Secular Discourse Research Articles

Fantastic theology of Robert Sheckley: A pseudo-secular world

The article considers one of the views on God existing within the modern Western literary tradition and out-side of religious systems. The image of God was chosen as a cultural phenomenon relevant for interpretation, which exists both in religious and secular discourse. The research involved the creative heritage of Robert Sheck-ley – one of the most popular authors of fantastic literature in the mid-20th century. The analysis was based on fantastic tales, since they provide the opportunity to prove all strategies for social behaviour, as well as different views on life. The image of God created by Sheckley was reconstructed using intertextual analysis, which helps identify original mythological and religious narratives and individual allusions. This provides the opportunity to define the features of Sheckley's individual fantastic theology and find the reasons for using the image of God in secular literature. The analysis revealed that the used religious names, denominations and plots bear only formal similarity with the traditional ones. They are used and interpreted arbitrarily. God is interpreted as being anthro-pomorphic, pragmatic, partial and not interested in the fate of his creation. Communication with God is described as commercialised and is built on the model of the consumer society. The works of Sheckley indicate the possibil-ity and necessity of contact between the man and God with the obligatory personal participation of the individual. The American writer creates texts that are modernised in terms of the plot using traditional Christian ideas about the spiritual development of people and the need to preserve the Christian value system as a universal one. In this connection, Sheckley offers possible behavioural models for the created image of God.

Conceptual Metaphor in Meditation Discourse: An Analysis of the Spiritual Perspective

Meditation has spread beyond the frontiers of religion to go global in other areas of social practice, including secular and spiritual-but-not-religious contexts. Conceptual metaphor, as proposed by Lakoff (1993) has been described as a powerful mechanism to facilitate the communication of first-person experiences connected to religious and lay contemplative practice, including meditation and enlightenment, as reported in several studies. Despite the detachment of the spiritual-but-not-religious movement from other areas of practice, the question of how metaphor is used in discourse about meditation within this perspective has not been addressed. This paper investigates the role of conceptual metaphor in spiritual-but-not-religious meditation discourse through a bottom-up qualitative analysis of a corpus of talks about meditation given by three highly-recognized spiritual teachers. Results chart the topics that are addressed more frequently through metaphor in the corpus (metaphor target domains), describe the range of areas of experience (source domains) used to characterise metaphorically the three most frequent target domains (thought, the present moment, meditator), and discuss fundamental differences in non-deliberate and deliberate conceptual metaphor use with the help of a selection of examples from the corpus. The findings provide evidence of relevant metaphors used to model the experience and practice of meditation in spiritual-but-not-religious settings and how they are rendered in discourse. Comparisons with metaphorical models already identified in religious and secular discourse contexts are also established, with a special focus on the models that have been transferred from traditional religious meditation spheres to current contexts of social practice.

Secular, Islamic or Muslim feminism? The Place of Religion in Women's Perspectives on Equality in Islam

The Western focus on ‘Islamic feminism’ takes two extreme forms: it is often dismissed as an oxymoron for attaching a religious (patriarchal) adjective to an emancipatory feminist project, or it is hailed as a road to a liberal, reformed Islam. Many Muslim feminists refuse to use this term; some reject feminism outright. There is consequently a tension within the term that many Muslim women activists acknowledge. In order to gain a better understanding of how religious and secular discourses combine in ‘feminism in Islam’, this text aims to examine the place of religion in women’s emancipatory strategies. When we look at the history, strategies, discourses, and especially at the concept of ‘religion’ Muslim women activists and thinkers deal with, a complex landscape emerges. ‘Islam’ ceases to be a reference to a given religious paradigm but becomes itself a contested terrain, one with religious, but also political, legal, and institutional actors. Theological, hermeneutical, post-foundationalist, reformist, legal, and social activism all envisage ‘Islam’ from different perspectives and locate the discriminatory aspects they resist in different fields of the Islamic paradigm or practice. The aim is to explore the meaning and practice of ‘feminism in Islam’ while taking a critical approach to an essentialist understanding of both Islam and Islamic feminism.

Contested Authorities over Life Politics

Abstract Conflicts between religious and secular discourses, norms, actors, and institutions are differently shaped across the Middle East and Europe in accordance with their specific socio-legal contexts. While current scholarship has often studied this tension by focusing on religious rituals, the authors shed new light on the way religion and secularity shape the everyday making of life politics by way of a three-country comparison of abortion debates in Germany, Turkey, and Israel. Through face-to-face interviews with stakeholders involved in interpreting secular abortion law, the authors analyze how social actors in three predominantly monotheistic countries and socio-political circumstances construe secular abortion laws differently in practice. The authors show that, contrary to common belief, contestations over abortion do not neatly divide between religious and secular authority, but they create gray zones of negotiation. Articulated through specific historical, political, and religious circumstances, such gray zones involve everyday decisions on human authority in determining abortion practices and differing understandings of women’s bodies.

Православізація як суспільний феномен та категорія історичної соціолінгвістики

The purpose of the article is to introduce the concept of „conversion to Orthodoxy ” into the analysis of historical sociolinguistics for the characterization of a language situation caused by the redistribution of Ukrainian territories after the third division of Poland and during the Second World War. The objectives of the article are to reveal the meaning of the concept of „conversion to Orthodoxy” and to identify the linguistic markers of this phenomenon in contemporary religious and secular discourse. The author studies the content of the category „conversion to Orthodoxy” based on new sources that have not yet been put into circulation by sociolinguistics. Methods of analysis: case study, discourse analysis, sociolinguistic correlations, comparative and biographical method, which allowed applying socio-cultural linguistic approach to studying the database. The results related to the conversion to Orthodoxy obtained in the article prove the destruction of the national and religious identity of the Ukrainian territories in the 18th-20th centuries and illustrate intercultural communication under the scheme of integration with assimilation based on a geopolitical factor, violence and terror.

Introduction to Secular Genology

The search for the origins of the secular is important for science because it clarifies the concept of “secular” as a category of modern thought against the background of rethinking the classical theory of secularization and uprising of post-secular concepts. The article argues that despite many different approaches to the definition of the secular there is a common thing that unites them — the recognition of religion as a finite area and the existence of the “non-religious”. The article presents the positions of well-known scientists who tried to explain the origin of the category of the secular within social sciences, including those who challenge the classical theory of secularization. In search of the signs of uprising the “secular” in culture a researcher can consistently dive into history and find them in almost any historical era. But such a search inevitably leads to the final borders of social sciences beyond which the theological discourse begins. Even those researchers who consistently defend secular principles (Berger) face this problem. In this regard some researchers continue their studies in the theological plane (Trostnikov, Milbank). There is also a potential problem here — artificial construction of new concepts of “secularities” which would have no relation to the “secular” itself. Therefore the reconstruction of the genealogy of the secular makes sense only if it helps to explain the logic of modern social and ideological processes. From this point of view the researcher has no choice: even before he determines where the secular begins, he already states that the secular has become itself in the Christian paradigm (theological, geographical and chronological); right here it has acquired the problem field in which the culture of modernity and the paradigm of modern scientific knowledge exist. The author concludes that the development of secular discourse is also a theological process.

Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment in Russia? Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment in Russia? Century

The article explores the themes of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment through the lens of Freemasonry, and, more specifically, Freemasons in Russia who wrote history. It tests the approaches of Masonic history writers against Berlin’s definitions of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. Whilst a definitive break between the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment seems attractive, the article advances a more nuanced picture of the plurality of religious and secular discourse in Russia. Instead of opposing the Enlightenment, many late eighteenth-century Masonic writers of history provided their own, alternative interpretative models of history as a way out of the perceived crisis between the mind and the soul.

In Search of the Iraqi Other: Iraqi Fiction in Diaspora and the Discursive Reenactment of Ethno-Religious Identities

In Iraqi fiction, the prerogative to narrate the experience of marginal identities, particularly ethno-religious ones, appeared only in the post-occupation era. Traditionally, secular Iraqi discourse struggled to openly address “sectarianism” due to the prevalent notion that sectarian identities are mutually exclusive and oppositional to national identity. It is distinctly in post-2003 Iraq—more precisely, since the sectarian violence of 2006–2007 began to cut across class, civil society, and urban identities—that works which consciously refuse to depict normative Iraqi identities with their mainstream formulations became noticeable. We witness this development first in the Western diaspora, where Iraqi novels exhibit a fascination with the ethno-religious culture of the Iraqi margins or subalterns and impart a message of pluralistic secularism. This paper investigates the origins of the taboo that proscribed articulations of ethno-religious subjectivities in 20th-century Iraqi fiction, and then culls examples of recent diasporic Iraqi novels in which these subjectivities are encoded and amplified in distinct ways. In the diasporic novel, I argue, modern Iraqi intellectuals attain the conceptual and political distance necessary for contending retrospectively with their formative socialization experiences in Iraq. Through a new medium of marginalization—the diasporic experience of the authors themselves—they are equipped with a newfound desire to unmask subcultures in Iraq and to write more effectively about marginal aspects of Iraqi identity inside and outside the country. These new diasporic writings showcase processes of ethnic and religious socialization in the Iraqi public sphere. The result is the deconstruction of mainstream Iraqi identity narratives and the instrumentalization of marginal identities in a nonviolent struggle against sectarian violence.

Православие и «Радикальная ортодоксия»: понимание «посредничества» и перспективы взаимодействия

The article critically examines the concept of “mediation” used by the modern conservative Christian philosophical and theological movement “Radical Orthodoxy” (arose at the end of the 20th century among Anglican and Catholic philosophers) and also puts the question about the prospects of dialogue between Orthodox tradition and the “Radical Orthodoxy”. The article gives general information about this movement and contemporary researches on it. It is noted that the term “Orthodoxy” in its name does not indicate a connection with Orthodoxy or any Christian denomination but is used in the sense close to the concept of Christian tradition and placed in a postmodern context. “Radical Orthodoxy” considers Christian theology a universal “mediator” which is designed to replace secular meta-discourse and strengthen the voice of Christianity in the world today. The author notes that the idea of universal mediation is connected with the gnostic approach to theology. Analyzing the principles of philosophical and theological constructions in this movement the author draws a parallel between the proposed concept of “mediation” and the fact that the authors of “Radical Orthodoxy” of all the themes of Russian religious philosophy showed special interest in gnostic Sofia. The article analyzes the origins of this view of Sofia and identifies the margins beyond which the Church considers sophiology to be a heresy. “Radical Orthodoxy” sophiologizes the concept of “mediation” in order to protect it from the threat of its “adaptation” to secular reality and to establish an ideal mediator which possesses the maximum possible explanatory theological flexibility. Nevertheless, this approach has some vulnerabilities, since its way of theologisation of secular discourse can lead to the opposite effect – the secularization of theology, which was sometimes done by Russian religious philosophers of the 19th-20th centuries. In conclusion the author argues that a successful dialogue between representatives of the Orthodox tradition and the “Radical Orthodoxy” is more promising in the socio-political plane than in the theological one.

The Transformation of the Crimean Tatars’ Institutions and Discourses After 2014

Abstract The article deals with the transformation of the Crimean Tatars’ institutions and discourses after the 2014 conflict around Crimea. It shows the change in the balance of power of traditional institutions such as Mejlis and Muftiyat, which for many years represented secular and religious components of Crimean Tatars’ ethnic identity. It tells how the Mejlis was dismissed from the political stage in Crimea, while the Muftiyat has enjoyed a great support by new authorities. This transformation and threats to societal security inevitably led to reassessment of previous views and goals of the main actors in the Crimean Tatar community and the formation of new institutions with hybrid composition and discourse. The article focuses on organization such as ‘Crimean solidarity,’ which was formed in 2016 as a reaction to authorities’ pressure over the Crimean Tatars. Using discourse analysis of statements of activists of this organization and content analysis of social media, the author presents the main topics of its discourse and types of activity. She shows how the traditional Islamic discourse of activists of this organization has been transformed by the incorporation of the main concepts of secular discourse developed by the Mejlis. The author argues that the appearance of ‘Crimean solidarity’ indicates the blurring of lines between secular and religious, and ethnic and Islamic in the Crimean Tatar society. It shows how people with different backgrounds and agendas manage to leave their differences aside to support each other in the face of a common threat.

Cosmopolitan Veiling in Paris: Young French Muslim Women in Transition

This paper focuses on the beauty and sartorial choices of young French Muslim women in the Paris area. Through biographies on their morning rituals, this article questions the notion of cosmopolitanism when it comes to their veiling practices. Research suggests that these young women, through their double presence in the world – as French citizens and as global citizens – are powerful agents of change of the dominant material culture and consumption. Their varied beauty and sartorial choices help them construct a coherent inner and outer self and manage social and gendered interactions, facilitating circulation. It is argued that wearing the hijab can be conceptualized as a new form of cosmopolitanism, neither ‘from below’ nor ‘from above’: it reframes a Eurocentric view of conflicts between religious and secular discourses in postcolonial times, as well as French fashion.

Clannishness: Jewett, Zitkala-Ša, and the Secularization of Kinship

AbstractScholarly critiques of the racial and imperial dimensions of domesticity have overlooked a deeper biopolitics of kinship that is tied to the secularization process. For late nineteenth-century reformers, “clannishness” names a sociological problem common to recalcitrant populations, from “uncivilized” Indians to “degenerate” Yankees and “mountain whites of the South.” But writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and Zitkala-Ša use literary resources to evade what Talal Asad calls the “grammar” of subjectivity in secular discourses. Their experiments with first-person voice uncover a transpersonal understanding of kinship that is illegible in domestic and reformist discourse.

The Place and Effect of Animals in Families

Research Framework : The general challenge and originality of this thematic issue of the journal Enfances Familles Générations consists in jointly exploring two major social transformations brought about by the integration of animals into families : the first transformation being in human families and the second in human-animal relationships. Objectives : The purpose of this introduction to the thematic issue "The Place and Impact of Animals in Families" is to present the current state of knowledge on the subject, by characterizing the approaches taken and identifying blind spots and how to address them. Methodology : The article is based on a review of the literature and an analysis of approximately 100 English- and French-language publications in the social sciences and humanities that focus on the place and effect of animals in families. Results : The first part of the article is devoted to an analytical presentation of the literature. Three principal methods of integrating animals into families can be identified in the works studied : integration, assimilation and substitution. In addition, two types of approaches have been favoured to date on how to understand the family in its relationship with animals : "fixist" and flexible. The second part of the article develops a critical analysis of this research. We show that, taken as a whole, these studies generate a naturalization effect of the very specific zoological, sociological and spatio-temporal realities studied. We show that this naturalization is linked to the ill-considered use of certain semantic categories ("companion animal," "family pet" or simply "pet") 1 . It is also linked to particular systems for the production of sociological knowledge on the place of animals in families (based in part on data provided by key players in the pet industry, or created on a pointedly moral foundation). Conclusions : The article underlines the need to develop and implement a genuine sociology of family/animal relationships that, on the one hand, more candidly assumes the implicit biases that have guided research to date (a clear positioning in relation to the three methods of integrating animals into families), and on the other hand seeks to denaturalize the categories it uses while questioning the knowledge systems within which it is embedded. Contribution : Beyond a critical and problematized interpretation of the literature, this article outlines several lines of research that aim to complete and rebalance the particular image that the current literature on the dynamics of integrating animals into the family provides. Five lines are identified : (1) the symbolic construction of the integration of animals into the family (artistic and media representations, construction of categories) ; (2) the physical conditions of this integration (role of technical objects, markets) ; (3) the role of animals in the construction of the identity and socialization of families ; (4) the uses of learned and secular discourses on animal families to define and legitimize a model of human families ; (5) a sociological redefinition of the family, taking into account the different types of animal integration.

My 600 Pound Pilgrimage

This essay studies the TLC channel reality show My 600 Pound Life as a manifestation of the religious ritual of pilgrimage. The influence of popular culture upon religion, and of religion upon popular culture, is well established. Of special interest is the study of ritual, a highly formal discourse and practice. Because of its formal nature, ritual may be found across both sacred and secular texts and practices. Discourses may perform a ritual function vicariously for an audience. When a ritual is of religious origin, it appeals to an audience’s sense of religious meanings and authority. One central ritual pattern, of religious origin but found widely in secular discourse and practice, is the pilgrimage. This essay explains the major formal components of a pilgrimage, and then using a method of rhetorical homology, identifies My 600 Pound Life as formally a pilgrimage. The ideological commitments induced in an audience through formal appeal are discussed in this particular case. The essay shows the value of looking for religious form in the secular, the value of studying pilgrimage specifically, and the value of the method of rhetorical homology.

The Relocation of Transcendence

Denmark, Estonia, and Sweden are, if measured by certain sociological criteria, considered to be three of the world’s most secular countries. Nature—forests, pristine beaches, and the countryside—plays a specific role in the allegedly secular discourse of the mainstream populations of these nations. Not only is it almost without exception deemed as a positive asset worthy of protection, it is also thought of as holding certain existential qualities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this article suggests that Alfred Schutz’s conceptualization of transcendence—further developed by Thomas Luckmann—can be used to describe the existential experiences in nature of contemporary secular people. The article results in a suggestion for an operational definition of transcendence.

The Problem of Female Genital Cutting: Bridging Secular and Islamic Bioethical Perspectives.

Recent events, including the arrest of physicians in Michigan, have renewed bioethical debates surrounding the practice of female genital cutting (FGC). The secular discourse remains divided between zero-tolerance activists and harm-reduction strategists, while Islamic bioethical debates on FGC similarly comprise two camps. "Traditionalists" find normative grounds for a minor genital procedure in statements from the Prophet Muhammad and in classical law manuals. "Reformers" seek to decouple FGC from Islam by reexamining its ethico-legal status in light of the deficiencies within narrations ascribed to the Prophet, the health risks posed by FGC, and contemporary perspectives on human rights, and thereby delegitimize the practice. This paper argues that alignment between secular and Islamic views can be found in a harm-reduction strategy by demonstrating that the impetus to reduce harms is found within Prophetic statements on FGC. From an Islamic ethico-legal standpoint, it is justified to acknowledge the permitted status of FGC procedures that do not harm-in other words, the ritual nick-and at the same time the prohibited status of procedures that lead to credible medical and psychological harms. Bringing these multiple perspectives and data points into conversation forges a common ground to delegitimize and eradicate harmful genital procedures among Muslim communities.

The Father Said Goodbye: The German Press’ Reactions to the Resignation of Pope Benedict xvi and the Conclave

This paper analyzes the different constructions, interpretations and understandings of authority in the German journalistic press coverage in spring 2013, when Benedict xvi declared his resignation from the papal office, and the following time until his successor – Pope Francis – was elected. Pope Benedict’s resignation was an occasion that caused a stir in the journalistic field. The pope, the highest religious authority of the Roman Catholic Church, had brought his own power up to discussion. The opportunity was favourable for the journalistic, secular media to start an extensive critique and deconstruction of the Pope’s religious authority – but surprisingly enough, this did not happen. So, how and to whom is religious authority ascribed in the German press discourse? In this article I argue that the secular German press discourse not only refrains from deconstructing traditional religious authority, but reinforces it on various levels.

Fostering World Peace Through ‘Cultures of Meaning’: A Case Study of Shaykh Hamdi Ben Aissa and the Sanad Collective

When considering the question of world peace, many of the political and intellectual responses of our age continue to operate within a well-defined prism that privileges secular, diplomatic, political, and economic solutions that have failed to adequately diagnose the root causes of this persistent global challenge. Further still, religion is frequently regarded as an exclusionary and divisive force, or worse still as an obstacle, that is to be channeled and contained. This paper seeks to address this imbalance. Part I seeks to provide a wider critique of the contemporary status quo and to proffer a diagnosis of the underlying root causes of our current global crises. In doing so, I build upon existing critical academic scholarship, with a special focus on Rajani Kanth’s forceful critique of ‘Euro-modernism’ and Steven D. Smith’s ‘cage’ of secular discourse. Here, I argue that the central malaise of our age relates to the shrinking landscapes of ‘meaning’ in our expanding global monoculture, a challenge that the paradigm of traditional religion is well suited to address. Part II, seeks to bolster this point further through an illustrative example of one such local communal solution in practice working from within the rich resources of Islamic spiritual tradition in my case study of Shaykh Hamdi Ben Aissa and his dynamic community, the Sanad Collective, in Eastern Canada.

The making of an Islamist public sphere in Bangladesh

The article examines the process of making an Islamist public sphere in Bangladesh and identifies the actors involved. It argues that Islamist social Islamization movements in the form of various da’wa (preaching) activities, madrassah activisms, and Islamist political parties’ Islamization projects collectively contribute to the making of an Islamist public sphere. It shows how da’wa movements’ everyday living experiences, madrassah’s absolute authority over public Islam, and Islamist political parties’ social welfare, and associated activities construct an Islamist imagination. A parallel counter Islamist discursive arena with secular discourse is in construction and circulation that formulates oppositional interpretations based on Islamist identities, interests, and needs. The article argues that instead of explicitly challenging the secular hegemonic discourse, Islamist social movements engage in a contested relationship with it, and gradually claim their separate position. It further maintains that although these Islamist movements differ ideologically, and vary the ways they perform and propagate Islam, they invariably contribute to the rise of an Islamist public sphere in Bangladesh.

Sexual and Religious Regimes of the Self in Dutch Discourses about Homosexuality: A Queer Theological Analysis and Alternative

Abstract This article discusses two major ways in which sexual and religious identities are conceptualized in Dutch public discourses about homosexuality. In a secular discourse that stresses that LGBTs should be able to ‘be themselves’, certain religious identities are often ignored, subordinated or attacked, while the self that needs to be realized is rendered primarily a sexual self. A conservative Protestant (counter-)discourse on ‘being in Christ’ subordinates (homo)sexual identity to Christian identity—or even rejects it. To move beyond such (Late) Modern oppositional constructions of religion and homosexuality in terms of (religious/sexual) “identity”, this article explores the (queer) Catholic concept of sacramental characters—as an anti-identity—and suggests that it has the potential to unsettle some of the deadlocks in public discourses about homosexuality and sexual diversity.