spite of increasing awareness of state civil law structures. The paper helps us theorise on how economic disputes resulting from lack of effective legal enforcement yields itself easily to the deployment of spiritual justice. The significance of this study is that it contributes perspectives into issues of law and political modernisation and their interrelationships with religious imaginations. It departs from previous accounts that focus on the pervasiveness of religion in the contemporary Ghanaian public sphere. Instead, the current study devotes attention to the conditions that occasion the deployment of religion in the public domain.

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Peering into Prisons, Gazing upon Graves: Early U.S. Missionary Media from Burma

This article examines the nineteenth-century print culture and religious imagination inspired by the imprisonment of an American Baptist missionary to Burma during the First Anglo-Burmese War, 1824–1826, and by the death of his wife and child shortly thereafter. Adoniram Judson had been incarcerated on charges of spying for the British but was eventually released to serve the king of Burma as a translator for the treaty that ended the war. Eight months later, his wife, Ann, and their two-year-old daughter, Maria, died from fevers. Stories of the Judsons’ suffering began to circulate widely after an illustration of Ann’s and Maria’s graves was published in 1839 and an illustration of them visiting Adoniram in prison was published in 1853. These scenes of buried and chained bodies were reproduced, redrawn, and reimagined in the nineteenth-century Protestant press and took on new shape in twentieth-century film and twenty-first-century commemorative displays. This article argues that the multiple iterations of these wrenching scenes created an imagined world of redemptive missionary sacrifice that travelled from the 1830 s through to the twenty-first century along circuitous routes, changing shape and repopulating along the way. Collectively picturing the Judsons’ extreme physical suffering in a foreign land primed generations of Baptist communities to see missionary labor and its domestic support as acts of righteous sacrifice.

Negative Affect, Queer Aesthetics, and the Illuminations of Cleanness

ABSTRACT In 1924, W. W. Greg referred to the twelve illuminations of London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x. as “queer pictures.” Greg’s provocative description of these images serves as the foundation for a reconsideration of the manuscript’s much maligned visual program. By first attending to the affectively negative and highly aestheticized terms which have come to be associated with the images, such as “crude” and “amateur,” this article argues for the reconsideration of the implications of such language. In doing so, it provides a means of understanding how such language reinforces notions of aesthetic and sexual normativity. It likewise explores the role of Cleanness — one of the four poems copied into MS Cotton Nero A.x. — in establishing an aesthetic dialectic which pervades the manuscript object itself. In juxtaposing the “fayre formez” of God’s court and the “dedez vnfayre” ascribed to sexual deviancy, the poet of Cleanness fashions a dialectic which highlights the co-constitutive interplay of cleanness and filth in the medieval religious imagination. This article ultimately contends that the “crudity” of the illuminations represents a complex understanding and deliberate extension of the poet’s textual dialectic which is predicated on the careful suggestion of sin and explicit depiction of God’s judgment.

Envisioning Hijra: the ethics of leaving and dwelling of European Muslims

Within the current Western European context, where the presence of Islam in the public sphere has become an object of continuous polemics and debates, emigrating or ‘leaving Europe’ has emerged as a conceivable option among a wide range of people who identify as Muslim. Both within and beyond specific pious circles such migratory moves have sometimes been framed as hijra. This special issue enquires into the way hijra is imagined and experienced, but also how the issue of hijra is debated and acted upon among European Muslims who are contemplating the possibility of leaving Europe, or who have already left the continent. In order to cover both the specific and the more general dynamics surrounding hijra, this thematic issue is motivated by one, albeit multi-layered hermeneutical objective. In general terms, we aim to understand the complex and multiple significations operating around the notion of hijra among European Muslims of various backgrounds and convictions. In so doing we seek to contribute to the mounting anthropology of Islam in Europe by examining articulations of mobility and migration through religious imaginaries and repertoires. This implies ethnographically accounting both for the perspectives and assessments of those who are situated and located in Europe and desire to leave the continent in order to perform the hijra, as well as for the ways in which hijra is lived and practiced by those who have left Europe and moved to a Muslim-majority context. In order to buttress further the emerging anthropological field at the nexus of religion and mobility/migration, this introduction cautiously maps out a number of analytical concepts which we think could strengthen the multifaceted ethnographic ventures of the contributions comprising this thematic issue: the ‘ethics of dwelling’, ‘regimes of mobility/diversity’ and religious imaginaries and repertoires, being the most prominent.

Understanding Religion and Politics in Africa: A Call for the Re-enchantment of the Scholarly Imagination

Abstract In his 2015 book Christianity, Development, and Modernity in Africa, Paul Gifford argues that Christianity in Africa is bifurcated into an ‘enchanted’ and a ‘disenchanted’ form. He presents the conundrum that the enchanted form is pervasive yet incompatible with modernity and consistently ignored by scholars. In this review article I draw on Gifford’s conundrum as a springboard to propose a new angle from which to analyse religion and politics in postcolonial Africa: one that moves beyond received dichotomies between tradition and modernity, public and private life, or this-worldly and otherworldly concerns. The work of Michael Schatzberg, Peter Geschiere, Ogbu Kalu, and Emmanuel Katongole moves in various ways past the oppositions that undermine Gifford’s work. In dialogue with these scholars, I articulate a plea to scholars of religion and politics in Africa to develop an appreciation for the powerful role of the religious imagination in African and global arenas of power.

Корреляция жанра видения XIX века с протестантской и православной культурой: философско-религиоведческий анализ

The increasing interest of the mass audience to various types of fantasy art triggered an interest for the genre of religious vision, a phenomenon of the theological literature of the XIX century. The present research featured a philosophical and theological analysis of the genre of vision in the Western European and Russian religious culture of the XIX century. The research objective was to identify the origins of the genre of vision that arose in the religious culture of the XIX century and to give it a general description. The author compared the visionary experiences of the Protestant author Ellen G. White and an anonymous Orthodox author. The study helped to reveal that people's idea of the existence of the other world is an integral component of the imaginary world that underlies any religion and can be a subject of comprehensive analysis in modern theology and cultural studies. The author used the following research methods to comprehend the spiritual experiences embodied in the genre of visions and recorded in the doctrinal literature of Protestantism and Orthodoxy: the comparative historical method and the textual analysis of visionary texts, theological literature, and ontopsychological studies. The theoretical basis included various works by Russian philosophers, cultural scholars, and theologists, who elevated the visionary literature to the level of meta-scientific synthesis. The scientific novelty of the research is that it compares the spiritual experiences of Protestantism and Orthodoxy. The paper introduces a method that can be used to study other religious confessions in philosophical and religious discourse.

Islam and the Creative Imagination in Senegal

In few other places in the creative traditions of sub-Saharan Africa isthe factor of Islam more prominent and influential than in Senegal.Manifested on the level of form and subject-matter and spanning a widecross-section of talent in both the traditional and modern media ofcreative expression, this prominence and influence can be attributed toanumber of factors ranging from the artistic maturity, religioussensibility, intellectual astuteness and ideological orientation ofindividual artists to the more general impact that Islam, as a dominantreligious force, is perceived to have had on secular life in Senegal. Thesefactors, to a large extent, determine the various ways in which individualSenegalese artists define themselves and their art vis-a-vis Islam, inparticular, and society, in general, definitions which creatively translateinto formal choice, thematic focus and, to use a cliche, “message”.Two opposite sets of equally militant attitudes constitute the polarextremes that bracket the range of Senegalese artists’ creative responseto Islam, thus paralleling or ‘reflecting’ similar patterns that obtain inthe society at large. This is hardly surprising, given the conception thatSenegalese, and indeed, most African artists, have of the nature andfunction of art in society. On one pole is that ensemble of attitudes shapedby a zealous embrace and vigorous advocacy of the primordiality ofIslam as the most, indeed, the only, legitimate and effective vehicle forthe totalization of the individual and the society. Art in the hands ofindividuals on this end of the creative spectrum becomes an instrumentof propagation of religious ideals, in this case Islamic religious ideals.But beyond this religious vision or in conjunction with it, cultural and ...

CОЦИАЛЬНОЕ ПРОЕКТИРОВАНИЕ КАК ВИД РЕЛИГИОЗНОГО ВООБРАЖЕНИЯ (ПО МАТЕРИАЛАМ ИЗ ИСТОРИИ РУССКОЙ МЫСЛИ КОНЦА XIX - НАЧАЛА XX СТОЛЕТИЯ) (Social Design as a Kind of Religious Imagination (on the Materials From the History of Russian Thought of the Late XIX – Beginning of XX Centuries)

Russian Abstract:Предмет исследования – религиозное социальное проектирование в дореволюционной России. English Abstract: The subject of the research is religious social projection in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Discursive construction of the farmer-pastoralist conflict in Nigeria

Abstract The farmer-pastoralist conflict (FPC) in Nigeria has aggravated in recent years. It generated intense debate between 2015 and 2018 because of the aggravation of the conflict and the increased fatalities associated with it. This paper analyses the media representation of the conflict. Data were newspapers’ editorials and regular columnists’ stories and supplemented by government and independent bodies’ reports. Newspapers, as agents of popular culture, play a critical role in the propagation of various discourses of the conflict which seek interpellation and are also contested. This paper shows that the discourse is dichotomous and conflictive between ecological reasoning and ethnic-regional and religious imaginations.

The University and the Church: Don Briel's Essays on Education ed. by R. Jared Staudt

Reviewed by: The University and the Church: Don Briel's Essays on Education ed. by R. Jared Staudt Philip Rolnick The University and the Church: Don Briel's Essays on Education edited by R. Jared Staudt, (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2019), xxxvi + 250 pp. Almost all academics have thoughts about the nature of the university, its flaws and its possibilities. But Don Briel (1947–2018) was unique: he looked deeply at the best of what had been written about Catholic education, perspicaciously analyzed its current state, and then, with astonishing effectiveness, implemented his visionary plan. The University and the Church: Don Briel's Essays on Education lays out Briel's "Foundational Principles" (part 1) and his understanding of "The Church's Vision of Higher Education" (part 2), and concludes with "Catholic Studies and the Renewal of the University," his personal account of and reflections on the university programs he actually initiated (part 3). George Weigel notes in his foreword: "The essays in this volume are more than a memorial to a great educator, a good man, and a faithful disciple. They are a template for the ongoing reform and development of Catholic higher education" (iii). In chapter 1, "Wanted: A Ground for the Imagination," Briel juxtaposes two moral responses to the experience of the world: Martha Nussbaum's call for tolerance in light of "the radical individuality of all concrete experience," and by contrast, his own view that "the fundamental mystery of all experience of the world evoked by the religious imagination is humility" (6). Briel then applauds authors (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, [End Page 676] and others), who, with the humility to let God be God, can then see the world in a clearer light. Briel's foundational principles of education are in large part drawn from John Henry Newman and Christopher Dawson. From Newman, Briel learned that the non-Christian bent of modernity is not primarily a matter of rationality. With Newman, Briel considered "the rejection of Christianity to arise from a fault of the heart, not of the intellect; that unbelief arises, not from mere error of reasoning, but either from pride or from sensuality" (15, citing Newman, Letters and Diaries). Briel would later apply this insight in the specific ways that he formed his seminal programs in Catholic Studies, first at the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN), and later in programs across the country and internationally. He clearly grasped that students, faculty, and administrators needed something that addressed the whole person. A superior argument would not be sufficient. Briel found a way forward in Newman's distinction between a university and a college. For Newman, "the university is committed to the exploration and disputation of various theories and thus embodies … 'the element of advance,' or progress, whereas the college, focused on the formation of mind and character of the student, promotes a certain 'stability,' thus situating students in a living tradition" (200). In the preface, David Deavel nicely summarizes this crucial distinction: "The university principle, found particularly in the lecture hall, promotes the unity of knowledge and the relationship between faith and reason, while the college principle involves both personal formation and an attention to study. Both principles require the presence of the Church to survive" (x). Briel's great accomplishment was to take Newman's nineteenth-century ruminations, readjust them for our own time and problems, and bring them to life. Briel's vision was bold, but it was also doable. Prudently, he recognized that, while a large or even a mid-size Catholic university could not adopt Newman's ideas whole cloth, "a creative minority"—a program or department within the university—could do so (224). And so, in cooperation with colleagues from several departments, Briel initiated the Catholic Studies program at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1993. The practical beauty of Briel's endeavor is that it can be achieved within existing Catholic universities as well as secular state universities. Briel's chapter "Renewing the University in a Tragic Culture" reports on important instances of programs in both kind of settings, programs that have taken root in the United States and elsewhere in North...

Remembering the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Elizabethan England

The state-sanctioned murder of thousands of French Protestants in August 1572 had a profound impact on Elizabethan England's political and religious imagination. The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre was commemorated in prayers, pamphlets, poetry, and drama throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris (1593) is routinely read as the exemplary English response to this atrocity. This article recovers the diverse range of English Protestant texts remembering the Massacre in order to reexamine the discourse of English nationhood in its European context and to revisit our understanding of Marlowe's play. Drawing upon recent work on early modern memory, it explores how these various texts manipulate affect to advance particular religiopolitical agendas. These memories negotiate a complex entanglement of confessional and political allegiances, at once identifying with their French coreligionist and distancing the foreign violence from an insular England. This article demonstrates that the Massacre played a crucial role in the literary construction of the English Protestant nation. Ultimately, it identifies Marlowe's play as a radical transformation of English remembering of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

Wielka świątynia Atona – wybrane problemy interpretacyjne

The aim of this article is to present an interpretation of the true nature of what was built at the site of the Great Aten Temple at Amarna (Tell el-Amarna), and to show that king Akhenaten had a wider and more varied ideological and cultic vision than he is commonly credited with, in which everyone could appreciate the nature of the god Aten. His religious vision was directed towards intellectual and ideological goals, but also had an economic context. The results of latest archaeological work at the site of Great Temple of Aten (‘House of the Aten’), in the opinion of Professor Barry Kemp suggest the existence of a ‘people’s temple’, which explains much of what the excavations are uncovering.

Immaculate Conceptions: The Power of the Religious Imagination in Early Modern Spain by Rosilie Hernández

Immaculate Conceptions: The Power of the Religious Imagination in Early Modern Spain by Rosilie Hernández

Immaculate Conceptions: The Power of the Religious Imagination in Early Modern Spain by Rosilie Hernández

Immaculate Conceptions: The Power of the Religious Imagination in Early Modern Spain by Rosilie Hernández

Immaculate Conceptions: The Power of the Religious Imagination in Early Modern Spain. Rosilie Hernández. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. xii + 264 pp. $80.

Immaculate Conceptions: The Power of the Religious Imagination in Early Modern Spain. Rosilie Hernández. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. xii + 264 pp. $80.

‘Black but Human’: Slavery and Visual Art in Hapsburg Spain, 1480–1700 by Carmen Fracchia

Reviewed by: ‘Black but Human’: Slavery and Visual Art in Hapsburg Spain, 1480–1700 by Carmen Fracchia Tanya J. Tiffany Carmen Fracchia. ‘Black but Human’: Slavery and Visual Art in Hapsburg Spain, 1480–1700. OXFORD UP, 2019. 256 PP. THE ROLES of enslaved peoples and freed Black men and women as both the subjects and producers of images in early modern Spain have garnered increasing attention in recent decades thanks to the work of scholars such as Victor I. Stoichita, Luis Méndez Rodríguez, and Carmen Fracchia, the author of the book under review. At once drawing upon and going beyond previous, more specialized studies, Fracchia’s monograph is the first to analyze slavery and depictions of Blackness in visual culture across imperial Spain. As she states at the outset, Fracchia aims to explore both “hegemonic visions” of Black subjects and to uncover “critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves,” but she does not always make clear how she is engaging these opposing perspectives and the tensions between them (1). (Although she never explicitly defines the term, Fracchia uses “Afro-Hispanic” mainly to refer to people of sub-Saharan African heritage, and she occasionally also employs it to discuss Muslim North Africans and their descendants.) In assessing questions of representation, readers will therefore want to consider Fracchia’s book alongside contributions—too recent for her to have taken into account—by Nicholas R. Jones, who argues that Black agency can be uncovered even in apparently derogatory portrayals by white Spanish writers (Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, Pennsylvania State UP, 2019), and Erin Kathleen Rowe, who has examined “how Afro-Iberians participated in the co-creation of devotional life” across the Catholic world (Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism, Cambridge UP, 2019, 2). Like the book as a whole, Fracchia’s chapter 1, “Black but Human,” is named for the topos used by Afro-Hispanics to proclaim their humanity when facing a system that treated them as material goods. The author explores emerging theological as well as literary discourses on skin color as mobilized in Iberia and elsewhere, including the equation of whiteness with purity and the idea that pious Christian souls, whether housed in European or African bodies, were white and thus beloved by God. Chapter 2, “What Is Human about Slavery?,” considers how the institution was justified by royal and ecclesiastical officials in Spain and Portugal, where hundreds of thousands [End Page 103] of enslaved people from various ethnic backgrounds lived and worked. Many churchmen defended the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans as a means of introducing them to the faith. Within this framework of conversion, Fracchia discusses images of baptized Black men, in particular a Baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch by Saint Philip from The Book of Hours of Charles V (ca. 1519) and an eighteenth-century Allegory of Baptism in the Mosque-Cathedral in Córdoba: paintings whose iconography pictures the supposed whitening powers of the sacrament. Chapter 3, “Visual Culture and Slavery,” turns more fully to visual images, considering tensions surrounding the depiction of Blacks in Spanish sacred art, especially the figure of the Black Magus. Fracchia emphasizes that northern European artists routinely represented one of the Magi as Black beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, but this iconography became standard in Spain only in the 1520s. She sees this delay as part of a pattern in which images of Blacks were unusual in regions where slavery was widespread. The causal, chronological argument for this seeming paradox merits more detailed investigation. As Fracchia herself demonstrates, the Black Magus was central to the religious imaginary of Seville’s late fourteenth-century “Our Lady of the Kings” (the “kings” here refer to the Magi), which was founded as “the very first black confraternity in Western Europe” at a moment when enslaved Africans were beginning to arrive in the city (48). Fracchia also highlights the broader importance of Black saints to the Afro-Iberian communities that emerged with the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, noting that various later Black confraternities likewise dedicated themselves to the Virgin of the Kings and Saint Benedict of...