Huguenot Belief and Practice in Eighteenth‐Century Paris

Protestantism was illegal in eighteenth‐century France, yet many French Reformed Protestants, better known as Huguenots, managed to maintain their religion and identity until the French Revolution granted religious freedom. Several thousand of them lived in Paris, but remained a tiny minority in a very Catholic city. Given this context, and little access to pastors or collective worship, what kind of Protestantism did they observe? This article suggests that, like other minority groups, their religious practice and thinking were influenced both by the Catholic environment in which they lived and by the culture of the late eighteenth‐century city. By 1789 they had moved away from certain Calvinist traditions, and some of them had adopted a surprising ecumenism.     

Hume,Bishop Butler,and the Revival of Ritual in Anglophone Protestantism

A sweeping reassessment of the role of ritual, ceremony, and aesthetics took place in anglophone Protestantism between the late eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries. While the nineteenth‐century developments themselves have been extensively studied, little scholarly attention has been paid to the importance of the earlier emergence of philosophical language capable of explaining and justifying, in a Protestant context, the ritual and aesthetic dimensions of religious practice. I argue that this language, paradoxically, grew out of a symbiosis of sceptical modernity, traditional religious apologetics, and the religious “enthusiasm” of the early eighteenth century. I approach the topic through the interconnected oeuvres (and careers) of David Hume and Joseph Butler, presenting the first synoptic account of their ideas about the psychological underpinnings of religious worship, and the use made of their ideas by later generations of anglophone Protestants. As mainstream Anglicans, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians confronted the challenges presented by Methodism and Evangelicalism, they found support in a synthesis of Butler's and Hume's ideas. Eventually, the beneficial role of ritual and aesthetics in religious worship came to be widely accepted throughout the anglophone Protestant world.     

Lay Defender of Catholicism: Dr. Edward Swarbreck Hall in Tasmania 1833–1881

Tensions between Protestants and Catholics persisted throughout nineteenth‐century Australia. Historians have tended to examine the part played by the clergy, pressure groups or newspapers in sectarian disputes in the main colonies of New South Wales and Victoria. This article contributes to an understanding of anti‐Catholicism in the Australian colonies by focusing on the actions and writings of one Catholic layman, Dr Edward Swarbreck Hall, in mid nineteenth‐century Tasmania. To minimise religious hostility, Hall was tolerant towards Protestants, loyal to the British Crown, and worked co‐operatively with other creeds in helping the poor. This approach made Catholicism more acceptable to Protestant society until the late 1860s. Thereafter religious divisions became more pronounced with the appointment of Irish Bishop Daniel Murphy, who adopted the authoritarian policies of the papacy and asserted the rights of Catholics. Feeling threatened by Catholic assertion and antagonised by Catholic doctrinal beliefs, Evangelical Protestants expressed anti‐Catholic sentiments at public meetings and in newspapers. In showing how Hall defended Catholics when aspersions were cast on their clergymen, their character, or their religious practices, this article concludes that Catholics were not passive victims, but Hall's fierce polemical style worked against his desire for religious peace.     

Reading Anzac Religion and the Sacred: The Bible as a Central Text and Artefact of Australian Soldiers' Experience of the First World War*

This article demonstrates the resilience of religious traditions and practices among Australian soldiers, and the need for caution about presuming connections between the experience of modern war and secularisation. A core argument is that the Bible should be understood as a central text and cultural artefact of Australian soldiers' experience of the First World War. The pocket New Testament was the most widely possessed book among Australian soldiers, and probably the most read and valued. For many it offered profound religious, moral, and emotional consolation. For others it possessed talismanic qualities, conjured home associations, or became an “object of memory.” Communal reading practices made Testaments prominent in the aural experience of war, but such practices could also elicit antipathy towards religion. Taken together, these findings inform scholarship on the mentalités and material culture of Australian war experience, challenging the longstanding scholarly and popular myth of the secular Australian soldier. Additionally, the article breaks new ground in situating Australian experience within a substantial international scholarship on the crucial role of religion (both official and popular) among soldiers of all combatant nations. Partly due to its majority Protestant population, Australian soldiers' Bible possession and usage resembled that of Anglo-Saxon and German Protestants.     

Barack Obama's Political Theology: Pluralism,Deliberative Democracy,and the Christian Faith

Abstract

Obama won the 2008 election precisely because he crafted a political theology that enabled him to create a truly progressive Democratic Party religious and racial-ethnic minority platform that welcomed pro-choice and pro-life social-justice leaning Catholics and Evangelicals into a new coalition. His political theology was directly influenced by Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright and the black church civil rights tradition, white liberal Protestantism, his mother Ann Dunham's skepticism and free spirit, and Evangelical and Catholic leaders, advisors and opponents. Obama's best and most comprehensive statement on his political theology is his chapter on "Faith" in his New York Times No.1 best-selling autobiography The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006). Obama contends that religiously motivated people must learn the art of compromise, proportion, and how to find shared values. They must translate their religious concerns and vision for America into universal rather than religion-specific values, which must be subject to debate, amenable to reason, and applicable to people of all lifestyles and faiths or no faith at all. They should also be willing to sublimate their ultimate theological and religious convictions for the common collective good. Secular people likewise must adopt a similar approach towards religious people and activists.     

Tourism and sacred landscape in Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park,Nepal

Abstract

While tensions between the sacred and the profane in tourism have been of long standing interest to tourism scholars, there is a dearth of literature on the growing influence of tourism on local residents’ spirituality and religious practices in sacred landscapes. This paper examines how local residents’ interpretations of sacred landscapes are influenced by tourism development, and whether tourism plays a role in influencing and reproducing sacred landscape and place-based spiritual values. This exploratory study is based on four months of fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2015 in Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park in Nepal’s Khumbu Region. Results of the 33 interviews conducted with ethnic Sherpa community indicate the Sherpa consider their homeland as a beyul (sacred, hidden valley), and its landscapes (i.e. mountains, forests and lakes) as the abode of local deities. Tourism’s influence on local spiritual values is evident and reflected in changes in mountain deity worship, shift in human-environment relationship, and alterations in religious routines and practices. Although Sherpa still regard Khumbu as a sacred place and are actively involved in maintaining their spiritual values and cultural identity, the religious influence of beyul is slowly diminishing as reliance on tourism grows.     

Medicalising the Jewish Ritual Bath: Women,Health and Purity in the Late Ottoman Empire

Menstrual impurity is among the most important religious practices in Jewish lore. Examining two case studies of Judeo–Spanish Ottoman Jewry: discussions of the temperature of the ritual bath water; and purity, hygiene and the collective of the Jewish body, this article demonstrates that menstrual impurity in Ottoman Judaism underwent an intensive medicalisation process. This process reframed menstruation from a religious concern to one involving medicine, health and hygiene. This article offers a glimpse of how non-Western Jews dealt with European conceptions of medicalisation, actively debating them according to their Ottoman cultural surroundings. Moreover, it illuminates the mechanisms women used to negotiate their immersion and command their own bodies, emphasising their anxieties, demands and resistance.     

Unsettling “Inner City”: Liberal Protestantism and the Postwar Origins of a Keyword in Urban Studies

The term inner city first achieved consistent usage through the writings of liberal Protestants in the USA after World War II. Its genesis was the product of an era when a largely suburban mainline Protestantism was negotiating its relationship to American cities. Liberal Protestants’ missionary brand of urban renewal refocused attention away from the blight and structural obsolescence thought to be responsible for urban decay, and instead brought into focus the cultural pathologies they mapped onto black neighbourhoods. The term inner city arose in this context, providing a rhetorical and ideological tool for articulating the role of the church in the nationwide project of urban renewal. I argue that even as it arose in contexts aiming to entice mainline Protestantism back into the cities it had fled, the term accrued its meaning by generating symbolic and geographic distance between white liberal churches and the black communities they sought to help.     

Natural hazards and religion in New Orleans: Coping strategies and interpretations

Socially disadvantaged people are more vulnerable and exposed to the effects of extreme natural events and the social disasters which follow. This article presents the coping strategies and cultural creativity of the most vulnerable (non‐conformist African American religious/spiritual) communities in New Orleans today and in the aftermath of Katrina. Rituals and religious practices play an important role in resilience‐building and for relief and recovery from disasters. Case studies are presented to demonstrate how these devotions, and the community‐building and mutual support that take place as a result (as well as individual practices), have assisted practitioners in their struggle for survival during Katrina and the yearly hurricane season. The article also examines how natural hazards are perceived and reflected in religious explanations and expressions, as well as in spiritual arts, and how they lead to change and adaptations. Here, affected people are not regarded as ‘passive victims’ but as creative and active agents.     

Rehabilitating the Spirituality of Pre‐Islamic Arabia: On the Importance of the Kahin,the Jinn,and the Tribal Ancestral Cult

This article brings into focus the misunderstood and oft‐ignored pre‐Islamic spirituality of, primarily, the Hejaz and their religious leaders, the kahins, often uncharitably translated as soothsayers. A combination of factors has limited discussion of pre‐Islamic religion, including the persistent rejection by Muslims of pre‐Islamic history as a time of ignorance (jahiliyyah) and a Judaeo‐Christian bias in Western scholarship. From the perspectives of anthropology and comparative religion, certain conclusions about pre‐Islamic spirituality can be derived. Most important among these is that the pre‐Islamic Arabs engaged in clearly religious practices revolving around the importance of the tribe and its members, living and dead. This article will hopefully spark a renewed interest in the study of the spirituality and religion of the pre‐Islamic Arabs.     

Faith in China: religious belief and national narratives amongst young,urban Chinese Protestants

This paper investigates the national narratives of young, urban Protestants in contemporary China. Based on 100 interviews conducted in Beijing and Shenzhen, it argues that in constructing their national narratives, Chinese Protestants display critical selectivity in adopting the values of official party‐state nationalism. They display affection towards China, a sense of responsibility for improving the country and a concern for society's morality, all of which echo official nationalist priorities. However, they are critical of China's political arrangements, dispute the primacy of economic growth and are less hawkish on international and territorial issues. They see no contradiction between their Protestant and Chinese identities, but generally prioritise the former. This selectivity is explained by the fact that Protestantism generally attracts those less satisfied by the social and political status quo, and because of, in Carlson's terms, the ‘boundary‐spanning’ nature of the Protestant identity and morality to which these converts then subscribe.     

The Godless Congress of 1938: Christian Fears About Communism in Great Britain*

In September 1938, the World Union of Freethinkers held a conference in London. Fascistant Protestants and many Catholic intellectuals and clerics called the event the “Godless Congress,” and they viewed it as a part of a communist attack on Christianity in Britain and wanted it to be banned. Mainstream Protestants were also provoked by the conference, but most believed that the congress provided Christianity with an opportunity to re‐assert itself. These varied but substantial reactions show that many Christians were ready and able to defend publicly their Christian faith against what they saw as atheistic communism.     

THE ENDURING PUBLIC STRUGGLE TO CONSTRUCT,CONTROL, AND CHALLENGE HISTORICAL MEMORIES

Sumit Guha's History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 develops important arguments about the public significance of historical knowledge and the essential role of historians in public life. All societies need collective memories to sustain their cultural identities, as Guha shows in this wide‐ranging account of how such memories have been constructed in South Asian societies since the thirteenth century. The knowledge of historical experts is increasingly challenged or derided by contemporary social groups and political activists, who circulate their own historical narratives via new networks of communication. Political uses of historical knowledge are not new, however, as Guha shows in detailed accounts of how Hindu, Muslim, and British imperial regimes all used historical narratives to justify their own power. He also explains how other social groups challenged official historical narratives with their own popular stories about the past. This book contributes to recent work in global intellectual history by comparing similarities in the historical practices of premodern Europe and South Asia, discussing the cross‐cultural exchanges in colonial‐era institutions, and describing postcolonial challenges to European ideas. Guha thus offers an insightful analysis of how social and political forces influence and respond to the cloistered institutions that produce historical knowledge and construct collective memories. He concludes that evidence‐based historical narratives must be continually defended amid current public assaults on historical knowledge in both South Asia and the United States. More generally, Guha's book suggests the need for ongoing analysis of how public events, social conflicts, and new communication systems can reshape or discredit the work of historical experts.     

Access culture: Web 2.0 and cultural participation

This article applies aspects of Jürgen Habermas, Manuel Castells and Lawrence Lessig’s theories to demonstrate how digital communication and new media platforms enhance cultural participation as well as how cultural policy affects the cultural behaviour of users who produce and are consumers in a digital convergence culture. The digital platforms and new media used in the analysis include an open source animated short film, Elephants Dream, the social networking sites YouTube and MySpace, and the BBC’s Creative Archive. The aim of this article is to study how cultural policy makers can learn from these examples and how they can make use of the participatory, self‐publishing characteristics of Web 2.0 in order to create accessible digital cultural public spheres.     

The I.H.S. Monogram as a Symbol of Catholic Resistance in Seventeenth-Century Ireland

It has been suggested that the presence of religious images and scenes in secular buildings of sixteenth-century date can be viewed as an expression of resistance by the native Irish to English colonial activity in the aftermath of the Munster Plantation (J. A. Delle, 1999, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 3: 11–35). Such images, however, may merely represent a continuation into the early modern period of a Medieval tradition of adorning secular houses with devotional images. If a religious symbol of native Catholic resistance to English colonization and Protestantism in Munster is to be sought then perhaps a more appropriate image would be the I.H.S. monogram—a symbol associated with the Counter Reformation and the Jesuits. The paper presents an example of the monogram located within a tower house at Gortnetubbrid in County Limerick, Ireland.     

Between the devil and the deep blue sea: nationality,power and symbolic trade‐offs among evangelical Protestants in contemporary Northern Ireland1

ABSTRACT. National identity is a symbolically complex configuration, with shifts of emphasis and reprioritisations of content negotiated in contexts of power. This paper shows how they occur in one post‐conflict situation – Northern Ireland – among some of the most extreme of national actors – evangelical Protestants. In‐depth interviews reveal quite radical shifts in the content of their British identity and in their understanding of and relation to the Irish state, with implications for their future politics. The implications for understanding ethno‐religious nationalism, nationality shifts and the future of Northern Ireland are drawn out.     

The Reception of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement in Three Yorkshire Parishes, 1559–72

Abstract

This article explores how the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 was experienced at parish level, up to the year 1572. Churchwardens' accounts for the Yorkshire parishes of Masham, Sheffield and St Martin's, Coney Street, York, are used alongside ecclesiastical court records and other sources to build a picture of local responses to the settlement. The factors found to be significant include the degree to which the reforms demanded a change in previous community practices, and the pace and sequence with which sacred material objects were removed and installed. The latter are viewed as concrete aspects of religiosity which gave meaning to more abstract doctrines for both clergy and laity. The way in which authority was realised in the parishes, through coercion, collaboration, negotiation or conversion is also explored. Most significantly, the ability of lay parishioners to negotiate among themselves, and with external agents of authority during the process, determined the resulting style of local Protestantism.     

Consumption,Environmental Sustainability and Human Geography in Australia: a Missing Research Agenda?

‘Consumption’ is a central concept in the global environmental sustainability agenda. However, one important argument from Agenda 21 — that all social actors must now practise ‘sustainable consumption’— has been publicly and politically marginalised in high‐income countries such as Australia. Geographers potentially have a role in bringing consumption back onto the agenda by constructing a critical geography of consumption. Such research can help understand how the contextual use of natural resources is perceived and practised, and how consumption helps to shape contemporary social relations. This body of knowledge is vital for building sustainable development into everyday lives. Yet a focus on urban consumption perceptions and practices appears somewhat lacking in Australian geography. Ways forward can be drawn from international geography, such as in the United Kingdom where a substantial body of work has drawn a complex picture of contemporary consumption and environmental understanding. It has also challenged prevailing ‘ecological modernisation’ policy approaches, which ignore consumption's cultural facets. In sum, considering consumption in Australia can offer insights into cultural practices expressed through consumption; can challenge and add to European geographical literatures, and can also contribute to sustainability debates by offering alternatives to currently ineffective policy discourses.     

Tracking local dwelling changes in the Chittagong Hills: perspectives on vernacular architecture

Historically, geographers, anthropologists and colonial British administrators (1860–1947) frequently mentioned two ethno-geographical categories – khoungtha and toungtha – when referring to the tribal groups in the Chittagong Hills of Bangladesh. Some of these early works considered the livelihood patterns of these groups and the nature of their social and economic interactions. However, a discussion of the changes to their vernacular built environment has escaped any serious investigation. Using empirical findings, this article examines the changes to architectural practices of lowland and highland groups in the socially and ethnically complex region of the Chittagong Hills. Narrowing the discussion to the toungtha Mru ethnic group, this article also examines religious patterns, building techniques and spatial changes in a remotely placed, relatively inaccessible part of the hills where the built environment is still a strong cultural priority.