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.     

The Calibanisation of the South in the German public ‘Euro crisis’ discourse

This article highlights the renaissance of the essentialist topos of the ‘lazy and irrational’ ‘Südländer’ (Southerner, Southern countries, South) in the German political and media discourses during the ‘Euro crisis’. It argues that it served to legitimate the political and economic measures taken in Southern European countries that pushed them into still more peripheral positions within the European Union (EU) and deepened the cleavage between North and South. Culture, or better culturalism and racism as its political ideological version, thus were used as a trap, as an intellectual battleground for justifying extremely complex economic and political decisions in a simplistic fashion throughout a crucial period of European history. The article furthermore demonstrates how a postcolonial reading may productively decode the processes of Othering taking place within Europe itself, especially between the so-called core and peripheral countries.     

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.     

The man within the breast,the supreme impartial spectator,and other impartial spectators in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Adam Smith infused the expression ‘impartial spectator’ with a plexus of related meanings, one of which is a super-being, which bears parallels to monotheistic ideas of God. As for any genuine, identified, human spectator, he can be deemed impartial only presumptively. Such presumptive impartiality as regards the incident does not of itself carry extensive implications about his intelligence, nor about his being aligned with benevolence towards any larger whole. We may posit, however, a being who is impartial and who holds higher levels of intelligence and of benevolence, and then converse over what her sentiments would be about the matter under discussion. It is natural to conceive of a being who is unsurpassable in such qualities, who is morally supreme, and who naturally takes the definite article the without having been definitized by the writer (because unnecessary, just as we speak of ‘the world’). Signal passages, new to edition 6, suggest that Smith formulates the man within the breast as a representative of the always present and everywhere morally supreme impartial spectator. When Smith speaks of the man within the breast as ‘the supposed impartial spectator’ (all new to edition 6), we interpret ‘supposed’ as sup-pos-ed (purported), not sup-pos’d (posited).     

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.