Nigeria's Igbo Jews: Jewish identity and practice in Abuja

The now widespread Igbo belief in a Jewish ancestry goes back to the 18th century. However, it was during and after the Nigerian civil war (1967–1970), in which at least one million Igbo died in the failed bid for Biafran independence, that Igbo identification with and as Jews concretized. Igbo saw themselves as sufferers of genocide, like the Jews of World War II in Europe, and as inhabitants of a beleaguered plot of land surrounded by hostile forces, similar to the state of Israel. The civil war and its disastrous consequences initiated a still ongoing period of intense questioning among the Igbo concerning their history, present predicaments, and future prospects. A small number of Igbo began to question why, if they were in fact Jews, they should continue practising Christianity. Their community now numbers between 2,000 and 5,000 people throughout Nigeria. There are three established Nigerian synagogues in Abuja, the federal capital, most of whose members are Igbo. The significance of Biafra, the centrality of the state of Israel, pride in Jewish ancestry and practice, and questions surrounding the range of Jewish skin colour, predominate in Igbo Jews' discussions of their identity. In contrast to the vast majority of Igbo who, if they maintain a sense of Jewish identity, do so while practising Christianity, Igbo Jews have severed themselves from the now dominant religion. Understanding themselves to be part of the global Jewish community of the diaspora and the state of Israel, the Igbo practising Judaism in Nigeria are eager for religious and political recognition from world Jewry and the Jewish state. However, self‐identifying Jewish groups without documented historical connections to more established Jewish communities face considerable challenges in gaining such recognition, particularly as genealogical Jews.     

Yangjiao or the ��Other��? Christianity and Chinese society in the second half of the nineteenth century

This article explores the relationship between Christianity and Chinese society in the second half of the nineteenth century by re-examining the primary sources of anti-Christian movements. The first part shows how Christian churches broke the dominance of the Qing government over local society. Conflicts between Christianity and Chinese religion were often transformed into political confrontations between churches and the Qing bureaucracy. The second part analyzes how Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism interpreted Christianity, with an emphasis on how to understand the perception of Christianity in Chinese society. Exploring broader societal perceptions of Christianity—and not just those expressed in the writings of the Confucian literati—allows for a more nuanced understanding of Chinese interpretations of Christianity. The third part studies the relationship between churches and Chinese religious sects. On the one hand, in the language of anti-Christian movements such as those of the Zaili and Cai sects, Christianity was the hateful “Other.” On the other hand, in the process of preaching Christianity, churches themselves experienced a period of transmutation: they recruited into the church not only non-religious civilians but also the followers of popular religions. For a long period, Christianity was called yangjiao, the “foreign religion,” making it the “Other.” Missionaries started to feel an urgency to reject their identity as the “Other” after the harrowing experience of the Boxer Movement.     

Murphy's Moral Economy of Labor

Abstract

Throughout its history, the institution of the Catholic Church has been at odds with the social and political changes of modernity. However, many scholars claim that after Vatican II, the Church began to accept modernity's political regnancy, and subsequently embraced doctrines such as separation of Church and State and religious freedom. In fact, some scholars go so far as to claim that in recent decades, the Catholic Church has led political crusades that resulted in the political, economic, and social liberation of many, such as its spearhead movement against Communist countries and the liberation theology movements in Latin America. The purpose of this article is not only to examine such claims but to look more closely at the political implications of the thought of Pope Benedict XVI. I propose that Benedict XVI does not simply embrace modernity, but he challenges it from within and presents political society with an alternative foundation for political liberalism. To this effect, I examine the main tenets of his social thought, including his political anthropology and concept of personhood, his idea of secularity, and his understanding of the role of political institutions. I assess whether his ideas can be universally accepted by liberal, secular societies or whether the character of these ideas will appeal only to those who embrace Christianity.     

Christian Democracy without Romance: The Perils of Religious Politics from a Public Choice Perspective

Christian Democracy is often championed as a romantic means of bringing ethical considerations for the common good into the daily life of politics. Public choice theory, on the other hand, reveals that the search for the common good is quixotic amidst divergent policy preferences within a nation. While there may be a handful of values that are accepted by nearly all citizens (e.g., prohibitions on murder), more mundane policy choices will likely promote differences of opinion. Given the often arbitrary nature of voting procedures, the ability of one faction to manipulate the vote choice, and the self-interested behavior of politicians to be re-elected, political parties will inevitably alienate some portion of the citizenry. Attaching Christianity to short-term political outcomes serves to undermine its long-term goal of promoting God's mission. Nonetheless, the Catholic concept of subsidiarity is congruent with many of the findings of public choice theory and offers a way for Christians to engage in public life without tainting themselves in the political partisan arena of political partisanship.     

From Revolution to Dissolution: The Quai d'Orsay,the Banque Russo-Asiatique,and the Chinese Eastern Railway, 1917–1926

This article explores the use made of Christianity during the Second World War and the dilemmas created for the Allies by Stalin's religious record. It is particularly concerned with the way in which Christianity appeared for a while to become a bridge between East and West, with the explicit promise of continued post-war co-operation. However, in the immediate aftermath of the war, Anglo-American policies in particular switched from using Christianity to rehabilitate the adverse image of the Soviet regime to what had been the inter-war policy of using religion to demonise it. Inter-war demonisation held up the Soviet Union as a model not to be emulated. Post-war demonisation pointed to the Soviet Union as an expansionist threat bent on world domination. The article examines Stalin's responses, and Allied perceptions of those responses, to the changes in Western religious policy and propaganda from the Second World War to the emergence of the cold war. The article seeks to show how both sides used religion for political purposes, but that in the final analysis Western reluctance to relinquish what was perhaps its most emotive means of indicting and containing Communism meant that Christianity, instead of becoming a bridge, became a divisive factor that contributed to both the onset of the cold war and public acceptance of it.     

Christianity and Secularisation in the West and the Middle East: A Theological Stance

In this article I argue that Christianity is essentially secular. Hence, secularisation not only has a theological connotation concerning Christian faith but also it is the highest and most perfect realisation of Christian religion, since it signifies the cross that is in the centre of Christian faith. As Christians take upon themselves secularisation as an existential choice, namely the powerlessness of God and of the human being, they simultaneously take the worldly‐human existence as “here” and “now” upon themselves. I will argue that this is the culmination of Reformation. Further, I want to demonstrate that secular Christianity, in the sense given in this article, remains a challenge for both Western and Eastern worlds. In order to accomplish this I will reflect in the first part of this article — from a theological point of view — upon some sociological interpretations or theories concerning mainly secularisation in Western Europe and also the contemporary socio‐political scene in the Middle East. In the second part of the article I will present several Western and Eastern theological positions that defend secularisation, and through their contributions I will construct my own theological stance for secular Christianity.     

Sanctioned Heterodoxy: Local Cults in Two Chinese Catholic Villages, 1900-Present

While ecclesiastic and state authorities in Europe largely abolished medieval cults of saints because of their “heterodoxy,” late-imperial and modern Chinese Catholic communities in Shanxi still promulgate local cults dedicated to women and men who are believed to have performed posthumous miracles or who represent heroic virtue. Although constrained beneath the scrutiny of imperial, ecclesial, and modern political ideas of “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy,” two Shanxi Catholic villages, Dongergou and Liangquandao (Liuhecun), have managed to preserve and promote Sister Maria Assunta Pallotta and Father Wang Shiwei as contemporary versions of traditional local cults. One of the manifest characteristics of these two Chinese Catholic local cults is how they have been transformed by traditional Daoist cults and have successfully survived in a liminal space between “orthodox” and “heterodox.” Relying on archival materials from the former Taiyuan Catholic Diocese Archive, records held in Roman archives, and oral testimonies, intricate patterns of accommodation and resistance to political and church authorities can be discerned as means for these remote Catholic villages to construct identity and cultivate social cohesion.     

Tradition and Christianity: Controversial Funerals and Concepts of the Person among the Paiwan,Taiwan

This essay focuses on the complex and dynamic relationships between tradition and Christianity among the Paiwan, an Austronesian‐speaking people in Taiwan. The ethnography comes from a village in which adherents of traditional religion and Presbyterians live in the same area, but in separate quarters. They have close kinship and marriage ties; however, the funeral constitutes a major area of controversy and tension. I juxtapose their contrasting representations of death and funerals to highlight their differences and trace the source of their conflict to the ideological domain of concepts of the person. I argue that the differences in their funerals can be explained by the differences in the ways the two groups articulate two versions of the person. Adherents of traditional religion emphasize the holistic side of the person by calling the spirit of the deceased to reunite with the living, whereas Presbyterians stress the individualistic side of the person and maintain the boundary between the living and the dead. I propose that it is the co‐existence of two distinct concepts of the person and the different ways of articulating those concepts which shape the dynamic but often contradictory relationship between tradition and Christianity.     

The Thomas Souls Ministry – Onto‐praxis,Dividualism, and Charismatic Catholicism at Lake Chambri,Papua New Guinea

The Thomas Souls Ministry is a prayer group founded by Catholics from the middle Sepik. It is led by a spirit of the dead called Thomas who takes possession of a Nyaura (West Iatmul) woman to preach, prophesy, counsel, and heal. While a prominent debate within the Anthropology of Christianity argues for radical change and rupture with the pre‐Christian self and society, I suggest that continuity within change is found in the way my interlocutors have made Christianity their own. I argue that the local concept of the person defined by aspects of dividualism and reflecting ontological premises of people's lifeworld has strongly influenced the way Christianity was appropriated. In current religious practices people put these premises into action and reinforce them in intersubjective encounters with the divine other. Analysing people's ‘onto‐praxis’, I argue that the Thomas Souls Ministry can be understood as part of a re‐empowerment process that re‐appropriates local meanings, spirits, and practices despite, and in fact against, the influence of the Catholic mission proselytizing in the region.     

Religious Identity and the Future of Northern Ireland

Religion matters in Northern Ireland because it shapes social and personal identity and influences the very different worldviews of people within the two cultures of the province (Protestant and Catholic). Because religion matters so profoundly, no long-term solution to the political problems of the province will be possible without acknowledging its impact on values and thinking. The significance of the expressions "the Catholic community" and "the Protestant people" is explored as is the impact of religious ideas on current policy issues. A comparison of Northern Ireland and the United States is offered as a way of suggesting the effect social and economic mobility will have on attempts to resolve the province's political troubles.     

New idols: Catholicism in the face of Fascist totalitarianism

Abstract

This article explores the attitudes of the Vatican and Catholic culture towards Fascism and Fascism's political religion during the pontificate of Pius XI, in the context of the Catholic church's rejection of modernity as a new epoch of paganism that took the form of political mysticism. It shows that despite the Concordat of 1929, the papacy reacted with growing alarm to the Fascist regime's ‘sacralization of politics’ that threatened to make Catholic religion a handmaid of the totalitarian state.     

Islam and the Dutch in the East Indies: Oppression or Opportunity?

ABSTRACT

Dutch colonial ambitions in the East Indies had to contend with Islam, and this contention intensified as colonisation progressed and Islamisation deepened. The Dutch made pragmatic alliances with Muslim leaders and sultans in pursuit of trade dominance and profits. This, combined with protestant reformation in the Netherlands, allowed for significant religious freedom in the East Indies. The Dutch did proselytize Christianity, with most success in the Outer Islands to the east, mostly because of an absence of a major established religion in those areas. They favoured coexistence over religious wars. In order to improve the lives of locals, Islamic movements were permitted to establish enduring institutions. In the early twentieth century, this included the two largest Muslims groups in the world, the traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulama and the reformist Muhammadiyah, which coincided with the emergence of political Islam in the form of the Islamic Traders Party. These formed important socio-religious structures that influenced political thought and modern state institutions, including the state ideology, the Pancasila, and the constitution, which obliged the state to accommodate religion.     

Investigating Red Toryism

Abstract

Identifying and distinguishing the dominant features of civil religion, political theology and public theology is an important aspect of the trans-Atlantic conversation about the role of religion in the common life. Civil religion is often a form of patriotic self-celebration that in the West, and particularly in the US, has often been expressed in terms of Christianity. Its defect lies in its lack of transcendental and thus critical reference. Political theology attempts to meet this defect by bringing the disciplines of theology and critical thought to bear on the relation between politics and religion. Political theology, however, too often equates or reduces the public to partisan or governmental policy, and understands the state as the institution that comprehends and guides all other spheres of society. Public theology seeks to remedy this by insisting that institutions of civil society precede regimes both in order of occurrence and by right, and insists that theology, in dialogue with other fields of thought, carries indispensable resources for forming, ethically ordering and morally guiding the institutions of religion and civil society as well as the vocations of the persons in these various spheres of life.     

Two forms of Catholicism in twenty-first-century Italian public debate: an analysis of positions on same-sex marriage and Muslim dress codes

There is a peculiar relationship between religion and the political system in twenty-first-century Italy. In particular, the collapse of the Democrazia Cristiana party has favored the rise of new political entrepreneurs eager to exploit religion as a legitimacy factor, while the Catholic Church has attempted to influence politics without the mediation of any specific political party. New debates involving religious values have therefore developed. This article analyzes the positions taken and the frames proposed by Italy’s Catholic political actors in relation to two particularly telling issues, that of same-sex marriage and that of the Muslim dress codes. Its most striking finding is the presence in the Italian political system of two distinct forms of Catholicism in politics. One, promoted by the Catholic Church and followed by most centrist Catholics, is quite tolerant in terms of social and religious pluralism and supportive of human rights and social justice, but it emphasizes the ‘traditional’ heterosexual family as the cornerstone of society. The other, ‘civilizational’ form, promoted by the Lega Nord and some other center-right representatives and intellectuals, is based on an idea of Italian citizenship articulated in religious, cultural, and ethnic terms, and thus excluding those who are not members of this community. Here Christian identity is not defined by the Church’s teachings, but rather represents a marker of Western civilization in opposition to Muslim civilization.     

Co-optation and Its Discontents: Seventh-Day Adventism in 1950s China

Most studies of Christianity in the early PRC have focused on the politicization of religious practices under the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, explaining how the Christian faith empowered people to resist the state’s atheistic propaganda. In fact, both Communist officials and Christians invoked ideas about transcendent power and moral purpose, blurring the boundary between secular and religious concerns. The state-sanctioned patriotic religions had greatly impacted the political and theological orientations of Chinese Christians in the Maoist era. This article looks at the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Shanghai, one of the first Protestant denominations to be denounced in the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. When the state infiltrated the Adventist institutions, some of the pro-government Adventist leaders worked with the officials to bring the church closer to the socialist order. Most of the Adventists, however, resisted the state and organized themselves into a diffused network of house churches. This study highlights the fluid and complex political environment that the Adventists experienced, and the ways they interacted with the Maoist state. The reorientation of theological concerns, the new strategies for evangelization, and the growth of autonomous church networks enabled the Adventists to be a fast-growing religious movement.     

The New Republicanism Without Religion?

The past decades have witnessed a harvest of new books and articles exploring the modern republican tradition and its relevance for contemporary political theory. Members of this movement present the tradition as an alternative to both political liberalism and communitarianism and offer its unique conception of liberty (“freedom from domination”) as a distinct third option beyond the “positive” and “negative” varieties famously identified by Isaiah Berlin. Yet in recovering this view of liberty, civic republicans have neglected the essential role that religion plays in the modern republican tradition. This omission represents not only a serious deviation from the tradition, but, what is more, it fundamentally weakens civic republicanism’s capacity for theorizing and achieving political liberty at the level of institutional life. In the modern republican tradition, religion has been understood to undergird republican liberty both in terms of shaping the morals, customs, and habits of citizens and in providing normative authority for the value of liberty over domination. In this essay, I offer a counter-narration of the modern republican tradition that gives religion its due and challenges civic republicans to recognize the central role that religion has played, and should continue to play, in theorizing and promoting republican liberty.     

Fighting for the Afterlife: Spiritists, Catholics, and Popular Religion in Nineteenth-Century France

This article examines the position of nineteenth-century French spiritism in relation to the Catholic Church. Spiritism offered an alternative "religion" to French Catholics dissatisfied with the church's traditionalism in a modernizing world. I begin by describing the spiritists' position on Catholic dogma and the movement's place as an urban popular religion. Spiritist critiques of heaven and hell incorporated liberal and republican values, thus making it appealing to these groups who were often hostile to the church. I move next to conflicts between the adversaries. Spiritists, unfettered by dogma or even logic in some cases, freely incorporated the supernatural into the nineteenth-century acceptance of Enlightenment values such as reason and science. The church, unable to deny the reality of supernatural phenomena claimed by the spiritists, limited itself to asserting the devil's hand in these phenomena. It thus could not fully address the challenge of spiritism. Spiritism as a popular religion complicates the assumption by many folklorists regarding the disappearance of popular beliefs in the face of the modern. The article concludes with a call to modify these theories in order to understand an evolving, often urban, popular culture which integrated "tradition" and "modernity" and continually created new forms of the marvellous.     

Confrontation and conciliation: the sami,the crown and the court in seventeenth-century swedish lapland1

This article aims to discover in what kind of legal cases conflicts may be traced between the Sami and representatives of the Crown, and in which situations conciliation is apparent; and it also answers the questions of how and why this happened. It is evident, from the court rolls from the court district of Jukkasjärvi (one of the two northernmost lappmarker in Sweden at this time), that the Crown prosecuted the Sami for sexual offences and crimes against religion. This was due to the prevailing ideology of the seventeenth century, in which Lutheran Christianity prevailed, and because the court was the arena for a power discourse: there was a “right” way to live and behave. This came into conflict with Sami tradition. The Sami themselves pursued a desire and need for conciliation, which becomes apparent in cases of crimes such as murder, manslaughter and grand theft, but also in civil cases, e.g. inheritance. This was due to the fact that the population was quite small, bound together in different relations, and because large-scale conflicts were not beneficial to Sami communities. Even though the Crown Court was an arena of power, it was also used by the Sami for their own ends, and thus we can see an interactive Sami society, independent of the prevailing political Lutheran Christian ideology and its discourse.