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Abstract
From the late 1980s, foreign—primarily American—missionaries started to travel to Ukraine in large numbers. This article is concerned with the impact of American Baptist missionaries and how their influence was perceived locally in 2016, the time of my fieldwork. When I set out to conduct my fieldwork research among Baptist believers in Lviv, I was surprised that local believers denied the impact of foreign missionaries on their communities and worship style. Moreover, many local Baptist churchgoers I met claimed they had never encountered an American missionary and insisted that foreign missionaries had not played any significant role in the development and transformation of Ukrainian Baptism. In this article, I present the data from the fieldwork and analyze the Ukrainian Baptists’ reasons for minimizing the influence through the perspective of religioscapes, and glocalization as the dialectic process between homogeneity and heterogeneity.
Abstract
The English writer John Michell (1933–2009) occupied a significant position within British alternative religion. Michell’s manifold books revolve around his life-long aim to re-enchant the English landscape and launch a new golden age. Michell was a devoted Traditionalist and is widely considered the founding father of the vast field of British Earth Mysteries. Associated groups embrace speculative theories of the earth, claiming the existence of telluric (dragon) energies. As Michell’s impact on such groups is widely acknowledged, within the context of Earth Mysteries, this article centers on cerealogy and the Dragon Environmental Network as examples in exploring Michell’s discursive and enduring influence.
Abstract
In feminist research on religion, women and gender, the concepts of “lived religion” as well as “agency as doing religion” take a prominent place. Both include an intersubjective and mostly partial perspective. However, against the background of current developments concerning a global religious right, the paper argues for the inclusion of a critical perspective through the methodology of a double critique that includes both an analysis of power relations that marginalize women in religious groups and an analysis of women’s reproduction of gendered as well as racialized power relations. This argument is embedded in the complexity of post-secular feminist research including research on women, gender and religion, feminist critiques of secularism (and of anti-Muslim discourses), feminist, queer and trans theologies, and research on the religious right and their anti-feminist politics. The paper suggests to take feminist theologies and feminist spiritualities/religious practices as reference point for such an analysis.
Abstract
The authors should be congratulated for writing about ‘critical religion’. Whatever else critical religion might or might not be, nothing could be more important than a critical inquiry into the categories that powerfully organise our knowledge and our institutions, including our universities. By publishing in a major journal, the JAAR, they bring into the mainstream significant topics that are habitually marginalised. They raise many valid points for public debate. Their article, however, is marred by reification and contradiction. To squeeze their generalisations into one journal article, the authors set up Russell McCutcheon, Craig Martin and Timothy Fitzgerald as the core of an imaginary school, and then when they stumble on a possible disagreement between us, they accuse us of inconsistency. Speaking for myself, I explain why I have habitually used the term ‘critical religion’ to refer to my own work, and why I have recently considered abandoning it. I point out that the authors never properly discuss the genesis of the discourse on the non-religious secular, which is fundamental to any serious attempt to understand ‘critical religion’. They ignore my work on India and Japan. They nowhere discuss a central core of my own position, that religion is a member of a configuration of empty categories, including politics, nature, economy, and nation, a signalling system that is the source of hegemonic power and the illusions of enlightenment modernity. However, these shortcomings should not deter us from taking forward their work as a positive opportunity.
Abstract
In this article, I return to Giorgio Agamben’s intervention on the pandemic to reflect on one of his claims, namely the mundanity of the Roman Catholic Church. Agamben comes to this conclusion after reporting about the passive response of the Church to the state-of-emergency legislation and the “barbaric” conditions of social relationships that followed. These conditions, and not the conspiracy theories on the invention of an epidemic to extend forms of social control, are the primary focus of Agamben’s concern. I confine Agamben’s critique of the Church with a stipulation concerning the extrincist character of the Church’s reaction to the recent epidemic crisis. I argue that, due to the extrincist character of that reaction, the temporal power of the state has proven itself necessary to the defeat of the pandemic, but the spiritual power of the Church has manifested itself as superfluous.
Abstract
Scholars of religion who make use of the concept of transcendence are likely to encounter objections that this concept is too vague, too metaphysical, and too theological for use in Religious Studies. This article develops a differential-phenomenological concept of transcendence that is not susceptible to these charges and that, thanks to its complex logical structure, is potentially fruitful for use in Religious Studies.
Abstract
The Chinese, both in China and in an international migration setting, are commonly regarded as the world’s most secular population. However, the relationship between Chinese people and Chinese Popular Religion is nuanced and survey data, more often than not, do not account for the plethora of religious activities Chinese people engage in despite simultaneously self-identifying as secular. This paper examines the supposed secularity of Chinese immigrant families living in Edinburgh. It asserts that although self-identifying as secular, these families engage in undeniable religious activity and possess religious beliefs. Crucially, there is a marked difference between the beliefs pertaining to secularity of the parents and their children, with the former being adamant in their secularity and the latter being more willing to acknowledge the complicated relationship between religion and the secular.
Abstract
The study tries to evaluate the development of the Hare Krishna Movement (ISKCON) in the Czech Republic. It points out that after a period of great openness and the emergence of non-traditional religious groups after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the spread of this movement gradually stagnated. After a period of “anti-cult” attacks, the movement did become part of the standard religious scene, although its attractiveness decreased. Based on two models (the model of religious success and the concept of religious memory), the study shows the limits to the wider success of the movement. However, given the widespread secularization and the prevailing “religious apathy” of Czech society, the Hare Krishna Movement’s impact in Czech society can be considered a limited success.