NAZISM AS A SECULAR RELIGION1

This article examines the implications of Richard Steigmann‐Gall's recent revisionist representation of Nazism as a Christian (Protestant) movement for the increasingly fashionable accounts of Nazism as a secular or political religion. Contrary to Steigmann‐Gall's contention that Protestant Nazism undermines these accounts, I suggest that his portrayal of Nazism as a variant of Protestant millennialism is not necessarily inconsistent with the secular religion approach. A closer look at the so‐called löwith‐Blumenberg debate on secularization indeed reveals that modern utopianisms containing elements of Protestant millennialism are the best candidates for the label of secularized eschatology. That Steigmann‐gall has reached exactly the opposite conclusion is primarily because his conceptual understanding of secular religion is uninformed by the secularization debate. Insofar as Steigmann‐Gall extracts his model of secular religion from contemporary political religion historiography on Nazism, this article points to a larger problem: a disjunction between historians utilizing the concept, on the one hand, and philosophers and social theorists who have shaped it, on the other.     

IMAGINATION AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORY: AN ESSAY CONCERNING KOSELLECK'S CONCEPTS OF ERFAHRUNGSRAUM AND ERWARTUNGSHORIZONT

Reinhart Koselleck is an important thinker in part for his attempt to interpret the cultural changes resulting in our modern cultural outlook in terms of the (meta)historical categories of experience and expectation. In so doing he tried to pay equal attention to the static and the changing in history. This article argues that Koselleck's use of “experience” and “expectation” confuses their metahistorical and historical meaning, with the result that his account fails to do justice to the static, to continuity in history, and mischaracterizes what is distinctive of the modern era. As well as reconfiguring the categories of experience and expectation, this essay also introduces a third category, namely, imagination, in between experience and expectation. This is done to render intelligible what is obscure in Koselleck's account, and as a stimulus to a study of history that divides its attention equally between the static and the changing. In fact, it is argued that the category of imagination is pre‐eminently the category of history, on the concrete historical as well as the metahistorical level.     

A BON RELIGION VILLAGE

Editor's Note: This writer went to Tibet in the summer of 1994, and visited Wenbu in Nyima County, a village dating back to ancient times.     

DEBATING MODERNITY AS SECULAR RELIGION: HANS KELSEN'S FUTILE EXCHANGE WITH ERIC VOEGELIN

This article reviews Hans Kelsen's mysterious and recently published last book, contextualizing it with reference to the little known dialogue between Kelsen and Eric Voegelin. The confrontation between Kelsen and Voegelin, two of the most illustrious émigré scholars who found a new home in America, is important to revisit because it touches upon several axes of debate of crucial importance to postwar intellectual history: the religion–secularity debate, the positivist–antipositivist debates, and the controversy that also led to the famous Voegelin–Arendt debate: how to read the horrors of totalitarianism into a historical trajectory of modernity. Although the Kelsen–Voegelin exchange ended in failure and bitterness, its substance goes to the heart of modern intellectual history.     

ETHNICITY, RELIGION, AND CLASS AS ELEMENTS IN THE EVOLUTION OF LAKE WINNIPEG RESORTS

Resorts on the south basin of Lake Winnipeg serve a significant proportion of the summer cottage market of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Of the larger resorts, Winnipeg Beach and Grand Beach were developed by rival railway companies as popular resorts to exploit the mass excursion market, whereas Victoria Beach was developed by a syndicate intent on creating an exclusive, tranquil cottage retreat. These, and other smaller resorts, were and still are patronized by different market segments identifiable by class, religion, ethnic association, and place of primary residence in Winnipeg.     

COMMENTS ON A POPULAR MODEL OF MINOAN RELIGION

Summary. The theory that worship of a great goddess dominated Minoan religion to such an extent that it can be described in almost monotheistic terms remains commonplace in accounts of Minoan civilization. The intellectual bases of this theory are questioned, and alternative approaches are suggested.     

THE BON RELIGION

TotracetheoriginsoftheFbetanpeople'sbeliefinbuddhismweneedtogoback1,300yearsintothepast.Buddhismhasnotalwaysexist-edontheTibetanPlateau.ProiortotheadventofBuddhism,thenativereligtonoftheSnowlandwhichflourishedmorethan1.300yearsagowastheBonreligion,founded…     

等待轮回 宗教浸染下的印度文化漫思

<正>"印度过去的全部历史,如果还算得上历史的话,就是一次次被异族征服的历史。印度的社会根本没有历史,至少是没有为人所知的历史。而我们通常说的印度的历史,不过是一个接着一个入侵印度的侵略者的历史,印度就在这个一无抵抗、二无变化的社会消极基础上建立了他们的庞大帝国。"每次读到伟大导师卡尔·马克思关于印度的评价,都不免好奇:这是一个怎样的国度?要找到答案或许需要从地理、法度与人性去考量印度的文化,但所有这些都浸染在印度的宗教之中。     

MODERNITY: A PROBLEMATIC CATEGORY IN THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS

Emotions in History: Lost and Found by Ute Frevert is a lively introduction to some of the issues that historians must address when writing about emotions. Emotions in History notes some of the uses emotions have had in both public and private life, and it charts the changing fate of several emotions—particularly acedia, honor, and compassion—that have been either “lost” or “found” over time. Nevertheless, it suffers from a notion of modernity that obscures rather than clarifies. Making “modernity” the cause of changes in emotional ideas, comportment, and feeling, it cuts today's society off from its earlier roots and fails to see the continuities not only in emotions themselves but also in the mechanisms by which emotions have changed over time. Frevert's assumption that only the modern world has been interested in emotions is belied by eloquent learned writings on the topic in the medieval period (though not using the term “emotions”). Further, modernity is not alone in having effective mechanisms by which ideal standards of emotions and their expression are transmitted to a larger public.