The ‘Emerging Church’ in America: Notes on the interaction of Christianities

The ‘Emerging Church’ is an American-born movement that dates to the late 1990s. It is fundamentally a movement of cultural critique in which the primary interlocutor is the dominant tradition in the United States, conservative Evangelicalism. In this article I address the phenomenon of Emerging Christianity based on historical, literary, and ethnographic analyses of Emerging Church advocates and critics. In particular, I argue that four points of dialogue characterize the status of Emerging in the United States: ‘post-foundational’ theology, ‘ancient-future’ worship, ‘missional’ evangelism, and a general posture of ‘deconversion.’ Ultimately, I present the story of the Emerging Church for its significance to two broad theoretical questions. First, how do new forms of religious identity come into being? And, second, for those working in the ‘anthropology of Christianity’: what happens when Christianities interact? In response to these questions, I stress the Janus-faced quality of Emerging Christianity and its reliance on the categories, narratives, and vocabulary of conservative Evangelicalism in constructing its thoroughgoing cultural critique.     

Myths, models, and metaphors: Religion as model and the philosophy of science

Clifford Geertz's widely-used paper ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, makes the claim that ‘the importance of religion lies in its capacity to serve … as a source of general, yet distinctive conceptions of the world, the self and the relations between them …—its model of aspect—and of rooted, no less distinctive “mental” dispositions—its model for aspect’. However, apart from a highly critical article by Nancy Frankenberry and Hans Penner (1999) little attempt has been made to investigate this understanding of religion as model. This paper briefly considers the validity of Frankenberry and Penner's criticism and investigates possible applications of the elaborate analysis of models and metaphors in the philosophy of science since the time of Mary Hesse to the analysis of religious phenomena.     

Contemporary religious studies and science—A postcritical witches' brew

The six preceding essays are written at different levels and range over a complex set of issues which are representative of the methodological and theoretical disorder one finds in religious studies, today. So disordered is religious studies that it should be considered pre-scientific (perhaps like Alchemy), instead of a science. However, out of these essays, a common set of themes emerge. These are: contextualism, reduction, scientific or critical realism, explanation, and scientific models. An examination of the arguments of each of the preceding essays shows a wide variety of views, although two general positions can be discerned: on one hand, the reductionist-contextualist-realist position is (approximately) occupied by Geertz, Goldberg, Saler, and Segal, on the other hand, the anti-reductionist-contextualist-constructivist position is (approximately) occupied by Jensen and Rennie. To conclude, the author of this response paper makes an argument for a scientific approach to the study of religions which is moderately reductionist, contextualist, and critical realist but one which is also capacious enough to include hermeneutical explanation and the role of models in religious studies.     

Is Scripture the origin of the Halakhah?

Scripture, in particular the Pentateuch, forms the natural starting point for any inquiry into origins in Judaism. The question answered here derives from a simple fact: the Pentateuch is privileged within the Rabbinic system, which links as much of the Halakhah to the Pentateuchal law codes as it possibly can. So it is quite natural to treat Scripture as the base-line and the Halakhic category-formations as the variable, in seeking the origin of the system. But what happens when we treat the system as the base-line and Scripture as the variable? Then we see that the Halakhic system viewed as a coherent statement does not originate in Scripture. Scripture is not the origin of the Halakhah. Why not? Because of this paradox: Scripture is necessary for the Halakhic system. But Scripture is insufficient for the Halakhic system. The Halakhic system is necessary for Scripture. The Halakhic system is sufficient without Scripture. It requires only Scripture's facts - and these on their own form no system.     

An ‘Oedipus pattern’ in the Old Testament?

The Oedipus myth and a scapegoat pattern have been central issues in both Walter Burkert's and René Girard's writings about ancient Greek religion. This article proposes the existence of a comparable pattern in the Old Testament legend about the Ark (1-2 Samuel). Together with other Old Testament narratives (David, Moses) and other ancient Near Eastern legends and rituals, these instances form a transformational network, which shows some fundamental positions in a trans-cultural scapegoat-pattern of actantial positions: king, hero, villain and scapegoat.     

Reconciling Nuers with Dinkas: A Girardian approach to conflict resolution

In the Sudan in the 1990s, violent conflict between the Nuers and the Dinkas, both African tribes in the South of Sudan, included rape, murder, the burning of homes and the abduction of children. This conflict ended through the Wunlit People-to-People Peace Conference, organised in 1999 by the New Sudan Council of Churches, with the support of the Sudan People's Liberation Army.In this essay the conflict and its resolution are interpreted through René Girard's theory of the scapegoat mechanism. The essay offers a series of guidelines for successful reconciliation. At the centre of the proceedings was the religious sacrifice of the white bull of Mabior. The resolution of the conflict confirms Girard's theory of sacrificial violence. In the author's view, Girard's theory offers a model for transforming debilitating, imitative and violent behaviours into beneficial and positive ones.     

Divine reconciliations: The Mother of Grain and Gautama Buddha in De'ang religion

Located in China along the boarders of China and several Southeast Asian countries, Southwestern China is characterised by ethnic diversity and the influence of various world religions, especially that of different schools of Buddhism. This article examines how the De'ang people transform the cosmological order of Theravada Buddhism to reassert the indispensable position of their indigenous agricultural goddess, the Mother of Grain. Corresponding to myths that portray the reconciliation between the goddess and Gautama Buddha, the rituals dedicated to her are performed primarily by women, while male monastic institutions participate on certain ceremonial occasions. A comparison with similar beliefs and rituals in other cultural groups in the region demonstrates that the Mother of Grain in De'ang religion offers an exceptionally strong local challenge to the male bias embedded in Buddhism. By examining the conflicts and compromises between Buddhism and the indigenous religions of Southwest China, this article analyses the complex local negotiations of gender ideologies when world religions and local beliefs are at odds.     

Prologue: Negotiating women's roles and power: The practice of world religions in contemporary Asia

The articles that comprise this special issue make a convincing case for the importance of anthropological research in the field of gender and religion. Based upon the work of a panel presented at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, these articles demonstrate the anthropological facility for moving back and forth between ‘great traditions’ and local conditions. In different ways and in different contexts, these articles point to a variable pattern of ancient, local or indigenous cosmological equality and women's ritual leadership that are effaced as a result of political or cultural conquest by a literate, centralised, male-dominated ‘great tradition’. Equally important, these articles demonstrate that this effacement is rarely complete. Rather, women's power is fluid, dynamic, variable and negotiated at varying institutional and interpretive levels. These tensions illustrate how analyses of gender in religion work with different sets of issues. The first set of issues centres on women, that is, on actual persons who have varying degrees of agency within specific social situations. The second set of issues centres on what is often called ‘Woman’, a symbolic construct that conflates gender, sex and sexuality that is composed of allegory, ideology, metaphor, fantasy and projection.