Christianity and Political Engagement in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This paper focuses specifically on the impact of the Christian churches on the social, cultural and political contexts of South Africa. It considers the political role of the mainline Christian churches and their ecumenical bodies during the apartheid era. In post-apartheid South Africa, the social and political context has changed and the Christian churches relate to this new context in varied ways. The rapid growth and proliferation of Christian churches under forces of globalization to some extent undermines social cohesion and development. The traditional practice of the public gathering, or imbizo, is particularly threatened. This article therefore seeks to address the question of whether Christian institutions in a rapidly globalizing Africa are an asset or liability for promoting identity and belonging, social cohesion, and the development of social capital.     

Religious Cultural Hybridity in Chudosik (Ancestor Memorial Service/Ceremony) in Korean Protestantism

This article attempts to examine Chudosik in Korean Protestantism. The distinctive characteristics of Chudosik can be understood in terms of regarding religion as cultural practices. If so, Chudosik can be seen as a religious practice in everyday life of Korean Protestants. By conducting an ethnographic fieldwork in Seokkyo Korean Methodist church, I conceptualise five practical characteristics of Chudosik: indigenous, transformational, spiritual, pragmatic, and compounded. These characteristics show how the religious practices of Seokkyo congregation members keep both traditional socio‐cultural values and the features of Christian service in order to satisfy their demand, and how they transform their religious practices. In this sense, Chudosik represents the cultural hybridity of Korean Protestantism. It is also a spontaneous output of the Korean Protestants’ cultural habitus and the Korean context. Furthermore, in regard to Chudosik, it is also possible to say that Protestantism is re‐embodied onto Korean culture.     

“Let Me Come to Tell You”: Loide Shikongo,the King,and Poetic License in Colonial Ovamboland

In this paper, I explore cultural discourse, gender and the subjectivities of local people on the frontier of empire in mid‐20th century southern Africa. Using the example of Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, a prominent woman from Ondonga in northern Namibia (the colonial “Ovamboland”), and an epic poem on the deposed King Iipumbu yaShilongo that she performed in 1953, I discuss how gender was constituted and mediated. The narrative of a remarkable woman’s life and her poetry is told to understand how gender in relation to other forms of identity was constructed in different cultural discourses. I argue that both the Christian mission’s cultural discourse and the South African colonial administration’s efforts to masculinise the “native” political authority gendered Owambo elite women whose identities had previously included “gender” only as a rather contingent component. The example of Loide Shikongo, however, also shows that many Owambo continued to pursue heterogeneous, and sometimes ambiguous, strategies in their claims to Christian models of modernity.     

Fransis al-Marrash on Religion and Cultural Revival

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on questions of religiosity in the works of the Aleppine Christian scholar Fransis al-Marrash (1836–74), one of the leading figures of the Arab nahda (cultural revival). It presents the characteristics of al-Marrash’s concepts of true and false religion, and how these concepts relate to his theory of civilization. The article concludes that al-Marrash’s preoccupation with these concepts resulted in the formulation of contested modes of religiosity and a particular perception of reformed religion.     

Maltese ‘gallarija’: a gender and space perspective

In Malta, there are hundreds of balconies, especially in Valletta. However, the most fascinating ones are boxed-balconies known as ‘Gallarijia’ in Maltese. The Knights, an ultra religious Roman Catholic military Order who ruled Malta for over 260 years, adopted covered-balconies designed and used in Muslim countries; in the hope that it would ensure their segregated life style as well as; concealing their illicit sexual activities with Maltese women. The Grand Master de la Cassiere built the first covered-balcony in his palace in Valletta; soon it found affinity with the Maltese well-to-do families who called it their own. Although, cultural and technological transfers between Muslim and Christian worlds have always been a way of life in the Mediterranean region, successfully adopting an innovation from another culture requires suitable social, economic and cultural environment in the host country. The objective of this article is to explain how and why a Christian military order has successfully adopted a Muslim inspired design for their balconies. We suggest the key to understand this phenomenon and the paradox it poses is the status of women in Malta during the Knights' rule.     

God and the illegal alien: United States immigration law and a theology of politics

This essay considers the marks of authentic Christian prophecy in Fra Anton Montesino's 1511 sermon in Hispaniola, in its political and cultural context, arguing that these marks are witness, courage, discernment and a concrete, contextual focus. It then reflects on the ways in which these marks of authentic prophecy might be displayed in our own very different context, drawing a characterization of that context from Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. It concludes with reflections on the foundation of prophecy in prayer and hope, and with critical discussion of Luke Bretherton's use of the motif of “exile in Babylon” (Jeremiah 29) as a Biblical image for Christian prophetic presence in liberal, secular societies.     

Policing intercultural encounters: adventures in Beijing

This article reflects on the notion that China is viewed in the West as a site of absolute cultural Otherness, and contributes to debates around the manner in which Euro-Chinese intercultural interaction is imagined in European thought. Adopting a perspective inflected by Foucault's representation of disciplinary power, and by critical work pursued in the field of Contact-Studies, it scrutinises European cultural artefacts that map Beijingese space, and the adventures in that space of the European subject. These artefacts, which deal with different Beijings, are Victor Segalen's Rene´ Leys; Pierre-Jean Remy's Le Sac du Palais d'E´te´; and Christian Garcin's Le Vol du pigeon voyageur. The essay shows that the novels defy our expectation that variant ‘distillations’ of China—Imperial, Republican, post-Maoist—might invite different representations. And it concludes that the novels examined evince a European desire not to represent Beijing, and China, as a zone of transcultural contact.     

The Consorts of King Wu and King Wen in the Bronze Inscriptions of Early Chou

Abstract

Daodejing is an essential text in Chinese culture. The number of its English translations exceeds a total of 112 editions. The first one was produced by John Chalmers, who was a Scottish missionary from London Missionary Society stationed in Hong Kong and Canton for a long period of time. Chalmers's close missionary colleague, James Legge, who was subsequently the first Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford, produced another translation. This paper aims at revealing the socio-cultural and intellectual processes behind the making of these two translations. In so doing, it discusses the differences in the two texts and explores the reasons for their differences.

Christian missionaries in China were the agents for the cultural interactions between China and the West. Not only did they bring the Christian message to China, but they also introduced the Chinese ideas through their translations and writings to their Western audience. This should be a fruitful and important topic for serious scholarship in both the studies in Sinology and in the history of translation.     

Codrington,Keesing, and Central Melanesian mana: Two Historic Trajectories of Polynesian Cultural Dissemination

Much has been said about mana since Robert Henry Codrington's 1891 exegesis based mainly on ethnography from the Banks Islands in northern Vanuatu. In Polynesian contexts, mana has been regarded as a cultural common denominator, with comparatively minor differences within the vast Polynesian cultural area. In Melanesian scholarship, however, consistent with the general emphasis on cultural diversity within the region, it remains a matter of considerable debate whether there is much to gain from approaching mana with generalising ambitions. In his seminal contributions to the discussion, Roger Keesing insists that Codrington mistook mana for a noun and consequently derailed scholarship on Melanesian mana. But Codrington's work is mainly based in the language of the island of Mota, where Codrington spent several years during his almost three‐decade long tenure as a pioneer linguist and missionary with the Anglican Melanesian Mission. And in the Mota language, mana is nominalised. In this article, I argue that this is attributable to regular visits from the Polynesian outlier Tikopia in pre‐Christian times, intensified by the proclivity of the Maori‐speaking first leaders of the Melanesian Mission to identify concepts that were phonemically familiar in their search for adequate translations of theological notions related to spiritual agency. When the language of Mota was chosen as the lingua franca of the Melanesian Mission in the 1860s, the Banks Islands' version of mana, soon explicitly associated with the powers of the Christian God, was disseminated through large parts of the south and central Solomon Islands and northern Vanuatu – including Tikopia. This has provided the islands exposed to Anglicanism with relatively new notions of agency and efficacy and created some common cultural denominators.     

Cultural Materiality and Spiritual Alienation

Abstract

This article takes its point of departure in Phillip Blond’s Christian criticism of secular materialisms and the failure of modern thought to appreciate the true materiality of creation. He challenges secular thought and returns to a combination of Greek and Christian Trinitarian thought, in order to reach for a new ground for political theology. Blond’s Christian ontological claims are contested, but an aspect of them is brought into the context of cultural creation and related to questions of the spiritual dimension of cultural arte-facts in a secular setting. Against the background of Friedrich Nietzsche’s struggle with the difficulty of singling out a pure secular culture from the old and (in his view) stifling religious heritage in society and culture, this article suggests that a radical notion of human intentional (but finite) creation, analogous to Blond’s idea of God’s infinite creative intention, may be helpful for a construction of a materialistic critical theory about contingent spiritual obstacles to political change.     

Lactantius’s Power Struggle

Abstract

During the Diocletianic Persecution and at the dawn of Constantine’s rise to power, Lactantius penned Book V of the Divine Institutes, in which he offers a striking account of Church-state relations. For Lactantius, imperial power is at odds with the Christian “course of life.” To be a people of virtue, Christians must perform justice from below, under the rule of a secular state whose gaze is fixed on its self-preservation at all costs. Lactantius makes clear that if Christians collude with the power of the state, exercising power from above, justice becomes an impracticable virtue. Not only would Christianity’s transition to the imperial seat alter the material conditions which best form Christians in virtue, it would, in Lactantius’s view, cultivate lives of vice and alienation from God. This essay contends that in Book V of the Divine Institutes, Lactantius employs Christian reasoning to demonstrate how secular politics are antithetical to Christian discipleship.     

Strathern's Melanesian ‘dividual’ and the Christian ‘individual’: a Perspective from Vanua Lava,Vanuatu

What happens to people's concept of the person when their ‘dividuality’ engages with the Christian concept of the ‘individual’? According to Vanua Lava kastom, when people die they go to sere timiat, the place of the dead. But do they still go there when the person had been a Christian during their life time? Where is the Christian heaven and hell? Is there a separate Christian ‘soul’? Will the dead be eternally separated from each other and their ancestors? Can kastom and Christian concepts be reconciled? Depending on denomination and degree of conversion (devout, nominal, or ‘back‐slider’) people have found multiple answers that help them conceptualise their final resting place. Their answers are of relevance for theoretical debates in anthropology about dividuality, individuality and engagement with modernity.     

Reading Beside the Lines: Marginalia,W.E. Gladstone,and the International History of the Bulgarian Horrors

This article explores the marginalia found in the personal volumes of William Ewart Gladstone in the context of the Great Eastern Crisis (1875–8). Diverging from previous narratives, which have lionised Gladstone for his apparently prophetic support for the independence of Christian subjects within the Ottoman Empire, this article argues that Gladstone read and understood little about modern South-Eastern European history, Bulgaria, or the Bulgarians before the publication of his influential political pamphlet, The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. Gladstone's powerful interjection, based upon widespread, imagined categories of cultural understanding, directly influenced British foreign policy at a critical juncture with profound international consequences. Britain abandoned its traditional support of the Ottoman Empire - allowing Russia to wage a punitive war against its former ally - and instead supported the independence of the ‘Christian races’ of the Balkans along the budding principle of national self-determination. Gladstone's marginalia provide a unique linkage between studies of cultural languages of understanding, individual decision-making, the mechanisms of political power, and the construction of foreign policy. In certain cases, therefore, marginalia may help reveal the nexus between local histories of cultural production and major events in international history.     

‘Leger est aprendre mes fort est arendre’: wool,debt, and the dispersal of Pipewell Abbey (1280-1330)

The culturally syncretic character of medieval Southern Italy and Sicily was never so apparent as under Norman rule in the twelfth century. From the fusion of artistic styles in the Capella Palatina in Palermo to the organization of King Roger II’s Regno, the influence of Byzantine, Arab, Christian, Norman, and Lombard traditions is evident. This paper argues, however, that underlying these more obvious manifestations of cultural intersection was an enduring sense of ethnic identity. This self-conscious expression of identity is revealed through the articulation of ancestry and lineage in the eleventh- and twelfth-century charters of the aristocracy in the Principality of Salerno. The distinctions between conquerors and conquered, long considered irrelevant after decades of intermarriage, were remarkably durable throughout this period. Both Normans and Lombards employed genealogical memory as a strategy to enhance their status in the Principality: the Normans aimed to legitimize their present rule; the Lombards wished to recall their past dominance in the region. This paper suggests that the evidence for ancestral memory reveals both differences in self-perception and contemporary attitudes towards political change among the various religious and ethnic groups in the medieval Mezzogiorno. While the intersection of cultures in the South is unmistakable, this paper modifies previous theories to recognize the resistance to cultural absorption by both the new settlers and the indigenous peoples.     

Resistance,Charity, and Rebirth in Roberto Rossellini's Rome,Open City

Abstract

With its use of contemporary events, location shots, and a plot that mixes comedy, tragedy, and passion play, Roberto Rossellini's 1945 film Rome, Open City founded the movement known as “Italian Neo-Realism.” The film vividly presents the Christian teaching on the relation between religion and politics. Rossellini asserts that a Christian Europe can be reconstructed only on a foundation of charity rather than hate, vengeance, or even justified punishment for Nazi crimes. It is not on the basis of tales of resistance that Italians and Europeans can be reborn, Rossellini argues, but on the basis of the Christian command to “love your enemies.” European rebirth means the installation of a moral order that makes parenthood feasible and respectable. By reflecting on Rossellini's masterpiece, I examine the triumph and the tragedy of the Christian Democratic Europe that Rome, Open City foretold and helped to found.     

Richard Tawney: Moral Theology and the Social Order

Abstract

After noting the impressive scope of Tawney's contribution as an economic historian, labour theoretician and Christian moralist, attention is given to his three classic socialist texts: The Acquisitive Society, Equality, and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Tawney's critique of capitalism is rooted in his Christian convictions concerning the worth of each human person and also informed by his historical analysis of the evolution of capitalist social relations. His telling exposure of the transitory historical nature of so much of capitalism's vaunted absolutes has lent an authority to his contribution. Wealth, property and the mechanisms of the market are not sacrosanct, and must be subject to measures that will ensure more equitable social objectives. As a social theorist he straddled the Christian and secular humanism that formed the lifeblood of the labour movement, and this remains relevant to our more pluralist society, where agreement upon basic moral norms can help construct a social consensus that will promote a greater justice and human flourishing.     

Gendered Religions

Brooten, Bernadette Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism Cooper, Kate The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity Sawyer, Deborah F. Women and Religion in the First Christian Centuries     

The Carnival of Custom: Land Dives,Millenarian Parades and Other Spectacular Ritualizations in Vanuatu

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the aestheticization and commoditization of culture in specific grand rituals held in Vanuatu. Through political, commercial and juridical processes, the traditional referent of these neo‐ritualizations has been replaced by a celebration of the kastom theme itself; the official value of a regional, national, and global cultural heritage. The examination of two iconic rituals, the Nagol land dive on Pentecost island and the 15th February annual commemoration of John Frum on Tanna island, reveals them as similarly invoking a Christian and colonially inspired reverence in their idealization of an ancestral past. Nevertheless, the increasing monetarization of village communities through the global promotion of kastom spectacles by media and for touristic purposes is ever more frequently considered locally as a factor of inequality or division.     

Athanasian Paganisation of Arius: Unprecedented Application of the Deification Theme

Athanasian contribution to the development of the deification theme and its subsequent influence on Christian spirituality remains significant. Athanasius certainly applied deification in his fight with Arianism. A generally acknowledged application of deification in Athanasius in an anti‐Arian context also finds additional support in a seemingly unexpected place—Athanasian criticism of pagan divinization, mostly concentrated in Against the Pagans. Relying on a traditional Christian apologetic approach for criticism of pagan divinization, Athanasius contextualizes the theology of Arius as the paganization of Christianity as well as proposes necessary prerequisites for Christian understanding of deification. This is an unprecedented application of deification in Christian theology where one Christian author portrays the teaching of another Christian author as pagan divinization.