Exorcism as Empowerment: A New Idiom

During the years 1610 and 1611, two Ursuline novices underwent an exorcism in southern France. In the spring of 1611, their confessor, Father Louis Gaufridy, was condemned of witchcraft and rape by Dominican inquisitors, and burned at the stake by state officials. The Dominican inquisitors found Father Gaufridy guilty of causing the Ursulines to be possessed by demons, and luring the young women to caves where they participated in illicit activities. Rather than accepting the role of victim, the Ursulines, working in collusion, accomplished the miraculous: public exoneration, and reintegration into their religious community accompanied not only by a reclaimed stature as women religious, but by an elevated stature. Through an intricate play of accusation and expiation, carefully worked through the demons that possessed them, the Ursuline novices reconstructed themselves as virtuous women religious.     

The Cross or the Double-Cross: Roman Catholicism,Anti-Communism,and the Political Theology of Venerable Fulton J. Sheen

The Venerable and Most Reverend Fulton J. Sheen was an advocate of American Catholic patriotism and opponent to the spread of totalitarianism, especially communism. He grounded the two positions in what I call the “ecclesial foundation” in which he defined American citizenship in terms of membership in religious institutions. In Sheen's view, religious institutions provided the ultimate, spiritual ends for humankind. Therefore, the American government had to protect, above all, religious liberties at home and abroad. Totalitarian regimes, which Sheen believed sought to replace spiritual with material ends of the state, violently deprived their subjects of religious liberty and, therefore, embodied the spirit of the anti-Christ. Only the Vatican had the spiritual and moral authority to identify this spirit, and—especially after the Second World War—only America had the military and economic power to confront it. Ironically, this argument was an appropriation of the old Nativist arguments against the Vatican itself. The Nativist argument was that religious liberty of Protestant churches was the source for political authority of the American state to use against the absolute, arbitrary, foreign dictator in Rome. Sheen's appropriation and redeployment of the old narrative persuaded millions of Americans to oppose totalitarian ideologies and view, after centuries of distrust, American Catholics as loyal citizens.     

What's in a name? Clerical representations of Parisian beguines (1200-1328)

This article examines how Parisian university clerics responded to the city's communities of beguines (uncloistered religious women), highlighting in particular the ways in which clerics employed the term ‘beguine’ in sermons and preaching material from thirteenth-century Paris. Because the beguines were not hidden behind convent walls but were instead a visible presence in the city, they were often the focus of Parisian clerics' ideas about religious women. Sermons preached, composed, and copied in Paris reveal the process by which Parisian medieval thinkers constructed, although not always consciously, a negative meaning for the term ‘beguine.’ Always poorly defined, ‘beguine’ evoked a wide variety of meanings and associations for clerical observers in medieval Paris. The varied ideas about and images of the beguine allowed the Parisian intellectual elite to include these women in discussions of their own position in society as clerics in charge of the religious instruction of the laity. Clerics used the beguine as an example of the contemplative life, often comparing their own intellectual approaches to religious knowledge with the beguines' mystical knowledge. These positive comparisons, however, were joined by negative accusations when clerics expressed concern that the beguine thought too highly of her spiritual gifts.     

What's in a name? Clerical representations of Parisian beguines (1200-1328)

This article examines how Parisian university clerics responded to the city's communities of beguines (uncloistered religious women), highlighting in particular the ways in which clerics employed the term ‘beguine’ in sermons and preaching material from thirteenth-century Paris. Because the beguines were not hidden behind convent walls but were instead a visible presence in the city, they were often the focus of Parisian clerics' ideas about religious women. Sermons preached, composed, and copied in Paris reveal the process by which Parisian medieval thinkers constructed, although not always consciously, a negative meaning for the term ‘beguine.’ Always poorly defined, ‘beguine’ evoked a wide variety of meanings and associations for clerical observers in medieval Paris. The varied ideas about and images of the beguine allowed the Parisian intellectual elite to include these women in discussions of their own position in society as clerics in charge of the religious instruction of the laity. Clerics used the beguine as an example of the contemplative life, often comparing their own intellectual approaches to religious knowledge with the beguines' mystical knowledge. These positive comparisons, however, were joined by negative accusations when clerics expressed concern that the beguine thought too highly of her spiritual gifts.     

We Know Not God's Designs in Permitting a Separation: Women Religious,the Consolidation Controversies,and the Nineteenth-Century American Catholic Church*

This article bridges the fields of Catholic history, Women's history, and American religious history to propose a new perspective for studying the development of the American Catholic Church, termed by me as the consolidation controversies. Previous historians have focused on the development of the local parishes and the dioceses, focusing on the power conflicts between the lay trustees and the local bishops that accompanied this institutional growth. However, an often-forgotten aspect of Catholic history is the simultaneous rise of religious congregations and orders. As these communities developed, their leaders clashed with the local bishops over questions of property and authority over members of the communities. Often at the centre of these power struggles were the women religious. Rather than allowing themselves to be manipulated, women religioudemonstrated their own autonomy, navigating larger institutional politics. Should these women fail, they faced losing their place in the diocese as well as their position and vocation as women religious.     

There's Life in Establishment—But Not as We Know It

Abstract

Secularization theory, central to the dominant discourse of modernity, sought to describe a tendency—regarded as ‘inevitable’ by some leading scholars— whereby transcendence was squeezed out of the system by processes of bureaucratization and rationalism, and relegated to the margins of private faith and practice, dying altogether, perhaps. The new Inner Cities Religious Council, set up by the government in 1992 to administer the areas where religious migrants and others live, afforded an opportunity to test the political validity of this theory using discourse analysis of government documents. Startling, if inconclusive, evidence is revealed of a ‘religious’ response by government to minority issues, which reveals secularization to be driven by choices—not inevitable but a power struggle: one to which the Church of England appeared to capitulate, even while it facilitated other faiths in their own pursuit of status claims.     

“六日战争”对美国犹太人族群认同的影响

20世纪60年代,"大屠杀"话语的传播引发了美国犹太人对族群命运的担忧。在"六日战争"前,面对阿拉伯国家的反犹宣传及其对以色列的重重围困,美国犹太人担心"再次大屠杀"会发生,从而促使美国犹太人对以色列的生存产生深度忧虑。美国犹太社团逐渐把维护以色列的特殊利益和争取美国社会对以色列的同情与支持,作为游说活动的主要目标。美国犹太游说组织通过舆论引导、公开呼吁、经济动员等方式积极进行游说。"六日战争"后,美国与以色列之间的特殊关系迅速发展。美国犹太人的民族自信心和自豪感显著提升,并自觉地将以色列与自身的命运紧密相连。他们在归属意愿、宗教情感、对以色列的文化兴趣、青年群体族群意识等层面表达对以色列的认同,以色列在美国犹太人族群认同中发挥的作用凸显。     

2. NO ROOM FOR GOD? HISTORY,SCIENCE, METAPHYSICS,AND THE STUDY OF RELIGION

Despite widespread beliefs to the contrary within the secular intellectual culture of the modern academy, scientific findings are not necessarily incompatible with religious truth claims. The latter include claims about the reality of God as understood in traditional Christianity and the possibility of divinely worked miracles. Intellectual history, philosophy, and science's own self‐understanding undermine the claim that science entails or need even tend toward atheism. By definition a radically transcendent creator‐God is inaccessible to empirical investigation. Denials of the possibility or actual occurrence of miracles depend not on science itself, but on naturalist assumptions that derive originally from a univocal metaphysics with its historical roots in medieval nominalism, which in turn have deeply influenced philosophy and science since the seventeenth century. The metaphysical postulate of naturalism and its correlative empiricist epistemology constitute methodological self‐limitations of science—only an unjustified move from postulate to assertion permits ideological scientism and atheism. It is entirely possible that religious claims consistent with the empirical findings of the natural and social sciences might be true. Therefore historians of religion not only need not assume that atheism is true in their research, but they should not do so if they want to understand religious people on their own terms rather than to impose on them an undemonstrated and indemonstrable ideology. Exhortations to critical thinking apply not only to religious views, but also to uncritically examined secular ideas and assumptions, however widespread or institutionally embedded.     

Towards a Theory of Santa: Or,the Ghost of Christmas Present (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This account of the cultural phenomenon of Santa/Father Christmas draws on the polarities that attend the rituals of Santa/Christmas: secular/religious; commodity/gift; sacred/profane; material/spiritual etc., while also arguing that these dichotomies act together, rather than as simple oppositions. The account also draws on empirical work by the authors and a wider group of practitioner‐researchers on how young children construct and reason with Santa. We then discuss the threat to Santa from the audit culture, which involves an inversion of his benign characteristics in terms of suspicion and surveillance. Our conclusion is that Santa is more of a religious figure than he is often given credit for being, and is felt by ‘believers’ to be superior in terms of ‘delivery’, as current systems of accountability might put it. But he is threatened by an audit culture for which he is almost the epitome of Stranger Danger. ‘Santa’, after all, is an anagram of ‘Satan’.     

Revitalizing Federalism: A Brownsonian Prescription for Preserving National Unity Amidst Growing Diversity

Abstract

Historically, the United States has achieved a relatively high degree of political stability. The reason: the Federal Constitution provides a complex architecture that checks and divides political power and compels compromise. In A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty, Richard Reinsch and Peter Augustine Lawler recommend the work of Orestes Augustus Brownson, a Civil War era theorist, to properly interpret the genius of this unique American constitutional order. In The American Republic (1865), Brownson emphasized that America’s written constitution is rooted in its unwritten constitution; the habits, customs, and sentiments of the people. The Founders’ federal division of authority between the nation’s general government and the particular governments of the states simultaneously recognized Americans’ national unity and genuine diversity. Today, that diversity—racial, religious, ethnic—is even more granular. In accommodating that diversity, a revitalized federalism would return greater power to the people of the states over domestic policies. This would not only regenerate democratic decision-making, but would also help to reduce the political polarization by allowing policy outcomes suitable to diverse communities.     

Scab Ministers,Striking Saints: Christianity and Class Conflict in 1894 Chicago

Throughout 1894, Chicago's churches were as divided by class as the nation itself. During the Pullman strike and boycott, the city's leading Protestant and Catholic authorities hewed to an ideology of contract freedom that precluded support for the American Railway Union. Meanwhile, a handful of young Protestant ministers championed the strikers, echoing the criticisms of those working-class Protestants who had long decried the established churches’ ties to capital. This latter bloc expressed its frustration not merely with words but also through uprisings within local churches and even by founding a church of its own. In light of these findings, the author argues that a grassroots social Christianity preceded an elite Social Gospel; and furthermore, that the participation of working-class persons in the contests over the shape of modern Christianity demands a rethinking of the boundaries of both religious and working-class history.     

Matter,Places, and Persons in Cahokian Depositional Acts

Artifact caching, soil layering, and other intentional depositional practices—archaeologically defined “ritual deposits” of the past—are especially prevalent during the Mississippian period. Employing a perspective of relational ontology, however, we interrogate the validity of a past partitioned into religious, political, and daily spheres. Rather, this perspective emphasizes the multi-experiential and multi-dimensional aspects of social life. Meaning, intentional depositional acts can no longer be usefully described as simply “sacred” or “ritual” practices. Rather, these deposits should be explored as experiences tied to multiple layers of social life, investigating the relationships constructed through such deposits between humans, nonhuman agents, and the landscape.     

The Unquiet Frontier

Abstract

There are many different diagnoses of what constitutes the “post-secular.” My own view is that it constitutes the unprecedented and paradoxical coexistence of two supposedly contradictory social, religious, and cultural trends: on the one hand, the persistence of secular objections to public religion and on the other, the novel re-emergence of religious actors in the global body politic. John Caputo’s much quoted aphorism — that God is dead, but so also is the death of God — captures this agonistic model of the post-secular, in which what we are looking at is not the revival of religion, or the reversion of secular modernity into a re-enchanted body politic, but something more unprecedented and complex. Yet it also means there is little in the way of agreed discourse about the nature of the public square and the legitimacy of religious reasoning within it. This article considers one possible model, that of “post-secular rapprochement,” as one way of envisaging how newly-emergent forms of religious activism and discourse might be mediated back into a pluralist public domain.     

景颇族传统宗教仪式空间生产的现代性困境研究

少数民族传统宗教与族群历史、文化认同一脉相通，其仪式的强化实践素来为众人认可，透过仪式表象触及深层次的意识结构已成学界共识。研究传统宗教仪式的空间生产不仅对解析其背后的意识形态运动具有指导价值，也能为有关宗教、文化部门提供管控参考。文章从列斐伏尔的空间生产理论入手，探究地处边疆山区的景颇族传统宗教仪式在面对外来宗教的空间解构、现代性引发的空间变迁、族群内部的话语争夺及旅游空间介入调控等背景下，其相应的主体实践及力量博弈，厘清空间生产的主次困境和作用机理，以传统宗教有益价值为导向，引导仪式空间生产朝凝聚族群、强化团结的目标靠拢。     

Milestones and Stumbling Blocks,Continued

This commentary is based on a banquet address I presented at the 1989 Pioneer America Society conference. It looks back over the 15 years since hearing an address by Fred Kniffen at the 1974 Pioneer America Society conference, which was published as "Milestones and Stumbling Blocks." Kniffen's work in folk architecture and the work of his friend, Henry Glassie, have greatly influenced my own work in vernacular architecture and material culture. I offer an opinion on our progress in answering Kniffen's call for new efforts to comprehend daily life and the American landscape–our "search for landmarks"–contemplate new trends. My remarks are based on the study of local architecture in Missouri. While I hope for increased activity in field recording of cultural heritage, I wish to emphasize the rather new arena of cultural conservation as we aspire to apply our knowledge in the documentation and encouragement of traditional cultural expression in our nation.     

Disco and Democracy: Thoughts on Stillman's Film and Book

Abstract

Statesmanship can be exercised in a variety of situations, not all of which involve sitting in the Executive Office. This response examines three of the most impressive American efforts at statesmanship—that of Madison in his capacity as Founder (on how best to secure rights), Franklin as author of a new American Way of life (based on virtues freed from religious seriousness), and Lincoln as theorist of a political morality. All three examples, I argue, provide evidence that a statesman is more than just a politician who has been dead for some time.     

Mormon Masculinity: Changing Gender Expectations in the Era of Transition from Polygamy to Monogamy, 1890–1920

During the period from 1890 to 1920, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐day Saints (LDS) perceived a crisis in the lives of their boys. Like their Protestant contemporaries, Latter‐day Saints spent much time attempting to find a solution. At the same time, the LDS church was experiencing its own unique set of upheavals. In 1890, one of the central tenets of Mormonism – polygamy – had to be replaced with sexual practices that aligned the LDS with wider American society. It was during this transitional period that members and authorities of the LDS church sought to gain respectability in American culture by emphasising the morality and value systems they shared with their middle‐class Protestant contemporaries. As Mormons restructured marriage around the practice of monogamy, they placed the burden of the refashioned religious identity almost exclusively upon men and their bodies. The new Mormon man ushered the LDS church into the American mainstream while maintaining an acceptable difference from that mainstream culture.     

Marriage,Sex, and the Church of Scotland: Exploring Non‐Conformity Amongst the Lower Orders

The history of marriage amongst the Scottish lower orders in the eighteenth century has largely been a story of sexual discipline by the Kirk (Church of Scotland). As much of this history has been produced through kirk session records — the arm of the church that monitored sexual morality and marital conformity — this is often construed as a story of contest between the church and a resistant lower orders, trying to negotiate alternative forms of family life. Using kirk session and secular court records and popular literature, this article explores how religious belief shaped sexual and marital behaviour, particularly non‐conformity, during this period. It examines the Kirk's interpretation of chastity and marriage, how these ideas filtered into popular culture and were used by the lower orders to negotiate their own sexual and marital behaviour and relationship to the Church. It argues that the Kirk's varying attitude to marital and sexual non‐conformity meant that marital non‐conformity was less significant than sexual sin in the popular and religious imagination.     

Religious themes in Central European postage stamps, 2006–2010

The countries of Central Europe present a suitable arena for studying the interplay of religion and nationalism. This study explores religious expressions of national identity through the issue of postage stamps, from 2006 to 2010, in seven Central European countries: Austria, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. While the national societies in question exhibit very different religious inclinations, as expressed through a variety of recent, comparable data, quantitative and qualitative analyses of the stamps they issued over a 5-year period enrich our understanding of the religious elements and traditions that form an integral part of Central European identities. As expected, states with higher relative numbers of religious adherents—Poland, Slovakia, and Austria—produce relatively more religiously themed stamps, particularly stamps that depict “living religion.” Protestant or Catholic traditions can also be traced in the relative frequencies of stamp issues. The stamps demonstrate how states employ religious traditions and heritage to perpetuate a sense of national community.