Is there a distinctively religious attitude? Durkheim suggested there was: it was that of regarding certain beliefs, persons, institutions, practices, or places as sacred. The idea of the sacred also featured prominently in the work of historians and phenomenologists of religion, where it referred to the transcendent ("other-worldly") object of devotion. While the phenomenologists’ idea of the sacred has fallen out of favor, Durkheim’s idea is undergoing a revival, to which the present paper is a contribution. To regard something as sacred, it argues, is to see it as having a particular kind of normative significance, which arises from its connection with an "occult" or hidden realm. While phenomenologists regarded this attitude as irreducible, this assumption is unwarranted. While serving to explain human behavior, this distinctively religious attitude also requires an explanation, one that will acknowledge both its human origins and its political role.
Qo 2:17 is a shocking text, both from the anthropological point of view and from the theological point of view, and that is probably why it was sometimes neglected, sometimes sweetened. However, a textual criticism and structural and literary analysis shows that this text has an ethical connotation: Qohelet hates life, because it is in no way the result of wisdom (Qo 2:14b–16); God’s work reflects "badly upon Qohelet," because it is unjust: indeed, the wise man, like the fool, must die and will not be long remembered.
Since Deng Xiaoping adopted a pragmatic policy of opening up and reforming the country in the late 1970s, Islam has witnessed a revival in China. Just as the Chinese nation has experienced rapid economic, political and social development, so too has Islam grown and diversified. Since Muslims generally enjoy the freedom to practice their religion and the benefit of China’s Preferential Program (a policy giving special privileges to minority Muslims) – if they obey the state law and keep harmonious relations with other social groups – some Chinese Muslims regard today as a "golden age" for Islam in the People’s Republic. This paper offers an overview of the major developments in Chinese Communist policy on religion and discusses the internal and external influences of domestic and international relations on Communist Party policy towards Chinese Muslims. It argues that Chinese Communist Party policy since the 1970s protects religious freedom but does so while maintaining state control over religion. Further, in the case of Islam in the People’s Republic, state protection and control are defined according to the domestic and international concerns of the State.
In this essay I argue that despite the scope of change in the realms of military, security, economic, and social policies, as well as changes in the legal sphere, the path dependency left by the institutions of the previous imperial and republican regimes has influenced the current arrangements for the regulation of religion by the state in China. This state of affairs has less to do with something specific to Chinese culture and more to do with the particular institutional context of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the first section of this paper, I consider the influence of previous regimes’ institutions that is still felt in the current regulatory mechanisms for the control of religion. Then, in the second section, I explore the current approach to religious affairs, drawing attention to its quadripartite dimensions: political, legal, administrative, and managerial. In a third section I examine the nature of the challenges faced by the Communist Party of China, the legal and state apparatus of the PRC, and the religious institutions. The discussion uses evidence from fieldwork that I have undertaken over the space of ten years on the philanthropic activities of Buddhist institutions in China. I conclude by discussing the political obstacles that stand in the way of implementing a secular state in China that is genuinely pluralist and supportive of religious diversity.
In this essay, I reflect upon Gandhi’s approach to inter-religious conflict in India in an effort to draw out his distinctive response to some of the challenges posed by religious pluralism. His perspectives on these challenges not only offer interesting moral and political insights into the Indian political and social context, but may enrich the analyses of those interested in religious diversity in Europe, North America, and China.
Today’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which came to power in 1949, continues to recognize religion and Christianity as part of the dominant Western culture, and as the means to establish relationships and promote religion and culture. When faced with a moral or ethical dilemma the CCP looks to a Confucian past for traditions just as the Canadian state draws on the Protestant and Catholic cultures of its so-called founding peoples. The Chinese state has additionally attempted to manage religious engagement by propping up select Buddhist temples and working through grassroots personal webs of connection to household religious altars, enshrined deities, and communal practices. In China and in Canada, states claim neutrality but in both cases and for different reasons religion is treated as culture. The paper’s ethno-historical approach draws on over 15 years of fieldwork and historical research throughout the Chinese cultural sphere (China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, and Canada). Looking across histories and nations it traces state governance in China and Canada, webs of connections, and personal interactions that have shaped religious identities and the resurgence of Chinese temple life and select religious cults.
In academic writings on multiculturalism in India the "Shah Bano controversy" (1985–1986) has been a much cited example of the incompatibility between gender equality and cultural diversity. As a response to the Supreme Court’s Shah Bano verdict in 1985, the then Congress-led Indian government introduced the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986. In this article, I analyze the parliamentary debates on the aforementioned Act in order to examine the dominant normative vocabulary of the Indian state in debating the issue of religious freedom versus demands for democratic citizenship rights. Such an exercise sheds light on how the Indian state has reconciled group-differentiated rights – the legal recognition of Muslim Personal Law in this case – with the liberal democratic principles enshrined in the Constitution of India. The analysis of the parliamentary debates on the Muslim Women’s Bill shows, firstly, that when purportedly incommensurable demands of gender-justice and religious freedom come to an elected deliberative forum, it is not necessary that such demands are resolved through "consensus" or through "negotiation and compromise," as has been argued by multicultural theorists. Secondly, the analysis of the parliamentary debates also demonstrates that while the proponents of the Bill prioritized group rights at the expense of individual rights, the opponents neglected the concern that vulnerable minority groups should be accorded differential treatment. I thus contend that both the proponents and the opponents of the Muslim Women’s Bill in the Parliament argued in terms of formal equality and lacked arguments based on substantive equality. Finally, I argue that although the Congress government prioritized group rights in the parliamentary debates, it did not give up the ideal of a common civil code, such that the government left the question of accommodating gender-equality concerns unresolved. It was thus left to the judiciary to determine whether to further entrench legal pluralism in the family law of India.
Most Canadians believe that they have resolved the issue of religious freedom—as well as the problems of the injustice of Christian privilege and discrimination based on religion—by redefining the social order according to Canadian models of secularism, multiculturalism, and human rights. Typical of this resolution were the protections against discrimination based on religion or "creed" in the Ontario Human Rights Code, drafted in 1962. However, dramatic social and demographic changes in Ontario over the last fifty years have presented the efforts of the Ontario Human Rights Commission to protect and promote religious freedom with unexpected challenges. New forms of ethno-racial and religious pluralism, more widespread secularism, more religious hybridity and innovation, and greater degrees of individualized expression of religious identity have forced the Commission to rethink its policies pertaining to religious freedom. The Commission is wrestling with the fact that not only has Ontario become more religiously diverse in terms of the number of world religions and sub-divisions in those traditions, but religion in Ontario is expressing itself in unprecedented forms. At the same time, jurisprudence and public attitudes about the role of religion in secular, liberal democracies are also evolving. This article examines the Commission’s treatment of religious freedom in its policy work on balancing competing human rights and protection of freedom based on creed. It analyzes the Commission’s challenges in formulating policies around religious freedom by examining the interaction between secularism, multiculturalism, and human rights culture in the context of the transition of Canada’s social order to a post-secular society.
This article examines the possible relationship between the sentiment of church-related tweets and church growth. It finds that within the sample of tweets analysed, there is a statistically significant relationship between the sentiment of a church-related tweet and the presence of church growth in the geographical area from which the tweet was posted. This work builds on the body of knowledge surrounding church growth and decline in the United Kingdom, by seeking to better understand how new sources of data, in this case freely available social media data, can be used to gain a better understanding of the behaviours of churches which regularly form, merge, move, split and close.
Be it considered in a very concrete and empirical way, or on a textual basis, the issue of death has been conceived in Judaism in the awkward paradox of both being crucial and, at the same time, receiving little attention. The theme of death discloses in any case a significant gap between a cosmic eschatology and a personal eschatology. This is precisely the focus of this paper. Drawing upon empirical and textual materials, it questions the relationship between cosmic and personal eschatology, and, in the context of Modernity, between scriptural and individualized eschatologies.
Grizzly Man is a movie about Timothy Treadwell, a man so fascinated by grizzly bears he lived with them in the wild for 13 summers before he perished, eaten by one of the animals he was intending to protect. The movie is built around more than a hundred hours of films left by Treadwell, who didn’t hesitate to put himself center stage in order to build his fantasy. Autofiction, megalomania and idealization influence the narrative of Treadwell as shown by Herzog, while his parents’ and friends’ testimonies show a much more fragile and unstable character. In presenting himself as a lone savior, the master of a universe he created and that he swore to save, Treadwell constructs a sacred persona, at the center of a lost paradise that only he can understand and protect.
This paper addresses the academic conversation on Protestant missions to the Indigenous peoples of coastal British Columbia during the second half of the nineteenth century through a consideration of the role of revivalist piety in the conversion of some of the better known Indigenous Methodist evangelists identified in the scholarly literature. The paper introduces the work of existing scholars critically illuminating the reasons (religious convergence and/or the want of symbolic and material resources) typically given for Indigenous, namely, Ts’msyen, conversion. It also introduces Methodist revivalist piety and its instantiation in British Columbia. And, finally, it offers a critical exploration of revivalist piety and its role in conversion as set within a broader theoretical inquiry into the academic study of ritual and religion.
The aim of this article is to show the advantage of submitting one biblical text to a variety of methodological approaches that will allow a reader to have a fuller understanding of the text. This article proposes to read a particular Pauline text (1 Corinthians 5:1–5) by using different methodological approaches that have been adopted and developed in biblical studies (the historical-critical approach, the "social-scientific" approach, the feminist and postcolonial studies approaches) to illustrate the benefit of using a multiplicity of exegetical tools in the hermeneutical tasks, instead of adopting just one.
This paper reconsiders and restates the sociology of theology as an investigation of the social origins of theological doctrines. It treats the sociology of theology as an integral part of the sociology of religion and links it with the sociology of ideology (or knowledge). In particular, it applies the sociology of theology to the emergence and diffusion of Calvinism as a theological system. The paper posits and identifies essential social origins of the main Calvinist sociological doctrines, such as those of an absolute, omnipotent God and Divine predestination. It specifically identifies their social origins in a definite political system for the first doctrine and a ruling class of society for the second. It shows that these doctrines are theological and ideological projections and rationalizations of Calvinists pursuing or attaining power and domination since Calvin and his collaborators, and through their descendants. The paper aims to make a contribution to the sociology of theology as a relatively neglected part of the contemporary sociology of religion and ideology.
This paper examines beliefs and experiential claims concerning life after death provided by some 5,000 people in Canada, the United States, and Britain in the spring of 2014. The surveys show that large numbers of people continue to believe life continues after death. Beyond belief, many maintain that individuals who have died are following what is taking place in their lives and continuing to be in contact. Such claims raise important questions as to why these beliefs and claims are so pervasive, and the appropriate responses of academics.
This article critically examines certain custom (ʿurf) based assumptions and theories regarding gender roles and norms in Sunni Islamic tradition and law. First the article considers how scholarship should conceptualize Islamic tradition. Next, the processes through which the concept of ʿurf has entered into the Islamic tradition and Islamic law in particular are considered. The ʿurf based assumptions regarding the nature of gender roles and norms in (neo)-traditional Muslim thought are based on what I term a "gender oppositionality" thesis. I argue that the gender oppositionality thesis has strongly influenced the manner in which the Qurān and Sunna have been interpreted with respect to gender issues and on the basis of which patriarchal traditional Islamic law (and ethics) have been constructed. In particular, I highlight and problematize the conceptual link between women as "fitna" (sources of chaos), male honor (ʿird) and sexual jealousy (ghairāt) in discourses in (neo-)traditional interpretations of the Islamic tradition. Finally, the article articulates how traditional Qurān–Sunna hermeneutics failed to recognize the importance of "comprehensive contextualization" of the Qurān–Sunna on the basis of which we can question the validity of gender-oppositionality based interpretations of the Qurān and Sunna present in (neo-)traditional discourses that were incorporated into Islamic law through the concept of custom.
This article details the strengths and vulnerabilities that Christian and Muslim immigrant women bring to situations of domestic violence in the Canadian Maritimes. An intersectional theoretical framework grounds the analysis of qualitative data collected from 89 Christian and Muslim women from 27 countries of origin who arrived in the region ten years prior to the field work. Their strengths include high levels of education, experiences of overcoming adversity, the ability to act strategically, and the use of social networks, while factors such as increased dependence on husbands, transnational family situations, responsibilities for family unity, and a lack of knowledge about local services are vulnerabilities. The findings show that Orthodox and Catholic Christians, Muslim women with young children, immigrant women employed full-time immediately upon arrival, and wives whose immigration is sponsored by their husbands lack access to important social support networks.
In this essay, I begin by examining arguments concerning "Orientalism" from the work of the late Edward W. Said. I then highlight the way that Kurban Said’s novella Ali and Nino is indebted to this tradition, the author relying upon it in order to create a complex world within a few pages. On the one hand, this novella is a wonderful work of art with which to work out some of Edward Said’s key ideas, and on the other hand, appreciating Edward Said’s key ideas is also crucial for a better appreciation of this novella’s complexity. The second part of the paper focuses on the novella itself, so as to think of Ali and Nino with Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism in the foreground of one’s mind. In conclusion, I not only highlight why this also sheds light on art and literature, religion and politics, history and current affairs, in such a geopolitically important area as the Caucasus as well as elsewhere the world over; I also point out parallels between the Orientalist stereotypes examined in this essay and key ideas from ascetic religious traditions.
Should theology be a part of the Great Conversation of the modern university? Oxford and Cambridge employ theologians while in Australia theology is utterly unknown in any reputable secular university. Harvard, Yale, and Chicago maintain divinity schools while Princeton, Stanford, and the best public institutions in America keep theology resolutely on the margins—in student clubs and chaplaincies. Canadian universities present a widely varying spectrum from coast to coast. This article explores why there is ambiguity and ambivalence over such an ancient discipline, particularly dealing with critiques in the name of "scientific" rigour. It shows how theology and the public university can be mutually beneficial so long as each abides by its authentic norms.
Heated discussion in the media, costly and laborious government commissions, and restrictive legal recommendations in France and Québec, Canada, have recently focused on the undesirability of face-covering veils (burqas and niqabs) in the public sphere. This article charts how these sites have, at the same time, concretized a contrasting idealized presentation of a desirable secular female body. This examination is grounded in recent Secularism Studies scholarship that argues that, like forms of religiosity, secularisms include a range of social and physical dispositions (Warner, 2008; see also Asad, 2003; Calhoun et al., 2011; Fadil, 2011; Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2008;
L’auteur présente un état de la recherche des critiques des sources et des analyses structurelle et littéraire de Qohélet 10,12–15. Puis, il poursuit son enquête en montrant comment l’ironie emprunte les voies de l’ambiguïté sémantique.
A recurring debate within discussions of religion, science, and magic has to do with the existence of distinct modes of thought or "orientations" to the world. The thinker who initiated this debate, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, distinguished two such orientations, one characterized as "participatory" and the other as "causal." The present essay attempts to clarify what a participatory orientation might involve, making use of the social-psychological category of a "schema." It argues that while the attitude to which Lévy-Bruhl refers is to be distinguished from an explicit body of doctrine, it does have a cognitive dimension and can embody causal claims. It follows that if such a distinction is to be made, it is not helpfully characterized as a contrast between participation and causality. A better distinction might be that between a mythical and an experimental attitude to the world.
L’édition critique accompagnée d’une traduction française, de commentaires, d’introductions et d’index des textes de Nag Hammadi (ci-après le Projet BCNH) a vu le jour à l’Université Laval en septembre 1973. Quarante années plus tard, cet article veut faire le point sur le travail accompli et celui qui reste à faire et proposer quelques réflexions sur l’état de la recherche dans le domaine.
This survey of clerical characters in Canadian English fiction from Ralph Connor (1901) to
Max Weber’s ethos of work was not an integral part of the pre-industrial culture of Ontario. It had to be inculcated to encourage the formation of a culture conducive to the industrial era. This article examines the formative role of religious discourse in fostering just such a work ethic by considering sermons, diaries, manuscripts, and other publications preserved in the archives of Anglican, Presbyterian, and United (Methodist) churches. It also analyzes denominational literature, which played an important role in shaping the popular culture in an industrializing Ontario (1885–1910). Alternative voices, which challenged the nascent ethos of industrialization, are also examined. This article finds that values promoting an emerging industrial order were prominent in sermons of the era, which often dealt with issues of social control, justification of social inequities, and the development of an appropriate work ethic.
This paper examines the commercial and recreational cultures of the urban Buddhist temple during Japan’s Edo or early modern period (1603–1868) as depicted in popular guidebooks to famous places (meisho ki). Encouraged by advances in travel and communication, and a vibrant bourgeois culture, meisho guidebooks presented religious sites to the common public not as static, immobile spaces catering only to otherworldly spiritual concerns, but as open and elastic geographies simultaneously offering immediate material rewards and leisurely and commercial attractions to visitors. As unique media of local religion, guidebooks reflect how the reputation and allure of popular Buddhist temples among the general public were driven by the commodification of local legends and objects of worship, as well as material pleasures of religious spaces. This paper argues the importance of guidebooks in the production of public knowledge and expectation about religious sites in early modern Japan. These guides reveal material concerns and entertainment not as having been antithetical to the operation of Buddhist institutions, but rather as supports for the spread of Buddhist teachings and popularization of deity worship among the urban populace.
In a recent article, New Testament scholar Zeba Crook argues that in order for the study of Christian Origins to be taken seriously alongside other academic disciplines, a naturalistic philosophy must be adopted. Currently, there is a blend of openness, agnosticism and rejection among New Testament scholars with regard to miracles in the New Testament. This article responds to the concerns about an openness to the supernatural and offers a suggestion on how the study of religion can remain an academic discipline apart from theology and yet still be open to supernatural explanations.
Little research has been done on Western women who convert to Shi‘i Islam. To fill this gap, this study was conducted on American and Canadian women who have converted to Shi‘i Islam. Most of the research subjects in this study reported a moderate to severe sense of social marginalization after conversion. This marginalization resulted from membership in multiple minority groups (Shi‘i, Muslim, convert, and female); Black converts reported the most severe sense of marginalization due to the added pressure of being a racial minority in North America. Most of the research subjects also experienced a sense of social exclusion from other Shi‘i Muslims. Therefore, the question arises as to why these women continued to adhere to Shi‘i Islam despite these difficulties. This article will attempt to answer this question through an analysis of the data provided by the research subjects.
Peu de recherches ont été effectuées sur les femmes occidentales qui se convertissent à l’Islam Chiite. Cette étude va donc permettre de combler cette lacune sur les femmes américaines et canadiennes qui se sont convertis à l’Islam Chiite. La plupart des sujets de cette recherche démontrent une marginalisation sociale modérée ou intense après la conversion. Cette marginalisation est causée par l’appartenance à de multiples groupes minoritaires (Chiite, Musulman, converti, et gente féminine) ; les Noirs convertis ressentent un plus profond sentiment de marginalisation dû par une pression supplémentaire d’appartenance à une minorité visible raciale en Amérique du Nord. La plupart des sujets de recherche ont porté leur expérimentation sur le sentiment d’exclusion sociale des autres groupes Musulmans Chiites. Par conséquent, la question se pose sur la raison pour laquelle ces femmes ont continué à adhérer à l’Islam Chiite en dépit de ces difficultés. Cet article tentera de répondre à cette question grâce à une analyse de données fournies à travers des sujets de recherche.
This article is meant as an invitation to further the use of the concept of utopia as a heuristic tool among historians of ancient Israel for the purpose of reconstructing the world of ideas of the late Persian period Yehud. To do so, and given that the term "utopia" may be and has been used in different ways, it advances, first, general considerations about an heuristic, pragmatic understanding of "utopia" and "utopian images" that may be particularly helpful for these purposes. Then it advances a number of observations about utopia and utopian images that were evoked when the literati of the late Yehud read and reread their authoritative corpus of texts. These observations deal, among others, with matters of exploration and certainty in the relevant community, of hope, of restoration and restorative utopias; they deal with issues of temporality as past, present and future utopias were construed and with the existence of multiple memories of utopias and multiple utopias. They address the issue that utopianizing tendencies led to memorable vignettes but not to memorable road maps, they do not fail to mention matters of utopia and power, and they conclude with issues for further discussion. On the whole, this article illustrates how "utopia"-informed approaches may shed light on the intellectual discourse of this community, while at the same time noting crucial differences between utopias and utopianizing tendencies both now and then that must be taken into consideration.
Cet article est conçu comme une invitation à poursuivre l’utilisation du concept d’utopie comme un outil heuristique par les historiens de l’Israël ancien, dans le but de reconstruire le monde des idées de la Yehud de la période perse tardive. Pour ce faire, et étant donné que le terme « utopie » peut être et a été utilisé de différentes manières, il propose, premièrement, des considérations générales sur une compréhension heuristique et pragmatique de l’« utopie » et des « images utopiques », qui pourraient être particulièrement utiles à ces fins. Puis, il propose un certain nombre d’observations sur l’utopie et les images utopiques qui ont été évoquées quand des lettrés de la Yehud tardive ont lu et relu leur corpus de textes faisant autorité. Ces observations portent, entre autres, sur des questions d’exploration et de certitude dans la communauté concernée, d’espoir, de restauration et d’utopies réparatrices ; ils traitent de questions de temporalité comme des utopies passées, présentes et futures qui ont été interprétées avec l’existence de multiples souvenirs d’utopies et des utopies multiples. Ils abordent la question des tendances utopistes qui conduisent à des vignettes mémorables, mais pas à des cartes routières mémorables, sans manquer d’évoquer les questions de l’utopie et de la puissance et de conclure avec des questions pour des discussions ultérieures. Dans l’ensemble, cet article illustre comment des approches éclairées de l’« utopie » peuvent éclairer le discours intellectuel de cette communauté, tout en notant des différences cruciales entre les utopies et les tendances utopistes de maintenant et d’alors qui doivent être prises en considération.
This article examines Jane Barter Moulaison’s critique of Bernard Lonergan’s The Way to Nicea, and proposes a more generous interpretation of his project. Barter Moulaison’s critique rests upon a misreading of Lonergan. She conceives of doctrine as a liturgical distillation of Christian narrative, but he understands the Nicene homoousion as a shift toward systematic meaning in the expression of Christian teaching. This shift presupposes a Christian realism mediated by true judgments. It developed through a dialectical process in which the inadequacies of earlier formulations were gradually brought to light and eliminated, to arrive at the judgment that what is true of the Father is equally true of the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Contemporary discourses on "religion" frequently use a distinction between "religious experience" and "institutional religion," which we have inherited in part as a result of the popularity of William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. This paper offers a discourse analysis of this distinction—including how it has been taken up by people who say they are "spiritual, but not religious"—and demonstrates that the distinction often seems designed to sanction anything "religious" that might conflict with or upset the status quo in late capitalism. In addition, this paper considers how the distinction has been appropriated by writers who incorporate it into portrayals of Jesus that similarly legitimate a consumerist life under late capitalism.
Abstract: This essay critically engages Timothy Fitzgerald’s Discourse on Civility and Barbarity (2007a), arguing that it takes an important step beyond Fitzgerald’s first book, The Ideology of Religious Studies (2000), in diagnosing a current malaise of the academic study of religion and in modeling a way past this malaise. Highlighting this valuable aspect of the book, I argue, requires correcting certain problems with its argument. Specifically, there is a tension between two overarching goals: writing "a critical history of ‘religion’ as a category," and criticizing "modern discourses on generic religion." Once these genealogical and critical projects are brought into more effective alignment, the book models an approach where a properly critical study of religion begins with a contingently and strategically theorized domain of ‘religion’ and explores its relation to other domains—not only ‘the secular.’
Résumé : Cet essai reconsidère d’un œil critique le livre Discourse on Civility and Barbarity (2007a), de Timothy Fitzgerald. Il soutien qu’il donne un pas important au-delà du premier livre de Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (2000), dans les faits de diagnostiquer une malaise actuelle de l’étude des religions et de modeler une piste alternative. Pourtant, pour accentuer cet aspect important du livre, on doit corriger des problèmes logiques avec son argument. Spécialement, il y a une tension problématique entre les deux buts du livre : l’écriture « d’une histoire critique de ‘religion’ comme une catégorie »; et la critique « des discours modernes sur la religion générique ». Dès que ces projets généalogiques et critiques sont apportés dans une meilleure alignement, le livre modèle une approche de grande valeur : c’est le travail d’une étude proprement critique du concept ‘de religion’ de le suivre où il mène, et d’analyser ses relations avec d’autres concepts.