Secular Enlightenment Research Articles

The establishment of the society for the restoration of orthodox christianity in the Caucasus and its activities in the education of the abkhazians

The events of the mid-60s of the 19th century became a turning point for the peoples of the Caucasus in many respects. There are fundamental changes in the socio-political and cultural life of the region. All this was due to both the energetic actions of the Russian government and the changes that took place among the Caucasian peoples. With the inclusion of the Caucasus into the Russian Empire, it became necessary to modify the actions of the autocracy in this region. Using various "levers", tsarism purposefully realized its main tasks in the region - the spread of Orthodoxy in the region and the formation of imperial identity and consciousness among the Caucasian peoples. The most important elements of such a civilizing policy in Russia are the secular school and enlightenment. Abkhazia, located in the northwestern part of the Caucasus, occupies an important strategic position. With the inclusion of Abkhazia into the Russian Empire, tsarism throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries sought to attract, first of all, the local elite into the all-Russian cultural space. The tsarist administration sought to create a strong system of government in the region, which would not have been possible without the involvement of competent officials from among the local population who knew the customs, life, familiar with the local living conditions. The government believed that the Society for the Restoration of Orthodox Christianity in the Caucasus, on which great hopes were pinned, could become the most important instrument of tsarist policy in the Caucasus. This article discusses the formation of the Society for the Restoration of Orthodox Christianity in the Caucasus, as well as some aspects of its activities in the field of education in Abkhazia.

The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob

Reviewed by: The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob Anna Tomaszewska The Secular Enlightenment. By Margaret C. Jacob. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2019. Pp. xi, 339. $29.95. ISBN 9780691161327.) The author of the seminal Radical Enlightenment (1981) has proposed another category encapsulating intellectual, social, and political metamorphoses spurred by [End Page 214] the "Age of Enlightenment." In eight chapters that take the reader through Western European and trans-Atlantic spaces and times spanning from the late seventeenth century until the 1790s, Margaret Jacob pictures the emergence of "the secular world" in which human life would increasingly center on the here and now without "a necessary reference to a transcendent order" (pp. 1–2). For Jacob, secularization does not imply a complete repudiation of religion, but redefining its meaning as a cultural practice, an approach traceable to The Religious Ceremonies and Customs (1723–43) by Jean Frederick Bernard and Bernard Picart. The secular Enlightenment turned toward science under Newton's auspices, witnessed budding sensitivity to social injustice and inequalities, criticized the alliance between church and state, and brought the development of the university culture. Clandestine literature and new forms of sociability, practiced in masonic lodges, city clubs, and cafés, created a global space of shared ideas and ideals: equality, cosmopolitanism, universal brotherhood. Inventions, such as that of the pendulum clock, prompted changes in the perception of time dedicated more and more to this-worldly activities. The secular ways became manifest in the lives of countless travelers, publishers, industrialists, academics, scientists, and poets—both minor figures, some of them female, and the leading protagonists of the epoch. France prepared the ground for the outbreak of its 1789 revolution: the deism, materialism, and atheism of the philosophes provided a setting in which the absolute monarchy and priestly privilege could be challenged. The Scottish enlighteners favored pragmatic topics: taxes, commerce, and how to counteract poverty, which would set the background for the development of capitalism and the conception of historical progress. Germany staged the advocacy of secular ethics and politics, the publication of subversive writings attacking organized religion, conflicts between rationalist philosophers and state authorities, and finally the resurgence of Spinozism that constituted the naturalist underpinnings for "a universal humanism" (p. 197). The Italians, overcoming tensions between the Catholic Church and the enlightened values, contributed to political economy with theories of money and trade, and to political theory by laying the foundations for a constitutional republic that would later serve as a model for the Americans. The way was also paved for abolishing torture, slavery, and eventually death penalty. Social and political unrest accompanied the demise of the Enlightenment, which set in motion the "creation of the democratic citizen," necessitating a "personal transformation … often transgressive of customs and mores" (p. 236), particularly those related to family life. The Enlightenment, which persisted in the writings of the Romantics, brought along "the secular" that "had become all pervasive" (p. 264). Jacob's fascinatingly many-layered and multifaceted account of the Enlightenment unfolds the extent to which its ideas have shaped our times, yet occasionally her usage of '"enlightened" slips from merely descriptive into normative. Jacob does not side with the proponents of the "religious Enlightenment"—the claim that religious controversies could have triggered the secularizing impulse (Jeffrey D. Burson) or that the "Age of Reason" made possible new forms of belief (David Sorkin). Her allegiance stays with those who, like Peter Gay, link the Enlightenment with the [End Page 215] secular. However, although Jacob's account expresses attachment to the secular values which have come to be associated with liberal democratic culture that some believe to prevail nowadays, it also perpetuates the view of those critics of the Enlightenment who would see in it a movement of dissent from Christianity. Anna Tomaszewska Jagellonian University in Krakow Copyright © 2022 The Catholic University of America Press

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SYSTEM OF SECULAR EDUCATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT IN KAZAKHSTAN

In the article it is examined the history of secular education and enlightenment in Kazakhstan. The author analyzes the education system since Soviet times. The works on this problem were considered, conclusions were made. In addition, the problem of secular education in the 20-30s of the twentieth century is divided into 3 stages and presented in tabular form. The author also notes that since 1923 there has been an increase in the budget of public education and an improvement in the financial situation of teachers. This, in turn, indicates the gradual development of the system of general education schools. The aim of the article is to analyze and comprehend the history of secular education and enlightenment in Kazakhstan. The authors tried to analyze some problems of the development of the system of secular education and enlightenment in Kazakhstan, such as the lack of school buildings; lack of teachers, specialists with special education, etc.

On Catholic Responses to Our Devastated Saeculum

On Catholic Responses to Our Devastated Saeculum Thomas Pfau Let mu begin with some remarks about the title of our Thomistic Institute symposium, "Intellectual Origins of Secularization and Catholic Intellectual Responses." To engage in speculation about origins, particularly where a phenomenon as complex as secularization is concerned, is bound to entangle us in the condition we are asked to diagnose. Thus, Alasdair MacIntyre has observed how genealogical inquiry, itself a distinctly modern endeavor, tends to "repudiate all the key features of accountability, understood in terms either of Socratic dialectic or of Augustinian confession." Implicitly, that is, a genealogical narrative about origins embraces the project of intellectual emancipation and demystification that drives David Hume's and Immanuel Kant's Enlightenment critiques of reason, and that is subsequently radicalized (and predictably turned against the Enlightenment itself) by Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. Hence, MacIntyre notes, "the genealogical stance is dependent for its concepts and its modes of argument, for its theses and its style, upon a set of contrasts between it and that which it aspires to overcome—the extent, that is, to which it is derivative from and even parasitic upon its antagonisms … drawing its necessary sustenance from that which it professes to have discarded."1 Genealogical accounts of secularization and its putative "intellectual origins" are liable to remain beholden to a distinctly modern, secular conception of time that will alternatively take the form of a stridently progressive or an inexorably declensionist narrative. Not coincidentally, genealogical accounts of either kind first came to [End Page 29] be championed both by major proponents of the secular Enlightenment and by some of its fiercest critics. We think of William Robertson's A View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (1769), David Hume's History of England (1754–1761), Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789), and Immanuel Kant's Conjectural Beginning of Human History and Ideas for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (both in 1783). Concurrently, an equivocal or outright declensionist account of history, understood as a fatal and irreversible lapse from an original state, informs Jean-Jacques Rousseau's essay On the Origin of Language (1749) and his second Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), which are unique in this regard and present him as both one of the major progenitors of a secular modernity and one of its sharpest critics. The list of writers engaged in fashioning origin-and-progress or decline-and-fall narratives could be extended almost indefinitely, to include Lord Monboddo (James Burnett), Edmund Burke, Johann Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Georg Hegel, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Jules Michelet, Leopold von Ranke, Heinrich von Treitschke, Max Weber, Oswald Spengler, and so on. Suffice it to say, to frame our topic in terms of origins and the intellectual genre of a "genealogy" is to be implicated in a historicist conception of time that (for better or worse) bears the imprint of homo faber and to embrace what Charles Taylor has labeled modernity's "immanent frame." Whatever its particular "findings" may turn out to be, genealogical inquiry constitutes an implicitly secular undertaking, and as such, cannot elucidate the meaning of a secularity it already presupposes.2 A second set of questions arises from the invitation that we specifically attend to the intellectual origins of secularity. To be sure, any attempt to understand our present, secular condition will take the form of some intellectual account or argument. We may identify major patterns and topoi that seem palpably secular in kind and contrast them with the robustly theist metaphysics that gradually shaped Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, and [End Page 30] in time the Slavic East between the third and the tenth century. While reconstructing such patterns and motifs is indeed an intellectual activity, it does not follow that the phenomena under investigation will themselves be of an intellectual nature. Arguably the most significant case in point, and the backdrop for this paper, concerns the rise of modern entrepreneurial and financial capitalism in late-seventeenth-century England. What in time came to be known as political economy had...

“Redeemed from savagery”: Sanctification and civilization in the accounts of Cook Islands missionaries Aaron Buzacott and John Williams

This article explores the way in which two Protestant missionaries to the Cook Islands in the mid-nineteenth century, John Williams and Aaron Buzacott, engaged with the idea of civilization in their ethnographic descriptions of the islanders. It contributes to an important strand of recent scholarship which focuses on developing a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between Enlightenment ideas and evangelical missionaries in the Pacific. While Buzacott and Williams firmly understood that the missionary was the instrument of transforming civilization, they did not merely replicate the lexicon or concept of civilization contained in secular Enlightenment philosophy. I argue that Buzacott and Williams used the theological concept of sanctification to frame the secular, historical, process of “civilizing” the Cook islanders, such that they argued that the driving force in the process of civilizing was not historical development, but rather, the sanctifying transformation wrought by the Holy Spirit. In short, Williams and Buzacott used the theological concept of sanctification to perform descriptive and ethnographic, rather than purely theological and normative, work. This study provides a window into a significant phenomenon, in which theological concepts played a formative, and frequently overlooked, role in Pacific missionary anthropology and ethnography.

The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob

Reviewed by: The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob John D. Eigenauer Margaret C. Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). Pp. 339, 13 b/w illus. $29.95 cloth. The great debate in Enlightenment studies in the past twenty-plus years has centered on the causes of secular modernity: What happened to move the world from the Middle Ages to our Secular Age? One dominant answer, propounded by Jonathan Israel across three massive volumes (Radical Enlightenment [2001], Enlightenment Contested [2006], and Democratic Enlightenment [2011]), is that our modern values arose from the world's wholesale acceptance of the materialist philosophy that undergirds Baruch Spinoza's (1632–1677) complex thought. A second answer is that our modern world was born of myriad factors ranging from global expansion (and the ensuing contact with unknown peoples) to increased literacy (making people more worldly and informed) to expanding economies (enhancing quality of life and freeing people from the cares of quotidian struggles). While Israel's thesis is enticing and powerfully argued, the majority of scholars see advances toward secularism as irreducible to the forces of philosophy; they therefore embrace a more complex system of causes. Margaret Jacob stands firmly in the latter camp. In her most recent work, The Secular Enlightenment, Jacob argues for a view of the Enlightenment that encompasses many factors that added impetus to increasing secularism across the long eighteenth century. These include "new spatial realities": politics, "the spread of money," imperialistic expansionism, "subversive literature," "travel literature," the expansion of cities, increased sociability, the growth of luxury goods, heightened literacy, and encounters with new peoples in faraway lands. Jacob's argument seems to be that new uses of and encounters with "space" (think of expanding cities and intercontinental exploration) opened up ways of seeing the world that contrasted with traditional views and invited increased secularism (9–24). Encounters with formerly unknown peoples outside Europe, for example, led people to speculate in travel literature (both real and fictional) about what it meant that some peoples had no conception of God—a possibility that denied a longstanding orthodox tradition that claimed that everyone possesses an innate idea of the divinity. Increased sociability in cities (in pubs, clubs, cafes, and masonic lodges, for example) created the possibility for expressions of "the outrageous, daring, and free" (20). And growing literacy made these dangerous ideas more widely available. However, even though these ideas certainly lend support to social history (over against a history that emphasizes ideas as primary motive forces), the account in the first chapter leaves a number of questions unanswered. While it is certainly true that encounters with non-European peoples invited many questions, we do not [End Page 443] learn what those questions were or how they were answered. As Andrew Curran notes in his essay on "Anthropology" in The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment (2014), these travelogues speculated on "human diversity, human origins, human comportment, human anatomy and (supposedly different types of) human minds" (30). How did secular attitudes emerge out of discussions of these topics? What answers were forwarded that moved the world towards increasing secularism? These are the type of questions that should be addressed in a discussion that theorizes that new conceptualizations of "space" promoted a more secular worldview in the long eighteenth century. There is no doubt that eighteenth century Europeans encountered conceptions and uses of "space" that forced them to rethink their worlds. But we do not learn in Jacob's chapter on space what those conceptions were or how they emerged. In fact, after a discussion on "space" in the first chapter—a discussion that ends with the assertion that "space had truly become emptied" (32)—the term virtually disappears from the book. Jacob announces in the second chapter another major theme in her view of the secular eighteenth century: time. Jacob sees time before 1680 as being understood in a decidedly non-modern way. Unfortunately, she does not explain what that experience was like or attempt to define the pre-Enlightenment concept of time. She makes references to changing ideas about the age of the earth, but does not explain how these new ideas relate to a more modern sense...

The Practices of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public by Dorothea von Mücke

Reviewed by: The Practices of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public by Dorothea von Mücke Peter Erickson Dorothea von Mücke. The Practices of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 292 pp. In this ambitious new monograph, Dorothea von Mücke argues that Enlightenment ideas about authorship and the public sphere were profoundly shaped by both religious thought and the natural sciences. Her volume thus seeks to trace their evolution within a broader network of intellectual and cultural influences. "The discourse of philosophy alone," she argues, "does not suffice to understand the trajectory of these concepts." Von Mücke is interested in [End Page 327] describing the kind of "cultural work" through which an autonomous domain of aesthetic perception and creativity was developed and populated by its own newly stylized audiences, critics, and practitioners (123–24)—a domain that, in turn, shaped the Enlightenment more broadly. For this, von Mücke understands the Enlightenment not so much as an array of concepts, but as a set of habituated practices: of contemplation, aesthetic appreciation, and public deliberation. The goal of her volume is to reveal "where such practices [were] articulated, maintained, and promoted" (xiv). She works to trace how practices of observation, confession, and public debate migrated between different discursive contexts and took on new meaning. One is struck, on the one hand, by how highly portable and adaptable such practices could be—the way that they could be transplanted, repurposed, and transformed in different contexts. On the other hand, in von Mücke's view, these practices retain a trace of their origin. They are often borrowed precisely for their aura (72). If practices of confession, for example, were secularized through this process of migration, they served at the same time to provide secular discourses with new meaning and with greater stature (123). This shift of habituated practices from one context to another could, von Mücke notes, even come about unintentionally, almost in spite of itself. Von Mücke cites the work of Martin Gierl, who has shown that theological debates around the beginning of the eighteenth century helped to establish a set of secular norms of public deliberation and fairness—a set of neutral criteria according to which one might evaluate doctrinal claims (xxiv). In Part I of her book, von Mücke focuses on how practices of contemplation, developed through both spiritual exercises and the natural sciences, provided the basis for a new conception of aesthetics centered around the idea of a disinterested observer. This section includes an especially inspired reading of the use of naturalist emblems in seventeenth century editions of Johann Arndt's influential True Christianity. In Part II, von Mücke turns to the connection between religious practices of confession and the secular genre of autobiography, primarily through readings of Rousseau's Confessions of a Savoyard Vicar and Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit. She argues against a direct lineage between conversion narrative and autobiographical memoir, instead focusing on the ways that, across these different discourses, authors developed strategies to justify their perspective and assert their subjectivity. It was ultimately, in her view, not the sense of "confession" as an account of one's conversion but rather the sense of confession as a profession of faith or a statement of one's convictions that had the greater influence on the Enlightenment. In Part III, she works to contextualize Kant's famous essay on the Enlightenment within other discussions of the public sphere in the eighteenth century, including debates about patriotism in the midst of the Seven Years' War. In being willing to consider religious influences on secular Enlightenment thought, von Mücke sees her study as an intervention into a field of Enlightenment research still dominated in North America by the militantly anti-religious French philosophes (xviii). It would have been interesting, in the context of considering the role of religious "practices" in the evolution of Enlightenment thought, for von Mücke to include a discussion of the concept of "spiritual exercises," as it was developed in the work of Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault. This would have offered an especially robust conceptual understanding of the...

Secular spirituality – what it is. Why we need it. How to proceed

ABSTRACTSpirituality is the taboo topic of science. Science, in conjunction with political and secular enlightenment movements, was one of the major drivers of modern enlightenment, secularization and progress. Science has itself become a powerful meta-narrative. And part of this meta-narrative is a materialist view of the world. In such a model consciousness can only be secondary to material events in the brain. Yet, spiritual experiences are, as data show, quite common. Because the enlightenment movement was so successful, it has done away with all that is considered unnecessary baggage, including spirituality. Therefore, a new discourse needs to start that addresses this problem. This can only be done via the notion of experience. Spiritual experiences are experiences of a reality that is experienced to be beyond the ego and its immediate needs. They are the basis of religion that later starts out to interpret and ritualize these experiences. In them human consciousness seems to have direct access to the structure of reality as such. It is interesting to see that the scientific process has a similar mode of operation: it needs a deep, often creative insight into the structure behind data in order to create a theory. This process is called abduction and is, phenomenologically speaking, very similar to a spiritual experience or insight. Thus, spirituality and science might have more in common than one would think at first glance. This would entail that we need to develop a methodology of inner experience if we want to take spirituality scientifically seriously.

Maria Theresa’s Enlightenment: The Habsburgs, Generational Challenge, and Religious Indifference

Maria Theresa’s EnlightenmentThe Habsburgs, Generational Challenge, and Religious Indifference Rita Krueger (bio) A recurring debate in enlightenment studies is the relationship between ideas and socio-political change. In his 1972 essay on the European enlightenment, Franco Venturi argues for research methods that ground the enlightenment, as a movement, in particular historical contexts with the goal of illuminating what it all “meant.”1 Scholars like Venturi investigate enlightenment coalescence, namely the ideas and the historical realities that cohered the increasingly self-aware cadre of writers, philosophers, statesmen, and others around particular notions of tolerance, reason, progress, and individual or national edification. By contrast, the cri de coeur of anti-enlightenment—of those who perceived their world to be under attack—emphasized the manifold dangers and terrible consequences of these new ideas. The struggle over whether to perceive intellectual ferment as hopeful evidence of progress and renewal or a threat to the stability of all that was good in the world played out not only among writers but also within influential households. In eighteenth-century royal families, intergenerational struggles could be and sometimes were grafted to the new language of the enlightenment, thereby setting up new locations for enlightenment ideas and for the passionate pushback against them.2 The eighteenth-century Habsburgs had their fair share of drama between couples, as well as among parents and children. The conflicts in Habsburg [End Page 69] relationships reveal the ways in which familial struggles shaped and were in turn shaped by political and intellectual change. Empress Maria Theresa, who embraced an ideology of both beneficent government and fecundity, has a mixed reputation. While her sons Joseph and Leopold are invariably styled as enlightened monarchs, or at least as enlightened absolutists, historians have at times placed Maria Theresa on both sides—sometimes portraying her as a conservative and, at other times, as an (accidental) enlightenment reformer. Both views have ample evidence to support them. Maria Theresa rejected ideas that she thought posed a threat to power, patrimony, and salvation. She pursued reform for the good of the state, but she viewed some of the intellectual challenges of the eighteenth century—religious toleration and new social principles among them—as fundamentally corrosive of individual and social morality. At times, she loathed and feared the “acrid ferment of enlightenment” and defended her intolerance of religious plurality, but she did so out of the deepest of religious and political convictions that evinced her love of her people and dynasty.3 Maria Theresa’s impact on the Austrian state was profound, but, with a few exceptions, she resisted using the grand canvass of the Habsburg realm as a political laboratory of the enlightenment. In the last decade of her life, her desire to address the miseries of the Habsburg peasantry, and her repugnance for and dread of warfare were tied to her disquiet over her own (and others’) salvation. In the first years of her reign, however, war had been the only way to protect her patrimony and have a chance to regain the territory of which she had been robbed. But, by the late 1760s, after the enormous cost of the Seven Years’ War and herself a widow, she began to see in war only the potential for loss (both territorial and human). She perceived her legacy partly as the dynasty itself, in both personal and political terms. It was within the family that she sought to shape political identities and control ideas, and it was within the context of imperial mothering that she expressed a religiously-informed political worldview that was, at the same time, a throwback to baroque culture and vibrantly new. She understood that a renewed Habsburg realm, which included the Austrian Netherlands, Central Europe, and the Italian peninsula, could influence events and people to create a more just world, but it should not be a secular world. In her mind, the empire would not thrive if it was unmoored from its critical anchors in dynastic power and Catholic hegemony, and she lamented the new statecraft of rulers like Frederick II who drew energy from secular enlightenment principles. It is worth reflecting on the intersection between the personal and the political in the...

DINAMIKA HUKUM ISLAM MASA MODERN DAN PROBLEMATIKANYA: SYARI’AH DAN DASAR-DASAR HAK ASASI MANUSIA (HAM)

The concept of human rights contained in the Universal Declaration is the product of an era that is inseparable from the influence of the historical, ideological, post-second world war intellectual background. Therefore, the concept of human rights, more or less, is the result of cultural fusion after the Western secular Enlightenment that is not grounded in religious principles. Regarding the concept of human rights as expressed in the Universal Declaration, some have accepted without reservation on the ground that the concept of human rights they have is in accordance with religious teachings. Conversely, some have considered that the basic principles of the Declaration is from the Western secular cultures that tend to put aside religious values. The third is the position of the moderates who take a cautious stance for accepting it with some changes and modifications.

“… but in its proper place. …”Religion, Enlightenment, and Australia's Secular Heritage: The Case of Robert Lowe in Colonial NSW 1842-1850

Over the last few decades historians have been rediscovering Australia's religious heritage, often in response to entrenched narratives depicting Australia's social, intellectual, and political history as a triumph of secular enlightenment over vestiges of Old World partnerships of religion, state, and society. That Australia has a rich secular heritage is indisputable, but to draw a sharp distinction between the “secular” and the “religious” is anachronistic and misguided, and any attempt to tell the story of Australia's secular heritage must acknowledge that the “secular” often found its justification flowing from more general religious premises grounded in enlightenment ideals such as rational religion, rational piety, and general Christianity. Indeed, when liberal democracy was emerging in the colonies the “secular” had to be justified in terms acceptable to the public square and these terms were broadly religious. Robert Lowe is an apt case study for divining the nature of the secular in colonial Australia, for his thought and political activity show the subtle and complex way that ideals such as “enlightenment,” “religion,” and “secular” entered into dialogue rather than warfare with one another and contributed to social institutions judged suitable for a fledgling pluralist nation.

Parnassus of the Evangelical Empire: Orientalism and the English Universities, 1800–50

Challenging the fundamental assumption of Edward Said that orientalism was a product of the secular Enlightenment, this article explores the state of oriental learning at England's most prestigious sites of intellectual and discursive production in the first half of the nineteenth century. By tracing the definitively Christian approach to empire propounded by the leading university orientalists of the period, the essay excavates an important era of orientalism overlooked by modern scholarship. From the most senior positions in the universities there spread a distinctly anti-secular and ‘providentialist’ reading of empire. Unlike the secular orientalism of the eighteenth and later nineteenth century, this new ‘evangelical orientalism’ formed the major institutionalised means of understanding Britain's Asian empire during the decades in which it was chiefly acquired. In place of the collusion of extractive imperialism and secular knowledge forms delineated by Edward Said, the article therefore outlines a relationship between orientalism and empire that was more fraught and contested.

Religion in America: A Political History

Denis Lacorne, a distinguished student of American politics at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (informally known as Sciences Po), has written a fascinating and noteworthy study of American religion. Its primary focus is the historiography of the relationship between religion and American politics and identity as seen through the rich literature of French reflections on that subject. The book's chronology consists of five critical moments or “historiographical regimes” in which two competing narratives of identity formation play out—the origins of one is in the secular Enlightenment; the other's origin is in a romantic Puritan/Protestantism (p. xix). This division, while replicating the tensions explored in Robert A. Ferguson's The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (1997) and J. David Greenstone's The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism (1993), is deepened and complicated when viewed from the perspective of French writings. French intellectuals then and now have often expressed a deep ambivalence about America, seeing it either as a vanguard nation of enlightened democracy or as a godless, hypocritical, money-obsessed nation that is also (paradoxically) an intolerant Anglo-Protestant theocracy. This ambivalence played out in mid-eighteenth-century French portrayals of America as a land of religious utopias—especially William Penn's Quaker Pennsylvania. First pictured by Voltaire, the Marquis de Jaucourt, and Abbé Raynal as reincarnations of ancient republican virtue, by the end of the eighteenth century, these Quaker/Protestant virtues were transformed by French writers into hypocritical covers for expansionism and exploitation; these authors portrayed America itself as dominated by a Puritanism that recalled the fanaticism of barbarians.

Moscow, the fourth Rome: Stalinism, cosmopolitanism, and the evolution of Soviet culture, 1931-1941

In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the Third Rome. By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world. Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today--transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin. Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.

The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (review)

Reviewed by: The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England Carrie Hintz D. Bruce Hindmarsh . The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford University Press 2005. x, 384. US $110.00 The Evangelical Conversion Narrative offers a stimulating 'biography of a genre' from its seventeenth-century origins through its decline in the nineteenth century, with emphasis on the conversion narratives of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival. Drawing on hitherto unexplored archival sources, D. Bruce Hindmarsh offers critical insight into the way that laity and clergy alike framed their spiritual lives in narrative form. The book traces the cultural changes that shaped the conversion narratives of this period, including technological and social change, [End Page 246] and the reasons why individuals turned to religious community as a means of shaping their lives. After a brief exploration of the early modern origins of the conversion narrative, Hindmarsh offers a useful exploration of the transatlantic evangelical revival in the 1730s, with an emphasis on 'how plastic religious identity had become by the mid-eighteenth century.' This chapter also argues for the social dimensions of conversion 'to stimulate parallel experience and allow the formation of a narrative community.' Much of the book is given over to a consideration of how the doctrinal, cultural, and social differences between religious groups might have shaped the kinds of narratives produced by individual believers, whether the evangelical Presbyterians of the Cambuslang revival in Scotland, moderate Calvinists within the Church of England, or Moravians. Hindmarsh's rich account covers a wide cross-section of people in the period, in large part because of his impressive work with archives and primary sources. As one example among many, he recognizes the 'special significance' of a collection of letters to Charles Wesley in the John Rylands Library, which contains 'the diverse testimony of women and men, those literate and barely literate, and persons of higher and lower ranks in society.' Hindmarsh offers powerful analysis of the interaction of self and community in the period, noting that conversion narratives were 'located at the cusp of modernity but also sharing all the assumptions of a fading Christian hegemony,' thus involving 'both creativity and discovery, both individuation and discovery.' With this expansive understanding of life narratives, it is regrettable that Hindmarsh does not draw on contemporary life-writing theorists who work on 'relational autobiography' (such as Paul John Eakins, Richard Freadman, and Nancy K. Miller), although he uses classic theorists of individualistic autobiography (such as Georges Gusdorf and James Olney) very effectively. Any scholar of the eighteenth century might productively consult this book as an alternative to secular Enlightenment models of the self. In writing the 'biography of a genre' Hindmarsh takes on a challenging task. With historical sensitivity, deep research, and engaging writing he brings to life not just the conversion narrative genre but the thousands of people who turned to it to recount their experiences. Carrie Hintz Queens College, CUNY Copyright © 2008 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition (review)

General and Miscellaneous God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition. By John Witte, Jr. [Emory University Studies in Law and Religion.] (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2006. Pp. xiv, 498. $30.00 paperback.) This, the latest and widest-ranging of Professor Witte 's explorations of the overlapping realms of law, theology, and history, is engaging, thoughtful, and respectful of the different intellectual and religious traditions with which he deals. It covers three distinct topics, human rights law, the American churchstate relation, and family law: For each, Witte uses the same methodology. He examines the contributions of the various religious traditions, Catholic, Protestant, and as far as he finds them applicable, Orthodox, Jewish, and Islamic. He relates all these to the contribution of the secular Enlightenment tradition, and tries to develop a synthesis that will allow today's Christians to live in love and peace with their neighbors. His conclusions are decent, humane, and ecumenical, and his treatment of debatable questions is very fair to both sides. Among other valuable discussions, he has a thorough and sympathetic account of the attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church and the post-Communist Russian government toward evangelizing initiatives from We stern Europe and America, and an enlightening examination of the legislative history of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. But he has fallen into a few historical gaffes. On page 300, for instance, he says that the Tametsi decree of the Council of Trent made parental consent a requirement for marriage. It did not. Rather, it provided that although the marriage of minors without parental consent should be discouraged, it was not invalid. Parental consent has never been required, or supposed to be required, for the marriage of adults. On page 234, he says, In Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, the Court refused to uphold a federal law forbidding contracts with foreign clergy, a vital issue for Catholic clergy. The federal law in question did not forbid contracts with foreign clergy; it forbade contracts with foreign workers generally. The Court did not refuse to uphold it; it refused to apply it. The lawfulness of making contracts was not a vital issue for Catholic clergy, who (unlike the Anglican priest involved in the Holy Trinity case) are generally assigned to their positions rather than contracted for. Such errors of detail-and these are not the only ones-may seem trivial in a work as broad in scope as this. But they undermine confidence. As the author sweeps across many centuries and several disciplines, many different readers will find him covering some subjects with which they are familiar, and many subjects with which they are not. …

The Struggle between “Religion and Nonreligion”: Jefferson, Backus, and the Dissonance of America's Founding Principles

The prevailing view of both the U.S. Supreme Court and liberal theory in America is that liberal principles are neither essentially religious nor essentially secular, but somehow foundationally neutral, or in the words of the Court neutral between “religion and nonreligion.” This essay challenges the cogency of this view through a comparative examination of two strong defenders of religious freedom from the American revolutionary era: Thomas Jefferson and Isaac Backus. Jefferson, the Enlightenment rationalist, and Backus, the Calvinist-Baptist, may initially seem tailor-made for this foundational neutrality, but closer examination reveals that religious freedom for them was not only an extension of their radically opposed views on religion but also an instrument for the promotion of those views throughout society. The ambiguity of America's founding principles is best understood, not through the notion of neutrality, but as the product of a yet unsettled struggle between devout religion and secular Enlightenment.

Progressing toward Inclusion? Exploring the State of Religious Diversity

Although the social work profession has a proud tradition of celebrating diversity and inclusion, these topics remain contentious professional issues. Religious discrimination in social work has been an issue of controversy for at least a decade, as evidenced by an exchange between Amato-von Hemert (1994) and Clark (1994). In a manner analogous to gender and race in former eras, Amato-von Hemert argued that religious perspectives are largely omitted from professional discourse, fueling the adoption of prejudicial attitudes toward religious populations. In response, Clark stated that Amato-von Hemert had assumed--not proven--discrimination and called for research to ascertain the existence of discrimination in social work forums. Given Clark's (1994) call for research, this article explores perceptions of religious discrimination in social work educational programs. Social work education, in particular, plays a foundational socializing role. The educational milieu fosters the adoption of attitudes that tend to shape future social workers' thoughts and actions throughout their careers (Cnaan, Wineburg, & Boddie, 1999). Consequently, it is critical that research identify potentially discriminatory patterns in the educational process. LITERATURE REVIEW In examinations of discrimination, social work theory on oppression has emphasized the importance of exploring systemic power relationships between competing worldviews or value systems (Wambach & Van Soest, 1997). A difference in worldviews, in tandem with a power differential, tends to foster a milieu in which discrimination occurs. Values congruent with the majority worldview tend to be selected, framed positively, and normalized (Kuhn, 1970). Conversely, values consistent with minority worldviews tend to be overlooked, depicted negatively, or even pathologized, particularly in instances in which value conflicts occur. Amato-von Hemert (1994) suggested that a difference in worldviews exists between the religious worldviews affirmed by members of various faith traditions and the secular, Enlightenment-based worldviews that tend to inform discourse in the helping professions (Smith, 2003). In keeping with this understanding, studies have indicated that religious perspectives are largely ignored in some journals and textbooks in the fields of gerontology (Sherrill, Larson, & Greenwold, 1993), psychology (Lehr & Spilka, 1989; Weaver et al., 1998a),psychiatry (Weaver et al., 1998b), medicine (Potter, 1993), marriage and family therapy (Glenn, 1997; Kelly, 1992), and social work (Cnaan et al., 1999; Hodge, 2002). Similarly, social work practitioners and students have reported receiving little or no content on religion and spirituality during their graduate educations (Canda & Furman, 1999; Furman, Canda, & Benson, 2001 ; Murdock, 2004; Sheridan & Amato-von Hemert, 1999). Consequently, it seems reasonable to posit that adherents of various faith traditions might experience the lack of attention given to religious perspectives as discriminatory. As Amato-von Hemert (1994) suggested, just as women might experience social work programs that ignore female perspectives as discriminatory, religious believers might experience programs that ignore religious perspectives as discriminatory. Accordingly, I hypothesized that self-identified adherents of faith traditions would be more likely to report personally experiencing discrimination because of their religious beliefs than would secular respondents reporting no affiliation. The extant literature also suggests a second hypothesis. Commentators have noted that helping professionals disproportionately hold what have been referred to as nontheistic or liberal religious worldviews that are congruent with secular Enlightenment norms (Armstrong, 2000; Bergin & Jensen, 1990; Neumann, Thompson, & Woolley, 1992; Sahlein, 2002). Fewer than half of psychologists (Shafranske, 2001) and social work educators, practitioners, and students endorse the concept of a personal God, which is arguably the central precept of theism (Furman et al. …

" I believe in enmindment ": Enlightenments, Taoism, and Language in Peter Dale Scott's Minding the Darkness

'I believe in enmindment': Enlightenments, Taoism, and Language in Peter Dale Scott's Minding the Darkness Jason Boulet PhD Candidate, Department of English, Queen's University How can we attune // our self clouded intellects / to the mysteries of Tao[?]. (Minding the Darkness, 32) In Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott neatly summarizes his poetic agenda: 'In my poetry I take issue with the Enlightenment contempt for poetry and religion; I propose that, in the spirit of Dante or the Tao Te Ching, we should move instead toward a deeper Enmindment that respects the truths of darkness, as well as those of light' (22). The focus of Scott's critique is not 'human rationality itself' but 'that imperfect ideological crystalization [sic] of it which we call the Enlightenment': 'The defect here has not been that of rationality, but only of the historic ideologies put forth in reason's name' (Deep, 22). Scott's 'Enmindment' is not a thoroughgoing repudiation of 'light' and reason in favour of 'darkness' and mystery but, rather, 'the translation of light / into awareness of the dark' (Minding, 11), which necessarily has its origins in a critique of the clear certainties of the Enlightenment: 'to fault enlightenment / for its lack of kinship with the dark / is to think critically once again' (14). Scott's attempt to 'think critically' about enlightenment and thus negotiate 'the truths of darkness, as well as those of light,' is most clearly evident in the third volume of his Seculum trilogy, 1 aptly titled Minding the Darkness. In this volume, which he has called his 'most important book' ('Note to Visitors'), Scott attempts 'to reconcile the movements of secular (historical) enlightenment, and of spiritual (personal) enlightenment' ('Afterword,' 246) in the hope of reaching, or at least inspiring, Enmindment. I would like first to clarify the precise object of Scott's critique, which is considerably more complex than his distinction between 'secular' and 'spiritual enlightenment' suggests, [End Page 925] and then proceed to examine the ways in which Taoist thought 2 – to which he points in his praise of the Tao Te Ching – both informs his critique and leads him to seek the key to Enmindment in the use and abuse of language. Throughout Minding the Darkness, Scott uses the figure of his dead father – politician and poet F.R. Scott – as a representative of the secular Enlightenment ideology that he critiques. Scott paints his father as a 'rationalist reformer' ('Afterword,' 246) who, convinced that 'the orthodox was wrong' (Minding, 22), optimistically believed 'politics [were] the only road to heaven' (22) and thought 'that misery could be replaced // by imagination and large-scale planning' (22–23). F.R. Scott 'persistently opposed the blindness of religion to the enlightenment of modern politics' (Ware, 831), in the belief that the replacement of an irrational and sectarian adherence to traditional religious orthodoxies 3 by a secular humanist worldview would eventually lead to an utopian world-community. Scott generally depicts his father as a 'victim' to the familiar narrative of 'willed Enlightenment' (Minding, 116), 4 in which the dawning light of human reason disperses the mystery and darkness produced by old superstitions and dogmas, leading to the resolution of religion-based conflicts and, consequentially, a brighter tomorrow for Humanity at large: 'my father's heaven // was the future of man ... the human race was his race' (Listening, 98, 99). The radical promoters [End Page 926] of secular Enlightenment cast themselves as the proponents of progress and 'innovation' (Minding, 184), while casting the religious fundamentalists as agents of retrogression – in their own terms, 'conservation' (184). Scott, however, clearly contradicts this progressive narrative of 'willed Enlightenment' by repeatedly rendering its radical attempts to 'engineer // new projects for humane / and rational community' (12) equivalent to battles waged over conservative visions of religious purity. Scott accomplishes this by paralleling the legacies of repression and destruction inspired by the utopian visions and paradisal dreams of both secular...

America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism

AMERICA RIGHT OR WRONG An Anatomy of American Nationalism Anatol lieven New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xiv, 274pp, $45.00 cloth (ISBN 0-19-516840-2)Over past fifty years, writes Anatol lieven in preface to this important and controversial book, the United States has stumbled into one disastrously misconceived intervention after another, both large (Vietnam, Iraq) and small (Lebanon, Somalia). It is time that more Americans begin to ask themselves just what is wrong with their bloody system (x). The question of what is wrong with has of course been asked before, classically by such foreign observers as Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bryce, and at home by a long train of critics and dissenters, from Puritan divines to Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Senator J. William Fulbright, and their presentday successors. lieven-a British journalist now resident in Washington who has written on east European nationalism-finds what is wrong with American system to be its nationalism, or, more precisely, the demons of American radical (217).Part polemic, part political sociology, and part comparative history, Right or Wrong is product of a particular time and place: period of great fear, war fever, and intellectual paralysis in George W. Bush's Washington during two years or so immediately following destruction of World Trade Center in September 2001. In his attempt to explain malfunctioning of US system, lieven argues that ugly underside of American nationalism, with its social sources in embittered white middle class, cracker south and frontier-minded west, and in aggressive religiosity of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, came to fore in nation's capital in newly respectable form in that time of perceived national emergency. This radical nationalism intimidated and silenced all potential centres of political opposition and dangerously threatened secular Enlightenment ideals enshrined in founding documents of American republic. America keeps a splendid and welcoming house, lieven observes, but it also keeps a family of demons in its cellar (i).The sudden political ascendancy in Washington of this bush-league American nationalism, which is fundamentally different from mild, civic nationalism of almost universally admired American creed, lieven continues, brought out worst instincts of Washington's lingering Cold War-era policy elites to produce a vengeful, bullying foreign policy comparable to that of Kaiser's Germany of 1914. Inevitably, this American militarism resulted in estrangement of United States from international community. The problem was exacerbated, particularly in Islamic world, by an unholy alliance that developed between radical American nationalism, with its roots in evangelical religion, and radical Israeli nationalism, with its roots in Israeli fundamentalist religion-and its characteristic intransigence on question of Palestine.Read closely-and Right or Wrong is a book that demands and richly repays close reading-the book's thesis is itself both partly right and partly wrong. lieven's overall argument about nationalist tendencies of Bush-era Republicans, whom author refers to repeatedly as the American Nationalist Party, is, of course, unexceptionable. But his research into that party's current religio-political and regional base serves merely to confirm conventional wisdom among political observers. …