Secular Criticism Research Articles

Postcolonial Nativism? Exploring the Postsecularist Critique of History on Sri Lanka

Recent scholarly work on Sri Lanka has sought to align itself with postsecularist trends in global scholarship. The Sri Lankan variant does not emerge from a direct concern with the place of religion in public or political life, but it exhibits similarities to its global counterpart in its desire to move beyond the legacies of the Enlightenment. David Scott initiated this critique by arguing that seemingly endless debates between contesting versions of national historiography demonstrate the limits of using the past to find justice in the present. Qadri Ismail builds on Scott’s work and calls for replacing history with “postempiricism,” a possibility he locates in literature. A third contributor, Ananda Abeysekara, proposes a radically dehistoricized present that is forged through the Nietzschean notion of “active forgetting.” In rejecting the legacies of British colonialism and the Enlightenment, all three writers question the value of history. This strategy is predicated upon the assumption that cultural nationalism is derivative of the Enlightenment and the West, and consequently dependent on empirical historical narratives. I argue that this strategy may be ineffective because an important strain of majoritarian cultural nationalism, ජාතික චින්තනය (Jathika Chintanaya), makes the same critique of history and the Enlightenment but uses it to promote the very views that the postsecularists are attempting to undermine. A more effective framework for ethical and intellectual interventions against exclusivist cultural nationalisms may be found in the idea of secular criticism deployed by Edward W. Said, which holds history and historicist thinking as crucial in developing a critical position that can contest essentialist thinking without resorting to the postsecular gesture of rejecting all that is putatively “European.”

“Take My Film and Let It Be”: Critics and Consecration in Faith-Based Cinema

This study represents an attempt to better understand how religion fits into the discourse between filmmakers and critics who review their work. The author uses the thought of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu—specifically, his notions of cultural capital and consecration—to analyze mainstream reviewers’ responses to the motion pictures of Alex and Stephen Kendrick, two brothers who have endeavoured to make mainstream films that “communicate the gospel without compromise.” In analyzing reviews of the Kendricks’ five “faith-based” films, a consistent pattern of comments from the reviewers is evident, a pattern that expresses negativity toward the brothers’ aesthetic, social, and theological choices. Also apparent, though, is an ongoing conversation in which the filmmakers seem to recognize the importance of listening to reviewers, even if the filmmakers have not toned down their message. Reviewer comments for War Room, a film whose budget and box office success have pushed it into the mainstream in spite of its very religious content, show that the filmmakers not only appear aware of the concerns expressed by critics but also persist in their attachment to religious filmic content that may not appeal to secular critics who, in Bourdieu’s terms, have a high level of “cultural capital.” With Bourdieu’s work in mind, the study suggests that many of the disagreements between the filmmakers and reviewers have as much to do with religion, class, and taste as they do aesthetics.

Fenomenologi Islamisme dan Terorisme

Abstract: There are three mainstream theories which elucidate the relationship between Islamic doctrine and political actions that lead to terrorism acts of its believers: Firstly: they who believe that justification of violence and terror acts is inherent products of religious doctrine. Secondly: those who view that terrorism is profane matters, unrelated to religious doctrine whatsoever. Thirdly, opinion that state that terrorism is syncretism as well as interrelative modification between politics and religion. Although the three theories differ in concluding the role of religion in terrorism, they share some analytical approach, which put religion as doctrine and politics as political drive in every terrorism act. To measure the more dominant motive of the two can be done using two perspectives of phenomenology. First perspective views islamist movement as a form of anti modernism which emerges as a cure for western-type of modernization. The west is the enemy. Second perspective concludes that the movement is phenomenon of manifestation as well as response to post-modern development. Islamism emerges as something different, echoing cultural autonomy, alternative political entity as well as moral ideological critique of secularism brought by modernism. 
 Key words: Islamism, terrorism, phenomenology

Is This Stone Alive? Prefiguring the Future Role of Archaeology

By reflecting on new and emerging perspectives and trends in the contemporary humanities and social sciences, including the critique of anthropocentrism, Eurocentrism and secularism, the questioning of human epistemic authority over knowledge building, the ‘indigenization of the academy’, and debates over the applicability of the humanities to the problems of the contemporary world, the author identifies tendencies that are relevant to discussions on the future role of archaeology. In her analysis of the ontological and animist/ic turns, the author claims that asking the questions ‘what is an object?’ and ‘is it alive?’ within the context of this paradigm shift might support the emergence of an alternative worldview based on a participatory perspective of the world that understands (new) animism as a different way of being human and relating to the world on different terms. The author asks whether it is possible for archaeology (as the discipline of ‘animated bones and things’) to potentially become an intellectual platform for exercising an alternative worldview.

Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace

Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace

The Sikh faith and its encounter with the humanities within the contemporary secular university

ABSTRACTThis article is an exploration of contemporary themes within the humanities and how they apply within the context of teaching the Sikh Faith within the contemporary secular University. It explores the contemporary crisis within the humanities and in a critical engagement with Edward Said's notion of secular criticism it offers a different perspective which is located within a notion of Sikh ethics.

From Secular Criticism to Critical Fidelity

Stathis Gourgouris has responded to the question “Is critique secular” with a decisive “yes” and has offered a passionate and sophisticated defense of this position in Lessons in Secular Criticism. Yet, his argument suffers from a simplistic opposition between the religious and the secular. If we are to think critically about criticism and about religion, we need to think beyond such oppositions and be open to learning from religious forms of criticism. The article works through Gourgouris to move from his emphasis on critical autonomy to what I will call critical fidelity. Working with theologians Chrisitine Helmer, Ted Smith, and Rowan Williams, I argue that certain forms of religious criticism help us think a social and political criticism beyond endless demystification and “interrogation” by identifying and cultivating critical practices of attachment that make possible liberating social bonds.

Een Nederlandse calvinist in Amerika

Abstract A Dutch Calvinist in the United States: Postsecular Critique in The Blood of the Lamb (1961) by Peter de Vries With The Blood of the Lamb, Peter de Vries has written a novel that can be qualified as a typical Dutch novel about secularization; but the novel is not Dutch. The Blood of the Lamb is written by an American author of Dutch descent. In this article, Lameijer and Ieven argue that De Vries’s way of dealing with religion can be understood as typical of how Dutch culture in the 20th century dealt with the secularisation of society. Reading The Blood of the Lamb from a contemporary, post-secular perspective, Ieven and Lameijer demonstrate how Peter de Vries’s novel can be taken as the starting point for a reflection on Dutch patterns of religion and secular critique.

“Going to Law”: Reflections on Law, Religion, and Mitra Sharafi's Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia

This essay explores religion's need for law, comparing the story told in Mitra Sharafi's Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia (2014)—about the virtual hijacking of British colonial law to serve the communal religious needs of Parsis in colonial India—to other contexts in which secular and religious legal systems have built symbiotic relationships, including in the United States and Thailand. It concludes by urging a reweaving of religious and legal histories after the critique of secularism and its shadows, separationism, and antinomianism.

Managing Mosques in the Netherlands

This article engages with the emergent ethnographical study of secular practice by focusing on how local bureaucracies manage the Muslim public presence in the Netherlands, particularly the construction of new mosques and the amplifying of the Muslim call to prayer. We argue that what started as the ‘Islam debate’, itself provoked by growing populist articulations of the fear of Islam, has gradually developed into a conflict in the practice of local governance about the meaning of secularism. Whereas the public and political debate about mosque issues is often dominated by what we call a ‘culturalist’ or ‘nativist’ form of secularism, in practice bureaucrats are often led by a ‘constitutional secularism’ that protects the constitutional rights of Dutch Muslims. Thus, in its practical application, constitutional secularism is one way of tackling Islamophobia and protecting the rights of religious minorities in general. Moving beyond the genealogical study and the deconstructivist critique of secularism by such authors as Talal Asad and Wendy Brown, we show that the ethnographic study of actual secular practice remains crucially important to avoiding monolithic text-based understandings of the secular as inherently dominating the religious.

Political Philology

Written at the height of the Greek/German economic standoff of July 2015, this review article finds in Stathis Gourgouris's Lessons in Secular Criticism a powerful critique of some of the legacies of Europe's attachment to Greece as well as a reactivation of some of its potentials. Arguing for a newly articulated referentiality between the classical tradition and the streets of contemporary Athens, Gourgouris provides a kind of political philology, a sense of every generation's potential emancipatory activation of language. Political philology might be understood to operate as a frontal critique of political theology and partner to the secular humanism proposed by Edward Said. The political and aesthetic activation of secular criticism involves a practical poetics as well as a critique of the conceits of the postsecular, of the notion of a political theology, and the claims of heteronomy.

Defending the West in All Its Amplitude: The Liberal Conservative Vision of Roger Scruton

ABSTRACTThis article explores the mixture of conservatism and liberalism that informs Roger Scruton's political and philosophical reflection. It highlights his response to the “culture of repudiation,” his resistance to totalitarianism, his defense of national loyalty (as opposed to ideological nationalism), his conservative-minded environmentalism, and his defense of order—and government—against libertarian and leftist assaults on legitimate authority. In particular, it explores a fruitful tension in Scruton's thought between a robust acknowledgment of the Christian features of Western civilization (a civilization that is unthinkable without a Christian emphasis on confession and forgiveness) and Scruton's forthright defense of the secular state against Islamist fanaticism. The article also explores affinities and differences between Scruton's understanding of the West's conjugation of Christianity and secularism and Pierre Manent's critique of radical secularism. The article concludes with reflections on Scruton's judicious melding of truth and liberty, and philosophy and Christianity.

From a Neo-Patristic Legacy of Georges Florovsky to the Radical Theological Commitment in the Dialogue with Science

The article discusses the possible ways of the dialogue between science and theology in the context of modern atheism and secularism. It is argued that the dialogue cannot be symmetric and that the task of a theological critique of secularism is extended to the critical analysis of modern scientific theories in the context of existential problems of humankind, as well as of any particular person. As a matter of a historical precedent one discusses an idea of a neopatristic synthesis in theology advanced by a famous Russian philosopher and theologian Fr. George Florovsky. The paper discusses a possibility of extending of a neopatristic ethos towards the dialogue between theology and science. One then accentuates the main problems of the dialogue such as the centrality of human person and primacy of existential faith as being the basis for a scientific creativity. Any tension between theology and science is destined to disappear if they both are seen as flourishing from the same human experience of existence-communion. Science thus cannot be detached from theology and it is in a complex with theology that it can be properly understood and treated.

Disenchanting Secularization

Disenchanting Secularization

Rediscovering Religion and Secularism A Critique of a Critique

In this paper, I will discuss the academic critique of secularism that is emanating from Western academic discourse and some of its limitations. I will also discuss how this scholarly critique of secularism has been used in Palestine, among other places, to defend symbolic as well as real repressive social norms within Muslim societies, and to defend the call for creating an Islamist state. This discussion is to be taken in the context of the Arab Spring, where political Islamist movements that embody fantasies about a certain past are calling for a return to a “real,” “non-secular,” “Islamic” state. Both such academic and political arguments base their analyses and arguments on false assumptions—epistemological as well as historical. My paper will attempt to discuss these assumptions and propose a possible political future that does not dichotomize secularism, religion, and politics, while drawing evidence from within Islamic knowledge on the rational rather than religious approach to organizing societies and states.

Idoloclasm: The First Task of Second Wave Liberal Jewish Feminism

This article suggests that Second Wave liberal Jewish feminism combined secular feminist criticism of the ideological roots of social injustice with traditional criticism of idolatry. Together, these closely related discourses allowed Jewish feminists to argue, with Christian feminists of the time, that the monosexual God who demands that idols be broken is himself an idol: a primary ideational and linguistic projection whose masculine character obstructs the political and existential becoming of women. Liberal Jewish feminists such as Judith Plaskow, in dispute with early Orthodox Jewish feminism, therefore insisted that Jewish feminism must begin with a counter-idolatrous reform of the theological concepts that underpin the relationship between God, self, and world, not with making permissible alterations to halakhah. However, while liberal Jewish feminists reclaimed some of the female aspects of the Jewish God (notably the Shekhinah), the point of reforming a tradition is to be faithful to it. They did not join their more radical Jewish sisters in a more or less pagan break with ethical monotheism, not least because the latter's criticism of idolatry funded their own prophetic drive to the liberation of both women and God from captivity to their patriarchal idea.

Lectionary Selections and Ecological Concerns: A Contribution to Dialogue

Inspired by spirit and documents of Second Vatican Council (1962-65), Dr. Leonard Swidler, theologian and historian, became a leading voice in ecumenical, interfaith, and interreligious dialogues worldwide. Whether as sponsor, host, or participant in conferences, meetings, or symposia, Swidler has been a leading theorist for dialogue among religious and ideological communities. His Decalogue has become ideal for dialogical encounters. (1) His 4-H's of Interreligious Dialogues: Head, Hand, Heart, and Holy identifies areas for fruitful dialogical exchange. (2) To meet need for publication of serious discourse in these emerging fields in 1964 with his late beloved wife Arlene, he established this Journal of Ecumenical Studies. His graduate courses and Dialogue Institute for International, Intercultural, and Interreligious exchange motivated many students from Temple University's Department of Religion to engage in and foster dialogue. I am among these students. Although Swidler's extensive writings do not focus on ecology, in Toward a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic (3) he called for multinational/religious/ideological dialogues to establish an ethic that is anthropocosmo-centric. This call recognized that future dialogues must address challenges to natural world. (4) I am convinced that ecological concerns are today's most essential dialogue. While Swidler has rightly insisted that goal of dialogue is to learn more than to communicate one's own perspectives, dialogue assumes one has a perspective to offer. I live and teach in Alaska, canary to a worldwide ecological crisis. Here, villages of Kivalena, Shishmaref, Shaktoolik, Unalakleet, Koyukuk, and Newtok are already seriously threatened, if not yet irreparably destroyed, by climate change. Those truly familiar with situation accept that in thirty to fifty years, 193 more Alaskan Native Villages will either to move or disband, their present locations having become uninhabitable. Alaska is not only locus of Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster in 1989 that ravaged waters and marine life of Prince William Sound, but it is also home to an oil-based economy populated by a significant majority of voices who deny scientific evidence of ecological concerns. While scientific and technological knowledge as well as industrialization greatly enhanced human comforts, these come at the price of unexpected consequences that proved increasingly disastrous for rest of creation as well as ourselves. (5) Environmental concerns (air and soil pollution, resource depletion, loss of biodiversity, overpopulation, climate change, etc.) are most pressing threat to humanity and to all other living beings. While disputes over natural resources preoccupied human history, if we fail to arrest ecological degradation, there will be no resources at all. Ecological concerns entered Christian discourse in response to an important article published in 1967 by Lynn White, claiming that Christian anthropocentricity was culpable for growing ecological problems. (6) In response, biblical scholars identified biblical texts for earth-affirming insights. These efforts to respond to secular critics who minimized every religion also led scholars and practitioners of other religious to identify ways in which they or their traditions appreciate and affirm nature. (7) It is thus that ecology became a topic for ecumenical, interfaith, and interreligious dialogues. Today, many recognize that all religious communities that determine how people understand nature and establish moral imperatives and values have potential to mobilize sensibilities of people toward goals of Earth Stewardship, here defined as shaping trajectories of social-ecological change to enhance ecosystem resilience and human well-being. (8) Statements identifying related concerns and protocols that been issued by religious bodies throughout world are posted on Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale (9) Pope Francis is currently working on a much anticipated encyclical on environment, which will be an important addition to these statements. …

Religious belief in a secular age: Literary modernism and Virginia Woolf'sMrs. Dalloway

This article explores Virginia Woolf's conflicted relationship with Christianity, namely, her avowed atheism and hostility to religious dogma, yet her openness to mystical experience and her use of the language of Christian mysticism in her writing. In particular, Woolf's critique of secularism in her novel Mrs. Dalloway remains open at some level to Christian beliefs and values. Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique reveals the soul as a “sacred” space or “sanctuary,” and her allusions to Christ in the character of Septimus Smith, and less obviously Clarissa Dalloway, suggest yearning for answers to human suffering in a “godless” world. In the end, however, the modernist effort to “sacralize” human goodness does not resolve deeper theological issues at stake in the novel, which Christianity locates in the doctrine of the fall and God's redemptive work in Christ.

Disrupting Wisdom 2.0: The Quest for “Mindfulness” in Silicon Valley and Beyond

In early 2014 activist Amanda Ream and members of Eviction Free San Francisco disrupted the fifth annual Wisdom 2.0 conference, at which Silicon Valley leaders discuss the benefits of ‘mindfulness’ practices. It was another confrontation between working-class residents of San Francisco and the technology employees who have gentrified their neighborhoods. A member of the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, Ream’s actions garnered support from other ‘socially engaged’ Buddhists from Berkeley and elsewhere. Secular critics have likewise questioned the appropriation of Buddhist practices by corporations whose business practices and products arguably undermine the cultivation of mindfulness. This article intervenes in these debates by outlining an approach called Contemplative Media Studies, which integrates critical media studies with the emerging field of Contemplative Studies. I argue that market imperatives have favored a corporate-friendly understanding of mindfulness that perpetuates structural injustice, and conclude that an expanded notion of civic mindfulness must include the revitalization of journalism and the development of non-commercial media systems.

Lessons in Secular Criticism. By StathisGourgouris (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013)

ConstellationsVolume 22, Issue 1 p. 161-162 Book Reviews Lessons in Secular Criticism. By Stathis Gourgouris (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013) Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Pooyan Tamimi ArabSearch for more papers by this author Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Pooyan Tamimi ArabSearch for more papers by this author First published: 19 March 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12150Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume22, Issue1March 2015Pages 161-162 RelatedInformation