The Common Good,Pluralism and the Small Church

Abstract

This paper discusses the understanding of “Common Good” that has been used by the Church of England, especially over the last five years. It suggests that its implicit universalism and identification of Christian morality with the ethical norms for the nation is premised on an understanding of the role of the Church which is no longer realistic. After a brief discussion of the latest statistics for church attendance and a comparison with other national churches in Northern Europe, I suggest that the Church of England is a “small church” and even that Christians constitute a religious minority. This means that the pursuit of the “Common Good” as defined by the church may simply be a piece of nostalgic longing for the time of the “big church.” The recent exclusions for the churches on same-sex marriage legislation indicate that the gap between most of the churches and the wider society. Rather than defining the common good, I suggest that in a pluralist society the churches which recognize their limited role will need to build alliances and common causes with other groups, both religious and secular.     

“There are mentalities that need changing”: Constructing personhood,formulating citizenship,and performing subjectivities on a settler colonial frontier

Settler colonial nations are sites of legal pluralism in which encounters between differing constructions of citizenship are formulated. These can involve customary, differentiated, and universal modes of citizenship. But the relationships amongst these are problematic, as are the ways they play out in the performance of subjectivities. To understand these dynamics, we need to think about ideas of personhood that are at their root. Based on research in Nunavik, this article focuses on how, through wildlife management, notions of personhood are being legally codified, particularly in relation to property. It examines the degree to which official ideas of personhood coincide with Indigenous ones in the construction of citizenship, and considers how these combine with property relations in the performance of subjectivities. Enforcing state wildlife regulations has altered the moral codes that define what persons are and determine how they should interact with one another. This research underscores the contradictions that arise as a result of codifying notions of personhood and citizenship in the context of settler colonialism.     

Making Sense of the Scottish Community Energy Sector – An Organising Typology

The community energy sector is widely understood to be a pluralistic sector, encompassing a broad range of aims, motivations, and practices. This heterogeneity is, however, still not very well understood. Dominant analytical frameworks in the study of energy geographies offer little in the way of exploring the diversity of motivations, visions, and social relations that are present within the community energy sector, nor their causes or consequences. Drawing on the notion of ‘critical pluralism’, this paper aims to highlight the diverse range of sociotechnical configurations that make up this sector in Scotland, and begins to discuss some potential causes and consequences. To do so, it presents a novel community energy typology, based on an analysis of technical and social dimensions of 367 projects in Scotland. This shows that whilst the Scottish community energy sector contains a broad range of motivations, technologies, and social practices, the sector has become dominated by groups for whom energy generation is a means to achieve local socio-economic development. The paper discusses the community-level and policy drivers that may have contributed to this. It also discusses how we can begin to understand a diverse sector’s ability to affect the wider structures in which it operates.     

Prefiguring the State

Merging means and ends, prefigurative politics perform life as it is wished‐for, both to experience better practice and to advance change. This paper contributes to prefigurative thinking in three ways. It explores what it might mean to prefigure the state as a concept; takes its inspiration from a historical episode rather than imagined time ahead; and addresses what, if anything, prefigurative conceptions can do when practiced. Central to my discussion is the plural state—taking shape as micro, city, regional, national and global formations. Plural state thinking makes room for divergent kinds of states but does not necessarily foreground progressive ones. Thus, to explore in more detail a transformative left conception of the state, discussion turns to 1980s British municipal radicalism. Taking up this adventurous episode in governing as a “thinking tool”, an imaginary of the state as horizontal, everyday, activist and stewardly emerges.     

A Response to David Lehmann

Abstract

The author offers a simple theological framework for critiquing the issues of globalization and empire. The vast majority of people look at the world with theological lenses, and far too often those who attempt to speak to them use language that makes little sense to the rank and file. Here then is one form that such a framework might take.

The Powers Are Good

The Powers Are Fallen

The Powers Can Be Transformed.     

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Deuteronomy and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Abstract

Deuteronomy portrays itself as Moses's speech at the edge of the promised land. This article examines the book's attitudes towards the other within this rhetorical setting by concentrating on the indigenous peoples, also in contrast to those outside the land of Israel. It is pointed out that the ideology of Deuteronomy is very exclusive, and its treatment of indigenous peoples compatible with ideologies that accompany genocides and conquests. Mitigating such exclusive thinking can serve as a model for human interactions today, and this would also seem to be compatible with the overall thinking of the New Testament canonical documents.     

Reconceptualizing Resistance: Residuals of the State and Democratic Radical Pluralism

Abstract: Arguing that resistance to the state is too narrow a conceptualization of a political project that challenges neoliberalism, we posit that there are latent, residual apparatuses of the state which can be activated as part of a systematic progressive politics. We examine Massachusetts’“Dover amendment”, a legal framework which governs group home siting throughout the state. Dover offers a powerful tool with which to resist a neoliberal socio‐spatial agenda, though it has been underutilized toward enabling an alternative landscape. We analyze how and why Dover has often remained latent as a tool for socio‐spatial resistance, and consider a provocative case in Framingham, Massachusetts that suggests how residual state apparatuses may be leveraged in support of an explicitly resistive, progressive agenda.     

Henry VIII et le schisme anglais

For the philosopher of Rotterdam, religious coercion has two essential sources of illegitimacy: the linking of religious and ecclesiastical belief and the use of politics for religious purposes. Bayle responds to it, with his doctrine of freedom of conscience, on one hand and by means of the essential distinction between voluntary religious affiliation and political obligation, on the other hand. From my perspective, his doctrine of tolerance does not involve an atheist state, nor does it mean the rejection of the presence of religion in the public space or its displacement to the intimate sphere of the conscience. This paper proposes a reading of Baylean tolerance as a political doctrine that allows the articulation between freedom of conscience (individual), minority confessions (private associations), and official religion (established church). Thus, the Baylean theoretical model could be considered a proposal to provide a normative form to the practice of toleration present in the seventeenth -century Netherlands.     

A peculiar pluralism

Abstract

In this article, we shall describe the complexity and differentiation that characterizes the state of religion in Italy, beginning with a concise reconstruction of the chief factors that characterize the relationship that Italians experience with their birth religion or the prevailing religion (Catholicism). We shall then describe the level of ethical and religious pluralism (found both within the Catholic universe and, especially, outside of that universe) that Italian society is beginning to experience directly, in part because of the fact that other religious entities (both old and new) are become increasingly visible in the public sphere, adding color and identity to the symphony of voices attempting to speak publicly in religious terms. In conclusion, we shall explore a phenomenon, popular religion, which continues to show extraordinary vitality. The basic hypothesis that we intend to set forth is based on the idea that ordinary Italians consider themselves Catholic but have a variety of different ways of interpreting their practical involvement with the Catholic Church.     

On the accuracy of estimating living stature from skeletal length in the grave and by linear regression

This study evaluates a method for obtaining stature estimates for populations represented by skeletal material, with individuals buried in a supine position. During the excavation of a Danish mediaeval cemetery, in situ skeletal length in the grave was measured from a point above the cranial point farthest from the body to the most distal point of the talus. The measurement was made with a folding rule placed on the sagittal midline of the skeleton, allowed to follow any curvature of the skeleton in situ. In the laboratory, stature was reconstructed anatomically, and this stature was regarded as an accurate estimate of living stature. Stature was also reconstructed from femur length by two linear regression procedures: 1) by sample and sex specific formulae, employing a leave‐one‐out approach, and 2) by sex wise formulae for Euro‐Americans from Trotter & Gleser (1952, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 10 : 463–514). Skeletal length in the grave and the two stature estimates based on linear regression were compared to anatomically reconstructed stature. Skeletal length in the grave estimated anatomically reconstructed stature with practically no bias (95% CI: −1.3–1.5 cm). Sample specific regression formulae estimated anatomically reconstructed stature also with no bias (95% CI: −1.2–1.1 cm). In contrast, statures calculated from Trotter & Gleser's regression formulae estimated anatomically reconstructed stature with a bias of about 4 cm (95% CI: 3.3–5.0 cm). Estimates of stature variance were biased for all three estimation procedures. However, for samples of adults, an adjusted variance estimate can be obtained by subtracting 8.7 cm² from the variance obtained from skeletal lengths in the grave. It is recommended to measure skeletal length in the grave whenever possible, and use this measurement for estimating statures for prehistoric and early historic populations. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.