RALPH WENDELL BURHOE AND BEYOND: PROPOSALS FOR AN AGENDA

Abstract. This paper deals with Ralph Wendell Burhoe's scientific theology and his theory of altruism. Its task is a critical examination of some of the main aspects of Burhoe's approach within the dialogue between science and theology; its goal is to enhance his vision. In the first part I argue that Burhoe's concept of God can be related to the Christian concept of a God of love through his theory of altruism. The second part deals with Burhoe's way of yoking religion and science. I apply insights of evolutionary epistemology as well as Philip Hefner's fruitful suggestion that Burhoe's enterprise is unavoidably metaphysical. In the last part, I investigate Burhoe's philosophy of science and the dominant role of Western culture, including the Judeo-Christian tradition, in Burhoe's thought. Incorporation of a more critical attitude toward science within Burhoe's positivistic approach is suggested.     

Teaching Religion in Indonesia: A Report on Graduate Studies in Java

Established in 2000–2001, the Center for Religious and Cross‐cultural Studies (CRCS) is the only master's level religious studies program at a non‐religiously affiliated university in Indonesia. In many respects, the program is experimental, operating within the dynamic political and religious environment of the Muslim world's youngest and largest democracy. Like other large democracies such as India or the United States, the Indonesian government and courts have their challenges and opportunities in navigating a multiplicity of religions. In Indonesia, this took on particular urgency in the context of religiously‐charged conflict in the 1990's and early 2000's which helped lead to the establishment of the CRCS. This paper seeks to explore how students and key faculty relate to the program's mission and approach to the study of religion while tracing the development of religious studies as a discipline in Indonesia. Special attention is paid to the political and, at times, controversial aspects of approaching religion with secular and pluralistic frameworks and language. It was informed by interviews and surveys conducted between January and May of 2010.     

SECULARIZING DEMONS: FUNDAMENTALIST NAVIGATIONS IN RELIGION AND SECULARITY

Since the turn of the millennium, theologians and secular scholars of religion have increasingly begun exploring the relationship between transhumanism and religion. However, analyses of anti‐transhumanist apocalypticisms are still rare, and those that exist are situated mainly among broader explorations of religious and secular bioconservatism. This article addresses this lack of specificity by drawing analyses of transhumanism and religion into dialogue with explorations of contemporary demonology through a close study of the beliefs of the evangelical conspiracist Thomas Horn and the anti‐transhumanist milieu around him. Exploring the milieu's multifaceted demonology of the secular world in light of genealogies of religion and secularity, the article situates Horn's demonology as one attempt to negotiate these genealogies, using what Sean McCloud terms a “‘supernatural’ hermeneutics of suspicion” that sees spiritual forces as the structural base of reality. It argues that, while fringe, milieus like Horn's illuminate broader cultural tensions and genealogical relations surrounding the place of religion in a secular(izing) world.     

ATHENS,JERUSALEM, AND THE ARRIVAL OF TECHNO‐SECULARISM

Abstract. Western civilization historically has tried to balance secular knowledge with revealed religion. Science is the modern world's version of secular knowledge and resists the kind of integration achieved by Augustine and Aquinas. Managing the conflict between religion and evolution by containing them in separate “frames,” as Stephen J. Gould suggested, does not resolve the issue. Science may have displaced religion from the public square, but the traditional science‐religion conflict has become threadbare in intellectual terms. Scientific theories have become increasingly abstract, and science has been attacked from the left as a source of objective knowledge. However, technology, not science, has displaced religious belief, a phenomenon I call techno‐secularism. Robert Coles's suggestion that secularism is a form of doubt inevitably attached to religious belief, and William James's reduction of religious experiences to psychological states, evaluating them according to their “cash value,” are unhelpful. Technology enables us to remake our environment according to our wishes and has become a kind of magic that replaces not just revealed religion but also theoretical science. Techno‐secularism has an ethical vision that focuses on healthful living, self‐fulfillment, and avoiding the struggles of human life and the inevitability of death.     

Outside the Box: (Post) Secular Projects of Transcendence

Secular theology builds upon the growing recognition and critique of the limitations of the confining box of religion built in and through the modern secularist dispensation. A bipolar model of religion and the secular, and the classificatory web within which it is nestled, have limited theology's field of vision and engagement. This article explores several examples of projects of transcendence that resist easy identification with either the religious or the secular, illuminating the limitations of the religion‐secular classification and the diffuse cultural trends that are reconfiguring it, even leading beyond it.     

Gendered violence and displacement of devadasis in the early twentieth-century south India

ABSTRACT

The early twentieth-century nationalist movements redefined Indian citizenship as gendered by appropriating the colonial categories religion/secular, marginalising the subaltern groups. Using Critical Religion and Cavanaugh, this article analyses the implications of these developments on devadasis, traditionally performers of music and dance, that resulted in their violent displacement to the fringes of the society. In doing so, this article shows that violence in the context of devadasi communities must be understood with a broader definition. The article will also argue that, albeit colonial categories, religion/secular categories had a different understanding among the indigenous/nationalists. In doing so, this article provides a postcolonial perspective to Critical Religion.     

BURHOE AND SHAPLEY: A COMPLEMENTARITY OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Abstract. The development of Ralph Wendell Burhoe's philosophy of religion and science occurred in the shadow of the continuing dialogue about the place of science in American society. Like his friend and mentor, Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, Burhoe was distressed and intrigued by the troubled postwar relations between science and religion. Unlike Shapley, however, Burhoe sought to create a new modernism, a blend of religion and science that would allow each to develop and complement the other.     

Theistic or secular grounding of human rights?

The philosophical debate on human rights and their core notion of “human dignity” is marked by controversy, not least regarding the relevance of a religious perspective. This article addresses two markedly different approaches to human rights: Nicholas Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs (2008) and George Kateb's Human Dignity (2011). While Wolterstorff argues for a theistic grounding of human rights, Kateb is highly critical towards theology and sets out to achieve a strictly secular account of what makes a human being unique. After two sections outlining their respective positions, the article moves into a comparative discussion and concludes that instead of the rigid alternative “theistic” or “secular” what we need in order to understand and defend human dignity and human rights may be a more open and broad-minded perspective on religion.     

“Experiences deemed religious”: Radical critique or temporary fix? Strategic ambiguity in Ann Taves’ Religious Experience Reconsidered

Ann Taves has written an interesting, lucid and informative book. In particular, the author's suggested reformulation of religious studies as the study of “things deemed special” indicates a critical alternative to the dominant discourse. But such a reformulation implies that the ‘secular’ side of the mutually parasitic religion‐secular binary also requires deconstruction. This in turn must surely lead to a critique of the representation of social psychology and related disciplines as ‘natural science’, a representation which itself is already dependent on the wider, globalizing, ideological religion/secular binary, and its supernatural/natural correlate. The author's ambiguous alternation between things deemed special and things deemed religious invites the discursive contours of ‘religion’ to re‐enter through the back door, leaving the status quo substantially intact     

CULTURE AND HISTORY: ESSENTIAL PARTNERS IN THE CONVERSATION BETWEEN RELIGION AND SCIENCE

Abstract. In this essay I respond to John Caiazza's claim for the primacy of what he calls techno‐secularism for understanding twentieth‐century history. Using the examples of the Taiping Rebellion in nineteenth‐century China and Zionism in twentieth‐century Europe, I argue that the range of Caiazza's schema is confined solely to the Protestant West with little applicability to other national histories. I argue further for the lack of clarity and therefore the uselessness of the dichotomy of the secular and the religious for understanding human history. I claim instead that, while the category of technology and the institutions of religion are important determiners in human history, they need to be subsumed, without special status, within a broader set of interrelated factors called “culture.” I appeal for the academic study of science and religion to give primacy for the near future to the history of science and religion over both theology and science.     

RELIGION‐AND‐SCIENCE DIALOGUE FROM THE VANTAGE POINT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Loyal Rue suggests that religion is not about God as such but about the cultivation of personal and social well‐being. Religion may employ cultural resources that include concepts of supernatural agencies, but religion's essential functionalities are not dependent on that particular resource. I largely endorse Rue's view of religion and employ Rue as a guide to thinking through its consequences for the future of Christianity. For Rue, two challenges face Christianity: the erosion of confidence in personal‐god concepts and the ecological crisis engulfing the planet. In the face of these twin momentous changes, I suggest ways in which certain cultural tropes in the Christian matrix will rise to the fore and others will erode.     

Response to editorial

This article focuses on the importance of analysing the mainstream post-rave dance scene in the context of studies of the religious significance of electronic dance cultures. Drawing on their own ethnographic research, as well as other recent comparable studies in Britain, the authors argue that the mainstream post-rave dance scene is a ‘secondary institution’ supporting the new social form of religion identified by Luckmann, which emphasises self-realisation and self-expression. The study serves as an invitation to re-consider the definition of ‘religion’ in relation to electronic dance cultures and points to the role of mainstream leisure industries in supporting contemporary secular worldviews.     

Habermas,Religion, and Public Life

Abstract

Although many scholars view Jürgen Habermas as the most important philosopher and social theorist since Weber, his account of religion has been relatively neglected. This may be a reflection of the fact that he appears to offer quite distinct views of religion, but it may also reflect the strong secularist assumptions of his early work. In this paper, Habermas’s early and later views of religion are outlined and the change in his understanding of religion is mapped—from being one of the sources of modernity’s inner problems to being a principal source of the passions and motivations underpinning cultural life today. I argue that the relative neglect of Habermas’s work on religion is unfortunate, as it offers a creative and important attempt to move beyond the secular assumptions that have characterised much modern study of religion, providing it with a central role in the mediation of the costs and benefits of modernity.     

Introduction: A ‘Curvature of Social Space’

This article provides a comprehensive and critical overview of existing research that investigates (directly and indirectly) the religio-spiritual dimensions of electronic dance music culture (EDMC) (from disco, through house, to post-rave forms). Studies of the culture and religion of EDMC are explored under four broad groupings: the cultural religion of EDMC expressed through ‘ritual’ and ‘festal’; subjectivity, corporeality and the phenomenological dance experience (especially ‘ecstasy’ and ‘trance’); the dance community and a sense of belonging (the ‘vibe’ and ‘tribes’); and EDMC as a new ‘spirituality of life’. Moving beyond the cultural Marxist approaches of the 1970s, which held youth (sub)cultural expressions as ‘ineffectual’ and ‘tragic’, and the postmodernist approaches of the early 1990s, which held rave to be an ‘implosion of meaning’, recent anthropological and sociological approaches recognise that the various manifestations of this youth cultural phenomenon possess meaning, purpose and significance for participants. Contemporary scholarship thus conveys the presence of religiosity and spirituality within contemporary popular cultural formations. In conclusion, I suggest that this and continuing scholarship can offer useful counterpoint to at least one recent account (of clubbing) that overlooks the significance of EDMC through a restricted and prejudiced apprehension of ‘religion’.     

Integration or Sealing-Over. A Pilot Study of Coping Strategies of Severely Traumatised Patients

This article is an attempt to begin to weave together Freud's work - on dreams here envisioned as the original model for virtual reality - and from Fromm's work - on the impact of the market on personality. The contributions of these two psychoanalysts provide a necessary dual foundation for an understanding of emerging aspects of human psychology that are evolving, at the beginning of the 21st Century, alongside the profound influence of the electronically driven global market. It is time for psychoanalysis to engage more fully in the study of cultural forces. While it is easy to disregard dreams, both in the general culture and of late in psychoanalysis itself, dreams and their interpretation have always been central in human living, in the development of religion and in the birth of psychoanalysis as our own secular religion. Dreams, in their disembodiment and in their fluidity of information transformations have served as one model for developments within cyber culture and virtual living. The destruction of nature is seen as an underlying theme in the development of compatible relativist-subjectivist philosophies and in the growth of cyberculture. Thus, Freud's insights into dreams and Fromm's into the marketing personality are both crucial to an understanding of major contemporary forces.     

RACE, RELIGION, AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF IDENTITY: A THEOLOGICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH DOUGLASS's 1845 NARRATIVE

This essay is about identity and the place of religion and theology in how it is thought about and performed. I purse this subject through a theologically informed reading of the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Taking Douglass's Narrative as emblematic of how identity continues to be conceived, I explain what is promising in the close link forged between religion, theology and culture. The promise of Douglass's Narrative resides in the emancipatory politics of race that it produces and the creative use of the theology of Easter in that politics. But I also explore the contradictions arising from that link—in particular, Douglass's oppressive gender politics. To overcome this problem, I conclude the article by pushing Douglass's cultural reading of identity and the Cross in a more robust theological direction, a direction that gestures towards a theology of Israel and of Pentecost.     

THE DEEP CONDITIONS OF SECULARITY

In modern societies and cultures today, religion is widely perceived as basically even if not merely trivially “optional.” This is a contention strongly advocated by Charles Taylor, most notably in his monumental A Secular Age. Throughout his career, Taylor has made the question of religion in modernity the core of his interests. In his most recent work, A Secular Age, Taylor addresses challenging issues of what he calls the “contemporary spiritual experience” and speaks to “the spiritual hungers and tensions of secular modernity.” I critically consider three aspects of this immensely suggestive if not uncontroversial work: (1) I examine whether there is in fact a possible reversibility or revisability to the so‐called ‘optional’ nature of belief that Taylor thinks is characteristic of the secular age; (2) I scrutinize Taylor's notion of “immediacy” of belief in the same milieu; (3) I interrogate his use of the term “fullness” in delineating the temper of the secular age.     

RELIGION AND FRANCIS BACON'S SCIENTIFIC UTOPIANISM

Francis Bacon often is depicted as a patriarch of modernity who promotes human rational action over faith in divine Providence and as a secular humanitarian who realized that improvement of the human condition depended on human action and not on God's saving acts in history. Bacon's New Atlantis is usually described as a “scientific utopia” because its ideal order, harmony, and prosperity are the result of the investigations of nature conducted by the members of Solomon's House. I challenge these characterizations by showing that Bacon's so‐called scientific utopianism is grounded in his religious convictions that his age was one of Providential intervention and that he was God's agent for an apocalyptic transformation of the human condition. I examine the centrality of these religious themes in two of his philosophical works, The Advancement of Learning and The Great Instauration, which are well known for setting out Bacon's critique of the state of learning and for presenting the principles of his epistemology. Analysis of The Advancement of Learning demonstrates Bacon's conviction that his reform of natural philosophy was part of a Providentially guided, twofold restoration of the knowledge of nature and the knowledge of God. Examination of The Great Instauration reveals that Bacon sees his age as one of apocalyptic transformation of the human condition that restores humanity to a prelapsarian state. Analysis of the New Atlantis shows that utopian perfection can be achieved only through a combination of right religion and the proper study of nature. Moreover, when the “scientific” work of Solomon's House is recontextualized within the religious themes of salvation and deliverance that permeate the New Atlantis, the full scope of Bacon's “scientific utopianism” can be seen, and this project is not the one usually portrayed in scholarly treatments. Bacon's program for rehabilitating humanity and its relation to nature is not a secular, scientific advance through which humanity gains dominion over nature and mastery of its own destiny but rather one guided by divine Providence and achieved through pious human effort.     

THE THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF RALPH WENDELL BURHOE

Abstract. A central aim of Ralph Wendell Burhoe's scientific theology is to define and interpret the meaning of human existence in relation to “ultimate reality.” As such, it can be understood as an exercise in theological anthropology. For Burhoe, this ultimate reality is “nature,” understood as the total reality system which is studied by the sciences and which the sciences are showing to be the sole determiner of the way things are. This article discusses various aspects of Burhoe's theological anthropology, as well as its value and credibility, and raises questions concerning his understanding of the value of the individual and the problems of evil and human sinfulness.