“Heaven and Hell on Earth” A critical discourse analysis of religious terms in Norwegian autobiographies describing personal experience of mental health problems

This article explores the use of religious terms in six Norwegian autobiographies written between 1925 and 2005 by people who themselves have been patients in the mental health services. Through a critical discourse analysis, we discuss the functions of religious discourse in the texts and its position in contrast to the medical discourse predominant in today's mental health services. It was found that religious (predominantly Christian) terms were used to varying degrees in all autobiographies as a means to capture the immensity and inherent ambivalence characteristic of mental health problems. Despite the “medical turn” in professional mental health discourse, there is no clear evidence of a decrease in the use of religious terms from the oldest to the most recent text. We propose that professional mental health workers to a larger extent take into account the religious dimension in therapy, and reflect on its larger historical and sociocultural context.     

ISLAMIC VERDICTS IN HEALTH POLICY DISCOURSE: PORCINE‐BASED VACCINES AS A CASE STUDY

In this article, I apply a policy‐oriented applied Islamic bioethics lens to two verdicts on the permissibility of using vaccines with porcine components. I begin by reviewing the decrees and then proceed to describe how they were used by health policy stakeholders. Subsequently, My analysis will highlight aspects of the verdict's ethico‐legal arguments in order to illustrate salient legal concepts that must be accounted for when using Islamic verdicts as the basis for health policy. I will conclude with several suggestions for facilitating a more judicious use of verdicts in policy‐relevant discourse. My analysis is meant to contribute to the dialogue between science and religion, and aims to further efforts at developing health policies that value health while accommodating religious values. In the encounter between the Islamic tradition and global public health, a multidisciplinary dialogue, where Islamic legists become aware of the health policy implications of their ethico‐legal pronouncements, and where health policy actors gain a literate understanding of Islamic ethico‐legal theory, will lead to verdicts that better meet the needs of patients, health workers, and religious leaders.     

Theorising 'Talk' about 'Religious Pluralism' and 'Religious Harmony' in Singapore

This article aims to make sense of the discourse on 'religious pluralism' and 'religious harmony' in Singapore. My choice of the 'Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act' , passed in 1990, to launch this inquiry is by no means accidental or random. I argue that in addition to an empirical domain, it is a central analytical tool that has provided an occasion for the articulation of a range of taken-for-granted statements about 'religion', 'religious pluralism', and 'religious harmony' in Singapore. I map out how the religious scene is discussed by various parties. The inevitability of Singapore's multi-religiosity, the fragility of religious harmony, and the need for constant vigilance are dominant strands. The article addresses these related areas: a brief historical contextualisation of religion in secular Singapore is followed by a condensed narrative of the conditions and deliberations leading to the Act. Further, the discourse on religious harmony from the early 1990s is juxtaposed to present concerns about religion and religious encounters in Singapore. The intention for this is two-fold: to see if there have been any major shifts in such 'talk, and to use the empirical material to call for the re-conceptualisation of categories/notions, such as 'religious pluralism' and 'religious harmony'.     

Prophecy,Ethical Constraints,and Unjust Silence

Cathleen Kaveny's Prophecy Without Contempt seeks to reorient the conversation among religious ethicists and political theorists about religion in public life. Rather than focus on religious speech in general, Kaveny distinguishes deliberation and indictment as forms of discourse, and she subjects indictment to ethical evaluation. She aims to constrain the public exercise of inordinate indictment, while encouraging prophetic indictment that meets the demands of justice. While the book is a much‐needed corrective, Kaveny's focus on the powerful rhetoric of prophetic indictment omits the harms that can come to the body politic from unjust silence. Such silence deserves more moral attention.     

French secularism as a ‘guarantor’ of women's rights? Muslim women and gender politics in a Parisian banlieue

This paper considers contemporary discourse in France that positions secularism (laïcité) as a guarantor of Muslim women's rights. In the first section I sketch a socio-historical genealogy of this discourse focusing on key shifts in its articulation. I suggest that the current identification between secularism and Muslim women's rights has its main expressions in recent public policy commissions and, as an example on the ground, in the positions taken by France's largest feminist organisation, Femmes Solidaires. Informed by one another, these commissions and this organisation (a) conceptualise Islam as overtly political and patriarchal and (b) define secularism as the primary way to ‘liberate’ Muslim women. The second section examines the impact of this discourse on Muslim communities in Petit Nanterre, a Parisian suburb where I conducted extensive anthropological fieldwork. Significantly, Muslim women in this suburb are uninterested in headscarf-related debates on secularism and more vividly engaged in the 2005 Pork Affair, a locally oriented controversy in a public school. I conclude that the religious concerns of the Muslim women positioned at the centre of the secular debate are expressed in certain forms of activism, efforts ignored by commissions and women's advocacy groups.     

Debate,Prophecy, and Revolution: Notes on Cathleen Kaveny's Prophecy Without Contempt

In Prophecy without Contempt, Cathleen Kaveny argues that prevailing scholarly approaches to religious and public discourse misunderstand the actual complexity of moral rhetoric in America. She endeavors to provide a better account through study of the role the Puritan jeremiad has played. Kaveny then offers a normative case for deliberative public moral discourse and the limited exercise of prophetic denunciation. I argue that Kaveny's distinction between deliberation and prophetic denunciation is overdrawn. They are ideal types that elide other rhetorical forms. Moreover, both deliberative discourse and prophetic denunciation assume a social contract or shared tradition. Healthy moral discourse requires revolutionary rhetoric to interrogate and break traditions that are themselves morally compromised.     

Is This Relevant? Physician Perceptions,Clinical Relevance,and Religious Content in Clinical Interactions

Despite wide support among physicians for practicing patient‐centered care, clinical interactions are primarily driven by physicians’ perception of relevance. While some will perceive a connection between religion and patient health, this relevance will be less apparent for others. I argue that physician responses when religious/spiritual topics come up during clinical interactions will depend on their own religious/spiritual background. The more central religion is for the physician, the greater his or her perception of religion's impact on health outcomes and his or her inclusion of religion/spirituality within clinical interactions. Using a nationally representative sample of physicians in the United States and mediated path models, I estimate models for five different physician actions to evaluate these relationships. I find that a physician's religious background is strongly associated with whether or not he or she thinks religion impacts health outcomes, which is strongly predictive of inclusion. I also find that not all of the association between inclusion and physicians’ religious background is mediated by thinking religion impacts health outcomes. Issues of religion's relevance for medicine are important to the degree that religious beliefs are an important dimension of patients’ lives.     

Distancing and Solidarity as Resistance to Sexual Objectification in a Nude Dancing Bar

ABSTRACT

Drawing on observation and interviews in a mid-Atlantic nude dancing bar, I examine front-stage customer-dancer relations as well as dancers' discourse among themselves backstage. I use James Scott's theoretical framework regarding subordinate group resistance strategies to analyze dancers' attempts to resist customers' harassment. On the micro-level dancers exercise agency, reconstructing their identities within the larger context of macro-level oppression. Dancers' front stage tactics include spatial distancing, verbal one-liners, physical aggression, calling on customers, and united action with other dancers. Backstage, dancers reframe the public text, articulating their own identity construction by creating a social site for solidarity and desexualizing the body.     

WORLDS OR WORDS APART? WITTGENSTEIN ON UNDERSTANDING RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE

In this paper I develop an account of Wittgenstein's conception of what it is to understand religious language. I show that Wittgenstein's view undermines the idea that as regards religious faith only two options are possible – either adherence to a set of metaphysical beliefs (with certain ways of acting following from these beliefs) or passionate commitment to a ‘doctrineless’ form of life. I offer a defence of Wittgenstein's conception against Kai Nielsen's charges that Wittgenstein removes the ‘content’ from religious belief and renders the religious form of life ‘incommensurable’ with other domains of discourse, thus immunizing it against rational criticism.     

‘Hope givers’? A scoping review of new media and mental health in 27 Australian Christian organisations

This article explains a range of conceptual and methodological innovations in the use of new media for the clinical practice and public communication of mental health. Building on two current contexts – the emerging research area of new media and mental health, and major reform of the mental health system in Australia – this article presents a scoping review of the online communication of Christian organisations that offer mental health care in Australia. This article compares the websites of 27 Australian Christian mental health organisations, analysing these organisations’ configurations of mainstream and religious modalities of mental health care, their discursive and visual communication strategies, as well as their use of social media platforms.     

Justice without Solidarity? Collective Identity and the Fate of the ‘Ethical’ in Habermas' Recent Political Theory

In past work, Habermas has claimed that justice and solidarity stand in a complementary relationship—that ‘ethical’ relations of solidarity are the ‘reverse side’ of justice. Yet in a recent address to the World Congress of Philosophy, he rejects this idea. This paper argues against this rejection. After explaining the idea, arguing for its centrality to Habermas' thought, and evaluating Habermas' scant reflections on this major transformation, I argue that his rejection of the idea is a result of a newfound skepticism about the power of secular reason, and should thus be understood in terms of his corresponding turn to religious traditions as alternative sources of solidarity. I argue against this ‘religious turn’ by developing an alternative advocated by Habermas himself in earlier reflections—attention to real sociopolitical movements. In particular, I analyze feminist and black liberation movements to demonstrate that Habermas' pessimism about secular sources of justice‐producing solidarity is unwarranted, and that, while ‘postsecular’ sources may provide one avenue for actionable solidarity, they are not the only one. I conclude by identifying a conceptual commonality in these two alternatives: an inclusive conception of what it means to be human.     

Being Fit and Looking Healthy: Young Women’s and Men’s Constructions of Health and Fitness

We drew on Foucault's notion of ‘practices of the self’ to examine how young people take up, negotiate, and resist the imperatives of a public health discourse concerned with the relationships between health, fitness, and the body. We did this through a discussion of the ways young women and men talk about their own and others' bodies, in the context of a number of in-depth interviews conducted for the Life Activity Project, a study of the place and meaning of physical activity in young people's lives, funded by an Australian Research Council Grant. We found that the young women and men in the study engaged the health/fitness discourse very differently: for the young men, health conflated with fitness as an embodied capacity to do physical work; and for the young women, health was a much more difficult and complex project associated with managing and monitoring practices associated with eating and exercise to maintain an ‘appropriate’ body shape.     

God's Mission as Word Event in an Age of World Christianity: An Asian Linguistic‐Transcultural Model

Christian community lives according to the Word of God, inspiring the church to be in ecumenical fellowship and to be amenable to the act of God's speech in an age of world Christianity. The Word of God is able to be translated transculturally in different times and places, while keeping the transversal, irregular horizon of God's discourse. In view of the rise of world Christianity much has been said about the indigenization of the Christian narrative that challenges the western concept of missio Dei. To renew God's mission in an East Asian configuration, a linguistic‐transcultural model is proposed for a public theology of mission that promotes the full humanity of those on the underside of history and acknowledges religious outsiders. A public mission of God's narrative takes seriously the project of interculturation and emancipation in the post‐western Christian era.     

Prophecy Without Contempt: Metaphors,Imagination, and Evaluative Criteria

While greatly appreciative of Kaveny's important study of a neglected form of religious/moral discourse in the public square, this essay critically examines her metaphors for prophetic indictments and finds the metaphor of moral chemotherapy particularly problematic and the metaphor of warfare, connected with the just‐war tradition, more promising. It stresses the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of avoiding contempt in prophetic indictments, as Kaveny conceives them, and finds her proposed solutions to this problem—standing with the people and expressing empathy and compassion toward them—inadequate to the task. It further argues that attending to prophetic imagination, in addition to prophetic denunciation, can broaden the scope of practical deliberation and, at the same time, increase possible prophetic contributions to moral and political discourse.     

Concepts of God and Germs: Social Mechanisms and Cognitive Heuristics

Previous research has shown that the more individuals view observable entities as animate, the more those entities are associated with having psychological and physiological experiences. This study examined the relationship between children's animistic and anthropomorphic reasoning for concepts of unobservable scientific (i.e., germ) and religious (i.e., God) entities. This study further explored how children's conceptions vary according to the social learning opportunities (i.e., discourse, rituals) parents reportedly create. Parent–child dyads with young children from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds participated. Three central findings emerged. First, children readily associated God with psychobiological characteristics but did not do so to the same extent for germs. Second, children applied more psychobiological properties to both entity types when they believed that the entity was animate. Third, engaging in rituals and discourse with parents was indirectly related to children's concepts of God but not related to their concepts of germs. Overall, this study presented support for a connection between children's animistic and anthropomorphic reasoning for unobservable entities, and an indirect effect of cultural input on this reasoning. The implications of these findings will be discussed.     

The Future of the Church as a Primary Health Place

ABSTRACT

There is a critical need for change in America's Health System, and religious organizations can facilitate not only the redefining of what health is but also the shaping of what the primary health services of the future should look like, function as, and be. The vision presented here is that the local parish or some extension of it be seen by the average citizen as a primary health place. The model proposed is that faith based living in community become the core health concept, defining what it means to be human and healthy become the core teaching, and that healing such that no illness need dominate become the goal. Within that context, health information, education, prayer, care, and support for most chronic illness, lifestyle change, and end of life concerns would begin at one's community of faith and only within that context to specially trained persons. This health system will compliment the sophisticated and complex acute medical care system that now exists.     

IN DEFENSE OF PUBLICS: PROJECTION,BIAS, AND CULTURAL NARRATIVES IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION DEBATES

John H. Evans's recent book Morals Not Knowledge is a timely argument to recognize broader social and cultural factors that might impact what U.S. religious publics think about the relationship between science and religion and their attitudes toward science and/or religion. While Evans's focus is primarily on what can be classed as moral issues, this response argues that there are other factors that sit within neither the older epistemic conflict model approach nor a moral conflict model approach that also merit further investigation. There is a significant need for further research that examines the social, psychological, (geo)political, and broader cultural factors shaping people's social identities in relation to science and religion debates. When undertaking such research, we need to be wary of creating a binary between scholarly and public space discourse. Social scientific research in this field should be led by public perceptions, attitudes, and views, not by concepts or frameworks that we project onto them.     

Groundwork for Transfeminist Care Ethics: Sara Ruddick,Trans Children,and Solidarity in Dependency

This essay considers the dependency of trans youth by bridging transgender studies with feminist care ethics to emphasize a trans wisdom about solidarity through dependency. The first major section of the essay argues for reworking Sara Ruddick's philosophy of mothering in the context of trans and gender‐creative youth. This requires, first, stressing a more robust interaction among her divisions of preservative love, nurturance for growth, and training for acceptability, and second, creating a more nuanced account of “nature” in relation to nurturance for growth to avoid casting transition as contrary to a trans youth's healthy development. In the second major section of the essay, I depart from Ruddick's framework to emphasize the difference of care for trans youth by trans and/or queer communities and through mutual caregiving, stressing a trans wisdom about dependency and solidarity found in the work of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Turning to Eva Feder Kittay's links between dependency work and equality, I argue that Rivera and Johnson's work contains a distinct knowledge derived from practice necessitating the connection between solidarity and dependency in particular communities. I then call for more work on trans care ethics, trans ethics, and trans wisdom more broadly.     

Muslim religious oratory on Swedish public service radio

This article analyses religious Morning Services, delivered by eight Muslim speakers, broadcast on Swedish public service radio during 2013 and 2014. Morning Services have been broadcast on Swedish radio since 1930, but only in recent years have non-Christian speakers been invited to contribute. Inviting religious minority speakers is understood as a strategy for incorporating selected representatives of religious minorities into hegemonic practices and discourses. The analysis identifies four shared discourses produced in the material and relates these discourses to hegemonic views regarding legitimate public expressions of religiosity in Sweden. The discourses are: 1) a positive discourse on religious pluralism, 2) a discourse that emphasises practical self-help-like effects of Muslim religious practice, 3) a discourse that articulates religiosity as challenging purported negative aspects of current society, 4) a discourse that raises difficulties which Muslims in Sweden face. The Muslim Morning Services illustrate a complex dialectic, as, on the one hand, they endorse hegemonic values and ideals and thereby contribute to and legitimise the status quo, while, on the other hand, their individual voices, personal narratives, and religious messages signify change through their use of public space which was previously unavailable to Muslims.