The Intended Reader of Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Judeo-Spanish Reading Culture

This essay explores rabbinic musar literature in Ladino from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries within the context of the emerging Ladino reading-culture in the Ottoman Empire. Rabbinic literature in the Judeo-Spanish vernacular opened the field of rabbinic knowledge for the first time to social groups hitherto excluded from the study of rabbinic literature: those who were ignorant of Hebrew, and women, to whom the rabbis now reached out explicitly in Ladino writings. Whereas the preferred forum for the reading and studying of vernacular rabbinic literature was the study group, or meldado, Ladino literature opened the opportunity of individual reading to an average Ottoman Jewish reading public, men and women alike. The rabbis clearly saw the dangers of individual reading and tried to contain its undesired consequences by encouraging reading with the mediating guidance by a talmid hakham. Nevertheless, ample evidence from at least the mid-nineteenth century demonstrates that individual readers challenged the rabbinical monopoly over the communication of traditional knowledge and its interpretation. It was this increasingly independent and critical reading public that would prove a most receptive audience for the secular genres of Ladino literature that developed at this time. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Musa Posseliana: Johannes Posselius the Elder (1528-91) and the Lutheran Greek Program

Abstract

In this article I examine one outcome of the programme for teaching Greek in Lutheran schools during the second half of the sixteenth century. Luther had insisted upon the teaching of Latin and Greek as a means to help ensure orthodoxy. Melanchthon had developed a curriculum in which the ancient languages formed the basis of Humanist education in the liberal arts. Johannes Posselius was a member of the first generation to study under this new curriculum. An examination of the texts he composed for the classroom shows his commitment to the active use of Greek. He presented Greek as a language suited to conversation and original composition, and modelled these uses in his own work. In his Greek poetic compositions, Posselius wrote for an elite audience, again demonstrating how Greek could contribute to contemporary literature.     

Red catechisms: socialist educational literature and the demarcation of religion and politics in the early 19th century

The catechetical genre not only has a long history in religious but also in political discourse. During the 18th century, catechisms were produced on a vast number of diverse subjects, ranging from secular ethics to sheep breeding. The catechism persisted throughout the 19th century and almost gave shape to the Manifesto of the Communist Party. By this time, however, some socialists were also sceptical of the genre; it was perceived as ambiguous. Catechisms are thus a focal point for changing understandings of politics and religion in 19th-century discourse. This article discusses the production and reception of early 19th-century ‘red’ or socialist catechisms to reveal how the ambiguity of the concept religion was negotiated in the context of the catechetical genre. By locating the debate on catechisms in the discourse on ideology, I show that this genre was a focal point for structural change in the semantic field of religion in modernity.     

Constitution and narrative: peculiarities of rhetoric and genre in the foundational laws of the USSR and the Russian federation

Constitutions are not just legal texts but form a narrative with an engaging plot, a hierarchy of actors and a distinct ideology. They can be read and interpreted as literary texts. The four constitutions in 20th century Russia (1924, 1936, 1977, 1993) can be attributed to specific genres (drama, fairy tale, gospel, performance). Moreover, they interact closely with the official culture of their time (painting, collage, film, literature). The constitutions serve an important task in the cultural self-definition of Russian society which as a rule occurred in moments of ideological crisis. The case of Russia is especially intriguing since the utopian project of a just society needed in every stage of its evolution (revolution, consolidation, “developed socialism”, postcommunism) a new convincing design which was able to guarantee the citizens’ loyalty to the state.     

Modernizing the Virtue of Humility

This paper offers a novel, secular account of the virtue of humility. There are only two such accounts in recent philosophical literature: one defended by Julia Driver, the other by George Schueler. Driver attaches the virtue of humility to people who underestimate their merits, or lack beliefs about their merits altogether. Schueler thinks that humility requires indifference to how we are regarded vis-à-vis our accomplishments. This paper brings out the limitations of those accounts and constructs a new one which is free of them.

The new account derives directly from the under-appreciated approach defended a century ago by Hastings Rashdall, who developed a secular (albeit religiously-inspired) account of humility according to which true humility reflects love for one's neighbour. After indicating the flaws in Rashdall's approach, I develop an account based on his intuitions. Specifically, I argue that humility requires suppressing our egos when they lead us to neglect or disregard other duties. Humility comprises two dimensions: a private dimension, for when we uphold self-regarding duties rather than succumb to the temptations of ego; and a public dimension, for when we display fidelity to other-regarding duties at the expense of the pleasures of ego.     

Sacred texts

It seems indisputable that the way we define and classify texts influences the way we read texts. My concern is to develop methods for reading and understanding texts that are influenced by distinctions between the secular and the sacred, and then draw out some preliminary implications of these methods and distinctions for relationships between church and state in liberal democracies. Distinctions between sacred and secular texts can be tracked with the conjecture that a full textual reading of a sacred text requires a kind of interior commitment. I develop the conjecture, and then argue that this requirement increases the distance between scepticism and religious belief. The upshot of such distinctions and implications is that we cannot read sacred texts as sacred while maintaining the secular consciousness that defines liberal democracies. Acknowledging these textual differences between religion and politics lays to rest, permanently, the popular creed of exceptionalism, the belief that secular patterns of thought, grounded in compromise and toleration, can scan and comprehend religious beliefs from some impartial perspective.     

The birth of enlightenment secularism from the spirit of Confucianism

The aim of the essay is to demonstrate that the contact of European philosophy with Chinese thought in the second half of the 17th and 18th century influenced the rise and development of secularism, which became a distinctive feature of the Western Enlightenment. The first part examines how knowing the history of China and Confucian ethics has questioned biblical chronology and undermined faith as a necessary condition of morality. These allegations were afterwards countered by reinterpreting Confucianism as crypto-monotheism. I will argue this debate has contributed to the birth of secular philosophy of history, which put an end to the Enlightenment Sinophilism. Throughout those changes in the image of China, nothing but an image was discussed: as it would be presented on a basis of the thought of Wang Fuzhi and other representatives of Chinese kaozheng考證 movement, the encounter with the contemporaries of the Westerners would have opened a real dialogue.     

Christian Ethics,Religious Ethics,and Secular Ethics: A Contemporary Reappraisal

In this essay, I argue that Christian ethicists should not think of themselves as religious ethicists. I defend this claim by arguing that the concept of religious ethics, as it has come to be understood as a discipline that is distinct from secular ethics, is incoherent. In part one, I describe the fraught attempts by theologians in the 20th century to identify the distinctiveness of Christian ethics. In part two, I argue that certain accounts of natural law unwittingly reinforce a problematic conception of secular ethics. Part three examines some trends in religious studies and comparative religious ethics to highlight problematic conceptions of religion. Drawing together these strands of inquiry, I contend that that the secular-religious dichotomy in contemporary ethics should be rejected, but by the same token, I suggest that comparative ethics remains a worthwhile enterprise.     

Decentered online Bible instruction: How active learning enhances the study of Scripture

The field of biblical studies lends itself well to decentered online learning – a kind that uses active learning to engage primary texts and their interpretations. Not only does such an approach work well in online and hybrid formats, it more readily welcomes readings that are more contextual, constructive, and collaborative. Three aspects best characterize a decentered approach to active learning online: an orientation toward primary texts, collaborative inquiry, and enhanced learner initiative. This essay describes the significance of each in turn, along with naming some best practices. I argue that this approach not only shifts focus toward learners and the learning environment, it works particularly well for teaching Bible courses online and in hybrid formats where interpretation of primary sources is the fundamental goal.     

The concept of personality in Russian theological literature

The term personality (li?nost’) appears in Russian theological literature in the first half of the 19th century under the influence of secular writers indebted to Romantic ideology. Confronted to person it gradually acquires somatic connotations and generally means person inarnate, creative individuality. Asomatic attitude is reflected in Nesmelov. In soteriological perspective, as Sergius Stragorodskij suggests, personality should be subjectively abandonded in order to be finally glorified by God.     

Expanding the study of U.S. religion: Reflections on the state of a subfield

The study of U.S. religion, which dates from the 19th century, expanded its sources, methods, and scope during the last quarter of the 20th century, as specialists offered more inclusive historical narratives. That methodological expansion never went far enough, however, and the impulse toward narrative inclusiveness has been restrained in recent years. The subfield, I argue, now faces a number of challenges that also confront other specializations in the study of religiondcontraction, overspecialization, fragmentation, and parochialism. After a focused overview of the subfield's history, I discuss those challenges. Proposing a tentative response, I suggest that specialists celebrate methodological diversity and theoretical sophistication, encourage comparative and translocative studies, and increase collaboration across disciplinary boundaries and national borders. Finally, I suggest that we expand the subfield's temporal span and geographical scope and reframe the study of U.S. religion in terms of the Atlantic World, the Pacific World, and the Western Hemisphere     

Expanding the study of U.S. religion: Reflections on the state of a subfield

The study of U.S. religion, which dates from the 19th century, expanded its sources, methods, and scope during the last quarter of the 20th century, as specialists offered more inclusive historical narratives. That methodological expansion never went far enough, however, and the impulse toward narrative inclusiveness has been restrained in recent years. The subfield, I argue, now faces a number of challenges that also confront other specializations in the study of religion—contraction, overspecialization, fragmentation, and parochialism. After a focused overview of the subfield’s history, I discuss those challenges. Proposing a tentative response, I suggest that specialists celebrate methodological diversity and theoretical sophistication, encourage comparative and translocative studies, and increase collaboration across disciplinary boundaries and national borders. Finally, I suggest that we expand the subfield’s temporal span and geographical scope and reframe the study of U.S. religion in terms of the Atlantic World, the Pacific World, and the Western Hemisphere.     

The influence of Mayan education on middle school students in Guatemala

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of Mayan education on the academic achievement of Indian and Ladino middle school students (N = 353) in Guatemala. This study also examined changes in ethnic identity achievement and the effects of changes in ethnic identity achievement on gains in self-esteem and other-group attitudes. Superior gains in academic skills for both Ladino and Indian students attending Mayan schools were found. The results also suggested that those students who increased their ethnic identity scores during their first year of middle school also increased their other-group attitudes. These results are discussed in terms of the benefits of Mayan education and ethnic identity achievement for both Indian and Ladino students.     

Redeeming, Ruling, and Reaping: British Missionary Societies, the East India Company, and the India-to-China Opium Trade

At the end of the 19th century, British missionaries campaigned to abolish the India-to-China opium trade, whose profits were crucial for British ambitions in Asia. This challenge by the missionaries had been slow to emerge, however, and focusing only on that well-known opposition masks the preceding half-century of accommodations and compromises with the opium traffic, both on the production end (Bengal) and on the receiving end (in Macau and Canton). Our research addresses the subjective calculus that was at work for the missionaries and asks how their reading of that calculus affected their movement across the spectrum from unconcern to outrage about opium. At the core of their enterprise from beginning to end was their unwavering commitment to the evangelical "Great Commission," which spelled out the obligation to bring the Christian gospel to unsaved multitudes around the world. We argue that they consistently embraced whatever was pragmatically necessary to advance that goal and resisted whatever threatened to block movement toward it. Beneath changeability on the surface, a thread of value-rational coherence ran through a century of calculated and strategic missionary activity. The same thread is likely to be in evidence in other theaters of global evangelism where missionaries were (are) involved in secular controversies.     

Tension and opportunity in post-world War II American psychology

The rapid growth of post-World War II psychology in the United States led to intradisciplinary tensions and opportunities. In this article, I examine these tensions and opportunities in the context of social change from the 1950s through the present, attending specifically to the broad impact of federal funding on psychology. I argue that as psychology became a resource-rich field, it was forced to move from a narrow, parochial stance to a position as a national-level professional player that had to deal with the challenges of mixing science and practice, as well as meeting the demands of non-White psychologists at the national level. The impetus to create a more inclusive psychology has grown in the last three decades of the 20th century and has helped create possibilities for greater richness in American psychology and movement toward a truly international role vis-a-vis emergent psychologies around the world.     

Aporia and the postsecular

The Politics of Postsecular Religion by Ananda Abeysekara provides a novel critical intervention within the growing debate on religion and the secular. It does this by exposing a limitation of the influential form of criticism known as ‘genealogical critique’ that has become popular in disciplines such as postcolonial studies, history of religions and anthropology. By grounding critical thought on the logic of aporia, it is possible to interrupt conventional forms of critique that merely recover or inherit the name, and thus to re-imagine political futures. The paper briefly demonstrates the applicability of aporetic logic by way of reference to the violent interdictions of modes of speech that were prevalent in pre-colonial India and which eventually enabled the Western category of ‘religion’ to take root in the minds of Indian elites in the late 19th and early 20th century.     

Does religious priming increase the prosocial behaviour of a Japanese sample in an anonymous economic game?

We examined the effect of religious priming on a Japanese sample in an anonymous dictator game whereas previous studies on religious priming on prosociality had mainly been conducted within Western contexts. The current study attempted to examine whether religion increases prosocial behaviour in a Japanese sample through the replication of ‘God is Watching You’ (Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007) where it was found that participants primed with religion‐related words and secular justice‐related words behaved more prosocially than participants primed with neutral words in an anonymous dictator game. The current experiment was conducted with Japanese students (n = 106) to examine whether the results of the original study could be applied to Japanese people. The results showed that among the three priming conditions (control, religion, secular justice), there was no difference in the amount of money participants allocated to anonymous strangers, although in the secular justice priming condition, theists allocated more money than atheists. The results might be due to the fact that the religious priming words used in the original study did not precisely activate the propositional network of religion that Japanese participants have. More culture‐specific studies are necessary to examine how religious priming works for non‐Westerners.     

Some aspects of the assertoric syllogism in medieval hebrew logic

This paper introduces the reader to the medieval Hebrew tradition of logic by considering its treatment of Aristotelian syllogistic. Starting in the thirteenth century European Jews translated Arabic and Latin texts into Hebrew and produced commentaries and original compendia.Because they stood culturally and geographically at the cross-roads of two great traditions they were influenced by both.This is clearly seen in the development of syllogistic theory, where the Latin tradition ultimately replaces, though never entirely, its Arabic counterpart.Specific attention is devoted to the debate about the so-called Galenian fourth figure.In medieval Hebrew logic one finds both defenders and detractors of the figure, the former appearing towards the beginning of the period in question.With the ascendancy of scholastic logic the fourth figure virtually disappears from Hebrew texts