Miroslav Volf on Living One’s Faith

Abstract

In this essay the author reflects on Miroslav Volf’s discussion, in A Public Faith, of Christianity as properly a prophetic religion. The author focuses especially on the two main malfunctions that Volf cites as accounting for the fact that the faith of individual Christians is often not prophetic, namely, what he calls “idleness of faith” and what he calls “coerciveness of faith.”     

Prophetic Activism in an Age of Empire

Abstract

The paper explores the emergence of prophetic activism as a counter-narrative to the dominance of conservative Christianity in national politics. It is based on the premise that the use of religion in American politics remains highly contested. While portions of American Christianity support an imperial project, alternative visions of a more humane future are simultaneously gaining strength. These new forms of prophetic activism are emerging in two distinct yet overlapping social locations: the borderlands and among cosmopolitans. Given the marginality of the borderlands context, prophetic activism has become firmly grounded in liberative religious paradigms that empower people to identify the commonalities between contemporary forms of exploitation and those against which the ancient biblical prophets once raged. An embrace of these same liberative paradigms also enable cosmopolitans to enter into solidarity with the struggles of others for justice.     

Book Reviews

Letters from the Dust Bowl by Caroline Henderson Alvin O. Turner (Ed.), 2001 Norman, OK, University of Oklahoma Press 320 pp., $34.90 hardback ISBN 0-8061-33-3 hardback The American ‘Dust Bowl’ landscape of the 1930s has been etched into the global imagination through powerful narratives: Farm Security Administration photography (1935-43), Per Loretz's film, The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, historians such as Donald Worster (1979) have constructed their own narratives of this time and place. Caroline Henderson's Letters from the Dust Bowl, edited by Alvin O. Turner, provides a counterpoint, in the form of a first-hand account and a woman's voice, to the news stories, government propaganda, and historians' analyses that construct our understanding of the Dust Bowl. Henderson's letters reveal not only the ‘real’ experience of living in that place during a particularly difficult time, but also the ‘before’ and ‘after’–what led these individuals to the Great Plains and what became of them afterward. Educated at Mt Holyoke, Caroline Henderson ventured out onto the panhandle of Oklahoma to homestead in 1907 as a single woman, who ‘hungered and thirsted for something away from it all and for the out-of-doors’ (p. 33). She met her future husband Will when she hired a crew to dig a well on her land. Letters from the Dust Bowl captures Caroline's transformation from an idealistic young woman to a woman ‘worn by years of struggle with land and life’. Caroline's ‘letters’ are an amalgamation of letters to family and friends, and letters and essays written for publications such as the Atlantic Monthly. Letters begins with Henderson's optimism and delight in both life and landscape. Caroline's early writings capture the excitement of homesteading, of marriage, of being a young mother. Her writings eventually shift from purely personal letters to family and friends to being a source of additional income. Drought and failed crops led Caroline to begin writing for publication in 1913; her first published article was on her first years homesteading. She became a regular contributor to Ladies' World magazine, as their ‘Homestead Lady’, until its demise in 1918.     

Samson: The Only Nazarite in the Hebrew Bible and His Women!

Abstract

Since the publication of Eißfeldt's study in 1935, it has been doubted by some scholars that a Hebrew god named Moloch or Molekh has ever existed. Recently, however, two studies have been published, one by George Heider (1985) and the other by John Day (1989), in which the existence of the god Molekh is defended once again. Especially Day's arguments seem convincing. Nevertheless, considering the Carthaginian archaeological evidence (in 1991 gathered by Shelby Brown), and also considering the ideological bias of the biblical passages concerned, the existence of a separate god of human sacrifice in Israel remains uncertain. By a new analysis of the biblical passages, arguments are given that the god Molekh is an invention from the Persian period in an attempt to conceal that Judahite worship of YHWH in the eighth and seventh century B.C.E. also included child sacrifice.     

Competing Political Theologies: Intra-Muslim Polemics on the Limits of Prophetic Intercession

Abstract

This essay revolves around an analysis of a polemical exchange between two highly prominent Indian Muslim thinkers in Delhi, Shah Isma'il Shahid (d. 1831) and Fazl-i Haqq Khayrabadi (d. 1862), over the limits of the capacity of Prophet Muhammad to intercede (shafa'at) on behalf of sinners on the day of judgment. While focusing on this polemical moment, it explores the question of how this ostensibly theological debate on the limits of prophetic intercession connected to a much broader political debate surrounding the sociology of sovereignty under conditions of political change and transition. It argues that the opposing arguments on the limits of prophetic authority made centrally visible in this debate were intimately connected to larger questions surrounding the normative status of social hierarchies, distinctions and monarchical modes of being in early nineteenth-century India.     

Radical (Evangelical) Democracy: The Dreams and Nightmares of Martin Luther King,Jr. and Antonio Negri

Abstract

This essay critically examines the theories of radical democracy offered by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision of the beloved community and Antonio Negri's vision of the multitude. The radical democratic visions of King and Negri continue to critically inform progressive reflections on democratic theory and propel new dreams of democracy. Despite their similarities, the differences between Negri and King are substantial. I argue that Negri's dream of the multitude and King's dream of beloved community have been shaped by different conceptions of radical democracy. While Negri works out of a tradition of Italian Marxism, King works within a critical tradition of prophetic evangelicalism. Thus, the political task, according to King, is to translate Jesus' teaching of the Kingdom of God into a beloved community on earth. King's creative negotiation of transcendence and history provides the requisite theological and political resources to develop a truly transcendent and immanent vision of a radical democratic society that is attentive to the demands and dignity of "all God's children."     

“A Different Kind of Theo-Politics: Abraham Joshua Heschel,the Prophets and the Civil Rights Movement”

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the sharp differences in the understanding of the Hebrew prophets by theologians, Jewish and Protestant, in Germany and the United States, with a particular focus on their invocation of prophetic teachings in relation to social and political movements. The sharp denigrations of the prophets – described as ecstatics (Gunkel) or rural naifs (Troeltsch) rendered the prophets useless as figures of inspiration in Germany in relation to racism, colonialism, and WWI. By contrast, the prophets have played a crucial role in American civil thought, especially in the Civil Rights Movement. The distinctive and influential interpretation of prophetic consciousness developed by the German-American Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel is examined for its parallels with the prophetic theology of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the political ramifications of Heschel's link between prophetic revelation and political leadership.     

Canaan Banana,Churches and the Land Issue: Revisiting Theology of Zimbabwe’s Vilified Prophet

ABSTRACT

This study seeks to revisit and evaluate the “combat theology” developed by Canaan Banana, a contemporary theologian, Methodist minister and the first president of Zimbabwe, notably with regard to the issue of land dispossession. It does so primarily against the backdrop of the historical analysis of the ways in which power operated at the intersection of religion and politics during the first three decades after Zimbabwe’s attainment of political independence (1980). The article interrogates several facets of Banana’s liberationist view of justice with regard to the land issue, including (a) speaking truth to political power, regardless of consequences; (b) bearing a prophetic witness vis-à-vis the church’s own complicity in wrongdoing; as well as (c) making a distinction between the selective acts of “liberating violence” and the systemic violence inherent in unjust socio-political structures.     

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.     

Red Tory and Blue Labour: More Theology Needed

Abstract

Phillip Blond's Red Tory project has been widely credited with influencing the policies of the Conservative Party under David Cameron, and especially Cameron's "Big Society" thinking. Maurice Glasman has, meanwhile, been a key voice in rethinking Labour Party policy in the post-Blair/Brown years—the so-called Blue Labour programme. Both make space for religion, and Christianity in particular, within the core narratives of their projects and both have sought to build alliances with church bodies. The two projects are united in their critique of liberal assumptions, and this leads to significant congruences between them. Yet the place of Christianity and religion in their thinking is surprisingly different, reflecting the political genealogy of their projects in Burkean Toryism on Blond's part and Alinskian Community Organizing on Glasman's. Nevertheless, the attacks which both have suffered at the hands of social and economic liberals suggest that their ideas have traction. Both, however, are deficient in that their focus on communities as sources of virtue refuses to acknowledge that Enlightenment liberalism has any virtues to its credit. This is fundamentally a theological, rather than just a political, error, since it fails to capture the essential both/and embedded in Christian orthodoxy and the importance of corrective perspectives in Christian practice this side of the eschaton.     

Transnational ways of seeing: sexual and national belonging in Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I argue that transnational ways of seeing help us apprehend the histories of globalization, immigration and imperialism that frame and make legible cultural productions. Focusing on John Cameron Mitchell's 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which has been almost universally received as being about transsexuality, this essay argues that the film is equally about transnationality and specifically about how queer identifications and identities are produced in relation to the nation-state. Hedwig explores the limits of national belonging and the pleasures of US popular culture through the lens of sexual and gender identity, with the ambiguity of the Hedwig's body embodying confusion about legal, political and cultural citizenship. The film identifies and critiques the violences of heteronormative national belonging, yet by reading Hedwig alongside the political and legal histories that make its narrative legible, it becomes apparent that the film's popular reception frequently erases the transnational and imperial histories that undergird and produce sexual identities and identification. I argue that cultural practices do not simply reflect national or queer identifications but also produce them. The fissures between the cultural work of the film itself and of its circulation illustrate how despite the mutual imbrication of sexuality and nationality, transsexuality is sometimes more readily apprehended than is transnationality.     

Reconsidering John Sergeant's Attacks on Locke's Essay

The Catholic polemicist John Sergeant published three major works of philosophy towards the end of his literary career, The Method to Science (1696), Solid Philosophy (1697) and Metaphysics (1700). They were highly critical of what Sergeant saw as the idea‐grounded epistemology of the Cartesians and John Locke, whom he labelled ‘ideists’. Previous scholars have interpreted Sergeant's texts as manifestations of his lifelong obsession with certainty, as initially developed in his Restoration polemics against Anglican divines. Using a previously neglected autobiographical letter, it is demonstrated that Sergeant's intentions were very different. Like Edward Stillingfleet and other critics, Sergeant saw Locke's philosophy as inspiring contemporary heterodoxy. The article identifies the specific channels by which Sergeant saw Lockeanism seeping into irreligion. Moreover, unlike Locke's Anglican critics, Sergeant resorted not to polemical accusations, but to abstract philosophy. This must also be explained contextually: Sergeant wished his works to become textbooks at the universities, concerned as he was by the pedagogical impact of the Essay. A premise of this article is that reception history is less useful for elucidating on the meaning of the received text than for telling us something about the intentions of the receiver, and about the intellectual culture in which the process of reception occurs. With this in mind, the article finishes by recontextualizing Sergeant's works within a broader narrative: his was an attempt to reassert the place of philosophy as a propaedeutic to theology in an age when such a conception of philosophy's social role was coming under intense scrutiny.     

Confronting Contradictions: Genre Subversion and Feminist Politics in Agnès Varda's L'une chante,l'autre pas

French filmmaker Agnès Varda's career has been largely defined by contradiction. She is acknowledged as influential, yet often discussed independently from the advanced filmmaking practices and intellectual debates of her New Wave generation. Her musical, L'une chante, l'autre pas, was particularly misunderstood: film critics and feminist scholars praised the film's feminist storyline, but found that the unexpected musical numbers undercut the seriousness of the feminist message, resulting in a film that is ultimately incongruous. Through archival excavation of Varda's sources, I argue that the film's incongruity was in fact intentional, an expansion of advanced filmmaking theories and strategies, in dialogue with influential Brechtian texts and contemporary feminist debates. This essay reveals specific social and economic factors that influenced the production and reception of the film and reconsiders apparent contradictions in Varda's career.     

Priestley in Germany

ABSTRACT

The paper focuses on the reception of Priestley in Germany, which is remarkable for the huge and assiduous interest it raised in different philosophical milieus. Priestley’s dynamical conception of matter, his explanation of the functioning of the brain, and of the production of material ideas are at the basis of the new form of materialism that develops in Germany in the late 1770s, and which differs completely from the model of mechanical materialism Germany was used to in earlier decades. Indeed, the German reception of Priestley’s ideas begins surprisingly early, just one year after the publication of his edition of Hartley’s Observations on Man (1775), and traverses the two final decades of the eighteenth century with a considerable number of reviews and references in the main philosophical journals and works of the time. In 1778, his introduction to the Observations was translated into German and presented in the form of a manifesto of a new materialistic philosophy compatible with the claims of morals and religion. Within a few years, Priestley became the unavoidable reference point for the most relevant theological and philosophical discussions concerning the nature of matter and spirits, the place of God, the possibility of human freedom, and the legitimacy of free thinking.     

Rousseau’s reception as an Epicurean: from atheism to aesthetics

ABSTRACT

What did Rousseau's readers mean when they called him an ‘Epicurean’? A seemingly simple question with complex implications. This article attempts to answer it by reconstructing Rousseau's contemporary reception as an Epicurean thinker. First, it surveys the earliest and most widely read critics of the second Discourse: Prussian Astronomer Royal Jean de Castillon, Jesuit priest Louis Bertrand Castel, and Hanoverian biblical scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus. These readers branded Rousseau an Epicurean primarily to highlight his atheism, his anti-providential and materialist natural philosophy. Then, it discusses Genevan pastor Jacob Vernet's positive assessment of Rousseau as a critic of ‘fashionable’ Epicureanism, before reconstructing Rousseau's critique of the reception of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man as an Epicurean text. These sources elucidate Rousseau's engagement with a range of ideas and argumentative positions that would inform his later self-identification as a ‘refined’ Epicurean. In particular, they highlight his interest in how a sentimental awareness of beauty might mitigate the potentially vicious effects of hedonism. The article concludes with novelist Mme. de Genlis’ critique of Rousseau's Wise Materialism, using his thoughts on the imagination to suggest some of the ways the neglected aesthetic dimensions of Rousseau's reception of Epicureanism might be developed.     

Children's agency and Islam: unexpected paths to solidarity

This ethnographic study analyzes the experiences of Palestinian children's agency of religion and its manifestation in religion as resistance while it is fighting the globalized hegemony. Children's agency of religion as resistance is cultivated within the debate of Islamist movements and the evolution of Palestinian national identity while it serves as a call for global solidarity. It is this creative construct of agency of religion that transcends borders and distinguishes itself from the old generation method of resistance. The differences between generations on this construct, as described by children's agency and their ability to transform, is constructed by particular meanings of Islamist symbols and rejects the assumption that children's roles are defined. The agency of religion as resistance evolves as the role of religion in national discourse is deliberated in secularism and sectarianism. In 2005/2006, I was awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship in the Anthropology Department of Johns Hopkins University. The award was for my work on children's political socialization in the Middle East. I also have been active with international studies: in 2009, I collaborated with the Children's Rights Unit, Institut Universitaire Kurt Bösch, Switzerland on the research project, Living Rights: Theorizing Children's Rights in International Development. I am serving as research member on the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and Ethnic Diversity (JLICED), Division of Children's Rights. My work has been published in the Journal of Qualitative Inquiry, Childhood, Children's Geographies, Journal of Mix Method Research and others. View all notes     

“Neptune to the Common-wealth of England” (1652): the “Republican Britannia” and the continuity of interests

ABSTRACT

In the seventeenth century, John Kerrigan reminds us, “models of empire did not always turn on monarchy”. In this essay, I trace a vision of “Neptune’s empire” shared by royalists and republicans, binding English national interest to British overseas expansion. I take as my text a poem entitled “Neptune to the Common-wealth of England”, prefixed to Marchamont Nedham’s 1652 English translation of Mare Clausum (1635), John Selden’s response to Mare Liberum (1609) by Hugo Grotius. This minor work is read alongside some equally obscure and more familiar texts in order to point up the ways in which it speaks to persistent cultural and political interests. I trace the afterlife of this verse, its critical reception and its unique status as a fragment that exemplifies the crossover between colonial republic and imperial monarchy at a crucial moment in British history, a moment that, with Brexit, remains resonant.     

Spiritedness,Reason, and the Founding of Law and Order: John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Abstract

John Ford's 1962 classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, analyzes the difficulties inherent in founding a new political order based on the rule of law. Some critics have concluded that the film mordantly portrays the closing of the frontier, the tragic loss of the rugged individualism it promoted (represented by Tom Doniphon), and the ascendance in its place of a fraudulent political class (represented by Ransom Stoddard), while exposing that even free societies are founded on crime. Yet, as others have argued, Doniphon also represents the spirited part of the Platonic tripartite soul, revealing spiritedness's ambiguous relation to justice: he refuses to fight unless personally threatened; perpetuates servitude, if not slavery; and shows no interest in promoting equality of women. Doniphon stands in opposition to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, pointedly recited at the film's chronological center, and his eclipse by Stoddard is not a tragic mistake. In addition, John Locke's state of nature teaching unlocks why Valance's death is not a crime that sullies the foundations of the society. Finally, the legend told as fact at the film's conclusion combines both men into a single entity, “the man who shot Liberty Valance,” thereby propagating a salutary lesson for future citizens: reason must combine with and rule over spiritedness if law and order are to prevail.     

Literature’s place in the global public health arena: Graham Greene’s fictional translation of leprosy in A Burnt-Out Case

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the engagement of Graham Greene's novel A Burnt-Out Case with traditional discourses of leprosy (the biblical ‘leper’ as a sinner, missionary care, tropical medicine, Albert Schweitzer's hospital in Lambaréné, germ theory), and shows how it suggests an ethics of care which highlights the psychosocial aspects of disease and healing. The paper argues that the reception of the novel opened a discursive space for the re-negotiation of images of leprosy after empire, making visible the structures and agents of global public health communication and their diverging conceptions of explanatory authority, scientific accuracy and the relation of science and literature. The article incorporates archival sources from press reviews to draft versions of the novel and the author's correspondence with prominent leprosy experts. It draws on media and science communication studies, disability studies and on contributions to the sociology of knowledge by Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn and Bruno Latour.     

The exorcist? John Gray,apocalyptic religion and the return to realism in world politics

This review article discusses John Gray's new book, Black mass: apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia, against the background of the evolution of Gray's thought and in the context of contemporary world politics. In particular, it examines his account of the role of apocalyptic religion in world politics and his claim that to manage this we need to revert to the insights of political realism in international affairs.