Secular Narratives Research Articles

The Challenge of Christianity for Gay and Lesbian Criticism—And Vice Versa

The current turn to religion in literary criticism is a return--a repetition, but one with critical differences. Arguably two of the most important differences are, first, that literary critics today are generally less knowledgeable about even the most influential religious traditions (including Christianity) than our forebears in the profession were. Second, in light of contemporary literary criticisms well-established concern for marginalized voices and perspectives, there seems to be a growing recognition (though sometimes uneasy) that religious voices and perspectives are often among those marginalized. More pointedly, as Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe argues, religious voices tend to be marginalized especially by scholars. In the case of Christianity, there is a special relationship between these two aspects of the recent return to religion in literary criticism. As scholars such as Luke Timothy Johnson contend, the widespread lack of sophisticated understandings of Christianity ironically owes in part to the ways in which Christianity is not a peripheral but rather a central, dominant worldview in U.S. culture. Witness contemporary literary critics' increasing discoveries of Christian formal and thematic influences in Anglo-American literature as if for the first time, when in fact those influences have been there all along. Indeed, literary criticism's current return to religion should not be taken to suggest a corresponding return to religious themes and interests in contemporary literature, for instance; on the contrary, such themes and interests are not new to contemporary literature because, broadly speaking, they never left it. This means, among other things, that sophisticated consideration of the relationships among cultural centers and peripheries holds special promise as a heuristic for exploring Christianity not only in literature but also in literary criticism itself. Christian voices may be found at peripheries as well as centers--sometimes both at once, and not always in immediately obvious forms. These complexities help belie the oversimplified secularization narrative that would neatly dichotomize scientific rationality and Christian faith, chronicling the rise of the former and the fall of the latter. In this vein, Charles Taylor's A Secular Age offers one of the more potent recent critiques of such secularization narratives. In Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction: Sexual Mystery and Post-Secular Narrative, I argue against the pervasive use of such secularization narratives in gay and lesbian criticism. While gay and lesbian criticism has produced insightful accounts of the complex relationships between centers and peripheries that are enacted in marginalized sexual subjectivities, it has tended in general to reproduce simplistic accounts of the historical and contemporary roles played by Christianity in these subjectivities. For example, critics have not yet adequately explained the fact that gay and lesbian literature, in many of its most characteristic narrative conventions, draws on and indeed parallels Christian narrative conventions--and not simply to subvert them. On the contrary, Christian discourses and gay and lesbian ones actually share certain common foundational commitments that are implicit in their representational conventions, even when these two groups of discourses are apparently furthest apart from each other. Specifically, these conventions or topoi comprise three types of narrative representations, which are interrelated and which often overlap: identification as incorporating intractable mystery through a dynamic rather than static interplay of difference as well as similarity; personal ethical transformation emblematized in coming-out stories and conversion stories; and the formation of communities defined by nonbiological kinship bonds that are more created than found but are nonetheless foundational. Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction delineates a theoretical paradigm by which gay and lesbian criticism (and sexuality studies more broadly) may take faith perspectives more seriously on their own terms, which allows for a more sophisticated and useful conceptualization of the roles played by Christianity in marginalized sexual subjectivities. …

Retelling Modern European Religious History: Postwar Immigration and the Alternative Narrative of Presence

AbstractThe rise of the secularization thesis in the 1960s resulted in secularization becoming the dominant narrative theme in most scholarly accounts of modern European religious history. In the past few decades, sociologists and historians have increasingly challenged the secularization thesis, but less energy has been devoted to devising an alternative to the secularization narrative. Philip Jenkins's Future of Christianity trilogy offers historians something new in this regard, though it also contains plenty of the old. While the first two books largely reiterate the traditional secularization narrative by focusing on the absence of old-stock Europeans from churches, the third book focuses more on the growing presence of vibrant Muslim and Christian immigrant communities in postwar Europe, a presence that has stimulated significant political and cultural debates concerning the place of religion in Europe's past, present, and future.

Goethe und die Bibel (review)

Johannes Anderegg and Edith Anna Kunz, eds. Goethe und Bibel. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2005. 344 pp. The editors preface this volume of fifteen essays by Swiss, German, and North American scholars with the claim that, while the topic could seem old-fashioned, rightfully understood it contains erhebliche Sprengkraft (9). Given the tremendous shifts and metamorphoses that the Bible went through in its status as text in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, an explosive volcanic or tectonic metaphor seems not out of place. If the Bible serves as a Substrat (15) of Goethe's work - or, one might add, of European literature in general - what happens to the whole cultural edifice when hermeneutic assumptions abruptly change, when divine scripture emerges as an historically contingent, composite text? The conventional answer is that biblical meaning becomes secularized and absorbed into the Enlightenment project. But Anderegg and Kuhn argue - very much in Ime with recent historiography of religion - that the term does not do justice to the complex status that the Bible not only retains but also attains in Goethe's work (14-15). At the same time, the editors assert, the book is not concerned with Goethe's Religiositat (12). To be clear: the agenda here is not religious apology. So how do these contributors articulate Goethe's relationship to the Bible in such a way that it falls neither into a one-way narrative of secularization nor into a speculative affirmation of belief? As a matter of fact, not all contributors do eschew these more conventional approaches. Thomas Tillmann advances a paradigmatic secularization thesis concerning Goethe's representation of speaking in tongues in his essay Zwo wichtige bisher unerorterte biblische Fragen. He comes to the conclusion, [Das Lallen lost] sich aus semer Bindung an Sphare des Religiosen und wird als asthetisch-individueller Selbstzweck der Sakularisation verfugbar (33). Meanwhile Hans-Jurgen Schrader identifies in both Werther and the conclusion oi Faust a theological message colored by radical Pietism: die Verkundigung der Allliebe Gottes, der endlichen Wiederbringung auch des Getrubten. . (88). But while not all the contributors share the editors' interpretive framework, lively paradoxes and tensions in Goethe's relationship with the Bible emerge here in great variety. A few examples will have to suffice. Anne Bohnenkamp, in her analysis of Goethe's lifelong preoccupation with the Song of Songs, shows how he wrests the poetry from the allegorizing, redemptive-historical framework of Christian hermeneutics and brings it closer to the less dualistic outlook of ancient Judaism (and twentieth-century Jewish philosophy). …

Motif-index of German secular narratives from the beginning to 1400

Motif-index of German secular narratives from the beginning to 1400

Miracles in Enlightenment England (review)

Reviewed by: Miracles in Enlightenment England Alexandra Walsham Miracles in Enlightenment England. By Jane Shaw. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 244. $45.00.) The tendency to regard the eighteenth century as a critical period in the eventual triumph of scientific rationalism over "superstition" has lingered long in English historiography. Jane Shaw's lucid and elegantly constructed book contributes to a growing body of research which is questioning settled assumptions about the intellectual contours of the "age of reason" and complicating our understanding of the nature of "Enlightenment culture." Exploring the speculation, debate, and critical investigation prompted by events that seemed miraculous to their observers, it offers a new perspective on claims that the period marked a decisive juncture in the narrative of progress and secularization that, until very recently, dominated historiographical assessments of it. Shaw identifies and traces three strands of thought about miracles: the Protestant doctrine that they had ceased after apostolic times; the renewed claims about supernatural healing and intercession made by the members of independent churches and sects from the mid-seventeenth century; and the attempt by Anglicans and natural philosophers to negotiate a middle way between the extremes of "atheistical" skepticism and nonconformist "enthusiasm." Her book demonstrates the extent to which the idea that the deity might intervene supernaturally in human affairs retained its vitality in the long eighteenth century, and indeed intensified in the century or so following 1650. As well as providing an overview of the theological and philosophical arguments that swirled about miracles, her chapters introduce us to a series of celebrated figures and episodes:from the thaumaturgic claims of the Baptists and Quakers and the Irish "stroker" Valentine Greatrakes, to the royal practice of touching for the king's evil, the prodigious abstinence of fasting girls, and the "perfectly Protestant miracles" of pious women cured while reading the Bible. Rejecting paradigms that presuppose a split between the elite and the common people, Shaw emphasizes instead the interaction between different social groups, and between theology and "lived religion." Highlighting the [End Page 385] extent to which interest in miracles became implicated in the burgeoning public sphere, she seeks to draw attention to the extent to which ordinary men and women participated in creating and shaping the Enlightenment, and how practical experiences of the miraculous fed into the heated abstract discussions that took place within the circles of the learned. Two further key lessons emerge from this monograph: the manner in which the techniques of experimentation at the heart of the new natural philosophy were harnessed to test and authenticate as much as to discredit supernatural phenomena, and the attractive suggestion that it may be helpful to think (with the sociologist David Martin) less of a steady advance toward a more "secular" society than of "successive Christianizations followed or accompanied by recoils." The broad thrust of Shaw's argument is enormously persuasive, but there are areas where the analysis might have been strengthened and deepened. Even while emphasizing the complexity and diversity of early Protestant thinking on this topic, her opening chapter may oversimplify the source of this ambivalence in presenting it as essentially a measure of the gap between clerical and lay theology. The polemical slogan that miracles had ceased must be assessed alongside works of systematic divinity that continued to carve out a place for miracles within a Reformed universe.To this extent, the implied contrast between the sixteenth and later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may be a touch overstated. So too the claim that several of the particular episodes on which Shaw focuses her attention constituted key "turning points." To say that the activities of Valentine Greatrakes "sparked an epistemological shift" may be to attribute too much agency to them. It may also overlook the degree to which miracles had always been implicated in "the domain of the natural philosophy," from Augustine and Aquinas onwards (pp. 73, 74): To suggest that they had hitherto been confined largely to the realm of the doctrinal is to posit too dramatic a change in the register of the age-old debate about the ontological status of the supernatural. What altered was rather the criteria and method of determining whether an event...

<i>Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature Anne C. Rose Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. By Tracy Fessenden. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. x + 337 pp. $35.00. The stated purpose of Culture and Redemption is to make religion a standard category of analysis in the study of American literature, but the book defines religion so narrowly that it leaves an impression of the author’s suspicion of religious activity and her inclination to speak quickly and be done with it. Tracy Fessenden argues that although literary scholars gladly embrace a “secularization narrative” that reduces religion to a historical artifact, pious instincts persist today in covert as well as overt forms (3). Alongside evangelical celebrations of Christianity as the American national faith, one finds a “hegemonic Christian secularism,” or what used to be called a civil religion consisting of public commitment to the country’s democratic mission (214). Escape from Puritanism’s intolerance, in other words, has been illusory. This is not a new thesis. Perry Miller spent his career documenting the capacity for self-transformation of the Reformed tradition, as did Max Weber before him, and although neither man explicitly named romantic nationalism or capitalist entrepreneurship a religion, they did not naïvely think of secularism as a simple mood of detachment but rather as a mind-set friendly to potent ideologies descended from faith. What distinguishes Fessenden from them is how dark her vision is. The American Protestant legacy uniformly oppresses, and she offers scholarly cultural criticism as the instrument to unmask popular errors. Her initial pessimism grows, however, from a questionably selective reading of American religious history. Fessenden’s bird’s-eye view of denominational and sectarian disagreements all but erases religious self-reflection and dialogue. After admirably [End Page 376] criticizing the current American habit of instantly equating all “religion” with conservative Christianity, she turns around to lump together Protestants over four centuries by virtue of their shared anti-Catholicism. Her chapter title, “From Disestablishment to ‘Consensus,’” for example, means that the First Amendment to the Constitution inspired an ecumenical Protestant campaign to make public schools places of indoctrination in commonly held views. The degree of truth to this argument should be appreciated along with its presentist orientation: doctrinal differences among Protestants that have seemed increasingly unimportant since World War II were once worth fighting for, and they produced widely diverging political stances. Baptists and Quakers championed religious disestablishment in the early republic, while Congregationalists deplored it. Unitarians joined Catholics, Jews, and Deists after the Civil War to block a constitutional “Christian” amendment, in opposition the initiative’s Methodist and Presbyterian supporters. Elemental as anti-Catholicism was in Protestant America, the behavior of Protestants has not been wholly predetermined by prejudice, and yet Fessenden’s decision to emphasize instances of bigotry makes Protestants seem pawns of destructive convictions. We may reject the religious logic of historical figures, I believe, but we first ought to get close enough to them to discover their reasoning. A book so concerned with the repressive potential of Protestantism at its ethnic and racial boundaries also remains surprisingly focused on the Protestant mainstream. Although Fessenden makes the Catholicism of F. Scott Fitzgerald the historical endpoint of an analysis that begins with the Puritans, she devotes almost no attention in between to non-Protestants. Minority writing, she clarifies briefly, signified “resistance” (106). Catholics and Jews, however, the most visible non-Protestants before the 1960s, supported healthy literatures that were not solely defined by feelings of disadvantage. Mathew Carey (1760–1839), the Philadelphia publisher and a staunch Catholic, chose the Catholic Douai text of the Bible in 1790 for his first edition of scripture, but he used the Protestant King James Version for more than sixty printings of the Bible after 1800. He was not at war with Protestant culture. Jewish immigrants living after 1880 in the crowded poverty of New York’s Lower East Side felt liberated by their tawdry share of American commodities because they remembered far worse deprivation at home. Reform Judaism became the dominant American practice precisely because Jews embraced their new land as nearly free of age-old prejudices. The self...

The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies: Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession

Histories of the discipline of literary studies have long relied on a narrative of secularization that traces the gradual transformation of a profession that was once more religious into one that is now largely secular. Recent work in a number of different disciplines has revised and challenged the basic assumptions behind secularization narratives, in part by complicating our understanding of the processes by which the categories "religious" and "secular" are constructed and differentiated. This essay begins with an account of some of this recent work, primarily from cultural anthropology and religious studies. In light of these theories, the essay then examines how various attempts to differentiate the religious and the secular have shaped disciplinary boundaries and identities as manifested in histories of the profession. To indicate how an account of these continued acts of differentiation is central to an understanding of professional history and identity, and to literary critical practice, the essay concludes with a brief look at some recent work in literary studies that has moved away from reliance on a straightforward narrative of secularization, and has instead re-instated questions about the on-going relationship between the religious and the secular.

Children's Acceptance of Conflicting Testimony: The Case of Death

Abstract Children aged 7 and 11 years were interviewed about death in the context of two different narratives. Each narrative described the death of a grandparent but one narrative provided a secular context whereas the other provided a religious context. Following each narrative, children were asked to judge whether various bodily and mental processes continue to function after death, and to justify their judgment. Children displayed two different conceptions of death. They often acknowledged that functioning ceases at death and offered appropriate biological justifications for that judgment. However, they also claimed that functioning continues after death and offered appropriate religious justifications. The tendency to claim that functioning continues after death was more frequent among older children than younger children, more frequent in the context of the religious narrative as opposed to the secular narrative and more frequent with respect to mental processes than bodily processes. Particularly among older children, two distinct conceptions of death appear to co-exist: a biological conception in which death implies the cessation of living processes and a metaphysical conception in which death marks the beginning of the afterlife.

Marriage Fictions in Old French Secular Narratives, 1170-1250: A Critical Re-Evaluation of the Courtly Love Debate. Keith Nickolaus

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsMarriage Fictions in Old French Secular Narratives, 1170-1250: A Critical Re-Evaluation of the Courtly Love Debate. Keith Nickolaus David StainesDavid Staines Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 79, Number 3Jul., 2004 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400090345 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 2004 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

“And a Small Boy Leading Them”:

Each of the three childhood stories, S. Y. Agnon's “Bayaעar ūvaעir” [In the Forest and in the Town] (1939), Amos Oz's Panter bamartef [Panther in the Basement] (1995), and Aharon Appelfeld's Layish (1994), offers a child protagonist who inhabits two parallel landscapes: his own environment and the biblical universe. These child protagonists relive a biblical experience, but the degree to which the respective writers make them participants in evoking the biblical sphere is different in each story. These stories exhibit distinctly different paradigms of the art of embedding the biblical text in a modern, secular narrative and of the status it is given within it. In Agnon's tale, the scriptural intertext is inseparable from a dense network of Judaic master texts, discoursing with and commenting on each other. In Oz's novella, the biblical arena is the ancient parallel of present-day reality, the admired yet challenged national epic that mirrors and informs current political and territorial aspirations. In Appelfeld's novella, the biblical pattern is a remote, foreboding myth, not fully recognized by the actors in the modern tale yet powerful enough to hover over them and determine their destiny.

'Is he still alive, or long since dead?': Loss, Absence and Remembrance in Nuremberg, 1945–1956

This article uses the search for the 'missing' Wehrmacht soldiers in the 1950s as a prism through which to explore the ways in which we might insert the notion of trauma into our understanding of West Germany's status as a postwar society. In seeking to point out the connections between the ways in which 'ordinary Germans' suffered during and after the war on the one hand, and the inability of post-war West German society to 'confront' the crimes of the past on the other, it argues that the traumatizing impact of war has to be considered alongside the ideological and political necessities of the Cold War and reconstruction if we are to understand why West German society failed to place the Holocaust at the centre of its memorial culture in the immediate post-war years. Moreover, in pointing to the Lutheran church as a key site of memorial politics in the post-war era, it argues for the integration of a study of religious narratives, mentalities and discourses into an understanding of the evolution of the commemorative practices of the 1950s which has hitherto been shaped by an excessively one-sided focus on secular sites and narratives.

Paolo Veronese: piety and display in an age of religious reform

Introduction - Early career in Verona: Venice - the rooms of the Council of Ten in the ducal palace - Daniele Barbaro consolidation - the frescoes at Villa Barbaro Maser consoliation in Venice - San Sebastiano recognition and the revival of Venetian tradition when seeing is believing the master narrator - the mature secular narratives the master narrator - the mature religious paintings late style - the religious paintings piety and display. Part 1 From Verona to Venice: Venice - the heir of Constantinople and new Rome change in Venetian society and art Veronese the Venetian patrons Veronese's other patrons. Part 2 Public display, 1550-65: recognition Veronese and the tradition of the Venetian altarpieces Veronese and the tradition of Venetian ceiling painting San Sebastiano the ceiling of the Jesuit church of Santa Maria dell'Umilta Venetian tradition renewed Veronese and Catholic renewal. Part 3 Public display, 1566-88: the saint as martyr the Council of Trent and the cult of saints the saint as exemplar Veronese and the tradition of the Venetian altarpiece Christ's baptism and crucifixion lavish display in existing churches - San Giacomo, Murano San Nicolo ai Frari - Santa Maria Maggiore the new status. Part 4 Paintings for private display: smaller devotional paintings larger narrative paintings paintings for camere grandi - the Coccina palace Old and New Testament subjects for the Bonaldi - Charles Duke of Savoy, Simone Lando and Charles de Croy. Part 5 Christ's feasts and last supper: feast in the House of Simon, Turin the marriage feast at Cana feast in the house of Simon, San Sebastiano and S. Maria dei Servi feast of St Gregory the Great, Monte Berico feast in the house of Levi, SS. Giovanni e Paolo Last Supper, Santa Sophia.

Plurality and Globalization: The Challenge of Economics to Social Theology

The phenomenon of the global market economy, drawing as it does on ‘liberal’ concepts of plurality and the transcending of tradition, offers a serious challenge to social theology. Neither liberal nor communitarian (confessional) approaches are able to give adequate accounts of two fundamental economic problematics: scarcity and interrelatedness. Liberal approaches have tended to subordinate theological insights to secular narratives in ways which obscure distinctive contributions from the Christian tradition. Confessional approaches have not handled finitude or translatability between communities and traditions with sufficient subtlety. This article argues that an adequate social theology on the economy will bridge liberal and communitarian approaches in ways which are cognisant of the particularity of traditions yet open to encounter between them, and, drawing on MacIntyre, Shanks and Selby, among others, sketches the outlines of such a dialogic traditionalism.

Finding the Gods in Public School: A Christian Deconstruction of Character Education

MORAL EDUCATION IN American public schools is inextricably intertwined with and influenced by various religious and secular narratives. Character education is a prime example. Although it attempts to find some shared virtues within a pluralistic society, a historical overview and a Christian deconstruction of the movement reveals the illusionary nature of this agreement. In reality, character education often smuggles particular narratives into public schools that are antagonistic to other religious or secular narratives. Recognition of this fact should lead educators to make serious adjustments in moral education within public schooling and in the structure of public schooling.

Web Forum: Apocacide, Apocaholics and Apocalists

Web Forum: Apocacide, Apocaholics and Apocalists

On mythic criticism: A proposed compromise

In the essay “On Mythic Criticism,” Robert Rowland (1990) charged some rhetorical critics with misusing the term “myth” and argued for a “narrow functional/structural” definition. His respondents agreed unanimously on the point that rhetorical critics must strive for precision in their work; however, they found the functional/structural definition too confining. In this essay, I offer compromise for critics to use in classifying a society's sacred and secular narratives under the umbrella term of mythos. This is followed by a brief contemporary example of the interplay of rhetoric and mythos.

Beowulf: A Study In Dilatation

When the author of Beowulf undertook to create in English a secular narrative poem of epic amplitude, he set himself to a task for which there was no precedent in the native tradition. In the Germanic past, narrative poetry had been confined to the heroic lay. This was a short poem, not exceeding some two hundred long-lines. It held to a single action, the sequence of which it presented with abrupt economy. Preoccupied with the scenic and the climactic, it had little leisure for any element which might retard the pace or attenuate the impact. To this tradition, the digressive, the repetitious, and the dilatory were alien. Only in style was the static indulged, in variation, in the ornamental and the vicarious epithet, and here only with restraint.

The People in Chaucer's Troilus

The silhouette of the Troilus, the kinds of poem behind it that it approximates, are essential and not difficult to perceive. Mr. Young, in the most important recent article on the subject, and in a delicate and masterful style, has shown its pervasive elements from the romances. Chaucer hardly set out deliberately to write a poem in the line of Chrétien de Troyes or Floris or what not, but the usages and assumptions of such poems, the commonest kind of serious secular narrative he knew, he adopted as a matter of course. There is vast variety in medieval romance, and the word itself (meaning at first merely a poem in French) is vague, to say nothing of the rarefied air which we reach when we try to grasp the romantic in the abstract. Medieval romance and the romantic in the abstract are not the same, though historically and essentially allied. I turn to the second. One of the essentials of the romantic, the satisfying a taste for the strange, Chaucer provided plentifully for his own day in the intentional ancient coloring, which affected his readers (and not us at all) just as the inevitable and unconscious medieval coloring affects us. He here aimed however no less at satisfying his own informed awareness that the remote past was very unlike his own present than at creating a romantic impression. The emotionalism which belongs to romance also in good sooth is plentiful. What Mr. Young is specially combating is the summary labelling the poem as a psychological novel, a phrase now almost a cliché, taken too literally, though no doubt meant by its first user as a mere simplification to assure the momentum of a fresh idea. The word novel is onesided, even misleading. The hazy word psychological implies lifelike portraiture of complex people with internal conflicts, which allows us with probability to descry undercurrents and motives. This is true of the Troilus. The facts are, as most critics will admit, that the poem is an intricate blending of romance on every side with delicate and perceptive truth to humanity (though emphatically not a mere “page out of the book of modern every-day life”); that the two are not contradictory, though more intense and more commingled here than in almost any other English narrative one can think of; that though it is stimulating to guess briefly, it is impossible to decide how much would fall into each category for Chaucer and his readers. Emphatically he no more medievalizes than he humanizes his chief source; he complicates and intensifies it.