Secular Rationalism Research Articles

Wicked Heritage Problems: Rethinking Critical Heritage Theory with Contemporary Liminality

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, an anxious presentism has taken hold of our social and political reality. This condition rejects the lessons of the past, fears the future, and amplifies crises in the present moment, suspending whole societies in uncertainty. These extraordinary times demand innovation of heritage critique, which lacks a core framework for understanding how heritage interacts with the uncertainty of transition. This paper offers an innovative approach to the problem, arguing for transferring the paradigm of contemporary liminality from political anthropology into heritage studies. Contemporary political anthropologists have adapted liminality’s ritual structure to large-scale phenomena like war, revolution, and extreme transition to understand these experiences at the level of the communities living through them. With an epistemology free from the constraints of secular rationalism, contemporary liminality provides a framework for understanding heritage amid transition that sheds new light on core investigations into the politics of memory and identity. It also leads to the concept of a liminal heritage, heritage that takes on characteristics of its liminal context such as ambivalence, ambiguity, imitation, danger, deception, violence, and creativity.

Neither remnants nor commodities: Spirit objects in early twentieth century Chinese regional fiction

This paper examines the regional fiction of early twentieth century China in order to understand how such texts presented the object world of rural life. In doing so it addresses a gap in the historiography of material culture in modern China, which has emphasized urban commodity regimes and has paid far less attention to the ways in which pre-existing object practices endured into the time of the modern Republic. Building off of the methodological insights of scholars such as Bill Brownand Janet Poole regarding the contribution that literary study can make to historical understandings of material cultures, this paper argues that the regional texts of Lu Xun, Xu Qinwen, Ye Shengtao, and Yu Dafu were bewitched by overlapping life worlds: one represented by the secular rationalism of the text's narrators, and the other represented by the animistic practices of the rural others they encounter, which was expressed through objects such as joss sticks, temple doorsills, and ancestral alters. These literary works reflected upon how objects were used to make meaning in ways that were not reducible to urban commodity fetishism or remnant “superstition.” As presented in these works, spiritual objects remain powerfully active parts of the affective worlds of rural people, collapsing binary distinctions between living language and inanimate matter, the human and the ghostly, the past and the present. For the narrators of these texts, these object practices invoke a complicated mixture of modernizing critique and empathetic recognition. As such, these texts allow readers to witness the early expressions of a complex dialectic of rejection and recognition/accommodation that has marked the attitude modernizing states in China have taken in relation to animistic material cultures over the past century.

Ecclesial Belonging in a World of Pure Experience: William James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Religious Rationality in Crisis

Abstract The global COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted several instances of churches violating state issued and scientifically recommended guidelines designed to keep populations healthy and to prevent the further spread of the disease. While these instances are minority responses to these orders, they nonetheless raise questions about the rationality of ecclesial belonging in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, I draw on the work of William James and W. E. B. Du Bois to articulate a conception of ecclesial belonging as a social epistemological process engaging a complex, fluid multiplicity of knowers of various scales. I argue that, in this view, ecclesial rationality involves the construction of a concatenation of internal and external practices individual believers and groups can traverse so long as they consistently satisfy a plurality of desiderata. I suggest that what is irrational about religious-based defiance of COVID-19 guidelines is the church-sanctioned severance of internal from external practices. I suggest that this behavior is supported by a failure to grasp the demands of ecclesial rationality rather than embrace them, and that this conception of rationality may have been eroded by the value-neutral skepticism of secular rationality.

Crisis of the Secularism Paradigm

This essay seeks to understand the relationship between modernity, secularization, and religion. By engaging such thinkers as José Casanova, Peter Berger, Charles Taylor, and Jürgen Habermas, the essay proposes that the post-Enlightenment project of secularization which would replace religion by science and secular rationality has proven elusive. Instead, there has been a resurgence of religion in different parts of the world, in particular Islam. Secularization itself is a complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to the absence of religion. Peter Berger summed up the persistence of religion across time and space, and in different cultures, as “desecularization.” The outstanding question concerns the proper role for religion, and whether it may return to the public square as complementary rather than antithetical to Enlightenment values in science, culture, and democratic, pluralistic polities?

Reason and Conviction: Natural Rights, Natural Religion, and the Origins of the Free Exercise Clause

One of the most intense debates in contemporary America involves conflicts between religious liberty and other key values like civil rights. To shed light on such problems, courts and scholars often look to the historical background of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. But this inquiry turns out to be no less controversial. In recent years, a growing number of scholars has challenged the traditional account that focuses on the roles of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the movement to protect religious liberty in late eighteenth-century America. These scholars emphasize that most of the political energy behind the movement came from Evangelical Christians. On this revisionist account, we should not understand the Free Exercise Clause and corresponding state provisions in terms of the Enlightenment views of Jefferson and Madison, which these scholars characterize as secular, rationalist, and skeptical – if not hostile – toward religion. Instead, those protections were intended to promote religion and especially Christianity. In this Article, I offer a different understanding of the intellectual foundations of the Free Exercise Clause. The most basic view that supported religious liberty was neither secular rationalism nor Christian Evangelicalism but what contemporaries called natural religion. This view held that human beings were capable of using reason to discern the basic principles of religion, including the duties they owed to God and one another. Because religion was founded on reason, individuals had an inalienable natural right to develop their own beliefs and to worship in accord with them. At the same time, that right was limited by the law of nature, which required people to respect the rights of others. In this way, the concept of natural religion established both the foundations and the limits of religious liberty. This view enabled people with different religious and philosophical perspectives to find common ground. It provided the basis for a political coalition between Evangelicals, rationalist Christians, and Enlightenment liberals that secured the adoption of state and federal constitutional guarantees for religious freedom. The Article begins by demonstrating that natural religion and its associated ideas of natural law and natural rights were central to the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Americans. Those ideas played a vital part in many areas of thought, including political and moral philosophy, natural jurisprudence, English law, Christian and Deist theology, and even Newtonian natural science – intellectual strands that came together in the Radical Whig ideology that animated the American Revolution. Next, I explain how those ideas can enhance our understanding of the religious liberty provisions of the first state declarations of rights; the political controversy that culminated in the passage of Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia; and the debates surrounding the adoption of the Federal Constitution and the Free Exercise Clause itself. Finally, I explore the founders’ views on the problem of religious exemptions from civil laws, and discuss the implications of this history for our current debates over civil rights and religious liberty – a subject that the Supreme Court recently grappled with in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and that it has agreed to revisit next Term in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia.

토마스 모어의 『유토피아』에 나타난 사목 권력과 통치성 : 미셸 푸코의 철학과 비교연구

The primary purpose of this essay is to analyze Thomas More’s Utopia in terms of biopolitics and governmentality that Michel Foucault theorized in his lectures at College de France. More’s story of an imaginary commonwealth is an illustration of early modern pastoral power that foreshadows the rise of (early) modern “governmentality.” Pastoral power as a sort of governing technology claimed that people should be governed just as Christ as an ideal pastor governs his flock (Christian subjects), and its economic ideology is the core of what St. Paul called oikonomia. Yet this religious governmentality began to be secularized from the sixteenth century and formed secular governmental rationality, and I would argue that More’s Utopia is a discussion of this governing technology developed from this pastoral power. This essay, in this light, has a dual purpose. First this article surveys and analyzes pastoralism and governmentality that operate as biopower in More’s work. Utopia has been read as a discussion of ideal state and a society based on proto-communism, but seen from a different angle it is a representation of Renaissance England’s governmentality. Nonetheless, a more important project of this essay is to critically anatomize the paradox of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics by surveying Utopia from a biopolitical perspective. Foucault was not able to properly answer why a power that “make[s] live and let[s] die” uncannily transforms into thanato-political and sovereign power that “take[s] life or let[s] live.” Reading More’s discussion of an ideal commonwealth allows us to grasp that a society aiming at utmost security based on biopolitics uncannily transforms into an extremely controlled society ruled by thanato-politics.

An Esbat among the Quads: An Episode of Witchcraft at Oxford University in the 1920s

This article presents evidence of an attempt to undertake a revival of witchcraft at Oxford University in the 1920s. The students involved in the attempt appear to have been influenced by ideas about witchcraft that were circulating in contemporary British society, including (but not limited to) the theories of Margaret Murray. The episode constitutes an interesting early step in the progress of the modern witchcraft revival. The surviving evidence also highlights how one of the most prestigious of British institutions could play host to overlapping networks of individuals whose occult interests challenged the norms of both traditional Christianity and secular rationalism.

Fighting Rage with Fear: The “Faces of Muhammad” and the Limits of Secular Rationality

In recent years, a number of incidents have pitted Islam against secularism and liberal democracy. This essay examines the Danish publication of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons in order to examine the deployment of rationality as a litmus test for political membership. It argues that Western media and political analysis of the protests surrounding the cartoons constructed Muslims as anti-rational and thus unfit for democratic citizenship. Such a deployment of rationality inhibits the possibility of and demands for political pluralism. The essay then looks to two disparate theorists of affective reason, Abdulkarim Soroush and William Connolly, to offer an alternative model of reason that encourages pluralist political engagement.

Strains of the Enlightenment: Making Belief in American Secularism and African Difference in The Book of Mormon

This article argues that the 2011 Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, best known for its parody of Mormon religious beliefs, uses what Sara Ahmed terms “affective economies” to paradoxically remake American beliefs in secular rationality. Whereas Richard Schechner posits a strict division between “make-believe” and “make-belief ” performances, The Book of Mormon demonstrates how the “make-believe” of Broadway makes beliefs and feelings in its audiences through circulations of affect. This article traces how such affects and beliefs are imbricated with national impressions about religious, racial, and sexual difference, particularly through the musical’s Mormon and black African characters. By attending to the musical’s impressions of Mormons and Africans, it deconstructs the musical’s tacit investments in American secularism and rationality through its circulation of “common sense” ideas about religious and racial others.

Human Dignity: the Foundation of Human Rights and Religious Freedom

The concept of human dignity lies at the heart of many national and international conventions of human rights. This idea, based on man's rationality, can be found already in Greco-Roman Antiquity, was fully developed in Christianity, in its synthesis with the Biblical conception of man as image of God. With the secularization of the European mind from the 18th century onwards, the justification of human dignity becomes problematic. This most influential attempt to justify it by secular rationality came from Kant, who saw man’s dignity as deriving from his capacity for moral reasoning and from it came the notions of autonomy and equality. However, during the last two centuries, secularized cultures produced skeptical attitudes toward both the Judeo-Christian and Kantian concepts of the intrinsic dignity of man, which eventually paved the way for twentieth-century totalitarian-isms. After the horrors of Nazism, concerns about putting human rights in the centre of culture, politics and law compelled a search ―largely impossible― for a common idea of human dignity, shared by different philosophical traditions, both religious and secular. During the years after World War II, especially after the Second Vatican Council, there was a renewed discovery of human rights as based on human dignity by Catholicism, which, in view of the different reduc-tionist or destructive tendencies found in the secularized culture, perhaps is the most satisfactory approach. Finally, the problem of religious freedom is examined as a case study for further reflections on human dignity.

Conservatism, Aesthetic and Active: Reflections on Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent

ABSTRACTRoger Scruton and Pierre Manent provide us much to admire, as authors and as men, and much to ponder. They can be seen as collaborators in the defense of the nation-state against the empty universalism of “human rights,” and, more generally, in exposing the boundless arrogance and blindness of modern rationalism insofar as it denies its inheritance from premodern sources. This defense of the nation-state and critique of secular rationalism are of vital interest to moral and political conservatives, and Scruton, for his part, has explicitly taken on the cause and the label of conservatism. But conservatives face an imposing and, I propose here, critically instructive obstacle in appropriating the teachings of these two contemporary giants. For, as soon as we begin to examine the foundations of their respective projects, Scruton's and Manent's approaches appear to be, not only quite different (and therefore, one might hope, complementary) but in an important sense directly opposed to one another. This opposition appears most directly in their respective estimates of the realm of politics: one would exaggerate little in saying that, for Manent, politics is everything, whereas Scruton wishes to constrict the reach of politics to the minimum. Thus, Scruton embraces the title “conservative” but understands it apolitically, whereas Manent declines to identify himself as conservative but fully embraces a political task essential to conservatism. Conservatives must confront this disconcerting opposition and see what can be learned from it.

E.M. Forster, the Clapham Sect, and the Secular Public Sphere

Critics have characterized E.M. Forster as an advocate of what Jürgen Habermas calls the “secular public sphere.” Yet Forster was critical of liberalism’s insistence that religious experiences should be translated into the language of secular rationality. The discussion of the Clapham Sect in “Henry Thornton” (1939) suggests that eighteenth-century evangelical Anglicanism set in motion a historical trajectory that led secular modern intellectuals to retreat into their own privacy, a position exemplified by Forster’s contemporaries in the Bloomsbury Group. One can thus look back to A Passage to India (1924) and understand how the novel’s spiritual themes articulate a politically relevant alternative both to Clapham’s rationalized religiosity and Bloomsbury’s secular insularity. Forster depicts the Hindu religious festival of Gokul Ashtami as promising an alternative form of social cohesion that resists translation into secular, rational language.

Post-secularity: A New Paradigm of the Social Sciences?

The theory of secularization was the hermeneutical paradigm of the process in which modern western societies witnessed the eclipse of religion in public life. In recent years, a significant amount of literature in the Social Sciences has been warning of the crisis of this paradigm and the need to revise it. In this context, the notion of post-secularity appears as a likely candidate to become the new paradigm of the tensions between religion and the secular in today’s world, with the promise of building bridges between religious rationality and secular rationality.

Tożsamość europejska jako problem historii i współczesności

Christianity, filtered through the heritage of Enlightenment, is a founding stone of European identity. Western Christianity is of particular importance here, as only in the region it dominated we can speak of Enlightenment and periods that precede it, that is Renaissance and Reformation. European Union is primarily constituted by countries that are culturally related to Western (Latin) Christianity. Enlightenment (secular rationalism) as such was not sufficient for creation of European identity. The paper describes the evolution of European identity closely linked with Christianity, that was later on left for rationalism and national identities. I try to prove that the identity of Europeans is historically closely linked to the diversity of nations that constitute Europe and that a national identity serves to underline European Community rather than deny it. Existing European identity has its roots in common history, contrary to popular believes that Europeans identify only with their nations. The paper also explains why new European identity needs to be constructed in relation to common European past and not in relation to the future of Europe.

The new Islamist public sphere in Bangladesh

Historically, Bangladesh has a strong and culturally embedded vibrant public sphere. The Bangladeshi public sphere always consists of a multiplicity of publics. The idea of public sphere in Bangladesh was based on the idea of secular rationality or religious neutrality. However, the situation is changing; attempts are being made to create an Islamist public sphere. This paper highlights two examples of this effort to foster the Islamization of the public sphere: production of Islamist fiction and founding women's discussion groups. It argues that the emerging Islamist public sphere in Bangladesh only subscribes to one interpretation of Islam and that the traditional authorities are now being replaced by the Islamist interpretation advanced by ideologues. It further argues that the absence of reference to local syncretistic traditions in the new Islamist discourse makes its authenticity suspect.

Religious Globalisms in the Post-Secular Age

This article explores the interconnections between mounting global crises and the emergence of the post-secular. Specifically, the article argues that the post-secular is both a description of and a response to shifting global realities in the twenty-first century. It describes the crisis of secular rationalism, brought about in many ways by an overemphasis on economic rationalism and neoliberalism (Steger et al., 2013). Yet, as noted by Jürgen Habermas (2006, 2008), Mariano Barbato (2010), and Justin Beaumont and Paul Cloke (2012), the post-secular offers a way of resisting, reforming, and potentially revolutionizing these dominant secular, rationalist, neoliberal frameworks that presently shape global politics and society. We suggest, however, that the influence of globalization has been under-theorized in these previous studies. In particular we argue that the intersection between the post-secular and emerging global political ideologies of market and justice globalisms is having a profound impact on religious movements, generating ‘religious globalisms’ that offer alternative responses to global crises around finance, poverty, and climate. Este artículo explora las interconexiones entre las crecientes crisis globales y el surgimiento de las sociedades postseculares. Específicamente, el artículo sostiene que el tema postsecular es tanto una descripción, como una respuesta a las realidades globales cambiantes en el siglo veintiuno. Describe la crisis de un racionalismo secular, suscitada de varias formas por una énfasis excesiva sobre el racionalismo económico y el neoliberalismo (Steger et al., 2013). Sin embargo, como lo señala Jürgen Habermas (2006, 2008), Mariano Barbato (2010), y Justin Beaumont y Paul Cloke (2012), la sociedad postsecular ofrece formas de resistir, reformar y potencialmente revolucionar esos marcos dominantemente neoliberales, racionalistas y seculares, que actualmente dan forma a la sociedad y la política global. Sin embargo, en estos estudios anteriores, sugerimos que la influencia de la globalización ha sido subteorizada. Sostenemos particularmente, que la intersección entre las ideologías de mercado políticas globales postseculares y emergentes, y la justicia del globalismo, está presentando un impacto profundo en los movimientos religiosos, generando un ‘globalismo religioso’ que ofrece respuestas alternas a las crisis globales alrededor de las finanzas, la pobreza y el clima. 本文探讨了正在加强的全球危机和后世俗的兴起之间的相互联系。特别是，本文认为后世俗既是对转变中的21世纪全球现实的描述，也是对这一现实的回应。通过多方面强调经济理性主义和新自由主义，它描述了世俗理性主义的危机（Steger et al., 2013）。甚至，如同哈贝马斯（Jürgen Habermas，2006, 2008），巴巴托（Mariano Barbato，2010），卜蒙特和克劳克（Justin Beaumont and Paul Cloke，2012)指出的，后世俗提供了对占主导地位的世俗、理性主义和新自由主义框架进行抵制、改革、以及潜在的革命的方法。新自由主义的框架目前塑造全球政治和社会。不过，我们认为，在这些以前的研究中，对全球化之影响的理论化不足。 尤其是，我们认为，在后世俗和正在兴起的市场的全球政治意识形态，以及正义的全球主义之间的交叉对于宗教运动具有深远影响，产生对于全球性的金融、贫困和气候的危机进行回应的“宗教的全球主义”（religious globalisms）。 이 글은 점증하는 지구적 위기와 탈세속의 등장 간의 상호연계를 분석한다. 구체적으로, 이 글은 탈세속이 21세기 변화하는 지구적 현실에 대한 묘사와 대응이라고 주장한다. 이 글은 경제 합리주의와 신자유주의에 대한 과잉된 강조를 낳은 세속적 합리주의의 위기를 기술한다 (Steger et al., 2013). 그러나, 위르겐 하버마스(2006, 2008), 마리아노 발바토(2010), 그리고 저스틴 보몬트와 폴 클로크(2012)에 의해서 언급된 바와 같이, 탈세속은 현재 지구적 정치와 사회를 만든 지배적인 세속적, 합리주의적, 신자유주의적 틀에 저항하고, 변형시키고 잠재적으로 혁명화하는 하나의 방식을 제공한다. 그러나 세계화의 영향이 이전의 연구들에서 제대로 이론화되지 못했다고 주장한다. 특히 우리는 탈세속과 등장하는 지구적 정치적 시장 이데올로기와 정의로운 세계화 간의 교차가 금융, 빈곤과 기후를 둘러싼 지구적 위기에 대한 대안적인 대응을 제공하는 ‘종교적 세계화’를 만들어 내면서 종교운동에 심대한 영향을 미치고 있다고 주장한다. В статье рассматриваются взаимосвязи между процессами глобальных кризисов и появлением постсекулярности. В частности, в статье утверждается, что постсекулярным является как описание, так и ответ на изменения глобальных реалий в двадцать первом веке. Она описывает кризис светского рационализма, вызванного, во многом, чрезмерным акцентом на экономический рационализм и неолиберализм (Штегер и соавт., 2013). Тем не менее, как отмечает Юрген Хабермас (2006, 2008), Мариано Барбато (2010), Джастин Бомон и Пол Клок (2012), постсекулярные предложения это способ сопротивляться, преобразовать, и потенциально реконструировать эти доминирующие светские, рационалистические неолиберальные структуры, которые теперь формируют глобальную политику и общество. Мы предполагаем, однако, что влияние глобализации было мало изучено в ходе предыдущих исследований. В особенности, мы утверждаем, что пересечение между постсекулярнотью и появляющимися глобальными политическими идеологиями рынка и глобализмом правосудия оказывает глубокое влияние на религиозные движения, порождая “религиозный глобализм”, который предлагает альтернативные ответы на глобальные финансовые кризисы, климатические, бедность.

Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome: A Reply to Luciano Pellicani

According to Luciano Pellicani, the US culture wars are grounded in a perpetual struggle between the enlightening forces of reason and democracy, on the one hand, and the dark forces of faith and theocracy, on the other hand. Accordingly, he claims that the Puritans sought to establish a medieval collectivist theocracy, not a modern market democracy, and that the US ‘culture war’ between enlightened secular liberalism and reactionary religious conservatism ultimately rests on the perpetual battle between Athenian reason and the faith of Jerusalem. In this essay I contest Pellicani’s assertion that faith is diametrically opposed to reason and that America needs to abandon its Christian legacy in favor of Enlightenment secularism. My argument is that the modern separation of belief from rationality underpins both the secular rationalism and fanatical fideism which confront each other in the United States and across the West today. The only genuine alternative to these two extremes is not an attempt to repair the wreck that is the Enlightenment project but rather a proper synthesis of faith and reason that distinguishes political from religious authority without divorcing religion from politics. It is true that mainstream Protestantism in the USA is characterized by a vague ‘civil religion’ that is post-Christian, neo-pagan and Gnostic in outlook. But it is equally the case that the rapprochement of Evangelicals and Catholics around shared notions of the common good has the potential to transform the American polity, economy and society in the direction of a more Christian settlement.

Liberalism and Revivalism. A Comparative Case Study of Liberal Ideology, Individualism, and Revivalism in Schleswig-Holstein and Värmland, ca. 1860–1920

Only rarely have the non-secular roots of modern political individualism been subject to study. In this article I forward the hypothesis that modern political individualism, as expressed by 19th-century liberalism, was a result of individualistic, low Church and nonconformist revivals to the same extent that it was a product of secular rationalism. The hypothesis is probed in a comparative case study of rural liberalism in two north European regions, Schleswig-Holstein (Germany) and Värmland (Sweden). I address three key requirements of the hypothesis: that the nonconformist revival movements in 18th and 19th-century northern Europe promoted an individualistic outlook among their followers; that individuality rooted in religious awakenings was congenial to liberal ideology; and that traits of non-secular individualism were incorporated with everyday liberal political discourse and practice.

Bioethics critically reconsidered: Living after foundations

Given intractable moral pluralism, what ought one to make of the bioethics that arose in the early 1970s, grounded as it was in the false assumption that there is a common secular morality that secular bioethics ought to apply? It is as if bioethics developed without recognition of the crisis at the heart of secular morality itself. Secular moral rationality cannot of itself provide the foundations to identify a particular morality and its bioethics as canonical. One is not just confronted with intractable moral and bioethical pluralism, but with the absence of a secular ground that can show why one should act morally rather than self-interestedly. The result is not merely the deflation of much of traditional Western morality to life-style and death-style choices, but the threat of deflating to political slogans the now-dominant secular morality, including its affirmation of human autonomy, equality, social justice, and human dignity. All of this invites one critically to reconsider the meaning and force of secular bioethics.

Physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy proselytizes for secular rationality in Pakistan

Commentaries challenge phony science and Islamic extremists' incitements to violence. Commentaries challenge phony science and Islamic extremists' incitements to violence.