Secular Narratives Research Articles

Médecine et religion: Collaborations, compétitions, conflits (XII e –XX e siècle) ed. by Maria Pia Donato etal. (review)

Reviewed by: Médecine et religion: Collaborations, compétitions, conflits (XIIe–XXe siècle) ed. by Maria Pia Donato etal. Peregrine Horden Médecine et religion: Collaborations, compétitions, conflits (XIIe–XXe siècle). Edited by Maria Pia Donato, Luc Berlivet, Sara Cabibbo, Raimondo Michetti, and Marilyn Nicoud. [Collection de l’École Française de Rome, Vol. 476.] (Rome: École Française de Rome. 2013. Pp. 400. €40,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-7283-0967-2.) Medicine has rarely been separable from religion. Only in parts of the developed world, and only in the last century or so, have religious considerations not impinged much on health-seeking behavior. At the extreme, medicine may become a religion in itself. In some parts of the United States, it is said, health and medicine have attained quasi-cultic status, and the British now find their established church in the tax-funded National Health Service. For most of human history, however, medicine has been not only deeply entangled with, but in some way subordinate to, religious imperatives: questions of health could never be seen in entirely secular terms. Over many years Darrel W. Amundsen and Gary B. Ferngren (often in tandem), among numerous other scholars, have provided an overall typology of how medicine and religion may interrelate and a broad sketch of historical developments, especially in classical antiquity and Christian Europe. Yet to read Ferngren’s recent Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore, 2014) is to be reminded how much remains to be done, particularly with respect to modern times as a counter to any simplistic narrative of progressive secularization. [End Page 898] Arguably no major or world religion has had a more fraught or variable relationship to medicine than has Christianity. It is to addressing that complexity over the longue durée in the Catholic Christian world and décloisonner (the editors’ felicitous verb) the various approaches to it that have been tried (medical, religious, social, or cultural history) that the present collection is dedicated. Some of the fruits of two research projects converge, one based in Rome (under editors Cabibbo and Michetti) on sanctity and healing; the second (under Berlivet, Donato, and Nicoud) on the medical professions and medical practice. Both span the Middle Ages and the contemporary world, mainly focused on Europe but with sideways glances at the Middle East and Latin America. The thirteen main contributions are presented in two groups of very unequal size. First come ten “hypotheses” about the main possible relations between medicine and religion given in the collection’s subtitle—collaboration, competition, conflict. Second, there are three interdisciplinary studies involving medicine, anthropology, and sociology. The first group is perhaps too large and its heading too capacious to be helpful. Important and absorbing themes, in fact, traverse both parts. One of them has to do with saints: canonization, the saint’s incorruptible body, and healing miracles. Another involves the Holy See, the Holy Office, medicine, and “biopolitics,” reacting variously to Mesmerism, artificial fertilization, and reproductive rights. A third embraces the religious orders and medicine (including astrology and the prolongation of life), from the Cistercians to the Jesuits and Oratorians. A fourth locates medicine within interfaith dealings, in the crusader states and the Spanish New World. That leaves only two contributions and even these loosely belong together: on demonology in Italian Renaissance medicine and the ending of the witch craze; and on the nineteenth-century Catholic psychologist Agostino Gemelli reacting to experimental psychology and psychoanalysis in reframing the origins of mental illness. A helpful editorial introduction and a historiographical scene-setting by Maria Pia Donato preface this fascinating array of studies. Although medicine and medicalization are mostly left undefined, this volume is an essential contribution to continuing debates about their definition and cultural setting. The emphasis on pursuing what might seem like medieval or earlymodern topics into the nineteenth century and indeed through the pontificate of Pope John Paul II is also extremely welcome. Peregrine Horden Royal Holloway, University of London Copyright © 2015 The Catholic University of America Press

Art and Allegory: A Method to Read The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe's greatest work, The Book of the New Sun, (1) has not yet received satisfying interpretation. Though Wolfe was an adult convert to Catholicism, few have investigated if and how New Sun reflects Catholicism. Hailed as an important writer in venues as diverse as The New Yorker and First Things, the measure of Gene Wolfe's importance in contemporary literature awaits an interpretive method that reveals his artistry and Catholic influence. Peter Bebergal in April's New Yorker writes of Wolfe that his habit of concealing the truth makes readers dig deep into his texts in the hope of finding clues not only to the plots and characters but to Wolfe's larger intentions. Partly what readers are excavating is Wolfe's Catholicism, which he is quick to say figures into his writing. Bebergal compares this to Flannery O'Connor, who cautions novelists to use religious concerns in ways that do not alienate the reader, to render encounters with the ineffable so that those who might not understand or care for particular metaphor ... can still be moved by it.... But Wolfe wraps his Catholicism in strange language and cryptic images. (2) This echos John Farrell's assessment in First Things of Catholic influence that defies straightforward allegory in works that science fiction as genre decreasingly accommodates for being religious, too difficult, and too strange. (3) Several science fiction critics have sought Wolfe's larger intentions. Joan Gordon, an academic specialist in science fiction, saw New Sun as messianic autobiography influenced by Boethius. (4) Peter Wright, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on New Sun as situated within science fiction, later published an entirely secular reading of the book as pseudo-religious, political autobiography taking place in a universe lacking spiritually transcendental dimension. (5) Science fiction critic John Clute has addressed New Sun several times. (6) Soon after New Sun's publication, Clute strongly endorsed Catholic reading of the text, saying Wolfe must be taken as attempting something analogous to Dante's supreme effort. (7) Clute went on to call it a feast and eucharist; layer after layer, without demonstrating why he thought so. (8) In different journal the same year, he was and more coming to think of [it] as highly charged political apologia for [Severian's] dubious (and maybe even blasphemous) assumption of the autarchy, and only secondarily 'confession.' (9) When Clute republished those essays he added material to identify the protagonist's mother, demonstrating method of reading, a pattern of associations, which he thought reflected the author's practices. (10) Notably, Clute did not retract his earlier opinion of the book as a eucharist. Wolfe rarely explains his own work, and although he discussed its religious possibilities in limited way in 1992 interview, (11) Wolfe has never mentioned Boethius, Dante, or any other medieval artist as influences. With fundamental questions unresolved, criticism of New Sun effectively ended decade ago. I will explain and demonstrate some medieval allegorical methods that open New Sun to coherent religious reading. After showing New Sun to be Catholic work, I will briefly consider implications for the much-needed further study of this long, subtle, and complex work. It is dual text, book with modern set of meanings when read by modern methods, and quite different set of meanings when read by an older method. Clute was correct not to choose between political secular narrative and religious testament, because discerning religious narrative in no way unmakes the secular meaning of the text. Textual duality exhibits literary technique, not genre, and both understandings of New Sun firmly reside within speculative fiction, which, if we include ancient epic under that designation, is the oldest genre of all. In the chapter Five Legs, the main character, Severian, indicates the duality of New Sun as work of secular fiction with deeper narrative. …

Claudia Bornholdt, Saintly Spouses: Chaste Marriage in Sacred and Secular Narrative from Medieval Germany (12th and 13th Centuries). (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 411.) Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012. Pp. xxvi, 239; 4 black-and-white figures. $59. ISBN: 978-0-86698-459-1.

Claudia Bornholdt, Saintly Spouses: Chaste Marriage in Sacred and Secular Narrative from Medieval Germany (12th and 13th Centuries). (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 411.) Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012. Pp. xxvi, 239; 4 black-and-white figures. $59. ISBN: 978-0-86698-459-1.

The Changed (and Changing) Face of Church History

Abstract: This article explores some of the ways church history has changed over the last two generations. Church history has become more global in its orientation, has re-emphasized important developments in time periods sometimes neglected, and has challenged the dominant narrative of secularization. The reformation period in particular has seen notable changes. The reformation is now seen to be less of a break with the previous medieval period and not simply an inevitable response to what was deemed a moribund or corrupt church. The vibrancy of late medieval spirituality and piety is now an area that students have to actively consider. While in the past the reformation was often told as the story of what a few great men accomplished, the number of personalities, the differences between many of these individuals, the geographic areas involved, and the time in which these issues developed have all dramatically altered our understanding of this historical period. The article discusses all of these areas and ends by exploring the challenge of teaching this historical period and of understanding the meaning of the reformation.

“Old faith is often modern heresy”: Re-enchanted orthodoxy in Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Charles Taylor’s recent revision of secularization narratives allows for a rereading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—two poems frequently construed as incompatible with Christian orthodoxy. Rather than recording a conflict between Sara Coleridge’s orthodoxy and the poet’s heterodoxy, “The Eolian Harp,” I claim, registers the tension between two Christianities, one secularized, the other fully enchanted. I then read the Rime not as morally and religiously unintelligible as others have, but rather as another expression of enchanted orthodoxy, one that affirms the participation of all things in the divine and that leaves room for many expressions of the numinous, not all of them benign.

Chinese paintings from Japanese collections

Exploring a high point in the cultural exchange between China and Japan, this volume presents forty masterpieces of the Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties that made their way to Japanese collectors and museums. These paintings are significant as mirrors of the two cultures. The book explores themes including the role of Japan in preserving a key parts of China's cultural and artistic heritage; the aspects of Japanese identity that derive from traditional Chinese culture; the use of Chinese paintings as models for key traditions of Japanese painting; and the use of Chinese paintings as status symbols in Japan. Filled with exquisite reproductions, the book discusses each painting in depth, including its religious or secular narrative and provenance in China and Japan. Published in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Forms of Religious Glocalization: Orthodox Christianity in the Longue Durée

This article advocates a “glocal turn” in the religion–globalization problematic. It proposes a model of multiple glocalizations in order to analyze the historically constituted relationship between world religions and local cultures. First, the conceptual evolution from globalization to glocalization is discussed with special reference to the study of the religion. Second, the necessity for adopting the perspective of the longue durée with regard to the study of Eastern Orthodox Christianity is explained. Third, an outline of four forms of religious glocalization is proposed. Each of these forms is presented both analytically as well as through examples from the history of Eastern Christianity (from the 8th to the 21st century). It is argued that this approach offers a model for analyzing the relation between religion, culture and society that does not succumb to the Western bias inherent in the conventional narrative of western modernization and secularization.

Islamist cyber-activism: contesting the message, redefining the public

Islamist groups are using social media as a counter-space to challenge the prevailing secular media narrative in Tunisia and redefine the public sphere. Since the 2011 uprising, these groups have brought Islam into the public and redefined a space previously circumscribed under the secular state project of the former regime. While Islamists have increased their activism, the secular message remains dominant. This discursive marginalisation leaves many groups seen, but not heard, in the media. Drawing on the theories of Henri Lefebvre on space and contentious politics, I demonstrate how perceptions of media exclusion give rise to Islamist online activism. Semi-structured interviews with Islamist and Salafist activists and media professionals inform the analysis. The Salafist Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia movement serves as a case study to unpack the role cyber-activism plays in giving voice to the resistance and redefining the public. This case study examines how the Salafist current uses the Internet to challenge the narrative and mobilise on the ground. It goes even further to access how the ideology itself serves these ends. This article also finds that Islamist activists' online contestation depends on the extent to which their ideology accepts, tolerates and navigates Tunisia's ever present secular political system. Contention is greatest where the disjuncture between public engagement and discursive marginalisation is strongest.

This Battlefield Called My Body: Warring over the Muslim Female

This communication centers on the argument that there is an ideological tug-of-war over the Muslim female body. The author discusses how religious and secular patriarchies, as well as feminism all make claims to the bodies of Muslim women and purport to know what is best for her. With particular focus on the headscarf and using comparisons with how non-Muslim women’s bodies are fought over, the author argues that there is a common thread connecting the warring sides as they each employ patriarchal and imperialist views of the Muslim woman that attempt to consume her agency. As the author examines the personal agency and veiling motives of Muslim woman, she counters the idea of Muslim women as passive recipients of mainstream religious and secular narratives imposed upon them by sharing different ways in which they self-author their own narratives in a post-9/11 USA.

Form & Faith in Victorian Poetry & Religion. By Kirstie Blair. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. vi + 258 pp. $110.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Form & Faith in Poetry & Religion . By Kirstie Blair . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2012. vi + 258 pp. $110.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesEarly in Form & Faith in Poetry & Religion , Kirstie Blair asserts, Victorian poets and their readers shared a vocabulary relating to contemporary religious debates that we have largely lost. And one of the keywords in this vocabulary was 'form' (5). Throughout the rest of her book, Blair creates a rich context for the importance of within Christianity and demonstrates how recognizing its importance enables readers to gain a deeper understanding of the Christian ideas of poets varied the Brownings, Tennyson, Rossetti, and Hopkins. With her exploration of Christianity, Blair is one of a growing number of scholars who have begun to reconsider the secularization narrative by focusing on the importance of faith rather than the prevalence of doubt. Following in the tradition of works such Timothy Larsen's Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (2006), Emma Mason and Mark Knight's Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (2006), F. E. Gray's Christian and Lyric Tradition in Women's Poetry (2010), and Charles LaPorte's Poets and the Changing Bible (2011), Form & Faith asks its readers to consider the complexities of faith within the period and to recognize various ways Christianity was represented through forms in architecture, liturgy, and poetry.As she conducts her study, Blair employs the methodology of strategic formalism: a term coined by Caroline Levine in which detailed close reading [is combined] with the analysis of broader historical relations (9). Blair begins by immersing the reader in historical well literary context she devotes the first chapter to the Tractarians. Using examples from Tractarian poetry and prose that reveal various controversies regarding forms of worship, Blair effectively demonstrates that the Tractarians' concern for reviving more formal aspects of worship became a touchstone for all Christians, for Victorian religious allegiances began to be read in terms of an individual's support for or condemnation of form (22). In the next two chapters, she strengthens this thesis by exploring reflections on church architecture and liturgy that reveal how ideas about the value of circulate within these discourses Christians question which forms are most appropriate for bringing individuals closer to God. Moving fluidly among these examples, Blair demonstrates that the Tractarian view of as a container for feeling, a safeguard or barrier, whose aim was to regulate emotion and to calm it (8) was influential throughout the era writers from various perspectives repeatedly wrestled with it.After providing this context, Blair explores how poets from different Christian traditions respond to these Tractarian ideas: the Brownings representing the dissenters, Tennyson representing the Broad Church, and Rossetti and Hopkins representing the Anglo-Catholics/Catholics. Her chapter on the Brownings is the most successful. While Blair focuses primarily on Christmas-Eve and Aurora Leigh to demonstrate the connection between the Brownings' dissenting views of Christianity and their tendency to emphasize forms dynamic, potentially unstable, on the verge of splitting open (123), she places her close reading of these poems within the context of letters and other poems that not only illustrates how embedded the Brownings were within these religious discussions but also reveals how interpretations of other poems like The Bishop Orders His Tomb become much richer within this context. …

Re-viewing Survivors (BBC, 1975–77): Gender, Genre, and National Anxiety

Apocalyptic narratives and concepts have traditionally been associated with religious eschatologies, but secular narratives that revolve around cataclysmic disaster or one sort of another have become increasingly prevalent in popular culture. Commonly regarded as falling under the rubric of the science fiction genre, the secular 'apocalyptic' concerns itself with the lead up to a potentially devastating disaster. However, it is the 'post-apocalyptic' that is of most concern in this article: a narrative variant in science fiction that typically follows the struggles of a single protagonist or band of random characters as they attempt to adjust to an uncertain future in a world transformed by a cataclysmic event. While academic interest in this sub-genre has grown over recent years, there has been a substantial emphasis on films and novels. It is my contention that the post-apocalyptic has long provided a fictional narrative setting for drama series, such that it constitutes a recognisable television sub-genre, worthy of study in its own right - a research project that I am currently undertaking. The two-fold aim of this article is concerned with a) bringing the post-apocalyptic television series to the fore in this field of study and b) signalling the need for a more detailed and nuanced account of the impact of feminism upon this sub-genre. In order to do this I have chosen to focus upon the 1970s, BBC series 'Survivors' (BBC 1, 1975-77) as a case study programme.

De erfenis van Wickham - Naar een nieuwe fase in het secularisatieonderzoek

How has historical research on secularization evolved over the past half century? Focusing on British contributions, this article distinguishes three phases: (1) approval of ‘secularization’ as a useful analytical concept, (2) criticism of the secularization paradigm on empirical and methodological grounds, and (3) historicization of secularization as a mid-twentieth-century master narrative. Because all three phases focus on the production of secularization narratives, this article advocates a fourth research phase, focused on the consumption or circulation of secularization narratives, especially outside the academic realm. With reference to the Sheffield Industrial Mission in the 1950s and 1960s, the article argues that secularization narratives not only have a referential dimension, but also a performative aspect. They not only explain the changing roles and functions of religion in modern societies, but also contribute to such changes, if only by providing frameworks through which people interpret their world. Accordingly, if historians want to explain why in the 1950s the Sheffield Industrial Mission called for radical transformation of ecclesiastical structures, or why in the 1960s staff members of the Mission disagreed on the course of action appropriate for communicating the gospel in a ‘secular’ environment, it is the use and impact of secularization narratives that has to be taken into account.

Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s. By Callum G. Brown. Studies in Modern British Religious History 29. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2012. xiv + 305 pp. $95.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Religion and Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since 1960s . By Callum G. Brown . Studies in Modern British Religious History 29. Woodbridge, U.K. : Boydell , 2012. xiv + 305 pp. $95.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesSociologists and historians have vigorously debated religious decline in West since 1960s, but until recently, most scholars have paid little attention to gendered dimensions of secularization. Religious decline for these scholars amounted to waning in beliefs and practices of men, with little consideration for women's religious experiences. Callum Brown, social historian of religion, stands out as one of most prominent proponents in gendering of secularization narratives and models. In first volume of his planned trilogy on religious decline, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800-2000 (New York: Routledge, 2001), Brown employed discourse analysis to make sense of secularization in modern British history. He made two controversial yet compelling claims in book: 1) secularization was not long, drawn-out process starting with Enlightenment or Industrial Revolution that gradually picked up steam in twentieth century; rather, it was an abrupt if not catastrophic event emerging in 1960s; 2) 1960s witnessed beginning of such marked decline in religious beliefs and practices because it was at this time that women began abandoning church in significant numbers due to sexual revolution and its undermining of traditional Christian constructs of femininity.Religion and Demographic Revolution constitutes second volume of Brown's trilogy. This book differs in some important ways from first volume: methodology is now demography; focus is not on one but four countries on both sides of Atlantic--Canada, Ireland, United Kingdom, and United States; and 1960s, subject of one chapter in first volume, receives Brown's full attention here. But basic argument has not really changed. If anything, what Brown is doing in this book is elaborating and expanding upon connection he made in first volume between women and secularization in 1960s.Brown points to three major cultural and social changes affecting Western societies in 1960s: 1) decline in Christianity's influence in West, particularly Europe and Canada; 2) demographic revolution in which severe drops in fertility and marriage rates revolutionized family structure; 3) the revolution in women's identities that ushered in a transformation in social construction of gender involving search for autonomy in sexual expression, education and economic life (1).Brown's thesis is that all three trends are interconnected. Secularization, in other words, is both demographic and gendered event. Demography and gender interact with religion in complex ways to determine degree of secularization in given context. Of four countries studied in this volume, mainland Britain and Canada represent highly secularized nations for Brown as measured in declining participation of women in churches as well as women increasingly rejecting religious identity. …

Forgiving Wordsworth: Revision, Religion, and Cockney Reconciliation in Leigh Hunt'sThe Feast of the Poets

AbstractThis paper investigates the role of Romantic forgiveness in the poetics of Leigh Hunt amid the often turbulent interaction between the first and second generations of British Romantics over politics, culture, and religion. While recent studies of the “Hunt Circle” or “Cockney Circle” by Jeffrey Cox, Charles Mahoney, and others have recovered the combative edge of Hunt's literary and political relationship with “apostate” poets such as William Wordsworth, this essay examines how the multifaceted poet and journalist sought to reintegrate Wordsworth into a broader reformed community in his revisions ofThe Feast of the Poets. Contrary to the exclusion of Romantic forgiveness in the secular critical models ofRene Wellek, M.H. Abrams, and Harold Bloom, the essay turns to Hunt'sAutobiographyto uncover, in an otherwise secular narrative, a model of Romantic forgiveness and reconciliation that derives from Hunt's religious thought. The reconciliatory revisions of Hunt's treatment of Wordsworth in the poetical‐critical pieceThe Feast of the Poetsexemplify this model of Romantic forgiveness. In moving from vitriolic attack in 1811 to redemptive praise in 1815, Hunt crafts a poetic space that retrieves the literary contributions of his political rival and grafts them into a re‐envisioned British culture focused on Cockney conviviality and cultural reconciliation.

The Problem of the Postsecular

What are we to do with the sacred? Jonathan Freedman recently posed this as “one of the great unanswered questions of contemporary literary criticism.” Readers of this special issue of American Literary History might frame the question differently, or dispute the largeness with which it looms, unyielding and intractable, at the horizon of our discipline. As early Americanists Justine Murison and Jordan Alexander Stein have noted, “the ‘religious turn’ in literary studies—taking place since the late 1990s but reimagined in more urgent terms following 9/11—has made a discipline-wide fashion of what had long been one of the most bread-and-butter concerns of our field” (1). Yet as Freedman voices it, the question of the sacred seems still to bewilder and hush, as though it were a daring, even destabilizing inquiry for literary scholarship to pursue. The sense that the “religious turn,” for those who do pursue it, marks the bold trespass of a tacit ban speaks to the enduring hold of the secularization narrative on American literary studies. The dominant narrative of secularization into which the academic study of literature in America fits its own emergence is a story of the West’s gradual but decisive emancipation from dependence on religious structures of organization, value, and meaning. In broadest outlines, the secularization story begins in the flowerings of intellection and creativity, within and against the structures of the Catholic Church, that have come to characterize the European Renaissance. The story continues in the Reformation, which upended the spiritual and political hegemony of Rome, and in the treaties that ended the so-called Wars of Religion by carving out separate domains of religious and political authority. Henceforward, the latter would be grounded in purportedly universal reason; the former, on Luther’s model, in inward, revelatory, and eventually discretionary forms of faith. This settlement lays the ground for democracy and

Progeny and Parody: Narcissus and Echo in Stevie Smith’s Poems

Probably to their credit, critics of Stevie Smith have not labored long in attempting to align her with a particular critical agenda. Rather, she's been most consistently read as liminal, resistant, ambivalent, and eccentric. (1) What makes her vexing for our curricula (to which courses does she properly belong?) has made her fascinating for Julie Sims Steward and Kristin Bluemel, who have fruitfully focused on the tensions, symmetries, and contradictions between her drawings and her poems; for James Najarian, Sheryl Stevenson, and William May, who have been sensitive readers of Smith's polyvocal intertextual innovations; and for Catherine Civello and Laura Severin, who have explored Smith's fiction and poems with a view to her engagement with popular culture and her representation of childhood as a means of subverting conventional gender concepts (particularly those concerned with domestic femininity). Approaching her from a poststructuralist perspective, many of her readers have noted some aspect of her gender- and genre-bending play with notions of subjectivity, identifying Smith as a prescient postmodernist and a challenger of patriarchy. While these may be persuasive arguments, it has nonetheless remained difficult to locate Smith within the galaxy of gender politics and feminism. Smith's most prolific critic, Romana Huk, observes, for instance, that Smith's work has been difficult to appropriate for feminist revisions of literary modernism because her critiques, parodies, and retellings of narratives often resolve themselves in less than clearly alternative terms, and even incorporate what appear to be traditionalist statements about women without employing what we recognize as irony. (Poetic 148) In the absence of classic irony, I propose to sharpen our understanding of Smith's feminism by attending to a classical motif to which she often figuratively returns in her poems: that of Narcissus and Echo. (2) Her work dwells on the metamorphosis both in the myth and of the myth, which has accumulated new and gendered meanings. And like Ovid's locus amoenus, Smith's scenes of narcissistic gazing are sites of disruption, familiar territory in which something dangerous is hiding. Indeed, the danger inheres in the well-worn assumptions that the myth has been made to serve, especially Christian and Freudian accounts of desire, worship, creation, childhood, and motherhood. Smith reveals that these psychoanalytic and religious frameworks, which seem utterly opposed, are both invested in the Narcissus narrative in similar ways: they preemptively erase Echo from the picture, they posit narcissism as a fundamentally feminine trait, and their concepts of childhood reproduce Narcissus's own infelicitous confusion of self and reflection. Against these shared contrivances of feminine and childish both Christian and secular narratives produce (even as they also disavow) a fragile fiction: the coherent adult male ego. It is not surprising that Smith scents both the instability and deep irony beneath these gendered constructions of adulthood, nor that some of her most withering critiques are aimed at dismantling them. Whether the child is cast as a narcissist in tidy contrast to a putatively selfless parent or is understood merely as a visible reflection of a parent's virtues, Smith explodes the self-serving fictions--demonizing and idealizing alike--into which adults write children. She undertakes this by mocking the poses of humility and subjection that disguise facile sexist fantasies of self-righteousness, and by reintroducing Echo into the Ovidian scene and teasing out her parodic potential. The children in Smith's poems collude with her various incarnations of Echo to subvert and ironize the pernicious repetitions of the Narcissus story in culture. Myth and worship In his 1914 essay On Narcissism: An Introduction, Freud postulates that while all infants pass through a phase of primary women tend to develop an intensification of the original narcissism, a phenomenon unfavorable to the development of a true object-choice (88). …

THE DISENCHANTMENT/RE-ENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD: AESTHETICS, SECULARIZATION, AND THE GODS OF GREECE FROM FRIEDRICH SCHILLER TO WALTER PATER

This article charts part of the literary genealogy of Max Weber's claim that modernity is defined by the ‘disenchantment of the world’. It clarifies the relationship between Weber's disenchantment diagnosis and the gods-in-exile theme as variously rendered by Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, and Walter Pater. It also sheds light on current debates about secularization, particularly on the extent to which the concepts of the ‘pagan’ and the ‘aesthetic’ tend by turns to enable and to destabilize secularization narratives.

Early American Religion in a Postsecular Age

A survey of the journalearly american literaturefrom the mid-1980s to today reveals a curious phenomenon: religion disappears from the tables of contents during the 1990s. Beginning in 2000, religion returns with measured consistency, culminating with a special issue devoted to “methods for the study of religion” in 2010 (Stein and Murison). This resurgence of interest in religion, not only as a topic of inquiry but also as an analytic category, coincides with the “religious turn” that for the past decade has shaped literary studies and the disciplines intersecting with it. In the wake of 9/11 and the political revival of the religious right, Americanists were surprised at the intense and exceptionally religious nature of the United States. Given the religious and political inflections of the war on terror to follow, the academic study of religion could not remain the “invisible domain” that it had been in American and literary studies throughout the 1990s (Franchot). The context demanded a critical response, particularly because the largely liberal and secular academy could not understand the visible fervor of the religious right at the turn of the twenty-first century. Across disparate fields and disciplines, scholars and critics have revisited religion as a serious topic of intellectual inquiry. Over the past decade, work on religion has focused on how literary forms mediate between the human and the divine, the role of a transcendent belief system in relation to political or social formations, and the conjunction between spirit and matter, the supernatural and the natural. In reflecting on such connections between the secular and the sacred, scholars also elicited a concomitant revision of the narrative of secularization that had long impeded the study of religion by defining modernity through religion's absence, irrelevance, and inevitable replacement by competing paradigms.

Cosmic American Studies

There is not only an existential poignancy but also an intellectual piquancy to the 1950 suicide note of F. O. Matthiessen, one of the founders of American studies: “I am depressed over world conditions. I am a Christian and a Socialist. I am against any order which interferes with that objective” (“F. O. Matthiessen”). Matthiessen attributed his fateful decision to a situation—the Cold War—in which it increasingly seemed difficult to assert credibly and pursue effectively a socialist agenda without being presumed or pressured to hold commitments to materialism, atheism, and secularism. The dominant narrative of American studies is that the Cold War gave the field its life—the ideological impetus and institutional infrastructure to produce and peddle a sophisticated version of American exceptionalism (Radway 47-49; Wise 308-12). But Matthiessen's tragic case suggests instead that the Cold War may have killed American studies, at least a possible version of it. Matthiessen's fatal dilemma, I want respectfully to suggest, might instruct us how to reconstruct the history and future of a field whose “bread-and-butter concerns” have always included religion (Stein and Murison 1; cf. Modern). Matthiessen's political credentials as a socialist were bona fide, and his intellectual inclinations were toward deep historicist analysis, but he couldn't commit to Marxism, despite his frank acknowledgment of its indispensable contribution not only to intellectual culture but also to his own thinking. Clearly, personal religious reasons played a role—“I am a Christian, not through upbringing but by conviction, and I find any materialism inadequate” (Matthiessen, “Education” 180). But I want to underscore Matthiessen's intellectual objections, which arose from the evidence of his historical inquiry into American literature and culture. That is to say, I want to distinguish between how his theological convictions may have prejudiced him against Marxism's secularist teleology and how his scholarly investigation of American literature and culture raised legitimate questions about Marxism's implicit secularization narrative. In reviews of the Marxist literary histories of his Americanist colleagues V. F. Calverton and Granville Hicks, Matthiessen complained of their inability to comprehend what he called “the main development of religious idealism from Edwards through the transcendental movement” and “the strain of affirmation of the ideal that runs from the seventeenth century to the twentieth” (Responsibilities187, 195). The secularist premises of Marxist analysis—at least in the crude form espoused by Calverton and Hicks—seemed to Matthiessen blunt instruments with which to accomplish deep understanding of the pronounced “religious idealism” of American literature and culture.

Danish State policy on the teaching of religion from 1900 to 2007

The author presents an analysis of the political decision making process regarding the teaching of religion in Denmark from 1900 until 2007. The author uses Norbert Elias’s concept of the survival unit as the analytical framework of the study. Instead of a classic secularization narrative in which the secular and religious spheres of society are differentiated into separate realms as the process of modernization unfolds, a different narrative emerges in which the State has used the teaching of religion as an instrument to further its vital interests, especially with regard to its international relations.