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JAAR - Recently Published (OUP)
JAAR - Recently Published (OUP)Faith in Politics: Religion and Liberal Democracy. By Bryan T. McGrawview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity. By Catherine Wilsonview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher. By Jacqueline Marinaview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] The Peyote Road: Religious Freedom and the Native American Church. By Thomas C. Maroukisview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Genre as Argument in the Sefer Yetsirah: A New Look at Its Literary StructureThe Sefer Yetsirah, the Book of Creation, is a cosmogonic work, narrating the creation of the world with the ten sefirot and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The text is semantically difficult, its reception is varied, and its structure is poorly understood. Various commentators have made competing claims about the nature of the Sefer Yetsirah. Some say it is practical, or theosophical, while others believe it to be a work of philosophy. I propose that there is a discernible pattern in its organization which is key to understanding its meaning and function. This pattern is a ring composition, a form commonly used in the Hebrew Bible and in late antique and early medieval works. The ring-composition form highlights passages that emphasize the practical application of the Sefer Yetsirah. Its generic form is just as important as its words in conveying meaning. With the aid of formal analysis, it is possible to better understand the meaning and function of the text, as well as the history of its reception. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters. By Omid Safiview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Heavenly Healing: Eschatological Cleansing and the Resurrection of the Dead in the Early ChurchThis paper uses constructions of the resurrected body in the early church as a lens through which to consider the roles of bodily ability and difference as identity markers in the study of religious texts. It argues that with the emergence of "orthodox" views of bodily resurrection and the encounter with the objections of Greek philosophy, the perfect resurrected body began to be described using the language of healing and cleansing. By examining constructions of resurrected bodies in the writings of Pseudo-Justin, Irenaeus, and Augustine, it argues that—unlike gender—certain bodily impairments are not reproduced in the resurrection. Their removal is tied to a particular view of salvation history and functions both as the completion of Jesus' healing ministry and as proof of the removal of primordial sin. The salvation of all flesh is completed with the eradication of bodily "deformity." view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Dignity & Discipline: Reviving Full Ordination for Buddhist Nuns. Edited by Thea Mohr and Jampa Tsedroenview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juarez. By Nancy Pineda-Madridview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] The Watch Tower Society and the End of the Cold War: Interpretations of the End-Times, Superpower Conflict, and the Changing Geo-Political OrderThe Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania professes to be politically neutral, concerned not with secular affairs, political ideology or worldly authority, but only with Jehovah's divine plan. This article examines one explicitly political state of affairs that featured prominently in the literature produced by the Society from 1946 until 1991: the Cold War. During the Cold War years, the dominant narrative of superpower relations was of the two kings in the Book of Daniel. According to the Society, their historic rivalry would only end with the onset of Armageddon. The demise of Soviet Communism necessitated an entirely new interpretation of the rival kings. The subsequent attempt to reconcile the spiritual and the secular in the modern world indicates that the organization is adept at recasting (and resurrecting) failed narratives and adapting contemporary events to reaffirm Charles Taze Russell's interpretations of biblical chronology, first expounded in the 1880s. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Searching for Africa in Brazil: Power and Tradition in Candomble. By Stefania Caponeview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity. By Lamin Sannehview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order. By Kambiz GhaneaBassiriview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Disgusting Bodies, Disgusting Religion: The Biology of TantraHard-core Tantric practice is disgusting, a point several scholars make. Scholarly interpretations of Tantric disgustingness, however, tend to follow the lead of Mary Douglas in suggesting that what disgusts is ultimately a reflection of social–historical concerns with borders and boundaries. Such interpretations fail to take seriously the Tantric consumption of feces, menstrual blood, urine, semen, and phlegm. Likewise, they fail to take seriously the particular sexual act involved, that is, intercourse with a menstruating, riding-astride, out-of-caste, mother-substitute. Consulting contemporary disgust research, I suggest that hard-core Tantra is literally disgusting because it is literally maladaptive. Disgust was naturally selected to deter the ingestion of bio-toxic pathogens as well as the practice of suboptimal sexual intercourse. Disgust maintains the species' viability. Tantra confounds disgust and thus disgusts. Tantra engages antibiological behaviors in its characteristically religious war against the body. As a disgusting religion, Tantra may be a perfected religion. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Augustine and the Trinity. By Lewis Ayresview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Augustine's Inner Dialogue: The Philosophical Soliloquy in Late Antiquity. By Brian Stockview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] The Evolutionary Psychology of Chinese Religion: Pre-Qin High Gods as Punishers and RewardersScholarship on religion in Early China (pre-220 BCE) has been predominantly concerned with the issue of ritual and has tended to be more concerned with placing this within the framework of Chinese history than that of religious studies. As such, other topics, such as deities, have either been neglected or subject to untested claims—often that deities do not exist and that Early China represents an atheist society, an argument that makes little sense in light of contemporary scholarship on religion in the field of cognitive science. This paper addresses the issue of deities in Early China by looking at how the High Deities of Early Chinese societies are represented in pre-Qin (pre-221 BCE) texts through statistical analysis of the corpus of texts and close readings of selected passages featuring High Deities. This paper shows that in contrast to some earlier appraisals of an absence of such agents, these texts are rife with depictions of the High Deities, and that they are often represented as moralizing agents that punish vice and reward virtue in others, something that is argued to be expected in evolutionary psychology. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Islamic Biomedical Ethics. By Abdulaziz Sachedinaview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Theory, Disciplinarity, and the Study of Religion: Lessons from a Publishing NightmareIn response to a recent scandal involving the unethical, if not illegal, copying and repackaging of our book, Theory for Religious Studies, for the field of performance studies, a group of distinguished scholars associated with that field accused us of commodifying theory, packaging it into a universal, transdisciplinary toolbox that can be applied in any field or discipline. It appears that they erroneously assumed that the publisher's (and other "authors'") repackaging of our book was our intention all along. While we object to this assumption and the misunderstandings that follow from it, we find in it an opportunity to reflect on the role and value of theoretical discourse in the study of religion. Over against the commodification of theory, which treats it as a generic product, we argue for a "poor theory" approach, which understands theorizing as a self-reflective process that involves experimental borrowing from and sharing with other fields and is attuned to the limits as well as the possibilities of any and every theoretical perspective. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] God and Government in the Ghetto: The Politics of Church-State Collaboration in Black America. By Michael Leo Owensview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Indian Dances and the Politics of Religious Freedom, 1870-1930This article examines Native American demands for religious freedom in an era when the U.S. government systematically suppressed indigenous traditions. Records from across Indian country reveal that religious freedom claims emerged as only one option in a broader strategic toolbox. While tribal leaders named some ceremonies as religion, they defended others as harmless social events similar to white dances, or as the Indian way of celebrating the Fourth of July. Significantly, while the former tended to take on characteristics that supported the designation of "religion" in the eyes of authorities, the latter tended to drop such attributes. The point here is not simply that some ceremonies were secularized while others became more religious—in fact neither development was absolute—but that the very distinction between "religion" and the "secular" in Native American traditions was a product of government suppression, a necessary accommodation to the norms of the dominant society. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Primal Religious Experience as Philosophical Evidence: A Response to Arvind Sharma's A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religionview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Response by Arvind Sharmaview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Introduction to the Discussion of A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religionview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] The Primitive, the Primal, and the Indigenous in the Study of Religionview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Alan Franklin Segal (1945-2011): In Memoriamview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] The Urgency of Widening the Discourse of Philosophy of Religion: A Discussion of A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion by Arvind Sharmaview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Heartease IIview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Toward a Scholarship of Liberation: Arvind Sharma's A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religionview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] In This Issueview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Contents Pageview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Editorial Boardview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Subscription Pageview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality and Religion in the Twenty-First Century. By Thomas Berryview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Oriental Monk as Popular Icon: On the Power of U.S. Orientalismview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism. By Seth Schwartzview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Twelve Canticles for the Zealot ...view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. By Jared Farmerview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism. By Jordan D. Rosenblumview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] History vs. Ritual in Time and End-time: The Case of Early Rabbinic Weddings in Light of Catherine BellTannaitic rabbis permit wedding processions but prohibit practices associated with these festivities, including the wearing of bridal crowns. Studies of rabbinic ritual based on social scientific models have overlooked the historical disjunction between Tannaitic and Amoraic evidence for weddings. This study explores this puzzling combination of prohibitions and permissions by making use of Catherine Bell's discussion of ritualization. Attention to practice as outlined by Bell leads to a renewed focus on the textual framing of Tannaitic discourse concerning wedding processions. This focus in turn leads to the recognition that the early rabbis create their own vision of wedding practice through negotiating their own historic moment—end-times. The larger eschatological context explored at the end of Sotah with its talk of extreme ascetic responses to end-times provides a framework for understanding Sotah's limited prohibitions concerning wedding processions and reveals a compromise reached by the various agents that remains otherwise obscured. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] The Virgin Mary, Monotheism, and Sacrifice. By Cleo McNelly Kearnsview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Secret Christians of Sivakasi: Gender, Syncretism, and Crypto-Religion in Early Twentieth-Century South IndiaA frequent pattern found among crypto-religious communities is that the rituals or beliefs held in secret are transmitted primarily by women, from mothers to daughters. This paper examines a small community of women in south India, the secret Christians of Sivakasi, in order to investigate why these women chose to maintain a delicate, and at times dangerous, balance between their outward observance of Hindu rituals and their inner, private adherence to Christianity. By contextualizing these Nadar women's lives in the vexed history of caste conflict in late nineteenth-century south India, I show that women in this upwardly mobile Hindu community found in clandestine Christian circles a means of securing a limited autonomy in an intensely patriarchal milieu, especially as their lives became increasingly circumscribed by Brahmanical customs. Georg Simmel and Paul Christopher Johnson's analyses of the affective dynamics of secrecy illuminate the complex motivations for women's involvement in these groups, in spite of the risks, and help explain why the conjugal bond becomes the focus of so much attention in the narratives of Secret Christians. By identifying features that distinguish crypto-religiosity, a relatively rare but distinctive outcome of religious encounter, in dialogue with Maurus Reinkowski and Joel Robbins's work, I hope to make this category more useful, and push our understanding of the complexities of religious change beyond the well-known dyad of conversion and syncretism. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam. By Fred M. Donnerview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Countercurrents from the West: "Blue-Eyed" Zen Masters, Vipassana Meditation, and Buddhist Psychotherapy in Contemporary KoreaOne surprising and yet relatively unknown aspect of contemporary Korean Buddhism is the significant influence of American and European Buddhism. Between 1989 and 2009, South Koreans witnessed well-educated "blue-eyed" monastic residents via the Korean media, and the emergence of new bestsellers by authors like Thich Nhat Hahn and Jack Kornfield, written initially for Western audiences but since translated into Korean. The new teachings from the West have inspired a sudden growth of interest in vipassana meditation as an "alternative" to Kanhwa Son practice, and the emergence of a new academic field: Buddhist psychotherapy. This new wave of transnational influence from the West has changed not only the way Koreans practice Buddhism but also how they perceive Buddhist history and their own identities. In addition, the perceived "prestige" of Buddhism in the West has provided a new rhetorical strategy to defend Buddhism against other religions, particularly Korean evangelical Christianity. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Readings of the Lotus Sutra. Edited by Stephen F. Teiser and Jacqueline I. Stoneview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala. By Kevin Lewis O'Neillview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History. By Aviva Ben-Urview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Reidian Religious Epistemology and the Cognitive Science of ReligionSome contemporary philosophers defend the claim that it is rational to believe that God exists even if that belief is not based on evidence. Many such defenses are developed from a religious epistemology inspired by the work of Thomas Reid's "common sense" epistemology that posits the existence of numerous cognitive faculties that nonreflectively deliver beliefs. Reid argued that one is justified in believing the automatic deliverances of these faculties unless evidence mounts to contradict them. Reformed Epistemologists have suggested that, likewise, one should give the benefit of the doubt to beliefs that are produced by a god-faculty or sensus divinitatis. Recent research in the cognitive science of religion provides new reasons to believe that humans are naturally endowed with cognitive faculties that stimulate belief in the divine. We discuss these scientific findings in relation to the arguments of Reformed Epistemologists and also with regard to arguments against the rational justification of religious beliefs. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election. By Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitzview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] The Consolations and Compensations of Exile: Memoirs by Said, Ahmed, and EireThis article explores exile as a religious orientation, focusing on three recent memoirs by American university professors: Edward Said's Out of Place, Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage, and Carlos Eire's Waiting for Snow in Havana. These writers criticize the political conditions that led to their exile even as they find compensatory or consoling meaning in their experience. The ways in which Said, Ahmed, and Eire shape their memoirs reflect distinctive versions of an exilic worldview, each with a significant religious dimension. In dialogue with Thomas Tweed's understanding of exile, I argue that autobiographical writing provides insights that cannot be duplicated by other approaches to religious studies. This article suggests the value of autobiography for religious studies and the particular contributions of the recent turn to memoir by American humanities professors. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Dewey's Bulldog: Sidney Hook, Pragmatism, and NaturalismSidney Hook distinguished himself as the most outspoken advocate of methodological naturalism in the pragmatist tradition. In response to the widespread ambivalence about methodological naturalism in the study of religion, this article exploits resources found in Hook's essays to argue for an unequivocal methodological naturalism in the study of religion. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Framing the Jina: Narratives of Icons and Idols in Jain History. By John E. Cortview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] In This Issueview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Contents Pageview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Editorial Boardview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Subscription Pageview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Religion, Dynasty, and Patronage in Early Christian Rome, 300-900. Edited by Kate Cooper and Julia Hillnerview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture). By Asher D. Biemannview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] 2010 Presidential Address: "Religion" in the Humanities and the Humanities in the UniversityTwo basic problems that scholars of religion routinely confront—specifying an object of study and figuring out how to study it—can be construed as opportunities. Scholars of religion typically overcome the difficulties inherent in specifying their object of study by offering a stipulative definition. Doing so, however, artificially stabilizes our object of study and obscures what I believe we ought to be studying: the processes of valuation whereby people decide on the meaning of events and determine what matters most. If we take processes of valuation as our subject matter, we can use historical methods to track how those processes unfold over time in various domains. In addition, as a subject-oriented discipline, we have the luxury of exploring how the processes that lead to the formation of our instable subject matter work at different, albeit connected, levels of analysis. This is an ability that I think at least some scholars in subject-oriented disciplines can and should cultivate as a contribution to interdisciplinary collaborative projects. An analysis of the making of "religion" in the modern university is offered as an example of how we might track a process of valuation over time. A twentieth century (neo-Darwinian) perspective on evolution is offered as a framework for understanding processes of valuation at multiple levels of analysis. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Crypto-Religion and the Study of Cultural Mixtures: Anthropology, Value, and the Nature of SyncretismAlthough anthropologists rarely use the term crypto-religion, one can argue that they tend to analyze the cultures of most non-western converts to Christianity in crypto-religious terms. This tendency, which follows from the theoretical investment anthropologists have in cultural continuity, inflects anthropological approaches to conversion and syncretism in disciplinarily specific ways. This paper works to develop a model of syncretism that is not haunted by crypto-religious analysis and to demonstrate its value in considering cases in which people have converted to charismatic and Pentecostal forms of Christianity. The argument is illustrated with field materials from research in Papua New Guinea and concludes by considering what this rethinking of anthropological notions of syncretism might mean for placing the concept of crypto-religion in the theorization of processes of religious transformation more generally. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] In God's Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity. By Matt Tomlinsonview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Can a Critic Be a Caretaker too? Religion, Conflict, and Conflict TransformationThis article argues that Russell McCutcheon's notion of the religion scholar as a critic is crucial for envisioning a distinct relevance to the academic study of religion in multidisciplinary conversations concerning questions of religion and conflict. However, McCutcheon's critical approach is insufficient for thinking about transforming conflicts and underlying structures of injustice. To actively conceptualize processes of conflict transformation, the religion scholar needs to assume the role of a caretaker and a critic and thus overcome McCutcheon's binary construal of these two approaches. The religion scholar as a critic and a caretaker may offer not only a second-order re-description of religion as a social construct but also a problem-oriented constructive engagement with histories, memories, and theological resources. The cultivation of a uniquely religious studies approach would depend on the ability of the religion scholar to become such a "critical caretaker." view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Embodied Research and Writing: A Case for Phenomenologically Oriented Religious Studies EthnographiesIn this article, I examine anthropological and phenomenological theories and scholarship that recognize our bodies and our interlocutor's bodies as texts that we can "read" to better understand ourselves and the lifeworlds our interlocutors inhabit. Drawing on my own ethnographic research and taking my cue from phenomenologists, I argue that Religious Studies ethnographers must look to their bodies as well as their interlocutors’ bodies as sources of knowledge. When we draw on our experiences and observations then we are truly writing empirically based scholarship. The ethnographer is grounded in her body, and her body is entwined with her interlocutors’ bodies and, by extension, their lifeworlds. Moreover, the body can be a vehicle for complicating, at times even transcending, emic (insider) and etic (outsider) boundaries. To ignore our embodied interactions with others in the field when we write is to occlude lived experience and how our bodies are epistemological sites that allow us privileged access into our interlocutor's worlds. "Our" bodies are ways for understanding "others" lifeworlds. When we take a reflexive turn in our written work, we acknowledge this embodiment and connections, and yield greater insight into religion as it is lived. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Religion and War Resistance in the Plowshares Movement. By Sharon Erickson Nepstadview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Emplacing a Pilgrimage: The Oyama Cult and Regional Religion in Early Modern Japan. By Barbara Ambrosview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Sinister Yogis. By David Gordon Whiteview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] The Articulation of a French Civil HinduismThis paper examines the impact that the French principle of laïcité has upon Indian and Hindu associations’ production of messages about Hinduism in Guadeloupe, French West Indies. Laïcité is meant to protect the public arena so that all religious traditions may coexist privately. It is the principle that, for example, has restricted displays of Muslim identity in women by banning the headscarf (foulard) in public spaces such as national schools. In Guadeloupe, Indian and Hindu associations are forced to respond to French public policy in configuring their messages about Hinduism. To fit their messages within the context of laïcité, associations have chosen to present Indian culture and Hinduism as two entities; Indian culture has to do with dances and songs, whereas Hinduism is everything related to the temple. Beyond the appearance of laïcité that Indian and Hindu associations cultivate, however, this paper suggests that they are deliberately creating understandings of Indian culture that are everyday more inclusive of Hinduism. Since the principle of laïcité does not allow this religious minority to exist in a meaningful way, the minority has expanded the notion of laïcité in order to survive. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] At the Origins of Mission and Missiology: A Study in the Dynamics of Religious LanguageThe term "mission" was first used to describe Christian evangelization in the sixteenth century, probably by Ignatius of Loyola. The theological sub-discipline missiology dates from the nineteenth century. This paper compares these innovations to understand them better and appreciate how religious language that describes religious practice works. Early missiology's distinctive rhetorical structure—namely its organization around missionaries as the "subject" of mission and those evangelized as mission's "object"—reveals the implications of Ignatius's innovation and explains the rapid proliferation of the term in early modern Christian Europe. "Mission" captured Europe's emergent self-understanding decisively shaped by the new awareness of the Americas, discursively placing Europe at the world's center, both geographically and morally. These innovations in Christian terminology exemplify metapraxis, a philosophical explanation of religious practice. Comparing them provides insight into how metapraxis evolves in new circumstances to legitimate religious practices both implicitly and explicitly. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Reason, Religion, and Democracy. By Dennis C. Muellerview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] The Four Great Temples: Buddhist Archaeology, Architecture, and Icons of Seventh-Century Japan. By Donald F. McCallumview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka. By Anne M. Blackburnview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Secret Faith in the Public Square: An Argument for the Concealment of Christian Identity. By Jonathan Malesicview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Metamorphosisview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Alejandro Garcia-Rivera (1951-2010): Un recordatorioview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination. By Courtney Benderview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community. By Ann Marie Yasinview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] A Postsecular Politics? Inter-faith Relations as a Civic PracticeMuch of the academic literature on religious dialogue, and the policy being formulated regarding inter-faith relations, lacks any scope for genuinely political relationships or any account of how inter-faith relations are affected by the market and the state. Abstracting accounts of inter-faith relations from broader accounts of political economy masks how the state and the market are key factors in establishing the conditions and possibilities for such relations. This article avoids such abstraction and develops a constructive account of how to reconceptualize inter-faith relations as a civic rather than religious practice and common action between different faiths as directly political rather than as humanitarian service provision. Part of this account entails situating it within broader debates about secularization and whether the contemporary context can be described as "postsecular." The key question addressed in this article is how can a common life be negotiated between different faith traditions, with different and competing claims to truths, amid the pressures and structures brought to bear upon that common life by the state and the market on which all depend? This article describes some of the factors shaping the relationship between faith groups, state and market within the contemporary context, and then, after locating these issues within broader theoretical debates about secularization, makes some constructive proposals for how religious groups might engage in inter-faith relations within this context. It closes by identifing the civic practices of listening, a commitment to place, and the building and maintenance of institutions as central to the formation of a politics of the common good. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Religion, Race, and Remembering: Indo-Caribbean Christians in CanadaIn this article, I consider the ways Indo-Caribbean Christian Canadians remember and tell stories about their own and their family's religious histories. Most participants in this study had Hindu ancestors who converted to Christianity during or after the Caribbean experience of indentured labor. Most of the stories I heard identified Africans as the source of the problems that once and still beset the homelands of the families I encountered. Moreover, many of the people I interviewed told generally positive stories about the period during which they or their relatives were objects of British imperial power and the Christian missionary project so closely associated with British geo-political expansion. I suggest that the narrative patterns I heard regarding both Africans and the British must be understood against the backdrop of the interpenetration of race and religion among the Indians I interviewed. view article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Contents Pageview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Editorial Boardview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] Subscription Pageview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] In This Issueview article | [Journal of the American Academy of Religion - recent issues] |
