Secular Establishment Research Articles

Political Church, Procedural Europe, and the Creation of the Islamic Other

AbstractTaking the cue from the controversial speech of Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg in 2006, this paper explores the connection between the apparently divergent positions taken by the Catholic Church and the European secular establishment on the question of European identity and Islam. The argument is advanced that the proceduralism of the European secular establishment contributes to breed its nemesis, a conservative politicised church, but also converges with it in identifying Islam as 'the Other.' It is thus asked whether a critical valorisation of Europe's emotional attachments may not actually strengthen its capacity to embrace the 'difference' represented by Islam.

The Relief Scandal In Montreal's Italian Community and Its Political Background: Fascio, Consulate and the Roman Catholic Parish of the Church of the <i>Madonna della Difesa</i>, October 1932-July 1933

The following essay is divided into three inter-woven parts. The first deals with the ravage of the Great Depression in Canada; the second explores the Canadian clerical and secular establishment's view of fascism and its local Italian proponents; the last part unravels the cozy collaboration in Montreal among local Italian fascists, the Italian Consulate, the priests of the Italian Catholic Parish Madonna della Difesa and the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, which was in charge of assisting needy people across the city. In 1932, with the approval of the Parish priest, Zanobri Manfriani, the Society gave the task of dispensing relief to Catholic Italians of the Mile End district to the local Italian fascio Luporini and its leader Ottorino Incoronato. After a few months. Incoronato, to avoid being charged with fraud, left Canada in a hurry, for good.

Resurgent Islam: a sociological approach

* Acknowledgements * Introduction 1. Resurgent Islam in a Secular World 2. The Paradox of Secularization 3. Sacrifice and Salvation in 'Islamic Terrorism' 4. Islam and Globalization 5. Clash of Civilizations and Civilizing Processes 6. Secular Establishment and Islamic Outsiders 7. Resurgent Islam and Sociology * Glossary * Bibliography * Index

Iran and Turkey

Relations between Turkey and Iran have recently improved to their warmest in a generation, lifted by common concerns about internal ethnic unrest, a short-term convergence of regional interests, growing economic ties and – albeit for different reasons and to different degrees – a shared sense of growing international isolation. However, historical rivalries, differing long-term regional objectives, Turkey’s still powerful secular establishment and its reluctance completely to alienate the West are likely to ensure that cooperation between Tehran and Ankara remains restricted to a number of individual issues rather than developing into a full-blooded strategic alliance.

The Church and the Secular Establishment: A Philosophical Dialog between Joseph Ratzinger and Jurgen Habermas

The Church and the Secular Establishment:A Philosophical Dialog between Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas Virgil Nemoianu Abstract Virgil Nemoianu is William J. Byron Distinguished Professor of Literature and Ordinary Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He is the author or editor of over fifteen books and has published approximately six hundred scholarly articles, reviews, and presentations on four continents. He is a member of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. January 19, 2004: Professor Jürgen Habermas speaking with then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at the Bavarian Catholic Academy in Munich. Used by permission. © Katholische Akademie in Bayern 2004. [End Page 16] Dialogs between leading thinkers of the Roman Catholic Church and other philosophies, theologies, or bodies of opinion and power are not a novelty. In fact, it would be correct to say that they have been a characteristic of the Catholic tradition over centuries or millennia, and that they constitute a salient difference between Catholicism and most other confessions or religions. Intersections and combinations with Platonism and Aristotelianism date from the very beginnings of Christianity. The Catholic Church or some of its leading intellectuals have responded in nuanced and complex ways to philosophies such as rationalism (Descartes), the classical and romantic movements, phenomenology, and even extreme left- and right-wing ideologies. One small example of such a dialog was a very few years ago the exchange of public letters between Archbishop and Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini and the semiotic critic and philosopher Umberto Eco. Some of these dialogs have proved to be highly fruitful and enriching, while others turned out to be dead ends or even deleterious. We can leave history the privilege to make detailed judgments on each of these, but we can also agree, I think, that this incessant [End Page 17] process maintained the healthy liveliness of Catholic intellectual life. That is why the discussion between Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger (as the future Pontiff Benedict XVI was called at the time and as I shall call him throughout this presentation) stirred unusually high waves in European intellectual life. It is perhaps redundant, but I will nevertheless introduce the two figures by short summaries of their careers and views. Overview of the Work of Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas Joseph Ratzinger's academic career covered the period 1953–77. In 1977 he became archbishop of Munich and Freising, soon thereafter cardinal, and by 1981 he moved to Rome in the high position of Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which he held for twenty-four years, although he continued to write, publish, or give public lectures and scholarly papers, over and beyond the production of official doctrinal documents and statements. During his years of doctoral and post-doctoral studies (doctorate and "Habilitation" under the German university rules), between 1953 and 1959, he worked on Saints Augustine and Bonaventure. He taught at the universities of Bonn, Münster, Tübingen, and Regensburg, and he was also one of the cofounders of the extremely important quarterly theological journal Communio. This journal was the brainchild of Hans Urs von Balthasar, arguably the greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, and continues to appear in twelve languages and variants. It is somewhat difficult to assess accurately the number of publications by Ratzinger, since some of them tend to overlap and the versions in different languages are not always identical. Nevertheless, we can speak about approximately twenty-five books. It is clear that Ratzinger's thinking derives from that of Hans Urs von Balthasar: a mode of thought that is extremely difficult to assign to either ecclesiastical "conservatives" or "liberals," a thinking that goes back to the Patristic sources of Christianity, beyond its medieval [End Page 18] structures and somewhat distanced from the pre-Vatican II neo-Thomism (though not necessarily hostile to it), and a mode of thought that admits the importance of the Beautiful at the level of the True and of the Good. However, unlike Balthasar, and even his close counterpart the Jesuit priest (and eventually cardinal) Henri de Lubac, Ratzinger was more decisively steeped...

The Historical and Discoursive Roots of the Justice and Development Party’s EU Stance

A structural transformation has occurred in the attitude of political Islam in Turkey regarding EU affairs since the 1970s. This essay will show the main steps in this transformation, through an examination of the political discourses and actions of those parties with strong Islamic references. The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP), in taking a pro‐European stand and in utilizing the accession process for the benefit of the party’s program and its execution, represents an important step in this transformation. In fact, the party leaders consistently claim today that their party is not Islamist. Since coming to power, the party leadership has tried to establish a bridge between its past political profile and its current EU accession‐based program and actions, amid questions concerning the party’s sincerity, which frequently arise among the secular establishment and opposition. This essay tries to show the problems and prospects that the EU accession process imposes on this party.

Cultural politics and vocational religious education: the case of Turkey

The ‘project of modernity’ that has transformed every aspect of Turkish society since the founding of the new republic in 1923 has been increasingly questioned and scrutinized in recent decades. Meanwhile, Islam has reasserted itself to become a real force in contemporary Turkish politics with ambiguous implications for long‐term social integration and political stability. Controversies surrounding religious education in general, and the Imam‐Hatip (prayer‐leader/preacher) schools in particular, exemplify the ‘cultural politics’ that has been going on between the secularists and the Islamists in Turkey. This article examines whether the Imam‐Hatip schools in the long run can play a positive role in the promotion of a broader educated Muslim base enabling the secular and the Islamic domains to cohabit successfully, or a negative role in which the schools are viewed as producing a new generation of Islamists resisting the secular establishment, thereby deepening the secularist‐Islamist divide.

The Secular Establishment - Frank GuliuzzaIII: Over the Wall: Protecting Religious Expression in the Public Square. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 219. $20.95.)

The Secular Establishment - Frank GuliuzzaIII: Over the Wall: Protecting Religious Expression in the Public Square. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 219. $20.95.)

Turkey's nationalist moment

In making two strongly nationalist parties the top vote-getters in this weekend's elections, Turks showed the assertiveness of a nation that feels itself emerging as a regional power and the defensiveness of one still embittered by Western Europe's rejection. The secular establishment can take only slight solace in the decline of the Islamist vote, as the overall voting pattern shows increasing fragmentation; mainstream secular parties garnered little more than half the overall vote. Overall, the result guarantees another era of three-party, and probably unwieldy, government.

Seventeenth-Century church paintings of Gottfried Hendtzschel: technical examination and church records

Technical research is rather scarce on the painting techniques of artists of the early Norwegian Reformation. Comparison of the technique of domestic church paintings in Norway of the period is therefore limited. For over 30 years, the artist Gottfried Hendtzschel decorated representative interior pieces in the diocese of Stavanger. Three pulpit panels, previously attributed to him, have been examined and their materials and techniques are presented. Church records have been examined to demonstrate his work and operating conditions. The study indicates a skilful artist working in a commission system arranged by the secular establishment in collaboration with the church.

Agrestius of Lugo, Eparchius Avitus, and a Curious Fifth-Century Statement of Faith

This study attempts to put into its correct historical context the single surviving page of a tract entitled De fide . The work was written by a certain "Agrestius" and dedicated to a certain "Avitus." In this study, Agrestius is identified as the bishop Agrestius of Lugo (in the Spanish province of Galicia) who attended the Gallic Council of Orange in the year 441. Avitus is identified as Eparchius Avitus, known to have been praetorian prefect of Gaul in 439, then emperor in 455-56. It is suggested that Agrestius of Lugo sought assistance in Gaul because of factional quarreling in Galicia. Because this quarreling involved accusations of heresy (Priscillianism), Agrestius had to attest to his orthodoxy when he visited Gaul—the De fide was part of this process. But the quarreling also resulted from questions of authority in Galicia—it seems that bishops such as Syagrius and Pastor, two of Agrestius' rivals, were being ordained in out-of-the-way places by various factions. Some of these quarrels also seem to have been the result of questions of jurisdiction involving the continued use in Spain of the old conventus , or judicial district. In Gaul, the episcopal establishment welcomed Agrestius' visit because it allowed Hilary of Aries and his partisans to have the appearance of extending their authority into Spain. The secular establishment, meanwhile, represented by Avitus, was happy to cooperate by placing its imprimatur upon Agrestius' orthodoxy. Eventually, however, the bishop of Rome, Leo, undertook to extend his authority into both Gaul and Spain. In 445, Leo issued rulings contrary to Hilary in Gaul, and in 447 he seems to have sided with Agrestius' rivals in Spain. The opportunity for a measure of unity among the western European churches represented by Agrestius' initiative in Gaul, therefore, eventually came to nought.

Twentieth-Century Capitalism and Socialism: the Present State of the Anglo-American Debate

LIBERALISM, wrote Herzen in a famous sentence, is not the doctor, it is the disease. Within our own generation that doubt has entered the liberal citadel itself and both of its major champions, the American liberal and the British socialist, have been driven into a re-examination of their major assumptions of thought. On the American side, the resurgence of Conservatism as a respectable philosophy, on the British side a growing dissatisfaction with the less attractive aspects of a welfare-society founded upon administrative Fabianism both of them reinforced by a deep suspicion (as Orwell's popularity is symptomatic) that classical Liberalism by-passed too easily the moral issues of power and authority has given rise to a search for new doctrinal outlines. There is a new emphasis upon the theme of social order and consensus, in itself a natural outcome of war: in that sense, the spirit of the age is to be compared with that of Augustan England, which was prepared to pay any price to prevent the repetition of the religious wars of the previous century. In England, the emphasis has become an intellectual preoccupation with the secular Establishment as a whole; in the United States it has become an effort to confer intellectual validity upon the dominant institutions the churches, the business corporation, the entertainment industries of the society, and an effort, beyond that, of the American intellectual to forego the tradition of his willing isolationism classically embodied in The Education of Henry Adams. If, indeed, America refused to listen to Adams in the Gilded Age, it listens almost religiously to his successors, so that the social scientist enjoys a contemporary prestige that almost amounts to a Chinese bureaucratization of his function. The outcome of all this is an Anglo-American literature of social and political science that throws interesting light upon the condition of the Western intelligentsia at mid-century. The literature, of course, must be seen within the framework of the social revolution of the times. Both Conservative and Republican have maintained intact the essential changes, respectively, of the Labour and the New Deal regimes, so that in the American case the radical sentiment has had to go to the edges of the American society the Puerto Rican problem, the issue of the American Mexican, the Negro case to satisfy its drive, while in the English case a book like Professor Cole's Post-war Condition of Britain catalogues a welfare state so extensive that it has to be compared with the same author's 'Condition of Britain of 1937 for the full scope of the