Secular Domain Research Articles

Religious ideologies of minimal computing: negotiating digital technology in religious nationalist education

ABSTRACT Using resistance to digital technologies in religious nationalist public high schools in Israel as a frame for discussing minimal computing, this paper explores how socio-religious ideologies foster minimal technological practices. Based on interviews with administrators, homeroom teachers, and religious and secular content teachers from three schools near an urban center, the study explores how multiple mandates to provide religious, nationalist, and modern education shape teachers’ educational approaches to digital technologies. The paper argues that an approach that segregates technologies to secular domains disentangles digital devices from religious subjectivity; one that allocates time for ‘profane’ digital technologies creates discontinuity between digital practices and religious educational aims; and one that integrates technologies into religious practice fosters a symbiotic digital–analog religiosity. By highlighting the role of religious ideology in shaping limited technological approaches, the paper explores how constraints on teachers’ practices stem not only from resource-driven limitations but from minimal technological will.

Othello and the Formalism of Compulsion

Abstract: I use the term “formalism” to name the tendency of compulsion to reduce experience, through repetition, to a simple shape, rhythm, and intensity. This essay shows how compulsion’s reduction of the self to just a few characteristics enables—even solicits—analogy across different contexts. Focusing on Othello , I consider several aspects of Shakespeare’s staging of compulsion: the two-way traffic between religious and secular domains; the splitting of the self, which often entails the projection of the self onto others; and the role of such splitting in the representation of racialized violence.

A Political Theology of Interpellation: On Subjection, Individuation, and Becoming Nothing

Abstract: This essay argues for the political-theological significance of Louis Althusser's theory of interpellation by analyzing the import of the "Christian religious ideology" in his argument. It suggests that the subject as a complex dispositif —of (self-)recognition in relation to a transcendent call, which bestows a proper name, a place in the world, and freedom in obedience—anchors both the Christian and the secular domains. In reconstructing the subject's constitutive elements, this essay argues that interpellation does not merely recruit individuals but itself acts as an operation of individuation . Moreover, the interpellative matrix of the subject works as a sorting mechanism that segregates those who cohere as subjects from those who do not. Turning to the fourteenth-century mystical figure Meister Eckhart, the essay theorizes deinterpellation as a delegitimating force against the interplays of transcendence and subjection wherever they are operative. Rather than opening the self to a transcendent call, Eckhartian deinterpellative becoming nothing affirms an anoriginary freedom detached from the entire matrix uniting interpellative transcendence and the subject.

“A Majority with a Minority Complex”: Reorientation of Myths and the Making of Hindu Cadres

The study of myths, I claim, must consider ways in which discursive formations inscribe subjects in the material contexts of their experiences. Situated within this larger objective, this essay examines the process by which being a member of any one of the diasporic Hindutva organizations in the US now measures as a subscription to a transnational communication network that identifies itself with a conservative religious revivalist movement. In my reading of the pedagogic materials produced by the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangha—a Hindu religious organization based in North America—I analyze the critical communicative role that lessons in history and myth play in inciting diasporic Hindus to embrace religious nationalism. Essentially, I argue how persuasive methodologies are emplaced to conflate historical and mythical events, dislodging them from their secular domains and recasting them as sacred bodies and narratives. Cloaked in moderate to extreme incendiary rhetoric, these newly minted subjects of transcendental faith stand as representatives and vanguards for all Hindu religious values, censoring slightest indications of disagreement. This project observes how a transnational and homogenous Hindu Indian identity is invoked through a striking linguistic reconstruction in which cultural myths are indexed as historical facts and nationalist histories are calibrated to mythical scales.

ПОВАРЕШКА МАРФЫ: АНТРОПОЛОГИЯ РЕЛИГИОЗНОЙ ИНФРАСТРУКТУРЫ

The infrastructural turn in the social sciences comes from a tendency to change the anthropocentric epistemology in social research. This new approach corresponds to the classic program of social anthropology as it makes the known unknown and provides one more perspective which helps reveal the invisible politics, inequalities, and social tensions. Yet, when it comes to the social research in the field of religion, the interest to how infrastructures work has not resulted in new academic discourses and research practices so far. This article outlines some directions and topics in the anthropology of religion which stem from the infrastructural turn. First, it highlights the work of the social imagination of believers when they deal with thick or thin (poor) infrastructural systems. Secondly, it discusses the moments of infrastructural breakdown which provoke believers to generate semiotic ideologies in order to represent their experience of communication with non-human agents, both mundane and divine. The infrastructural approach to understanding religious life does not pretend to become a new research methodology or social theory. Rather, it suggests that thinking infrastructurally on typical topics for anthropology of religion, such as pilgrimage, charity, memory or historical imagination, helps us to better understand the logic which shapes the everyday life of a religious person and community. Furthermore, it helps us remember that religious and secular domains of life are usually not separated in ethnographic reality.

“If a Woman Knows Cult Secret, She Must Never Tell”: Ritual Consecration, Secrecy, and Female Power in Egungun Pageantry Among the Yoruba

“If a Woman Knows Cult Secret, She Must Never Tell”: Ritual Consecration, Secrecy, and Female Power in Egungun Pageantry Among the Yoruba

Ambedkar, Buddhism, and Post-secularism: Inner Life, Politics, and Subalternity

The work of B. R. Ambedkar has spurred scholars and experts to rethink traditional assessments of both the secularization process and the relationship between religious and secular domains. Two generations ago, Ambedkar evoked conversion to Navayana Buddhism as an alternative to hierarchically ordered caste-based society. Through his landmark essay The Buddha and His Dhamma, he questioned studies on Dalit communities that saw them as trying to define their inner life solely as either a negative or mirror image of the standards set by caste-based norms. In the effort to retrieve the autonomy of the Dalit subject, Ambedkar brought to the forefront of his work that conversion was not simply opposition to the power structure of caste society but also meant to overthrow the false ideals that had historically distorted and degraded the Dalit self. The paper addresses some of the methodological questions in political philosophy and historiography that arise in Ambedkar’s thought regarding the analytical categories related to conversion. It begins with a provocation in its juxtaposition of categories from two different discourses: “subalternity” as a relational position in conceptualizing power and “post-secularism” as persistence or resurgence of religious beliefs or practices in the present. It then turns to examine the concept of “subalternity” to show whether it is a relevant lens to understand Dalit subjectivity and agency today. The paper argues that Ambedkar views conversion as a historical process turning away from a status of subalternity, or practices of exclusions, towards becoming individuals with agency, potentially full members of a political community. It also critically examines Ambedkar’s interpretation of Buddhist ethics as an intervention in the analysis of subalternity, showing that the religious ideology of dharma structures the caste order based on discrimination and exclusion. While displacing the explanatory principle of ritual hierarchy that unites Hindu society, Ambedkar addresses the egalitarian imaginary of modern politics that gives us an account of action based on democratic contest and resistance. The paper also explains why the move from Hinduism to Buddhist ethics by Ambedkar can, I argue, be constitutive of a post-secular ethic. Emotion and knowledge are not separate in Ambedkar’s social epistemology, but they draw heavily on the social transformation and importance of religion in people’s inner lives, which went along with conversion.

Intellectual (Neo-) Imperialism: The Examples of “Islam[ism(s)]” and “Jihad[ism(s)

In any scientific endeavour, or considered as such, methodology and epistemology are paramount, not to mention ontology: what is the nature of the reality that we are studying? What is the nature of the knowledge that is being produced and its rationality? What are the methods applied to the field of study? However, when it to comes to “Islam”, the “Middle East”, or the “Orient”, the starting points are assumptions and truisms, particularly in “scientific” fields such as Political Science or International Relations, especially when the subject is the relation between politics and religion. In the last few decades, Islam has become a central point of reference for a wide range of political activities, arguments and opposition movements. The term “political Islam”, or “Islamism”, has been adopted by many scholars in order to identify this seemingly unprecedented irruption of Islamic religion into the secular domain of politics and thus to distinguish these practices from the forms of personal piety, belief, and ritual conventionally subsumed in Western scholarship under the unmarked category “Islam”. There have been tremendous, innumerable websites, voluminous publications and many projects on “Islamism(s)” and “Post-Islamism(s)”, the idea that political Islam had failed. However, when reality did not confirm that prediction, a new term was coined: “neo-Islamism”. This paper aims to explore the thesis that, as in other fields, these labels are nothing more than an attempt by Area Studies within Western academia to mould reality according to preconceived ideas and according to policy-oriented circles and funded by governmental organizations, and that, when dealing with “Islam” and “politics”, we are urgently in need of a different epistemology.

Translation or Divination? Sacred Languages and Bilingualism in Judaism and Lucumí Traditions

I compare the status of a sacred language in two very different religious traditions. In Judaism, the Hebrew language is the language of liturgy, prayer, and the Written Law. The traditional way of reading Torah passages involved translating them into Aramaic, the everyday language of communication in the Middle East in the first half of the first millennium CE. Later, other Jewish languages, such as Yiddish, played a role similar to that of Aramaic in the Talmudic period, constituting a system referred to as the “Traditional Jewish Bilingualism”. Hebrew lexemes had denotations related to the realm of Biblical texts, while Aramaic/Yiddish lexemes had everyday references. Therefore, the act of translation connected the two realms or domains. The Lucumí (Santería) Afro-Cuban religion is a syncretic tradition combining Roman Catholicism with the Ifá tradition, which does not have a corpus of written sacred texts, however, it has its sacred language, the Lucumí (Anagó) language related to the Yoruba language of West Africa. While the Spanish-Lucumí bilingualism plays an important role in Santería rituals, the mechanisms of reference are very different from those of the Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism in Judaism. In Santería, divinations about the meaning of Lucumí words play a role similar to the translations from Hebrew in Judaism. I further discuss the role of ritual dances in Santería for the transition from the sacred to the secular domain and a function of Hebrew epitaphs to connect the ideal world of Hebrew sacred texts to the everyday life of a Jewish community.

Articulate the missing: The role of religion in political modernity

In this article, I argue that Habermas’s genealogical approach to modern reason and methodological agnosticism can lead us to a better understanding of the role of religion in our societies. I underline the relevance of Habermas’s awareness that ‘something is missing’ when we take faith out of modernity and consider the truths of philosophical reason to be infallible. Habermas succeeds in highlighting the complexity of the modern relationship between the religious and the secular domains, a relationship that is not merely epistemic, but also embodied in various practical relationships between religious and secular citizens. On this basis, and in the light of Habermas’s idea of modernity as an unfinished project, I argue that religion can be interpreted as a dimension allied to political modernity and democracy as well.

Does Faith Concordance Matter? A Comparison of Clients\u2019 Perceptions in Same Versus Interfaith Spiritual Care Encounters with Chaplains in Hospitals

In religiously pluralized societies, caregivers frequently care for patients or clients with a religious, spiritual, or secular orientation that differs from their own. Empirical studies exploring the implications of this faith diversity for spiritual care interactions between caregivers and clients are scarce. Some literature suggests that similarities in faith orientation between caregivers and clients relate to better professional caring relationships than encounters with dissimilar faith orientations, while other studies suggest that faith similarities do not relate, or relate only under certain conditions, to the way in which professional caring relationships are perceived. This study supports the second line of thought. Based on a survey among 209 clients and 45 chaplains in hospitals in the Netherlands, it shows that clients in faith-concordant encounters evaluate the spiritual care encounter just as positively as do clients in faith-discordant encounters. This is in line with broader trends of secularization and blurring of boundaries between the religious, spiritual, and secular domains.

Pentecostal Churches and Capitalism in a South African Township: Towards a Communism of the Market?

With reference to two Pentecostal churches in the Kayamandi suburb of Stellenbosch, South Africa, we consider the ways in which capitalism and the Pentecostal spirit interrelate in a contemporary South Africa. We start off by acknowledging that many forms of Pentecostalism now tend to follow the paradigm set by neo-Pentecostalism, and that the same might be true of our two church communities, Revival Fire Ministries, and the Apostolic Faith Mission, even if the latter is more typically regarded as part of the classical Pentecostal movement in South Africa. Then we discuss Pentecostalism and its relationship to the secular domain. We show how Pentecostalism, in contrast to traditional forms of Christianity, is par excellence involved in the immanent/horizontal affairs of believers' lives. Indeed, the market itself appears to be sacralized, implying a transfer of holiness into the secular domain. We conclude with the idea that we have observed a fourth wave of Pentecostalism, anticipating that the golden age of Gesara/Nesara may be considered as a secular faith, forming a Hegelian synthesis of the two so-called secular religions of the 20th century, capitalism and communism. We have analyzed it as an apocatastasis, meaning restoration to the original or primordial condition1.

Religious revival or control? Reading the spatial politics of an officially atheist country’s planning of religious scenic areas: Three cases in Shaanxi, China

This article re-conceptualizes the secular-religious relationship by examining the ‘secularized’ sacred sites (temples) and the ‘sanctified’ secular places (religious-themed scenic areas built upon the temples). This article begins with acknowledging the dialectical secular-religious relationship and pushes this line of theorization further from a socio-spatial perspective. By using the ‘trialectics of spatiality’ analytical framework, this article examines the production/reproduction of both the secular and the religious spaces that determined and were simultaneously determined by the diversified religion-state relations. Contextualized in the 2000s when the Chinese state held ambivalence towards religions, this article presents a comparative study of the spatial interaction between the local state and the religious personnel respectively around the planning of three state-sponsored religious cultural scenic areas. By delving into the territorial strategy of simulation, this article demonstrates how and why Chinese secular and religious agents deliberately crossed over the socially constructed boundaries between the normatively defined secular and religious domain.

Mind the Gap

Mind the Gap

From Online Buddha Halls to Robot-Monks

The interaction between religion and the new media has affected the perception that society has of religion, changed cardinal structures in the relationship between religious practice and religious authorities, and also transformed features and functions of the media. If we look at mainland China today, religious individuals and groups have their own WeChat and Weibo accounts, and internet websites; some believers operate solely in cyberspace and perform rituals online; and commercials often adopt religious symbols to brand nonreligious products. In other words, we find religious people or organizations that use (and even own) different media platforms as channels of communication; we also see that religious imageries are more and more put to use in the secular domain for nonreligious purposes. This article will analyze how and why Buddhists have resorted to social and digital media and even robotics to preach the Dharma and attract potential new followers, but also to redefine their public image in the wider Chinese society. This study also will ask whether the state has directed or merely engaged with this new Dharma media-enterprise, and in what way. In addressing these questions, one section of this article will explore the creation of the robot-monk Xian’er (at the Longquan Monastery, Beijing). Xian’er’s creation will be considered in relation to similar androids, placed in dialogue with the current debate on the use of robotics in religion, and viewed from posthumanist perspectives.

Violent times, the horror of the unspeakable and the temporality of religious experience

Violence is essential to religion, while religion holds the promise of transcending violence. The designation religious refers not to a type of violence, but to a specific issue of violence, namely the claim to higher (theodical) justification. This religious aspect is not confined to religion; it is also evident in the secular domain. A critique of religious violence needs to show the gap between violence and its justifications, experienced affectively in horror. This horror in response to the unspeakable is structurally akin to mystical experience, the temporal structure of which indicates the failure of the theodical justification for violence.

Negotiating Modernity and Islam in pre-1952 Egyptian Cinema

A quick glance at Egyptian films before the 1952 revolution can easily lead to conclusions that modernity in Egypt emerged as a predominately secular domain that is anti-religion. But a closer look at screenwriting tools reveals that Islam served as a substratum of everyday life practices of film characters. This essay sheds light on metaphors representing Islam in the cinematic critique of modernity by drawing on selected scenes from the popular classics Talaq Su'ad Hanim/The Divorce of Lady Su'ad, directed by Anwar Wajdi [Wagdi], 1948, and al-Zawja al-Sabi'a/The Seventh Wife, directed by Muhammad 'Imara, 1950. The two films enjoy a visible presence in Egyptian popular culture until today. Both critique how the materialization of modernity among the Cairene bourgeoisie leads to the appropriation of metaphors representing Islam, such as Islamic legal tradition, to sustain a class hierarchy thriving on colonization and war. The two films present an expanding trajectory and direction of female agency in response to the appropriation of Islamic personal law for divorce amid film characters who are depicted as caricatures of modernity. In so doing, these early films recognize how religion did not shrink or diminish under the pressures of modernization; they are examples of how cinema serves as a supplemental secular public sphere that is not anti-religion—one which accentuates the crucial difference between Islam as a faith, Islam as an ideology and Islam as a body of legal knowledge that has the vital semantic potentials to be translated into secular idioms, and in a "universally accessible language." More notably, the films underscore the importance of decoding the ethical intuitions of religious traditions which could be incorporated into a "post-secular" stance that finds an ally in religious sources of meaning in challenging the forces of global capitalism. And above all, the films show that such a task falls not only to experts and religious citizens but also to all citizens engaged in the public use of reason.

Christ in the Life and Teaching of Gregory of Nazianzus by Andrew Hofer

Reviewed by: Christ in the Life and Teaching of Gregory of Nazianzus by Andrew Hofer Kevin M. Clarke Christ in the Life and Teaching of Gregory of Nazianzus by Andrew Hofer, O.P. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), xiii + 270 pp. Saint Gregory of Nazianzus challenges first-time readers with his abundance of self-referential tropes throughout his orations and [End Page 1403] poetry. "Upon whom are you fixated, Gregory, yourself or Christ?" The Nazianzen seems to be the most narcissistic of all the Church Fathers. Further, Gregory does not give us the satisfaction of a "dogmengeschichtliche Christology," and so it seems one may even question the extent to which he deserves to be called the Theologian. But Andrew Hofer, O.P., in his book Christ in the Life and Teaching of Gregory of Nazianzus, shows that it is not narcissism at the heart of Gregory's preaching. Instead, it is precisely Gregory's love for Christ that propels him to discover all convergences with his own life and the life and mystery of Christ. Hofer writes that Gregory's "writings exude a highly sophisticated and profoundly personal insight into the mystery of Christ. He crafts his presentation to persuade others to be purified and, with Gregory himself as their model, to become like Christ in deification" (195). The text is well-structured around Hofer's thesis. Hofer observes that Gregory is "the most autobiographical of all the Greek Fathers," but not in the modern sense of the term "autobiography" (4). Gregory is eager to set himself up as an example of discipleship to his audience. Gregory writes about his life to show Christ hidden in it. Plus, it is not only Gregory's life that is interwoven into Christ's and Christ's into his. Gregory presents other saintly figures, such as his sister, Gorgonia, an exemplar of biblical living (45). Athanasius, too, rides triumphantly into Alexandria upon a colt like "my Jesus" (206). Confronting the injustice of Emperor Valens, Basil of Caesarea becomes "the fleshless one," a bloodless martyr standing like "my Jesus before the judgment seat of Pilate" (208). For Gregory, that is the point. The commingling of one's life with that of the Incarnate Word is not only a mark of discipleship but even the path to deification. Hofer organizes the book in the following manner. He builds a case in chapter 1 for a logo-centric theology, one that remains integral throughout the book. Gregory, often referred to as the second Demosthenes for his powerful rhetoric, is interested to claim rhetoric from the secular domain for his preaching, because his love for words is really a love for the Word. Contrary to the accusations of Emperor Julian that Christians were without reason (alogos), Gregory shows that Christ has assumed our rational nature (logikē physis). Hofer makes several key points: that "Gregory's words must not be separated from his faith in the Word"; that "the attention to words should be seen in relation to Gregory's training as a rhetor who seeks to persuade others to accept this philosophy of living by the Word"; and that "the Word in Scripture is channeled through Gregory's own earthly life and teaching for people to worship rightly" (53). Hofer argues that Gregory's autobiography is "Christomorphic," a notion he develops in chapter 2. Further, Gregory's Christology is "autobiographical," which [End Page 1404] Hofer develops in three parts in chapters 3–5. Chapter 3 explores a theological challenge in the "mixture" language that Gregory uses concerning his life and that of Christ. Gregory even uses mixture language to describe the Incarnation itself, though the Word does not become a single nature after the Incarnation (94–95). When Gregory ponders the rational soul of Christ, he exclaims: "O new mixture! O unexpected blending! He who is has come to be, the uncreated one is created, the limitless one is contained, through the mediation of a rational soul standing between divinity and the coarseness of flesh" (115; quoting Brian Daley's translation of Or. 38). Chapter 4 focuses on Epistle 101 and the ten anathemas from the perspective of Gregory's own salvation, and the impossibility of...

How Avoiding the Religion–Politics Divide Plays out in Sikh Politics

This article looks at the intersection of religion and politics in the evolution of the Sikh tradition in the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods in the Indian subcontinent. The Sikh notion of sovereignty is at the heart of the intersection of religious and secular domains, and this relationship is examined empirically and theoretically. In particular, the conception of mīrī-pīrī is presented as a possible explanation for understanding the ‘new developments’ in contemporary Sikh politics in India.

Relationship Between the Spiritual and the Secular: Vivekananda, Gandhi and Radhakrishnan

This article explores the repeated invocation of the spiritual by Vivekananda, Gandhi and Radhakrishnan. It attempts to understand the nature of the relationship they established between the spiritual and the secular domains while invoking the spiritual. The article argues that what was distinctive about frequent usage of the spiritual was its usage to articulate both the secular and the otherworldly goals in different ways. Moreover, none of them are strictly secular, if it means differentiation of the social and political domain from religion on the one hand and rise of ‘exclusive humanism’ on the other. For them, the domain of secular is the domain of realizing the spiritual. They are not two separate domains but constituted an integral whole where the activities of secular were defined and redefined in the light of the quest for the spiritual and vice versa.