‘Minimal Religion’ and Mikhail Epstein’s Interpretation of Religion in Late-Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

This is an examination of two essays on minimal religion by Mikhail Epstein (1982 and 1999), assessing the usefulness of the term ‘minimal religion’ for the analysis of religion in contemporary Russia. An adapted version of a paper delivered at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University of London, on 8 December, 2003. Note regarding Mikhail Epstein’s use of the words ‘religion’, ‘religiosity’ and ‘spirituality’: Epstein uses the word ‘religion’ to signify ‘mainstream’, church-based manifestations of religion and also the institutional, hierarchical structures related to those. Although in English usage the word ‘religiosity’ has negative connotations – signifying either a superficially felt religious sentiment or a somehow false and insincere expression of religious feeling, intended for outward show – Epstein appears to use the term entirely neutrally. For him it simply serves as a synonym for the word ‘spirituality’. In the two essays examined in the present article the word ‘spirituality’ signifies the whole inner spiritual life and aspirations of the individual and her/his reflection on an ethical way of living, whether the person concerned is a committed, church-going believer, or someone engaged in a personal spiritual or philosophical quest for meaning, or else someone who has experienced what Epstein refers to as ‘the wilderness’ of the Soviet years and has learnt of a spiritual dimension to life through that formative experience.     

Public, Social, and Individual Perspectives on Religious Education. Voices from the Past and the Present

Inspired by Charles Taylor’s recent quest for the meaning of religion today, this article concentrates on the question of the meaning of religious education (RE) today. The focus is not so much on the ‘what’ but instead more on the ‘where’ (the locus) and the ‘how’ (the function) of RE. The view on what is held to be a pedagogically tenable position regarding RE is build up by methodologically using a differentiated practical–theological three-course model that distinguishes between the public, the social and the private domain. Developments and tendencies within the three domains are shown in respect with religion as such and RE in particular. It is made clear what this may mean for religious educators and philosophers of religious education today, who conceptualize religious education as an impossible possibility. Miedema is full professor of Educational Foundations, Endowed professor of Christian Education in and Dean of the Faculty of Psychology and Education, and full professor of Religious Education in the Faculty of Theology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His research is focusing now on pragmatism, history of education, the philosophy of religious education, and early childhood education.     

Liberal pluralism,radical orthodoxy and the right tone of voice

This paper considers two differenttones of voice in philosophy and theology (‘liberal pluralism’ in contrast to ‘radical orthodoxy’) and relates it to a discussion about the theology of religions. ‘Tone of voice’ in this context is intended to denote the affective potency (or not) of a theological perspective as it impacts and influences religious attitudes. In addition, at a related level, ‘tone of voice’ is used when speaking of first-order or second-order perspectives: for example, a first-orderconfessional tone in contrast to a second-ordernotional tone. The paper proceeds to critically engage with John Hick’s pluralism and John Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy particularly from the point of view of considering thetone adopted by both perspectives. The conclusion is that both views are inadequate: Hick’s pluralism—as a second-order meta-theory—lacks the first-order power that is needed to affect ‘hearts and minds’, Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy has rhetorical power but is an ‘unfounded’ narrative which lacks the ability to rationally engage with thereal world. In the end, the suggestion is that the ‘right tone of voice’, in a religious context, ought to combine a realistic enquiry concerning the order-of-things with a first-order rhetorical strength.     

Russian postcommunism and the end of history

The article ventures a reading of Russian postcommunist politics from the perspective of the messianic turn in continental political philosophy, specifically Giorgio Agamben’s conception of the ‘end of history’. Taking its point of departure from a retrospective construction in the Russian political discourse of the 1990s as a period of ‘timelessness’, the paper argues that postcommunism may indeed be viewed as a paradoxical ‘time out of time’, a rupture in the ordinary temporality that entirely dispenses with the teleological horizon of politics. While the problematic of the ‘end of history’ has been popularized by Francis Fukuyama’s liberal recasting of Kojève’s reading of Hegel, the Russian experience is entirely contrary to this complacent and self-gratifying account of the triumph of liberalism and accords, instead, with Agamben’s understanding of the end of history as the deactivation of the teleological dimension of politics as such. The effect of this deactivation is not a catastrophic disintegration of the social order but rather the opening of the possibility of an inoperative political praxis that is oriented towards the affirmation of existence in the pure present. The article proceeds with outlining the implications of this reading of Russian postcommunism for understanding the present conjuncture of Russian politics.

Defensive dining: notes on the public dining experiences in Singapore

This paper examines the relationship between an individual’s degree of religiosity (or piety) and his/her participation in everyday life in a secular, cosmopolitan and multicultural society such as Singapore, by focusing on the practice of public dining. Given that Islam has dietary restrictions (‘halal’), this paper hypothesizes that a devout Muslim might be placed in a situation of considerable unease when dining publicly, as the external environment may conflict with these restrictions. The research for this paper involved interviews with 20 Singaporean Muslims, who have described themselves as being ‘devout’ and ‘practicing’, asking about their views on dining at public food courts or hawker centers. It finds that rather than choosing to avoid these situations, they engaged in a series of defensive strategies to accommodate their religious obligations as well as intercultural interactions, to a certain degree. This paper concludes that because deeply religious Muslims in Singapore implement ‘defensive dining,’ concerns about self-exclusion, isolationism and separatism are probably unfounded, as these individuals appear willing to participate in multicultural and cosmopolitan everyday life.     

Religious Political Parties and the Limits of Political Liberalism

Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in political theory. In this paper I analyse religious political parties in the context of John Rawls’s political liberalism. Rawlsian political liberalism, I argue, overly constrains the scope of democratic political contestation and especially for the kind of contestation channelled by parties. This restriction imposed upon political contestation risks undermining democracy and the development of the kind of democratic ethos that political liberalism cherishes. In this paper I therefore aim to provide a broader and more inclusive understanding of ‘reasonable’ political contestation, able to accommodate those parties (including religious ones) that political liberalism, as customarily understood, would exclude from the democratic realm. More specifically, I first embrace Muirhead and Rosenblum’s (Perspectives on Politics 4: 99–108 2006) idea that parties are ‘bilingual’ links between state and civil society and I draw its normative implications for party politics. Subsequently, I assess whether Rawls’s political liberalism is sufficiently inclusive to allow the presence of parties conveying religious and other comprehensive values. Due to Rawls’s thick conceptions of reasonableness and public reason, I argue, political liberalism risks seriously limiting the number and kinds of comprehensive values which may be channelled by political parties into the public political realm, and this may render it particularly inhospitable to religious political parties. Nevertheless, I claim, Rawls’s theory does offer some scope for reinterpreting the concepts of reasonableness and public reason in a thinner and less restrictive sense and this may render it more inclusive towards religious partisanship.     

Beyond the Conflict: Religion in the Public Sphere and Deliberative Democracy

Traditionally, liberals have confined religion to the sphere of the ‘private’ or ‘non-political’. However, recent debates over the place of religious symbols in public spaces, state financing of faith schools, and tax relief for religious organisations suggest that this distinction is not particularly useful in easing the tension between liberal commitments to equality on the one hand, and freedom of religion on the other. This article deals with one aspect of this debate, which concerns whether members of religious communities should receive exemptions from regulations that place a distinctively heavy burden on them. Drawing on Habermas’ understanding of churches as ‘communities of interpretation’, we explore possible alternatives to both the ‘rule-and-exemption’ approach and the ‘neutralist’ approach. Our proposal rests on the idea of mutual learning between secular and religious perspectives. On this interpretation, what is required is (i) the generation and maintenance of public spaces in which there could be discussion and dialogue about particular cases, and (ii) evaluation of whether the basic conditions of moral discourse are present in these spaces. Thus deliberation becomes a touchstone for the building of a shared democratic ethos.     

Internal Realism and the Problem of Religious Diversity

This article applies Hilary Putnam’s theory of internal realism to the issue of religious plurality. The result of this application – ‘internalist pluralism’ – constitutes a paradigm shift within the Philosophy of Religion. Moreover, internalist pluralism succeeds in avoiding the major difficulties faced by John Hick’s famous theory of religious pluralism, which views God, or ‘the Real,’ as the noumenon lying behind diverse religious phenomena. In side-stepping the difficulties besetting Hick’s revolutionary Kantian approach, without succumbing to William Alston’s critique of conceptual-scheme dependence, internalist pluralism provides a solution to significant theoretical problems, while doing so in a manner that is respectful of cultural diversity and religious sensitivities.

Religious Experience as an Observational Epistemic Practice

William Alston proposed an understanding of religious experience modeled after the triadic structure of sense perception. However, a perceptual model falters because of the unobservability of God as the object of religious experience. To reshape Alston’s model of religious experience as an observational practice we utilize Dudley Shapere’s distinction between the philosophical use of ‘observe’ in terms of sensory perception and scientists’ epistemic use of ‘observe’ as being evidential by providing information or justification leading to knowledge. This distinction helps us to understand how religious experience of an unobservable God can be an epistemic practice that satisfies our epistemic obligations and justifies religious belief.     

Conquering the quarters: Religion and politics in Hinduism

Conclusion Our understanding of South Asian society and history is sometimes muddled by the rigid distinctions we make between ‘religion’ and ‘politics.’ The resurgent appeal of Hindu nationalism, the involvement of Hindu renouncers in contemporary Indian politics, and the continuing relevance of religious issues to political discourse throughout South Asia, show that such a distinction is of limited utility. In this essay, I have examined the notion of digvijaya in some detail, in an attempt to show that this ‘most important Indian concept with regard to sovereignty’ was always both a ‘religious’ and a ‘political’ phenomenon. When it was performed by Hindu kings in the classical period, the ‘political’ dimension of digvijaya was foregrounded, while in the medieval and modern periods, when it was associated primarily with Hindu renouncers, its ‘religious’ aspects were paramount. But neither ‘political’ nor ‘religious’ aspects were ever absent from any of the digvijayas discussed here because religion and politics were mutually entailed in the digvijaya at all times, just as kings and renouncers were—and still are—alter-egos of each other. I am tempted to conclude that the digvijaya melded religious and political domains. Yet perhaps even to speak of ‘melding’ religion and politics is a peculiarly modern kind of discourse. Perhaps we need to rethink our categories and recognize that politics always has a religious element, while religion is always a political force.     

‘Elite’ young Muslims in Britain: from transnational to global politics

Studies on the politics of young western Muslims have been diverse; however, radicalisation theory has achieved dominant status. As espoused by its key proponents Kepel (2004) and Roy (2004), this theory argues that young, western Muslims are being radicalised by the dislocations and uncertainties of globalization, and trying to forge a religious identity in a secular environment. Focusing on a cohort of ‘elite’ young British Muslims, this paper highlights an often overlooked current of thinking whereby sectarianism/localism has been replaced with a commitment to universal principles such as human rights and other global causes. This cohort of young Muslims was less ‘home-centred’ (i.e. transnational) than their parents’ generation and more global in political orientation, reinforcing the view that ethnic and/or religious politics and universalism are not necessarily counter-posed. This shift is explained as a process whereby inter-generational differences (in terms of aspirations and resources) have created a momentum for intra-generational cohesion across boundaries and peer-to-peer information transfer heightened by experience of major traumas, either directly or indirectly, and by new global communications. In the face of global traumas such as 9/11, the first generation’s localism and transnationalism is regarded as inappropriate to the new global context.     

Subjective Well-Being and Kahneman’s ‘Objective Happiness’

This paper is an attempt to clarify the relation between, on the one hand, the construct of ‘objective happiness’ recently proposed by Daniel Kahneman and, on the other hand, the principal focus of happiness studies, namely subjective well-being (SWB). I have two aims. The first, a critical one, is to give a theoretical explanation for why ‘objective happiness’ cannot be a general measure of SWB. Kahneman’s methodology precludes incorporation of relevant pieces of information that can become available to the subject only retrospectively. The second aim, a constructive one, is to clarify the exact connection between ‘objective happiness’ and the wider notion of SWB. Unlike Kahneman, who treats the notion as a useful first approximation, I propose that its applicability should be thought of as context-dependent: under some conditions it could be the right measure of SWB but what these conditions are involves both psychological and ethical considerations.     

Illness Meanings in the Context of Cancer: An Indian Perspective

Attempts at meaning-making are considered an integral part of the process of psychological adjustment following the diagnosis of a major illness. The present study aimed at examining the applicability of Lipowski’s illness meaning framework and the utility of a card-task and an interview method for the assessment of illness meanings in an Indian sample of cancer patients (n=100). ‘Challenge’, ‘value’, ‘punishment’ , ‘weakness’ and ‘enemy’ were the five categories from the Lipowski’s framework that were found to be applicable in the current study sample whereas ‘strategy’, ‘relief’ and ‘loss’ were not applicable in the sample. Five new categories of illness meanings emerged namely; ‘burden’, ‘part of life’, ‘God’s plan’, ‘fate’ and ‘low threat’. Subgroups of patients formed on the basis of four broad categories of illness meanings (positive, negative, fate and low threat) differed significantly on depression, anxiety and quality of life, supporting the convergent validity of the interview based assessment. The study highlights that the card-task for assessment of meanings has significant limitations and that Lipowski’s illness-meaning framework requires expansion to capture the breadth of illness experiences in Indian patients.     

‘Out to get us’: queer Muslims and the clash of sexual civilisations in Australia

Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with twelve queer Muslims in Australia, this article analyses the ongoing struggle for queer Muslim recognition within the context of the so-called ‘Clash of Civilisations’. Analysing the rhetoric of national security and ‘Western’ civilisational identity, this article interrogates the incorporation of sexuality into the cultural and political discourse of the ‘war on terror’, from the xenophobic demonisation of Muslims as sexual predators, to liberal Islamophobia that posits Islam as an aggressive and alien Other against which liberal capitalism must be defended. Within this hostile environment, queer Muslims in Australia are articulating various strategies for finding meaning in their lives. From a Marxist perspective, this article analyses these strategies for recognition which range from complex acts of ‘closeting’ sexual, ethnic and religious identities, to subversive acts of critical hybridity that seek to negate the exclusionary nature of homophobia and Islamophobia within Australia’s multicultural society.     

How is God-talk logically possible? A sketch for an argument on the logic of ‘God’

In this paper I want to argue for the optimal way to characterise the logical and semantical behaviour of the singular term ‘God’ used in religious language. The relevance of this enterprise to logical theory is the main focus as well. Doing this presupposes to outline the two rivaling approaches of well-definition of singular terms: Kripke’s (“rigid designators”) and Hintikka’s (“world-lines”). ‘God’ as a “rigid designator” is purified from all real-life-language-games of identification and only spells out a metaphysical tag, which favours the view of “anything goes”. Instead, ‘God’ as a “world-line,” plus two ways of quantification, is much more flexible to theological traditions, teachings of the church, religious practices and personal feelings. Thus, it provides a sufficiently well-defined singular term for the purposes of logical theory. The whole sketch is based on Jaakko Hintikka’s logical ideas, mainly on his responses to different authors in PJH. I have systematically omitted direct references to his texts because I have modified considerably his ideas for my own purposes.     

Seeking sanctuary in ��the age of disorder��: women in contemporary Tablighi Jam����at

This article addresses the novel phenomenon of the attachment of women from privileged backgrounds to the Tablighi Jamā‘at movement in Indonesia. How to understand the involvement of these urban wealthy women who eventually give up their high-class lifestyles for the sake of their new understanding of Islam? The common stereotype of Tablighi Jamā‘at women is that they are oppressed, cannot exercise agency, and do not contribute to the development of the movement. However, based on an ethnographic study of middle and upper-class Tablighi Jamā‘at women, I found that their passion to return to the true path of Islam and the commitments it embodies have made them aware of their capacity to exercise agency within the movement’s structuring conditions. The women’s privileged social background has enabled them to embrace the meaning of being active in a religious group. The most notable contribution of these women is their effort in undertaking recruitment and sustaining this religious network of shared meaning with their colleagues. Within these activities they are social agents, not just tools of the movement’s men.     

Constructive Dialogical Pluralism: A Context of Interreligious Relations

This article presents current philosophical reflections on religious diversity and concomitant attitudes towards the interreligious situation. The motive behind this presentation is to show that in order to deal more efficiently with the phenomenon of religious plurality, there is a need for a development of the philosophy of religion, where new perspectives are opened up and explored. The very concept of religion as a belief system is put into question, since it has caused philosophical reflections on religious diversity to be confined to certain metaphysical and epistemological concerns. Instead of focusing on the noun ‘religion’, the article suggests a way to understand the adjective ‘religious’ and view religious plurality as a plurality of ways of being religious. This opens up a certain context of interreligious relations and interreligious dialogue, where this very dialogue itself can contribute to the development of philosophical tools, concepts and categories for dealing with the fact of plurality. I call this context constructive dialogical pluralism.     

The individual and nothingness (Stavrogin: a Russian interpretation)

This study is an attempt to reconstruct and sum up philosophical interpretations of Stavrogin, the main hero of the classic Dostoevsky’s novel “The Devils”, given by the outstanding Russian religious thinkers in the twentieth century. The author emphasizes that, however different can be their philosophical premises, the discussed interpretations of Dostoevsky’s hero are compatible and complementary. Confronting and, above all, synthesizing different points of view, he tries to grasp the basic historiosophical, anthropological and religious ideas of Russian renaissance.     

Towards a Religiously Adequate Alternative to OmniGod Theism

Theistic religious believers should be concerned that the God they worship is not an idol. Conceptions of God thus need to be judged according to criteria of religious adequacy that are implicit in the ‘God-role’—that is, the way the concept of God properly functions in the conceptual economy and form of life of theistic believers. I argue that the conception of God as ‘omniGod’—an immaterial personal creator with the omni-properties—may reasonably be judged inadequate, at any rate from the perspective of a relationship ethics based on the Christian revelation that God is Love. I go on to suggest that a conception of God as the power of love within the natural universe might prove more adequate, with God’s role as creator understood in terms of final rather than efficient causation.     

Religious Perspectives on Abortion and a Secular Response

This paper concerns the medical, religious, and social discourse around abortion. The primary goal of this paper is to better understand how seven of the world’s major religious traditions (Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Confucian, and Hindu) address abortion ‘in the clinic’. We do not aim to critique these commentaries but to draw out some of the themes that resonate through the commentaries and place these within complex social contexts. We consider the intersection of ontology and morality; the construction of women’s selfhood; the integration of religious beliefs and practices in a secular world. We suggest that for many women, religious doctrine may be balanced with secular logic as both are important and inextricably linked determinants of decision making about the termination of pregnancy.