“Big Momma Had Sugar,Imma Have It Too” Medical Fatalism and the Language of Faith Among African–American Women in Memphis

This essay offers a theological exploration of the relationship between medical fatalism and religious belonging among African–American women in Memphis. Drawing on the work of black and womanist theologians and on conversations with participants in a diabetes intervention program administered by a faith-based community health provider, I argue that how we narrate the meanings of our bodies is irreducibly religious. The language we use to interpret and communicate the meaning of our bodily existence emerges from a set of assumptions, often unarticulated, about what is of ultimate value to us. The essay focuses on three interlocking features that link faith with fatalism or hope: (1) The idea that if “I don’t claim that” disease cannot enter my body; (2) the role of faith-based clinics in re-establishing trust with marginalized communities; and (3) how nuanced attention to the social location of health seekers can re-frame our understanding of patient compliance. Disrupting fatalism can only be done from within a health seeker’s own narrative, and therefore, healthcare providers who learn these narratives and respect their holiness will develop more effective interventions.     

Pentecostalism,Conversions, and Politics in Brazil

The stereotype of all Latin American Pentecostals as political conservatives or apolitical has long been abandoned by scholars. But how Pentecostalism figures in the lives of Pentecostals so that some are indeed akin to stereotype and others are active, critical citizens involved in radical politics, remains a matter for debate. This paper argues that variation in type of citizenship among Brazilian Pentecostals may be understood not only in terms of variations in religious culture but also in terms of different types of conversion. It is proposed that reference to types of conversion, as distinguished by some theologians, helps explain why Pentecostals who share elements of a common religious culture nevertheless differ in type of citizenship; and why some Pentecostals and Catholics of the ‘base communities’, though different in their religious cultures, nonetheless share a common quality of critical citizenship.     

Concept History and Religious Discourse

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) has made important contributions to the study of political and social thought, as well as to cultural history more generally. Reinhart Koselleck has argued that, during the eighteenth century, basic concept use in Europe experienced widespread trends of (1) democratization, (2) temporalization, (3) ideologization, and (4) politicization. This article will consider the possibility of a conceptual history of religious discourse. While conceptual history has thus far focused primarily on political and social concepts, some research has more recently turned to religious concepts. This work should be expanded and can be improved by the insight of theologians and ethicists who often have a better understanding of religious concept use than conceptual historians whose main focus is political thought. I will summarize how concept history could be applied to religious concepts, how theologians might make a contribution to the theory behind Koselleck's understanding of modern concept use, and offer a critique of a recent methodological introduction to religious concept history.     

A Response to G. Scott Davis

This defense of my essay on Vitoria and Suárez argues that my use of the term “religious war” is based on religious authority at least as much as religious cause, and that Davis’s decision to discuss only Vitoria limits his ability to come to terms with my thesis. To Davis’s argument that for Vitoria war was justified against the Indians only as a necessity of simple justice and to protect the innocent, I argue that his disjunction between simple justice and religious cause is a false one that fails to come to term with the church’s primary reason for approaching Indians, with the Thomistic understanding of the relation between nature and grace and between reason and revelation, and with the distinction between what justice requires in relation to the church and Christians and what it requires for others. I explain finally that my claim is not that the Catholic political rulers readily responded to papal calls for war except when it was in their interest, but that papal war was central to the normative just‐war tradition of the church in canon law and among major theologians like Vitoria and Suárez.     

Europe,the New Abyssinia: On the Role of the First Hijra in the Fiqh al-Aqalliyyāt al-Muslima Discourse

Since the mid-1980s, Muslim jurists and theologians have discussed the permissibility of mass-scale Muslim permanent voluntary settlement in majority non-Muslim countries and the unique challenges Muslim minorities face in secularizing Christian societies. Their efforts constitute a new field in Islamic jurisprudence, fiqh al-aqalliyyāt al-Muslima (the religious law of Muslim minorities). A number of participants in this field have introduced analogies between present realities and the first hijra – the migration to Christian Abyssinia (Ethiopia) with the blessing of the Prophet Muhammad. The objectives of this article are twofold: (a) to point to the roles of these analogies in fiqh al-aqalliyyāt al-Muslima discourse and (b) to demonstrate how Islamic jurists and theologians interpret similar or almost similar mythical narratives to support conflicting arguments. The article draws on a qualitative reading of several dozen religious decisions, treatises and sermons by jurists and theologians collected from mosques, Islamic centres and libraries in Europe, as well as from online resources.     

FROM GOD TO INFINITY, OR HOW SCIENCE RAIDED RELIGION'S PATENT ON MYSTERY

The efforts of theologians in the last few decades to adapt their discipline to the methodological constraints of the “empirical sciences” have become obsolete. Just as many theologians have reached a tentative rapproachment with the “secular” mentality, the elements of mystery hitherto shepherded by religious thinkers have been appropriated in the cosmological models of the “new physics.” The paper explores revolutionary developments over the last ten years within quantum physics. It points to an imminent convergence between scientific and religious concepts within a larger framework of speculation termed synholism (from Friedrich von Weizsácher), and examines theoretical implications of such hypotheses in high-energy physics as a “cosmic consciousness” and “multiple universes.”     

Is moral ambiguity all we have to offer?

Theology risks marginalization in the debate about ethical medicine, if theologians merely surrender to ambiguity. We live in a pluralistic society, C. Ben Mitchell points out, but Christians must not accept pluralism as an ideology. In light of our own tradition, we must speak out on ethical issues as we see them. Since "the public" is sympathetic to religious values, public policy should not be dictated by anti-religious points of view.     

On the use of the uncanny in ritual

In ‘The Future of an Illusion’, Freud suggested that religion allows a person to ‘feel at home in the uncanny’ – that unsettling interplay of suppression and memory that arises from living subject to fears and anxieties in an unpredictable world. Here, the author examines a ritual called the ‘Wild Hunt’ that occurred during her ethnographic research among contemporary Pagans to explore how uncanny encounters within religious rituals can help participants come to terms with fears and anxieties, transforming inchoate emotions stemming from trauma or dislocation. Following Otto, the author suggests that such a sense of the uncanny can be central to the power of religious ritual. These uncanny elements within religious ritual provide an illustration of how religious experiences can help participants to feel ‘at home in the uncanny’, thereby bringing together the seemingly disparate accounts of Otto and Freud on the relationship between religion and uncanny experience.     

Fear of Death and Supernatural Beliefs: Developing a New Supernatural Belief Scale to Test the Relationship

Fear of death features in both historical and contemporary theories of religion, but the relationship between death anxiety and religious belief is still ambiguous, largely due to the use of inappropriate or imprecise measures. The current studies therefore aimed to develop a valid, targeted measure of respondents' tendency towards religious belief, the ‘Supernatural Belief Scale’ (SBS), and to use the SBS to examine the relation between death anxiety and religious belief. Results indicate that the SBS shows high reliability and convergent validity and that its relation to death anxiety depends on participants' religious identification: ‘religious’ participants fear death less the stronger their religious beliefs, whereas ‘non‐religious’ participants are more inclined towards religious belief the more they fear death. These studies contribute a new measurement tool for research on religious belief and provide a starting point for an experimental integration of discrepant research findings. Copyright © 2013 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Newman's Forensic Classic of Development: Its Uniqueness and Its Agon with Gibbon and Surrogates

In this article I argue for the uniqueness of The Development of Doctrine vis‐à‐vis other classic texts on doctrinal development supplied by the German theologians J.S. Drey and J.A. Möhler. Whereas the accounts of the German theologians are ‘theological’ in the strict sense, Newman's is theological only indirectly and forensic in its primary construction and execution. By ‘forensic’ I mean that the bulk of his reasoning is argumentative and intends to clear a space for thinking plausibly of the development of doctrine given other assumptions in the secular imaginary. While I make plain that in his classic text Newman is taking issue with the barriers against the idea of development from a number of religious constituencies, I suggest that in the end the enemy of enemies are religious rationalists, especially those with a historical sense largely derived from reading Edward Gibbon. Although The Development of Doctrine is an extraordinary text in so many ways, it comes to life when one understands it as Newman doing battle with Gibbon over the proper historiography of Christianity over the ages.     

Who’s Winning the War Against Science?

There is an outcry among scientists that they are being attacked on multiple fronts by fake news, alternative facts, climate change denial, fossil fuel industries, shrinking government funding, postmodernism, and religion. Is this siege mentality realistic or paranoid? It’s realistic. This article encourages theologians and other religious leaders to ally themselves with scientists in defense of evidence-based judgments in public policy-making.     

‘THEY KNOW HIM BY HIS VOICE’: NEWMAN ON THE IMAGINATION,CHRISTOLOGY, AND THE THEOLOGY OF RELIGIONS

Newman's gift to Catholic theology is the gift of ‘wisdom’: an ability to discern the shape of the whole, not by way of ‘generalized laws or metaphysical conjectures’ but through the ‘concrete’ and ‘living’ soil of the religious imagination. Newman's elemental trust in the religious sensibilities of non‐Christians and the revelatory roots of ‘natural religion’ proceeds from his view of the religious imagination as the experiential, pre‐verbal, and pre‐conceptual realm of contact between God and human persons always and everywhere. Above all Newman recognizes the salvific character of a life of personal holiness. In this respect the life of Christ exemplifies continuity and not radical interruption with countless human beings outside our usual ken who quietly lead lives of sacramental holiness. Bringing Newman into dialogue with contemporary theologians such as Jacques Dupuis, Roger Haight, Terrence Merrigan, and Thomas Merton, the author proposes four lessons for a theology of religions cast ‘under the light of Wisdom’.     

Extra ecclesiam nulla revelatio?: God’s self-disclosure to non-Christian religions in contemporary Catholic theology

The author explores the conciliar and post-conciliar documents of the Catholic Church in order to draw out the tensions and ambiguities of its position regarding the nature and role of revelation in the origin of non-Christian religions. Within the framework of this position, moderate Catholic theologians have argued that, as other religions have their origins in God’s specific self-disclosure, they differ only in degree from Christianity. Their arguments combined with an in-depth analysis of Church documents yields the conclusion that the position of the Catholic Church is logically amenable to an affirmation of religious pluralism de iure. If the Catholic Church desires to officially reject this conclusion, it must explicitly address the apparent inconsistencies that its own theologians find in this rejection.     

“I know what a Muslim really is”: how political context predisposes the perceived need for an objective Muslim identity

This article explores the process by which Western Muslim young adults develop the need to experience an ‘objective’ religious identity. We interviewed 20 Western Muslim young adults born in Montreal, Berlin, and Copenhagen within the age range of 18–25, exploring their religious identity development. The interviews were semi-structured and open-ended. Thematic content analysis was used to explore patterns in their narratives. The participants disliked the perceived ethnocentric Muslim identity of their parents, which they sought to ‘purify’ for themselves from ‘cultural contamination’. There were two important elements underlying the process of religious identity objectification: experience of anti-Muslim political discourse and exposure to religious diversity in the aftermath of deterritorialisation.     

Tasting the divine: the aesthetics of religious emotion in Indian Christianity

The category of rasa (emotional ‘tastes’) in Indian Christian theology and art offers a useful theoretical lens for the academic study of religious emotion. In this article, two Bharata Nā?yam dance ministries provide a case study in the practical applicability of a rasa theology that is emerging within contemporary Indian Christianity. The Christian choreographers have significantly altered the emotions of love and peace in comparison with classical rasa theory and its traditional use in Hindu devotion. Indian Christian artists and theologians have also begun to explore and invent additional aesthetic emotions, giving unique shape to their ‘emotional community.’ Important challenges attend the dance ministries as they are currently configured, yet rasa is a capacious analytical category that can shed new light on Indian Christianity and the study of emotion in religion.     

The Doubting Disease: Religious Scrupulosity and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in Historical Context

Psychologists and cultural historians typically have argued that early modern theologians such as Martin Luther, John Bunyan, and Ignatius Loyola exhibited behavior that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV) classifies as a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder termed “religious scrupulosity.” This essay argues that, although early modern theologians do manifest scrupulosity, such religiosity was a culturally acceptable, even recommended component of spiritual progress, a necessary means of receiving an unmerited bestowal of God’s grace. The larger aim of the essay is to point out some of the limitations of current DSM criteria when attempting retrospectively to diagnose historical figures with mental pathology.     

John Milton's Magisterial Reformation

In the English prose he published over a period of two decades, John Milton frequently uses the term ‘reformation’ to identify the age in which he was living and the causes for which he was fighting. In so doing, he reveals his support for the magisterial Reformation and his rejection of the radical Reformation. He expresses his desire not for religious diversity but for union with the Scottish and Continental Reformed Churches. He constructs a complex discourse that is self-serving, misleading in some ways, prophetic, and calculated to win a range of polemical contests. In supporting the magisterial Reformation, he also displays his support for theologians who participate in government, and magistrates who participate in determining religious belief and conduct. Milton thus repudiates many aspects of modernity and is, as he insists, a man who lived during, and promoted what he called, ‘times of reformation’.     

THE THEOLOGICAL DEBATE OVER HUMAN ENHANCEMENT: AN EMPIRICAL CASE STUDY OF A MEDIATING ORGANIZATION

For most theologians, theology should ultimately be used by the laity and/or the public. However, the religion and science debate has not focused on the divide between theologians and the laity. In this case study I examine the debate among theologians about human enhancement. I focus on the extent to which the structure of the debate in a “mediating organization” between the theologians and the public coincides with the structure of the debate among the theologians. I conduct a survey of participants in the organization, and find that the basic divides among the theologians are largely replicated. These results, when combined with studies of the theologians themselves and the laity, provide a more holistic understanding of the future debate about human enhancement.     

TheoArtistry: practical perspectives on ‘theologically informed art’

ABSTRACT

This article reviews the TheoArtistry Composers’ Scheme (2016–2018), in light of the developing concept of ‘theologically informed art’. Based at the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts (ITIA) (University of St Andrews), the scheme partnered emerging theologians and composers to create six new choral settings of Hebrew Bible ‘annunciations’. In addition to producing new music, the project became a practical touchstone for reinvigorating dialogues between theologians and practising artists, as well as Christians and non-Christians. First, the author assesses the scheme’s contributions to the study and practice of theologically informed art in the future. Second, she outlines some methodological issues associated with the scheme’s unique breadth of participants. Finally, she assesses ecclesiological and theological ambiguities within the scheme. The author argues that clarifying these ambiguities expands horizons for future collaborations in theologically informed art.     

Religious authority and the transmission of abstract god concepts

According to the Standard Model account of religion, religious concepts tend to conform to “minimally counterintuitive” schemas. Laypeople may, to varying degrees, verbally endorse the abstract doctrines taught by professional theologians. But, outside the Sunday school exam room, the implicit representations that tend to guide people’s everyday thinking, feeling, and behavior are about minimally counterintuitive entities. According to the Standard Model, these implicit representations are the essential thing to be explained by the cognitive science of religion (CSR). It is argued here that this theoretical orientation of mainstream CSR misses a whole dimension of religiosity—the acceptance of certain religious authorities, that is, the acceptance of other people’s superior expertise. Average believers (especially in doctrinal traditions) tend to accept the authority of religious experts who espouse highly counterintuitive ideas that they (the laypeople) understand in a distorted form, if at all. These highly counterintuitive ideas are culturally successful because laypeople see them as being justified by people they have reason to regard as epistemic authorities. The tendency for people to endorse (without fully understanding) highly counterintuitive religious ideas espoused by intellectuals may explain parallels in the development of separate traditions (e.g., Judaism and Hinduism), as religious philosophers follow parallel lines of reasoning.