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Eagleton, “Culture and the Death of God”

Next month, Yale University Press will publish Culture and the Death of 9780300203998God, by Terry Eagleton (University of Lancaster). This book should spark thoughtful and intriguing dialogue. The publisher’s description follows.

How to live in a supposedly faithless world threatened by religious fundamentalism? Terry Eagleton, formidable thinker and renowned cultural critic, investigates in this thought-provoking book the contradictions, difficulties, and significance of the modern search for a replacement for God. Engaging with a phenomenally wide range of ideas, issues, and thinkers from the Enlightenment to today, Eagleton discusses the state of religion before and after 9/11, the ironies surrounding Western capitalism’s part in spawning not only secularism but also fundamentalism, and the unsatisfactory surrogates for the Almighty invented in the post-Enlightenment era.

The author reflects on the unique capacities of religion, the possibilities of culture and art as modern paths to salvation, the so-called war on terror’s impact on atheism, and a host of other topics of concern to those who envision a future in which just and compassionate communities thrive. Lucid, stylish, and entertaining in his usual manner, Eagleton presents a brilliant survey of modern thought that also serves as a timely, urgently needed intervention into our perilous political present.

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Chidester, “Empire of Religion”

Next month, University of Chicago Press will publish Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion by David Chidester (University of Cape Town). The publisher’s description follows.Empire of Religion

How is knowledge about religion and religions produced, and how is that knowledge authenticated and circulated? David Chidester seeks to answer these questions in Empire of Religion, documenting and analyzing the emergence of a science of comparative religion in Great Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and its complex relations to the colonial situation in southern Africa. In the process, Chidester provides a counterhistory of the academic study of religion, an alternative to standard accounts that have failed to link the field of comparative religion with either the power relations or the historical contingencies of the imperial project.

In developing a material history of the study of religion, Chidester documents the importance of African religion, the persistence of the divide between savagery and civilization, and the salience of mediations—imperial, colonial, and indigenous—in which knowledge about religions was produced. He then identifies the recurrence of these mediations in a number of case studies, including Friedrich Max Müller’s dependence on colonial experts, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan’s fictional accounts of African religion, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s studies of African religion. By reclaiming these theorists for this history, Chidester shows that race, rather than theology, was formative in the emerging study of religion in Europe and North America. Sure to be controversial, Empire of Religion is a major contribution to the field of comparative religious studies.

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Abrams, “God and Blackness”

Next month, New York University Press will publish God and Blackness: Race, Gender and Identity in a Middle-Class Afrocentric Church by Andrea C. God and BlacknessAbrams (Centre College).  The publisher’s description follows.

Blackness, as a concept, is extremely fluid: it can refer to cultural and ethnic identity, socio-political status, an aesthetic and embodied way of being, a social and political consciousness, or a diasporic kinship. It is used as a description of skin color ranging from the palest cream to the richest chocolate; as a marker of enslavement, marginalization, criminality, filth, or evil; or as a symbol of pride, beauty, elegance, strength, and depth. Despite the fact that it is elusive and difficult to define, blackness serves as one of the most potent and unifying domains of identity.
God and Blackness offers an ethnographic study of blackness as it is understood within a specific community—that of the First Afrikan Church, a middle-class Afrocentric congregation in Atlanta, Georgia. Drawing on nearly two years of participant observation and in‑depth interviews, Andrea C. Abrams examines how this community has employed Afrocentrism and Black theology as a means of negotiating the unreconciled natures of thoughts and ideals that are part of being both black and American. Specifically, Abrams examines the ways in which First Afrikan’s construction of community is influenced by shared understandings of blackness, and probes the means through which individuals negotiate the tensions created by competing constructions of their black identity. Although Afrocentrism operates as the focal point of this discussion, the book examines questions of political identity, religious expression and gender dynamics through the lens of a unique black church.
Posted on by JCPW

Elver, “The Headscarf Controversy”

9780199769292Next month, Oxford University Press will publish The Headscarf Controversy: Secularism and Freedom of Religion by Hilal Elver (University of California Santa Barbara). The publisher’s description follows.

Hilal Elver offers an in-depth study of the escalating controversy over the right of Muslim women to wear headscarves. Examining legal and political debates in Turkey, several European countries including France and Germany, and the United States, Elver shows the troubling exclusion of pious Muslim women from the public sphere in the name of secularism, democracy, liberalism, and women’s rights.

After evaluating political actions and court decisions from the national level of individual governments to the international sphere of the European Court of Human Rights, Elver concludes that judges and legislators are increasingly influenced by social pressures concerning immigration and multiculturalism, and by issues such as Islamophobia, the “war on terror,” and security concerns. She shows how these influences have resulted in a failure on the part of many Western governments to recognize and protect essential individual freedoms.

Employing a critical legal theory perspective to the headscarf controversy, Elver argues that law can be used to change underlying social conditions shaping the role of religion, and also the position of women in modern society. The Headscarf Controversy demonstrates how changes in law across nations can be used to restore state commitments to human rights.

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Hornbeck & Norko (eds.), “More than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church: Inquiry, Thought, and Expression”

Next month, Fordham will publish More than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity 9780823257621and the Catholic Church: Inquiry, Thought, and Expression, edited by Patrick Hornbeck II (Fordham University) and Michael A. Norko (Yale University). The publisher’s description follows.

This volume, like its companion, Voices of Our Times, collects essays drawn from a series of public conferences held in autumn 2011 entitled “More than a Monologue.” The series was the fruit of collaboration among four institutions of higher learning: two Catholic universities and two nondenominational divinity schools. The conferences aimed to raise awareness of and advance informed, compassionate, and dialogical conversation about issues of sexual diversity within the Catholic community, as well as in the broader civic worlds that the Catholic Church and Catholic people inhabit. They generated fresh, rich sets of scholarly and reflective contributions that promise to take forward the delicate work of theological-ethical and ecclesial development. Along with Voices of Our Times, this volume captures insights from the conferences and aims to foster what the Jesuit Superior General, Fr. Adolfo Nicolas, has called the “depth of thought and imagination” needed to engage effectively with complex realities, especially in areas marked by brokenness, pain, and the need for healing. The volumes will serve as vital resources for understanding and addressing better the too often fraught relations between LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) persons, their loved ones and allies, and the Catholic community.

Inquiry, Thought, and Expression explores dimensions of ministry, ethics, theology, and law related to a range of LGBTQ concerns, including Catholic teaching, its reception among the faithful, and the Roman Catholic Church’s significant role in world societies. Within the volume, a series of essays on ministry explores various perspectives not frequently heard within the church. Marriage equality and the treatment of LGBTQ individuals by and within the Roman Catholic Church are considered from the vantage points of law, ethics, and theology. Themes of language and discourse are explored in analyses of the place of sexual diversity in church history, thought, and authority.

The two volumes of More than a Monologue, like the conferences from which they developed, actively move beyond the monologic voice of the institutional church on the subject of LGBTQ issues, inviting and promoting open conversations about sexual diversity and the church. Those who read Inquiry, Thought, and Expression will encounter not just an excellent resource for research and teaching in the area of moral theology but also an opportunity to actively listen to and engage in groundbreaking discussions about faith and sexuality within and outside the Catholic Church.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

The Parthenon Enigma

Preparing for the Sacrifice?  

“Athenians,” St. Paul begins his famous sermon in the Book of Acts, “I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” That basic fact about ancient Athens–that it was, in classicist Joan Breton Connelly’s words, an “intensely religious” society–mostly escapes us today. Since the Enlightenment, we are accustomed to see Athens as the prototype of rationalism and liberal democracy. That’s why so many civic buildings in America, like the Supreme Court in Washington and Federal Hall in lower Manhattan, take as their model the most famous Athenian structure of all: the Parthenon.

In a provocative new book, The Parthenon Enigma (Knopf), Connelly argues that the Enlightenment view is wrong, or at least crucially incomplete. One cannot understand the Parthenon, she says, without appreciating the central role religion had in Athenian life. Yes, the Parthenon was a political building. But in ancient Athens, politics, like everything else, was an extension of religion. To be an Athenian was to share an imagined identity as a descendant of Erechtheus, a legendary king born of a union (sort of) between the god Hephaistos and Mother Earth. Athenian citizenship, she writes, “was a concept whose sense extended far beyond our notions of politics, positing a mythic ‘deep time’ and a cosmic reality in which the citizen could not locate himself or understand his existence except through religious awareness and devotions.”

The centerpiece of Connelly’s book is a reinterpretation of the Parthenon’s frieze. Since the Enlightenment, conventional wisdom has held that the frieze commemorates a civic festival known as the Panathenaia. Connelly argues, however, based in part on a recently discovered manuscript of a lost work by the playwright Euripides, that the frieze in fact commemorates the myth of Erechtheus and his daughters, one of whom offers herself as a human sacrifice to save the city. (The word “Parthenon,” it turns out, means “place of the maidens”). This reading of the frieze, she argues, resolves some puzzling aspects of the conventional understanding–for example, other Greek temples, without exception, depict myths, not civic festivals–and better fits what we know of the history, legendary and otherwise, of the Acropolis, the famous hill on which the Parthenon sits.

Unless one is a classicist, it’s going to be very hard to evaluate her claim. Much depends on the correct interpretation of the section of the frieze in the photograph above. Is that Erechtheus on the right, giving his daughter a burial shroud? Connelly certainly provides a lot of detail. But, detail or not, this is a fun and worthwhile book, and its central argument about the overwhelming religiosity of Athens is compelling. Turns out St. Paul was right.

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Brinig & Garnett, “Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools’ Importance in Urban America”

Next month, the University of Chicago Press will publish Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools’ Importance in Urban America by Margaret F. Brinig (University of Notre Dame) and Nicole Stelle Garnett (University of Notre Dame). The publisher’s description follows.

In the past two decades in the United States, more than 1,600 Catholic elementary and secondary schools have closed, and more than 4,500 charter schools—public schools that are often privately operated and freed from certain regulations—have opened, many in urban areas. With a particular emphasis on Catholic school closures, Lost Classroom, Lost Community examines the implications of these dramatic shifts in the urban educational landscape.

More than just educational institutions, Catholic schools promote the development of social capital—the social networks and mutual trust that form the foundation of safe and cohesive communities. Drawing on data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and crime reports collected at the police beat or census tract level in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, Margaret F. Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett demonstrate that the loss of Catholic schools triggers disorder, crime, and an overall decline in community cohesiveness, and suggest that new charter schools fail to fill the gaps left behind.

This book shows that the closing of Catholic schools harms the very communities they were created to bring together and serve, and it will have vital implications for both education and policing policy debates.

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Longenecker, “Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North”

This month, Fordham Univesrity published Gettysburg Religion:9780823255191 Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North, by Steve Longenecker (Bridgewater College, Virginia). The publisher’s description follows.

In the borderland between freedom and slavery, Gettysburg remains among the most legendary Civil War landmarks. A century and a half after the great battle, Cemetery Hill, the Seminary and its ridge, and the Peach Orchard remain powerful memories for their embodiment of the small-town North and their ability to touch themes vital to nineteenth-century religion. During this period, three patterns became particularly prominent: refinement, diversity, and war. In Gettysburg Religion, author Steve Longenecker explores the religious history of antebellum and Civil War–era Gettysburg, shedding light on the remarkable diversity of American religion and the intricate ways it interacted with the broader culture. Longenecker argues that Gettysburg religion revealed much about larger American society and about how trends in the Border North mirrored national developments. In many ways, Gettysburg and its surrounding Border North religion belonged to the future and signaled a coming pattern for modern America.

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Carpenter & Dulk (eds.), “Christianity in Chinese Public Life”

On January 27, Palgrave Pivot published Christianity in Chinese Public Life edited by Joel Carpenter (Calvin College) and Kevin den Dulk (Calvin College). The publisher’s description follows.Christianity in Chinese Public Life

Today a quarter of all Chinese claim a major religious tradition, yet the state remains deeply concerned about religious activity. The West tends to view religion-and-state relations in China in bipolar terms: dissidents’ resistance and government repression. But as this work shows, the interaction of religion, society, and governance in China is much more subtle and complex than that. The contributors of this volume focus on Christianity in China to examine the prospects for social and political change. Students of democratization say that when citizens escape poverty, they seek more freedom of expression and they establish agencies to express those values. The resulting ‘civil society’ helps citizens mediate between their interests and those of the state and seek the public good through non-governmental means. Christianity in Chinese Public Life deftly explores the question: does an increase of religious activity in China amount to a nudging forward of democratization?

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Schäfer, “The Jewish Jesus”

Next month, Princeton University Press will publish The Jewish Jesus by Peter Schäfer (Princeton University). The publisher’s description follows.bookjacket

In late antiquity, as Christianity emerged from Judaism, it was not only the new religion that was being influenced by the old. The rise and revolutionary challenge of Christianity also had a profound influence on rabbinic Judaism, which was itself just emerging and, like Christianity, trying to shape its own identity. In The Jewish Jesus, Peter Schäfer reveals the crucial ways in which various Jewish heresies, including Christianity, affected the development of rabbinic Judaism. The result is a demonstration of the deep mutual influence between the sister religions, one that calls into question hard and fast distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy, and even Judaism and Christianity, during the first centuries CE.