Showing papers in "Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 2002"

Reenchanting nature: modern western shamanism and nineteenth-century thought

Abstract: In the second half of the 20th century there emerged in North America and Europe a complex phenomenon on the fringes of anthropology, science, and the so-called New Age that is often referred to as neoshamanism. Part of a larger discourse of nature-based spirituality, contemporary western shamanism is deeply rooted in European and north American history of thought. It can be analyzed in the light of a dialectic process of disenchantment and resacralization of the world. After having scrutinized neoshamanic concepts of nature, the article discusses paradigmatic examples for the existence of currents that contest disenchantment and fight the tendency within modern western culture to desacralize nature. It is shown the 19th century must be considered the formative phase of contemporary neoshamanic nature discourse.

On moving across: translocative religion and the interpreter's position

Abstract: Scholars in many fields have considered theposition of the interpreter, and religious studies scholars have addresed some of the relevant issues. However, none of the available accounts is fully satisfying because they either fail to locate the interpreter or imagine the interpreter's position as fixed. In this article, I draw on my experience of doing fieldwork with transnational migrants as I try to move toward a more textured account of where we stand when we do our work. I explore the ambiguities of that position and suggest that scholars, like transnational migrants, are constantly moving across. Scholars continually move back and forth between inside and outside, fact and value, evidence and narrative, the living and the dead, here and there, us and them.

Singing the glory of asceticism: devotion of asceticism in Jainism

Abstract: The Jain tradition is commonly portrayed in scholarly literature as being focused on, if not obsessed with, various and oftentimes extreme forms of asceticism. In the resulting scholarly portrait of the Jains, there is little if any place for devotion (bhakti). This scholarly separation of asceticism and devotion, as constituting radicaly different spheres of religious activity, is not restricted to the Jains but, rather, is widespread in the comparative study of religion. This article places Jain asceticism within a larger Jain religious framework to show some of the ways in which asceticism interacts with, and is often interdependent with, devotion. Asceticism is often performed in a devotional spirit. It is also often the object of devotion. A Jain can accomplish the spiritual goal of an improved karmic balance by performing asceticism him - or herself. A Jain can also accomplish this by praising asceticism with enthusiasm and devotion. This article argues that asceticism and devotion are not so much alternative practices as they are mutually reinforcing practices in Jainism. It also indicates that Jains practice bhakti to abstract principles similarly to the way they practice bhakti to humans and deities, and so we need to expand our scholarly understanding of bhakti and devotion.

Assaulting the border: kabbalistic traces in the margins of Derrida

Abstract: Cet article explore la pensee de Jacques Derrida en rapport avec la sagesse esoterique de la kabbale traditionnelle, un rapport explicitement revendique par Derrida. Ce rapport se decrit plutot comme une convergence que comme une influence : la convergence se fait sur le caractere textuel de l'etre et sur le role joue par le nom ineffable, l'indicible qui rend le dicible possible. Elle se manifeste egalement dans l'analyse du secret et de la circoncision.

Essay. Is there a future for religious studies as we know it? Some postmodern, feminist, and spiritual challenges

Abstract: This essay looks at some of the intellectual and institutional challenges facing religious studies as an academic discipline at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I argue that its future will depend on the way religion scholars are able to creatively engage with and respond to (1) the destabilizing implications of postmodern thinking, (2) the radical questioning of the androcentric framework of past scholarship on religion by critical feminist and gender studies, and (3) the new religious developpements arising out of interfaith encounter and the search for holistic spiritualities linked to practical commitment and social action but also to a new academic interest in global spirituality. The conclusion discusses how a more inclusive, less objectified understanding of religion is transformative of learning, the academy, and society. The essay challenges some of the foundations of the modern, western knowledge paradigm and outlines a larger vision than a merely academic one.

The liberation of questioning in Augustine's Confessions

Abstract: Augustin conclue ses Confession sur une parole enigmatique : aperietur (sera ouvert). Se degage ainsi l'importance du theme du questionnement, notion essentielle pour comprendre comment Augustin concevait la nature de la croyance religieuse et la foi. Envisager les Confessions comme un apprentissage du questionnement permet d'eclairer non seulement le contenu de l'oeuvre, mais aussi de sa structure, en particulier du brusque changement de ton et de theme entre les livres 1-9 et 10-13.

Women's religious conversions on death row: theorizing religion and state.

Abstract: Most scholars of religion who approach the phenomena associated with religious conversion in order to theorize religion tend to ignore the legal and political implications of the actual context in which conversion occurs for theorizing religion itself. Meanwhile, political and legal theorists who attend to the implications of executing convicted murderers who undergo religious conversion on death row err in a different direction. They virtually ignore the significance of the claims made by the converts and their associates about the conversion themselves for theorizing the state. Scholars across disciplines increasingly address issues of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation in respect to theorizing religion and theorizing the state independently of one another. At the same time, they do not seize the opportunity to incorporate their analyses into a wider study of the sociocultural production of religion and state in relation to each other. I examine the religious conversion of Karla Faye Tucker and Wanda Jean Allen on death row, as well as the scholarship that their convictions, conversions, and executions have generated across academic disciplines and fields. Close examination illustrates well the necessity for theorizing religion and the state in relation to one another in order to understand either adequately.

Imagining the divine: Ghazali on imagination, dreams, and dreaming

Abstract: This study presents a phenomenological analysis of Ghazali’s discussion of dreams and dream discourse as it specifically relates to the faculty of the imagination. The imagination is an important, though ambiguous and understudied, category, as it is responsible for diverse visual activities such as dreaming, visions, and prophecy. The imagination, then, is responsible for translating the incorporeal divine world into corporeal material images. These images, in turn, represent an integral part of the mystic’s experience. The imagination tries to overcome the fundamental aniconic tension in monotheism between God’s immanence and His transcendence. As a result, the products of the imagination are very ambiguous: for the philosophers they are chimerical, yet for the mystics they provide an important access to truth. Although this study is devoted to Ghazali, a twelfth-century Muslim, the conclusions are meant to aid in the much needed construction of the imagination as a nuanced and important category in the academic study of religion.

Jesus, Mama, and the constraints on salvific love in contemporary country music

Abstract: The discourse of contemporary country music creates a world permeated with religion and centered on the notion of salvific love. This form of salvation arises in the connection between people (or between people and God) and includes elements of sacrifice and transformation. Although highly conventional, country music must meet standards of 'authenticity' and 'relevance', which require the incorporation of contemporary American religious values (including self-love and self-actualization). An analysis of recent country music lyrics reveals the remarkable openness to new religious messages. However, the only acceptable messages are those that can be harmonized with the implicit Protestant Christian sensibility of the music. Salvific love, for this reason, is always heterosexual and at least compatible with a Christian message. While the music industry does its best to erase minority sexualities, the music itself is often surprisingly open to a queer interpretation.

Painting words, tasting sound: visions of Krishna in Paramanand's sixteenth-century devotional poetry

Abstract: Paramānand was a 16th century saint from the Braj region of India who composed devotional poetry addressed to the Hindu god Krishna. His poems are still sung today in homes and temples according to daily and yearly ritual cycles. According to the Vaisnava tradition, one of the major 16th-century Hindu devotional communities, Paramānand himself saw Krihna's play, and his lyrics are so profound that contemporary devotees can see themselves as players in Krishna's other-wordly, or better, nonwordly, games. Visnavas know these games as līlā. The author argue here that the aesthetic experience of hearing Paramānand's lyrics has provided an occasion for devotees through the centuries to experience a complementary sensual experience: seeing Krishna (darsana). Ultimately, every Krishna worshiper has the same goal: to participate in Krishna's games. Each of Paramānand's poems contains the potential for a highly individualized experience in which a devotee may ritually and sensibly join in Krishna's līlā. Each poem, therefore, contains the seeds of a synaesthetic transformation of language into vision. The dominant figure of speech underlying Paramānand's poetry is the metaphor of seeing Krishna through words. The author consult the literature on synaesthetic transformation to explain how Paramānand transforms words into sight. To hear Paramānand's lyrics is to see Krishna.

The ethical implications of the deconstruction of gender

Abstract: This article explores the utility of current feminist scholarship for rethinking the ethical subject and its prospects for moral agency. Specifically it employs and appropriates Judith Butler's early insights on the deconstruction of gender wherein she makes explicit connections between gender binarism and subject formation. I make the case that by deconstructing the social institution of gender we can also dismantle the epistemological power of the binary paradigm. My goal is to find some moral possibilities in the midst of highly abstract theory about subject formation. In a rather unorthodox reading of Butler, I suggest that we can combine the potential of a poststructural analysis of subject formation with a feminist preference for egalitarianism. The result is a modified moral subject that finds both its constraints and its agency in the material world. This compromised moral agent can serve as a starting point for rethinking ethics in a postmoral context.

Decapitation and the discourse of antisyncretism in the Babylonian Talmud

Abstract: One dilemma in the study of rabbinic literature is whether to understand that literature as a function of Bible reading or of historical agenda. This dilemma is endemic to any religious tradition with a canon at its core: does hermeneutics or history more fundamentally define the interpretive trajectory? I propose that in rabbinic literature the dilemma is not confined to contemporary methodological debates but, rather, is formulated and negotiated within the religious tradition itself. I analyze a passage in the Babylonian Talmud addressing the death penalty by decapitation and show that the Rabbis themselves construct an opposition between history and hermeneutics and offer a tentative resolution, though they also let the holes in their resolution poke through. I suggest that the dilemma of history versus hermeneutics in rabbinic Judaism is freighted with subcultural politics and thath the dilemma is generated by Judaism's quest to find a place for itself within the dominant culture.

The honesty of the perplexed: Derrida and Ibn 'Arabi on 'bewilderment'

Abstract: Cet article rapproche la facon dont Ibn 'Arabi et Jacques Derrida envisagent l'idee de perplexite (en arabe, hayrah). Pour Ibn 'Arabi, c'est le prelude a la rencontre avec le Reel, en cela qu'il met a bas le mur de rationalite qui fait obstacle a la comprehension d'Allah. Ainsi, cette notion s'apparente a ce que Derrida dit du tout autre : on ne peut vraiment entrevoir l'Autre que quand on est decontenance. Ici, les conceptions soufies ou deconstructivistes de l'alterite semblent se rencontrer.

Essay. The Supreme Court and the pedagogy of religious studies: constitutional parameters for the teaching of religion in public schools

Abstract: The United-States' Supreme Court uses the idea of objective pedagogy to define the proper role of religion in public school classrooms. The justices tend to leave this idea undefined, except to oppose objectivity to advocacy. Current pedagogical theory challenges this opposition. Moreover, educators often translate the Court's idea of objectivity into an exclusion of some methodologies in religious studies, like theology. A reformulation of religious studies pedagogy could not only meet the Court's standards on neutrality but also lead to a more engaging and open pedagogical response to the religious pluralism represented in public classrooms.

The theology of the lyric tradition in African American spirituals

Abstract: Typically, spirituals have been viewed as religious folksongs, whose literary complexity and theological importance have been appreciated insufficiently, especially as these relate to one another. Spirituals are not generally categorized as lyric poetry in spite of the fact that poetry has historically been used for theological purposes. Their cultural and artistic worth is appreciated most fully by demonstrating the close integration of their literary and theological significance. By using the tools of cognitive science, cultural studies, religious studies, and literary theory, the spirituals are shown to achieve a high level of conceptual freedom and spiritual self determination as a liberating response to the linguistic, physical, religious, intellectual, and social constraints of the slave poet's lives. By focusing in depth as an example on the metaphorical structure of the spiritual Oh Mary, Don't You Weep, Don't You Moan, it becomes clear that the spirituals should be classified as a type of sacred lyric poetry that was instrumental in developping and revealing the formation of African American Christianity.

A post-Kantian perspective on recent debates about mystical experience

Abstract: Academic discussion of mystical experience has tended to presuppose a model of experience that is broadly Kantian in character, and this is so in two regards. First of all it has adopted Kant's division between intuition and understanding - in the form of a distinction drawn between experience and interpretation. Through the former of each of these pairs, an object is said to be given; through the latter, it is said to be conceptualized. Second, many thinkers have presupposed the Kantian distinction of noumenon and phenomenon. This article questions the appropriateness of both these presuppositions. Situating my arguments in the context of the recent constructivist-essentialist debate, I suggest that thinkers of both sides have not been sufficiently critical in their employment of Kantian terminology. I argue that there exists an important subcategory of mystical experience that does not fit comfortably into the Kantian conceptual framework.

Review essay. Sacred space in North America

Abstract: Etude de la litterature americaine contemporaine consacree au theme de l'espace sacre. Debutant par la conception developpee par Mircea Eliade, l'A. approfondit sa reflexion en etudiant l'espace institutionnel, l'espace public, l'espace domestique, l'espace ethnique, qui definissent differents types de sacre.

Misunderstandings and hurt: how Canadians joined worldwide Muslim reactions to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

Abstract: This article examines reactions by Muslims across the world, but especially in Canada, to Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses Beginning with some background information about the novel, including the incident of the Satanic verses recounted in Muslim history The author then moves to a discussion of Muslim opposition to the novel, including reactions in India, Pakistan, Britain and Iran The next section of the article examines the responses of Muslims in Canada, specifically those of Toronto, Wich is the city with the largest population of Canada's Muslims and the headquarters for a number of Canadian Muslim organization The author concludes with an analysis of the reactions and delineate five implications of those reactions On the whole, their reactions revealed the distinctly Canadian identity of these Muslims

Biblical love poetry (... and God)

Abstract: Using George Bataille's reflection on desire, death, and God as the basis for considering the love poetry of the Song of Songs as a manifestation of the comingling of separate realms and separate bodies in the service of a longed-for continuity helps us to see that such a commingling is never far from the domain of violence and that such continuity is never far from death. But the biblical book itself helps us to see something that is missing from Bataille's analysis - that is, a more complex understanding of the implications of desire for the divine. What if, contra Bataille, God were not by definition immune to risk? What if the divine were not understood to be perfection but, rather, bound as well to the vicissitudes of desire, with all the anguish and ecstasy that it implies? The Song of Song's lyrical presentation of Eros, carried over as it is into the tradition of allegorical interpretation, may, in fact, have rather profound implications for how we talk about God.

Whose initiative? Whose faith?

Abstract: PRIOR TO 11 SEPTEMBER, I was planning to focus on Bush's faithbased initiatives, looking at some of the issues presented by the rhetoric and substance of his proposal to expand government funding of social services through religious organizations. Going back over my newspaper clippings from spring and summer 2001-a time that in some ways seems to belong to another world-I was reminded of one serious problem after another associated with the president's plan. The first problem concerns the continual slippage between a supposedly generic "faith-based" program and the Christian perspectives and commitments of both those who generated the proposal and many of the agencies supporting it. The term faith based is rooted in Protestantism: most Jews do not consider ourselves to be practitioners of a "faith." Use of faith language points to a systemic confusion of religion with Christianity in the United States, a confusion that this initiative would only reinforce. In March 2001, when the mayor of Atlanta, for example, invited 200 clergy and community leaders to discuss the president's initiative, only one Jew was present. She was the wife of a local rabbi who had come out of curiosity after seeing an announcement of the meeting in the newspaper. When she asked the mayor about how he chose his invitees, he told her that he had contacted everyone in the yellow pages listed under churches and then added, "I suppose you're going to tell me I left out all the imams too" (Goodstein 2001a: Al). This incident is emblematic of the way in which the rhetoric of "faith" disguises and nourishes a fundamental Christian centeredness. It raises serious questions about who would sit at the table to decide what applications would be solicited and funded and what presuppositions about religion would consciously or unconsciously guide the deliberations. The slippage between religion and Christianity reminds me of my days as a graduate student at Yale, fighting sexism in the religion department. Every time the chair announced

More lurid than lucid: the spiritualist invention of the world sexism

Abstract: Nineteenth-century American spiritualists coined the word sexism long before its modern incarnation in order to refer to a complex of ideas about human sexuality and reproduction that were consonant with the general advancement of women's rights. Among these ideas was the belief that spirit and mind were ascendant over matter and could act directly on it. In their view, a woman's sensitive spiritual nature gave her the power to join spirit and matter. She could provide a way for exalted spirits to enter the world through her, in the mental character and even the physical form of her offspring, by focusing her own and others' spirits into the embryo growing within her, as if she were making a photograph. The goal of enhancing this ability would justify changing law and custom to ensure women's autonomy and freedom, especially to protect their decisions about sexual relations in order to regulate favorable and unfavorable impressions on the embryo. Emphasizing the embryo's sensitivity to spiritual impressions, however, also led some progressives to the conclusion that women's autonomy should be restricted. Women had to be kept away from even immaterial influences that would adversely affect them during pregnancy.

Public education and the battle over the nature of social responsibility to the nation's children and schools.

Abstract: In recent years, allegedly worse schools have been blamed for lack of economic competitiveness and other social problems. Some observers have interpreted the supposed decline of education as a trumpet call to reform public schools. Others believing that public education is mostly beyond repair, have argued that the way to regenerate schooling is to create a market system of education in which parents can choose their children's schools, either public or private, and pay the tuition through vouchers funded by taxes.

In bad faith? Possibilities and perils in the age of faith-based initiatives

Abstract: tive American traditions did not figure prominently, if at all, in these civic events of mourning, perhaps a sign of their ongoing incongruity with our country's Christian-based civil religion. Nevertheless, the devastation to "Turtle Island," as America is known to native people, has been on the minds of many American Indians, and several indigenous religious leaders have traveled to ground zero to conduct healing ceremonies (Adams: Al; Indian Country Today 2001b: A2). One of these leaders, Chief Arvol Looking Horse of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Nation, has also addressed the public since the tragedy, issuing a statement in the native news and on the World Wide Web. As the Nineteenth-Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe, Looking Horse contends that humanity must make an important decision about the fate of our world. "In our Prophecies," he explains, "it is told that we are now at the Crossroads, either unite Spiritually as a Global Nation, or be faced with chaos, disasters, diseases and tears from our relatives['] eyes" (2001a, 2001b: 2). For Looking Horse, this spiritual unity includes all people, regardless of their religious beliefs. What is important, he argues, is helping to heal Mother Earth and bring about global peace. In these uncertain times many will construe Chief Looking Horse's message as a warning or call to action. But it is also possible to think of it as a tool. His statement, along with reflection on Native American experience in general, provides us with a way of thinking about our current

Faith based on what? A roundtable discussion

Abstract: The following roundtable developed from a special topics forum, Faith Based on What? Feminist Scholars of Religion Speak Out about the Bush Administration and Public Policy, presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Denver in November 2001 The AAR Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession sponsored this session to highlight one of the major obstacles for women in the profession: the absence of women's voices and feminist perspectives in public debates about issues regarding religion The panelists explored the connection between the wide range of policies of Bush administration has pursued that affect the well-being of women and the administration's proposal for an Office of Faith-Based Initiatives Because of 11 September the conversation broadened to include issues of foreign as well as domestic policy In both spheres government is very much involved in the task of defining religion, and this religion is not just a private concern but, rather, is central to contemporary public school

Essay. The death and revival of Jewish philosophy

Abstract: This essay reflects critically on the past 25 years of work in constructive Jewish philosophy in order to propose an agenda for future constructive Jewish philosophy in the next 25 years. The critical part of the essay focuses on the reasons why Jewish philosophers can no longer function as public intellectuals and why the field of philosophy itself can no longer serve as a focus for Jewish philosophy. The proposed agenda suggests that the primary topics for Jewish philosophy should be drawn instead from the field of religion and science, with an emphasis on the issues that physics raises for ontology, the issues that life sciences raise for psychology, and that both kinds of studies entail for constructive religious ethics.