Secular Modernity Research Articles

Brief, Undeniable: Lyric Address in Mark Strand

Abstract: This essay balances universalist and historicist approaches to reading lyric through an analysis of the poetry of Mark Strand. The ordering consciousness behind a given poet’s body of work offers an avenue to understanding Strand’s work and lyric more generally. Textual rather than biographical, this “lyric self” manifests the twin functions of the lyric poem, to challenge death and to reach out to the reader. Developments in late modernity have occasioned a turn from a self-enclosed mimetic model of lyric to a rhetorical one conscious of audience. Strand’s awareness of this change and his position relative to it assigns him a paradoxical vision of lyric, one that inscribes a self and communicates with the reader but simultaneously questions the potential and value of doing so. A close reading of Strand’s work reveals how his poems balance motivations fundamental to lyric form against the philosophical commitments of secular modernity.

Church Narratives and Secular Ideology Should the Orthodox Christians “catch up” with the Second Vatican

The article includes critical comments on some of the provisions of theological liberal Orthodoxy. The author’s viewpoint is based on the criticism of the ideas of Church secularization (New Reformation) in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council. The author considers the attempts to put church sermon under the secular agenda to be destructive, while such agenda has privileged, hegemonic status in modern culture; the author considers it erroneous to call to the Orthodox believers to follow the Catholic way of modernization. In the article the author rejects both the open modernistic concept of catching up development in its religious implementation, and the tendencies of retro-modernism related to the “new theology”, – in particular, to the “theology of origins” and the “theology of coming back”. The author characterized Rome Catholic Church modernization as deviation from the Catholic mission and de-catechization, and considers it necessary to restore the proper semantics of the “modernistic crisis” concept. He also states that in general the format of church “modernistic crisis” discussion is now obsolete, and now the issue of secularism and secular modernism crisis is more relevant, - exactly this crisis will constitute the priority subject of analysis I the nearest future.

Global Revival of Legendism

In the context of modern secularization, Legendism can be defined as a cultural form adjacent to traditional religion, taking supernatural narratives seriously but not devoting faith or authority to them. Design teams in South Korea have been creating massively multiplayer online games inspired significantly by the folk religion of their country, but well-integrated into the cultural diversity of their worldwide audience. Extensive description of the first case provides a conceptual grounding for the others, based on both qualitative ethnography and quantitative collection of statistics. With that introduction, the diversity of games is demonstrated through brief consideration of five others. Deeper explorations of two currently very popular theocratic virtual worlds affirm the continuing significance of Korean integration into legendary global culture. Primary themes include the relationship between magic and religion, the personal characteristics attributed to avatars and deities, and the cultural dynamics of globalization.

Cognitive Sociological Portrait of Secular Modernity: The Study of Perceptual Experience in Delayed Modernity

16. yüzyılda başlayan reform oluşumları, bir asır sonra Aydınlanma sürecini getirirken, rasyonelleşmeyi ve sekülerleşmeyi birbirine bağladı. Reformasyon sürecinde öne çıkmaya başlayan katı bilimsel görüşler, 16. yüzyılda Galileo Galilei ile ve bir asır sonra da Newton ile rüştünü ispatlayınca, benzer dalga sosyal alanda da vuku buldu. O zamana kadar egemen olan gelenek, yani kilise, despotik otorite ve kültürel yapı, bilimsel, felsefi görüşlerle sorgulanmaya girişildi. Çok boyutlu bir dönüşümü işaret eden Aydınlanma süreci, oldukça karmaşık ve açıklama açısından, bir o kadar da tartışmalı bir dönemdir. Makalede, Batı medeniyetinde ortaya çıkan Aydınlanma, rasyonelleşme ve sekülerleşme süreçlerinin, ülkemizde yapılagelen kavramsallaştırmalarında, gecikmiş modernitenin özgünlüğünün dikkate alınmamasından kaynaklanan yöntem yanlışlarının olduğu savunuldu. Bu amaçla, modern çağın bilişsel kabiliyetlerini inşa eden bu sürecin, bilişsel sosyolojik açıdan ele alınması gerektiği ileri sürüldü. Düşünsel ve sosyo-kültürel yapıyı kısıtlayan katı dini yapının kırılarak, deneysel düşüncenin pratik olarak hayata geçirilme süreci olan seküler modernite, algısal deneyim çalışması biçiminde inşa edildi. Aydınlanma sürecinin kasıtlı rasyonellikle ortaya çıkardığı seküler modernitenin, dil ve dini, dönüşlü etkileşime tabi kılarak, aklın evrensel algısını ve gerçekliğin yerel standartlarını nasıl artırdığı incelendi. Bu bağlamda, seküler dil ile dinin yapının etkileşimli süreci ortaya çıkarılarak, sekülerleşmenin algısal deneyime dayalı olduğu savı bilişsel olarak yapılandırıldı.

Global Politics of Knowledge Production: The Challenges of Islamization of Knowledge in The Light of Tradition Vs Secular Modernity Debate

This paper argues that the main objective of the ‘Islamization of knowledge’ project is to assert Muslim ownership over their institutions by developing an alternative system of learning/knowledge production that serves as a foundation for re-inventing/renewing the Islamic traditions to cope with the multitude of challenges that Muslims face today. These challenges stem from a number of intertwining factors that influence this process, including the modern advances that accompanied the colonial and post-colonial developments that shaped and reshaped the intellectual culture and institutions of Muslim and non-Muslim societies precisely by allowing Western methodological approaches to set the agenda and the objectives of the schools. Accordingly, proponents of the Islamization of knowledge such as Naquib al-Atas, Ismail al-Faruqi, Taha Jaber al-Alwani, and others have developed their own different approaches to the production of knowledge and in so doing have generated a philosophical discourse that offers a critique of modern/Western knowledge and its epistemological and methodological assumptions. What, therefore, has been the outcome of the Islamization of knowledge project in terms of producing, for instance, Islamic social sciences, broadly defined, in the areas of, say, economics, sociology, political science, and so on? How have normative teachings of Islam, its ethical concerns, and Muslim efforts to come to terms with modernity (an ideology that carries the values and ideas of triumphant capitalism and secularism) been incorporated into these disciplines to counter or respond to Western hegemony and Eurocentric and orientalist order of knowledge? Finally, have Muslims succeeded in bringing together scholars of the text (fuqaha) and scholars of the context (experts in different fields of knowledge from social sciences to sciences) to deal with pressing modern problems that require new interpretations? This paper will attempt to answer some of these questions.

Picturing National History: Turkey’s Popular Nationalism on the Rise Through the 1950s New Print Culture

Abstract This article interrogates the role of print culture and visual communication design in the permeation of Turkish national consciousness into everyday practices. It seeks to understand the phenomenon of “banal nationalism,” argued by Michael Billig, in a broader context of cultural production advocated by Tim Edensor. It does this by looking into Turkey’s first liberalization period in the 1950s where a boosting print industry, a standard print language, and high literacy contributed to the daily reproduction of a collective historical past through representations. This period is analyzed through publications like Sunday comic strips, advertorial giveaways, and illustrated history journals that emulate popular American formats in the commodification of history. These are treated as material tools to present and disseminate an imaginary reconciliation of secular modernism with imperial history in a new print culture. This analysis reveals how representations in the foreground of everyday cultural artifacts are used to produce and reproduce difference that designates a distinct national consciousness detached from the realm of state. It also sheds light on the prevalence of identity negotiation and the commoditization of culture in the professionalization of visual communication disciplines in non-Western design paradigms.

A Catholic Contribution to Modern Secular Culture: Henri Bremond, Jacques Le Brun, and the Idea of Pure Love

A Catholic Contribution to Modern Secular Culture: Henri Bremond, Jacques Le Brun, and the Idea of Pure Love

Theological Genealogies of Modernity: An Introduction

Theological Genealogies of Modernity: An Introduction

An Example of a Modern Secular Spiritual and Moral Guideline for the Physician: Shaping the Biography of a New Type of "Saint"

In the modern educational process, additional lectures are increasingly being introduced into the mandatory postgraduate education programme, aimed at developing the personal qualities of a physician, increasing the motivation of students towards the profession, and increasing the attractiveness of the image of a medical professional and a scientist. To that end, certain moral and ethical reference points are selected from the biographies of physicians of the "past", which are elevated to an ideal and repeated in every biographical article without proper professional evaluation. The mythologisation of the image of the physician in the professional community and in the mass consciousness is thus the subject of a separate study. In this article, the author examines the biography of Friedrich Joseph Haass, a nineteenth-century Moscow physician beatified by the Roman Catholic Church, in the context of the emergence of the biography of a new type of "saint" and examples of new secular spiritual and moral reference points, different from the traditionally established Church attributes of holiness, and in the absence of a close connection to the religious institution of the Church.

Institutio Sui Generis: Searching for a Global Catholic University during the 1970s

This study provides a critical look at the Catholic search for a global university of the future during the 1970s. It focuses on proposals and arguments from the Canadian theologian and sociologist Hervé Carrier SJ (1921–2014), who was rector of the Pontificia Università Gregoriana between 1966 and 1978. To understand his idea of the university, three aspects are key: firstly, French and German sociologists’ postwar dialogue on modern secularization; secondly, Karl Jaspers’ (1883–1969) concept of the unconditional search for truth; and thirdly, the lifelong education paradigm as a tool for regaining a supposed authenticity of the individual, conceived as a prerequisite for society and politics. Analyzing these keys brings out a critical evaluation of the limits associated with the subjectivity consciousness development at Catholic higher education institutions.

Disempowering Women and Constructing Muslims as ‘Other’: A Study of India’s Anti-Conversion Legislations

As a constitutional democracy, India remains committed to the cherished values of individual liberty and freedom of conscience which form the core of the fundamental rights enshrined in our constitution. However, in the last few years, we have witnessed a marked departure and foundational shift in the pursuit of these values. What we see in terms of the curtailment of women’s freedom, dictating personal relationship choices and maligning Muslims as a danger to Hindu women’s honour, delivers a severe blow to our pluralistic ethos and the cherished values of coexistence. The recently enacted legislations dressed up as anti-conversion laws to criminalise love choices bear a clear reflection of Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws in many ways. Against the background of the state making intrusions into private spaces, denying the right to choose partners and acting as an oppressive surveillance agency, this study argues that these laws subvert the vision of our constitutional democracy and defy various judicial orders. It examines the literature on Hindu rights for women, analyses the contents of the legislation considering the contemporary discourse, to argue that these laws amount to undoing our achievements as a secular modern nation in the last seven decades.

Normativity and the Critical Functions of Genealogy: The Case of Modern Science1

AbstractThe first part of this article offers some general remarks about genealogical approaches to history, focusing on historical narratives that stress the role played by theological considerations in the formation of aspects of secular modernity. A central question is whether such genealogies can serve to critique the present without drawing upon contestable moral or religious commitments. I suggest that genealogies fulfil this function when they identify inconsistencies in putatively neutral or secular stances by revealing how their coherence ultimately relies upon unacknowledged theological foundations. Key figures in this initial discussion include Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Milbank, and Brad Gregory. The second part of this article sets out a theological genealogy of modern science, offering it as a test case for some of the analytical considerations outlined in the first part. These latter sections are a summary of my own previous arguments about the theological foundations of modern science, considered under the description of theological genealogy. Here I discuss the religious legitimation of modern science, the origins of the idea of laws of nature, and the role played by theological anthropology in the development of experimental methods of inquiry.

The Power of Scripture: Political Biblicism in the Early Stuart Monarchy between Representation and Subversion, by Andreas Pečar, tr. Jozef van der Voort and Jennifer Walcoff Neuheiser

This slender volume, which studies the political deployment of Scripture from the end of Elizabeth’s reign to the outbreak of the English Civil War, both among divine-right royalists and godly Parliamentarians, translates portions of a German monograph published in 2011, too early to have benefited from the recent flowering of scholarship on the early modern political Bible. If the book feels slightly dated, it also reminds one that little more than a decade ago, scholarship on the causes of the English Civil War stressed political as opposed to religious factors (or, less often, religious as opposed to political ones). The political reading, which views the conflict as birthing secular modernity, goes back, Andreas Pečar observes, to the 1690s, when editors of Edmund Ludlow’s defence of the regicide turned the nonconformist MP into a Radical Whig by omitting to print the manuscript’s extensive reflections on divine providence, Antichrist, and the Whore of Babylon (pp. 5–6). Conversely, the religious reading—or at least the revisionist strain that Pečar discusses—sees theological conflicts ripping apart a political consensus.

‘Signs of the times’: Prophecy belief in contemporary Greek Orthodox contexts

This article examines the structure, content, and function of widely circulating prophetic narratives in contemporary Greece and Cyprus. Prophetologists play a key role in recycling and disseminating prophecies through traditional and modern means of communication in an attempt to explain conditions of crisis and to promote conservative moral values and nationalistic aspirations as salvific remedies in the public sphere. Their highly politicized prophetic discourse blurs the differentiation between religion and politics that characterizes secular modernity. But at the same time, the use of modern media and secular strategies for sacred purposes have unintended secularizing effects on the religious field. Finally, the article explores the reasons why prophecy belief finds fertile soil for proliferation in these countries.

Premises and Problems: Essays on World Literature and Cinema

Premises and Problems: Essays on World Literature and Cinema

Religious Responses to Covid-19 in England: An Analysis of the Key Socio-Legal Themes

Religious responses to Covid-19 raised several far-reaching questions with a number of socio-legal implications. How does the historical tension between science, politics and religion manifest itself in global pandemics? What ethical and human rights issues are at play as a health crisis unfolds, and what is the role of the media in mitigating such issues? Finally, how significant is the pastoral role which is thrust upon religious leaders in times of crisis, and how should this role be understood in the materialistic and secular modern era? This article addresses such questions within the specific context of England. It builds upon previous research by the author on the responses of the British Muslim community to the Covid-19 pandemic, by expanding the analysis to explore the broader socio-legal themes that emerged within religious responses to Covid-19 in England.

A Theological Case for Ukraine’s European Integration: Deconstructing the Myth of “Holy Russia” vs. “Decadent Europe”

Since 24th February 2022, Russia’s so-called “special military operation” has evolved into a campaign of mass extermination and demoralisation of the Ukrainian civilian population. Despite the barbarism of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, several prominent Christian leaders have sought to justify the barbaric invasion by appealing to notions such as “Christian values” and “Christian civilisation.” According to this narrative, Putin’s Russia represents “traditional Christianity”, which is in opposition to the decadent forces of secular modernity, represented by the nations of Europe and North America. This exclusive narrative depicts Europe as a hostile Other, representing liberalism, superficiality and depravity, that is set against the supposedly profound “Russian values” of family, tradition and respect for authority. This perspective also presupposes that “innocent sinless Russia” is engaged in an apocalyptic struggle against the “sinful immoral West” on behalf of Christianity. This dubious claim is repeated by Russian politicians and church leaders and amplified by Russian propaganda networks. Ominously, the baseless notion of “special Slavic spirituality” is prevalent not only among Orthodox Christians, but also among some post-Soviet protestants. The aim of this article is to deconstruct this myth in both a positive and negative sense.

Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of Theosophy: Spiritual Underpinnings of the Science of Deduction

Sherlock Holmes is often oversimplified as a secular modern professional, with a remorselessly scientific outlook. This hypothesis overlooks late-nineteenth-century English society’s pursuit of new social possibilities for spiritualism, following challenges from Darwinist biological determinism to orthodox biblical mythology and morality. If we see Holmes in a default empirical scientism affiliated to imperial ideologies, we will remain blind to the effects of multiple countercultural and spiritual tones that also underpin the “science of deduction.” Holmes’ methods were subliminally informed by theosophy, as Doyle gleaned much of his spiritual knowledge from first- or second-hand readings on Blavatsky. Thus, Vedantic and Buddhist philosophy find inadvertent—but not coincidental—traces in Holmes through theosophy. An intellectual offspring of the trinity of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, Holmes was also a child of Blavatsky’s occult philosophy. Adopting a decolonial praxis, this paper argues that comparisons between the materialistic principles of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, on the one hand, and Holmes on the other, are as useful as comparing the detective’s work to Blavatsky’s theosophy.

Working Title

Working Title

Ambivalences of Modernity in Contemporary Turkish Sufism: Cemalnur Sargut’s Affective Qur’an Community

Abstract This article engages the thought, career, and public activities of the prominent contemporary female Sufi master in Turkey, Cemalnur Sargut of the Rifaʿi order, to explore the negotiation and transformation of Sufi authority in the Turkish public sphere, permeated by the shadows of modern secular power. By examining the multiple platforms through which Cemalnur disseminates her teachings and the hermeneutic that guides her engagement with the Turkish Sufi tradition, this article offers ethnographic and theoretical insights into the encounter between the tradition of Sufism, female religious authority, and the reach and limits of modern secularity. I argue that through creative strategies of engaging the institutional and technological possibilities of the post-secular present (both in Turkey and globally), Cemalnur and her community have enabled an altogether distinct understanding of the modern—one that is not readily available for liberal secular conceptualization.