Ignatian Spirituality,Political Effectiveness,and Spiritual Discernment: Dean Brackley's Account of Liberation Theology

Dean Brackley offers a helpful, yet underutilized, way to understand liberation theology, namely as a politically and more than politically effective practice of spiritual discernment: a way of life in which one contemplatively and actively distinguishes the true divine liberator from false idols of death. Like several other Jesuit Catholic liberation theologians, Brackley draws on Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises – but he does so more persuasively, thoroughly, and accessibly. While some critics question whether liberation theology is too political, as if it reduced the human relationship with God down to worldly criteria of effectiveness, and others question whether it is too theological, as if its Christian faith commitments necessarily obstructed its practical aims, Brackley provides a promising way forward by turning to spirituality. His method of spiritual discernment not only overcomes political reductionism; it also supports an effective praxis of liberation by transforming self and community through an immersive meditation on Christ.     

“The Gospel Has Always Been Disturbing”: The Centrality of “God's Will” to the Cold War Political Activism of the Reverends Frank Hartley and Alfred Dickie

Religious faith was pivotal to the personal ideologies and radical political activism of the Reverends Alf Dickie and Frank Hartley, both of whom were prominent in the Australian peace movement from 1949 until the early seventies. This article examines Dickie's and Hartley's self‐identification as prophets in the context of the optimism of the post‐war era and its subsequent retreat as the Cold War altered the political climate. It examines how their post‐war political activism was framed by a devout faith in the existence of an objective “truth” with regard to the Cold War, a “truth” based on a self‐styled notion of the “Will of God”. Further, it argues that suffering was understood by these self‐declared prophets to be inherent to their mission and was thus embraced, when ostensibly visited upon them, as an affirmation of the righteousness of their cause. For Dickie and Hartley, an active association with the radical Left was a natural expression of God's Will.     

Political prayer and the dignity of labour: Botswana's workers' movement

The article draws on recent fieldwork to explore the intersection between class and Christian faith in the collective worldview of African labour unions in Botswana. Workers across different churches appeal to a Christian God whom they believe supports their struggle for dignity and a living wage. It is this axiomatic faith that underpins the spiritual interpretation of worker vocation and worker solidarity. Moreover, in Botswana, unlike in some neighbouring African countries, no contradiction is perceived between workers' left‐wing, socialist leanings and their Christian faith. Workers' identities are equally intertwined in their affiliation to their churches and to the labour movement in Botswana. Above all, I argue, following E.P. Thompson and other historians of early British and American labour movements, that the sanctification of labour dignifies for manual workers their physical labour, despite their lack of formal education.     

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.     

The Religious,the Secular,and the Natural Sciences: Nietzsche and the Death of God

When, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche poses the question of how the natural sciences are possible, he insists that they depend not on a principle that is natural but on the will to truth, the will not to deceive even oneself, with which, he holds, “we stand on moral ground.” Yet, that the natural sciences stand on ground that is moral also means, for Nietzsche, that their origin is to be located in “a faith that is thousands of years old,” a faith that, in the Genealogy of Morals, he develops as presupposing what he calls the ascetic ideals of Judaism and Christianity. Further, in holding that the natural sciences have their origin in principles that are biblical, Nietzsche goes on to indicate that, like the natural sciences, his own critical position, unconditionally honest atheism, is, in forbidding itself “the lie involved in belief in God,” not opposed to, but is rather an expression of, Judaism and Christianity's ascetic ideals. In addressing the interrelationships among the religious, the secular, and the natural sciences in light of Nietzsche, I argue that the natural sciences have their origin in principles that are not natural but that are no less religious than secular.     

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.     

The pastoral role of Contemporary Christian Music: the spiritualization of everyday life in a suburban evangelical megachurch

Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), popular music featuring evangelical Christian lyrics, is one of the most widely consumed forms of commercial entertainment for America's 70–80 million white evangelical Christians. CCM is an excellent lens through which to examine the complex interactions of religious faith, community sentiment, and popular music practices in the contemporary US. I explain how CCM performs the ‘pastoral’ task of reinforcing Christian faith in an evangelical megachurch in the suburbs of Sacramento, California. I argue that a monthly concert series not only guides evangelical Christians in their ‘walk’, but also helps constitute the flock by building a sense of community. I suggest three spatial analytics to understand CCM's pastoral role: the place of the suburb, the sacred space of the church coffeehouse, and the body. At all three scales of analysis, the musical and religious practices of CCM at one suburban church spiritualize the everyday lives of the participants.     

The Politics of Moral Patience

Abstract

Pluralistic societies perpetually seek for ways to get along, given the reality of that pluralism. That search generates pluralistic responses which include forbearance, concord, tolerance, radical democracy, among many others. This paper begins to explore the putatively rich notion of moral patience as a way of being in the world as Christians; moral patience as a way of living with the ‘‘other’’ without reducing the importance of the Christian faith and practice; moral patience as a way of setting the stage for living with long-term difference but without terminal division; moral patience not just as a way of taking a long time to make decisions, but as the finding of a way forward and getting on with life without first coming to some form of unified resolution. Specifically, my purpose is to argue that moral patience creates time and space for the Christian community to develop an ethic of discipleship; i.e. a politics that finds its source in the patience of God, in the imitation of Jesus Christ, and in the power of the Spirit. Such moral patience acts as a sort of political and ethical capacity, and encourages us to believe that because God has time, we also have time — to listen, to be vulnerable, to engage in important conflicts without becoming violent, to refuse to be driven by the speed that society seeks to impose on us, and to resist the notion that the world and other people are directly in our control — indeed to resist the notion that we are radically autonomous individual entities. The paper concludes with a brief glance at how the Christian practice of moral patience might shape work in a number of fields of moral inquiry.     

Tom's Tambu House: Spacing,Status and Sacredness in South Malakula,Vanuatu

This paper is based on video footage I filmed in South Malakula in April 1996. It explores the case of Tom Moses, a man who claims to speak with God. He has constructed a house on the outskirts of Milip village which he has declared tambu, or taboo/sacred. Around it he envisions a new living space, following directions given to him from God. I argue that Tom's enterprise can be understood in terms of a spacing—status—sacredness nexus. This nexus is grounded in a pre-Christian Malakulan sociality revolving around men's houses, ancestral worship and grade-taking rituals. This takes place with a lived Christianity which in many contexts is expressed as a departure from kastom. As such, I argue that this ‘spatial’ analysis can help us understand dimensions of local human relationships which purely discursive analyses sometimes eclipse.     

Desire and Selfhood

As Hegel observed in his Phenomenology of Spirit, “Self-consciousness, for the most part, is desire.” Phenomenologically, the “object of consciousness is itself… present only in opposition” to consciousness, while consciousness is felt as the absence of the longed-for object. According to Hegel, when desire is satisfied, this opposition ends and self-consciousness ceases. My essay seeks to answer the question of why desire never really terminates, why it almost continuously characterizes our waking life. I shall do so by exploring desire not just as a subjective phenomenon but as an ontological condition. What does desire say about the being of the subject? Desiring, the subject is stretched out in time. It is ahead of itself in its directedness to a not-yet present object. What is the condition for this temporal extendedness? What role does our embodied being-in-the-world play in it? How does the very spatiality of our selfhood condition our temporal extendedness? The goal of these questions is to understand desire in terms of the spatial and temporal aspects of our being.     

A conception of the self in the later middle ages

This paper presents a conception of the nature of the individual self in the late middle ages, involving the stance from which the ‘I’ beholds the world (in this case, one newly more autonomous from the corporate/ecclesiastical world view), and the manner in which the self (‘I’) apprehends itself (in this case, self-apprehension involves sensing that one's essentially public face is ‘being seen’ as standing out from the group by others, as well as knowing oneself via ‘reflections’ from others). A theme of ‘seeing’ the world from a more autonomous standpoint while ‘being seen’ as a more separated psychic entity is discerned, which is in keeping with an emphasis on vision in this age, discerned by other researchers. The paper bases its case partly on examination of the arguments and evidence cited by other researchers who have studied the self or individuality in the later middle ages.     

A conception of the self in the later middle ages

This paper presents a conception of the nature of the individual self in the late middle ages, involving the stance from which the ‘I’ beholds the world (in this case, one newly more autonomous from the corporate/ecclesiastical world view), and the manner in which the self (‘I’) apprehends itself (in this case, self-apprehension involves sensing that one's essentially public face is ‘being seen’ as standing out from the group by others, as well as knowing oneself via ‘reflections’ from others). A theme of ‘seeing’ the world from a more autonomous standpoint while ‘being seen’ as a more separated psychic entity is discerned, which is in keeping with an emphasis on vision in this age, discerned by other researchers. The paper bases its case partly on examination of the arguments and evidence cited by other researchers who have studied the self or individuality in the later middle ages.     

Ralph Cudworth and the theological origins of consciousness

The English Neoplatonic philosopher Ralph Cudworth introduced the term "consciousness" into the English philosophical lexicon. Cudworth uses the term to define the form and structure of cognitive acts, including acts of freewill. In this article I highlight the important role of theological disputes over the place and extent of human freewill within an overarching system of providence. Cudworth's intellectual development can be understood in the main as an increasingly detailed and nuanced reaction to the strict voluntarist Calvinism that is typified in the thought of his near contemporary William Perkins. At the heart of Cudworth's rejection of Calvinism is the dilemma over whether God is understood primarily in terms of will or justice. In this fleshing-out of the power of consciousness Cudworth moves from an instrumental account of the working of the human mind towards an account of human consciousness that is intrinsic to his definition of human agency.     

You gotta throw away culture once you become Christian: How ‘culture’ is Redefined among Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in Rural New South Wales

ABSTRACT This paper is an ethnographic and historical exploration of Aboriginal Pentecostalism, which permeated quickly into the Aboriginal community in rural New South Wales in Australia during the early twentieth century. Today the Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in this region renounce Aboriginal ‘culture’. This, however, does not mean they reject Aboriginality. By examining Malcolm Calley's ethnography on the mid‐twentieth century Pentecostal movement in this region and drawing upon my own fieldwork data, I show the way in which this group of Aboriginal Christians of mixed descent in a ‘settled’ part of Australia have maintained Aboriginality and reinforced attachment to the community through faith in the Christian God, whilst, paradoxically, developing strong anti‐culture and anti‐tradition discourses. This paper advocates shifting the study of social change from a dichotomised model that opposes invading moral orders against resisting traditional cultures, to one that examines the processual manifestations of the historical development of vernacular realities.     

La Fabrique de l’infini Phénoménologie du désordre et genèse sensible de l’idée d’infini chez Diderot

Against the classical point of view, for which the idea of the infinite is the expression of God’s in the human being, Diderot proposes a concept of the infinite that considers it as an immediate production of the body. Removing the infinite from its former divine origin, Diderot’s idea of the sentient body contests the classical concepts, particularly the one of order, which bound epistemology to theology. Thus, disorder acquires a new value, even in its pathological forms, which now can be considered as modes of an immanent and fundamentally creative process.     

Racism and Nationalism

Abstract. The article seeks to define the relationship between nationalism and racism in modem times. First, it defines racism as one of the principal nineteenth-century ideologies, sharply focused and centred upon the human body itself as its most potent symbol. Then it discusses nationalism as a much more loosely constructed faith which made alliances with most nineteenth-century ideologies such as liberalism, conservatism and socialism. When nationalism allied itself with racism it made racism operative -for example, within the integral nationalist movements from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. The article discusses how this alliance came about, and its consequences. It concludes that racism was never an indispensable element of nationalism. Moreover, it was not merely a form of discrimination, but a determinate way of looking at men and women which presented a total picture of the world. If nationalism made racism a reality, racism came to dominate nationalism once an alliance between the two movements had been consummated.     

Kant's orientation

Kant's ethics demand suppositions where a noumenal freedom does not contradict natural causality. A rational faith in God makes this possible, through a progressive program in nature, including history, through strife, culminating in the doctrine that the republican form of government represents man's essential ethical essence. This captures many traditional religious views but Kant asserts them as a rational exposition in response to modern and contemporary intellectual currents, especially Hume, Rousseau and Herder.     

Presencing the divine: religion and technology in the Latin West

ABSTRACT

For over a millennium, Catholic and Protestant traditions have deployed technologies to address the central paradox of the Christian faith: God’s absence after Easter. The following essay brings together scholarship on religious technics in the Christian Latin West during the medieval and early modern periods with a focus on the performance of presence. Medieval actors utilized an array of techniques, instruments, and contraptions to manifest the divine power present in holy matter. The movement of artifacts and people across medieval and early modern horizons mobilized and multiplied the effects of sacred proximity. The Society of Jesus’ emphasis on sensuality in worship and spectacle linked older forms of ritual piety with routinized religion. The shift from a predominantly Christian to modern culture in the West did not terminate organized religion’s close association with technology, but extended the experience of spiritual presence in the West through industrial and post-industrial, digital means.     

There is Something of One (God): Lacan and Political Theology

Abstract

For both Lacan and Badiou, Plato's Parmenides is a primary locus for the question of the One. Moreover, for both Lacan and Badiou, the One ultimately takes on political valence, as key to the problematics of representation and the discursive conditions of collectivity. However, unlike Badiou, Lacan's exploration of the question of One also passes through theology— through what I am calling "something of One God"— and I want to argue that it is only by bringing the One into explicit relationship with those monotheistic issues that we can fully understand its implications for analytic discourse and political life. Lacan's thinking on the "something of One" takes a necessary swerve back through a theological problematic, and in the process articulates the terms of a political theology, an essential conjunction of political and religious understandings of sovereignty, subjectivity and collectivity.