Timothy Jenkins

Bio: Timothy Jenkins is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: State (polity). The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 2 publications receiving 117 citations.

Church and Intellectuals, Nation and State

Abstract: 1 Origen, Comm. in Joh., I. 89. 2 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plates 19f. 3 Philo Judaeus, De Vita Contemplativa, 78. 4 Origen, On First Principles, IV. ii. 9. 5 Origen, Philokalia, VI; cf. the story of Ben Azzai 'stringing' the words of Scripture as fire burns around him in Song of Songs, Rabba 42. 6 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven 1979),p. 10. 7 Augustine, Letters, 55. XI. 21. 8 L. M. Poland, 'Augustine, Allegory, and Conversion', Literature and Theology, II, 1 (1988), pp. 37-48. 9 See Frances Young, 'Allegory and the Ethics of Reading' in F. Watson (ed.), The Open Text (SCM Press 1993),pp. 116-18. 10 Augustine, Confessions, XII, 27f.

The Rise and Fall of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe

Abstract: Two issues have been especially contentious in debates over religious change in Europe: the unity or diversity of the trends observed across the continent, and the significance of the large subpopulation that is neither religious nor completely unreligious. This article addresses these problems. An analysis of the first wave of the European Social Survey (ESS) shows that each generation in every country surveyed is less religious than the last. Although there are some minor differences in the speed of the decline (the most religious countries are changing more quickly than the least religious), the magnitude of the fall in religiosity during the last century has been remarkably constant across the continent. Despite these shifts in the prevalence of conventional Christian belief, practice and self-identification, residual involvement is considerable. Many people are neither regular churchgoers nor self-consciously non-religious. The term ‘fuzzy fidelity’ describes this casual loyalty to tradition. Religion usually plays only a minor role in the lives of such people. Religious change in European countries follows a common trajectory whereby fuzzy fidelity rises and then falls over a very extended period. The starting points are different across the continent, but the forces at work may be much the same.

The Religious Content of Ethnic Identities

Abstract: The religious dimensions of ethnic identities have been under-theorized. In contemporary industrial societies there is a tendency to characterize religiously demarcated groups as ‘really’ ethnic.This article suggests that the religious content of ethnic boundaries may be more important than might initially be assumed. A religious identification may have specific religious content and assumptions that may cause it to operate in different ways from other identities. Even if identities do not seem primarily religious per se, they may have latent religious dimensions that can become reactivated. Whilst identity conflicts and other social struggles may stimulate the return of the religious, once reactivated, the religious dimensions of identity may take on a logic of their own.Therefore, the article argues that in many contexts there is a two-way relationship between religion and ethnicity. Each can stimulate the other, rather than religion simply playing a supporting role to the ethnic centrepiece.

Believing in belonging: an ethnography of young people’s constructions of belief

Abstract: Evidence from a three-year case study suggests that how young people discuss their beliefs reflect where they define and locate legitimate sites of power, meaning and authority. For many young people today, religion is an insufficient source and mode of belief and belonging. The findings discussed here suggest an orientation to family, friends and other social relationships as legitimate and sufficient sites for locating belief, authority and transcendence. I argue that the young people studied do not holds beliefs to be ‘true’, in that they are propositional creed-like statements. Young people have shifted the meaning of belief to describe affective relationships in which they feel they belong to. Such a shift necessitates a relocation of the transcendent to the everyday and social. That shift is particularly evident as young people discuss how they continue their relationships with the deceased loved ones.

Rethinking the interplay of feminism and secularism in a neo-secular age

Abstract: The need to re-examine established ways of thinking about secularism and its relationship to feminism has arisen in the context of the confluence of a number of developments including: the increasing dominance of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis; the expansion of postmodern critiques of Enlightenment rationality to encompass questions of religion; and sustained critiques of the ‘secularization thesis’. Conflicts between the claims of women's equality and the claims of religion are well-documented vis-a-vis all major religions and across all regions. The ongoing moral panic about the presence of Islam in Europe, marked by a preoccupation with policing Muslim women's dress, reminds us of the centrality of women and gender power relations in the interrelation of religion, culture and the state. Added to postmodern and other critiques of the secular-religious binary, most sociological research now contradicts the equation of modernization with secularization. This article focuses on the challenges that these developments pose to politically oriented feminist thinking and practice. It argues that non-oppressive feminist responses require a new critical engagement with secularism as a normative principle in democratic, multicultural societies. To inform this process, the author maps and links discussions across different fields of feminist scholarship, in the sociology of religion and in political theory. She organizes the main philosophical traditions and fault lines that form the intellectual terrain at the intersection of feminism, religion and politics in two broad groups: feminist critiques of the Enlightenment critique of religion; and feminist scholarship at the critical edges of the Enlightenment tradition. The author argues that notwithstanding the fragmented nature of feminist debates in this area, common ground is emerging across different politically oriented approaches: all emphasize ‘democracy’ and the values that underpin it as the larger discursive frame in which the principle of secularism can be redefined with emancipatory intent in a neo-secular age.