Confronting Political Religion with Divine Religion: Christian Strategies of Re-Evangelization in the 1930s

Abstract

Western Christianity is currently engaged in a debate on religious pluralism, postmodernity and re-evangelization. This paper argues that the contours of this debate were already visible between the two world wars when Nazism (the ‘new Mohammedism’ as some Christian observers termed it) tried to take over the place Christianity was vacating. The defeat of this ‘political religion’ does not mean the victory of Christianity.     

Tacking Between Black and White: Race Relations in Gilded Age Philadelphia

Despite the growing interest in archaeological studies of race there have been no investigations clearly negotiating race and/or racism in Philadelphia during the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. This reality is perplexing, given the prevalence of race and racism in the past and present. Though this article does not explicitly discuss recovered artifacts it does situate scientific racism at the University of Pennsylvania, White violence in response to Black male enfranchisement and the popularity of blackface minstrel shows as everyday practices used to facilitate racial hierarchies and, thus influence identities and relationships. Although these practices lack salient archaeological materiality the purpose of this article is to convey the bombardment of dehumanizing tactics endured by Black Philadelphians as measures to contextualize the unavoidable dynamics of racial and class oriented repression unto the archaeological record.     

From One City to Two: Christian Reimagining of Political Space

Abstract

The paper questions the basic assumption that the nation-state is one city, within which there is a division of goods and a division of labour, which follow certain well-worn binaries: civil society and state, sacred and secular, eternal and temporal, religion and politics, church and state. It explores some deficiencies of John Courtney Murray's conceptualization of the political space in this way, and turns to Augustine's tale of two cities for a more adequate conceptualization. The paper especially argues that the two cities are not two institutions but two performances, two practices of space and time.