Browse

Martin Buber's embrace of Hasidism at the start of the twentieth century was instrumental to the revival of this popular form of Jewish mysticism. Hoping to instigate a Jewish cultural and spiritual renaissance, Buber published a series of anthologies of Hasidic teachings written in German to introduce the tradition to a wide audience. This book closely analyzes his writings and sources to explore his interpretation of Hasidic spirituality as a form of cultural criticism. For Buber, Hasidic legends and teachings were not a static, canonical body of knowledge, but were dynamic and open to continuous reinterpretation. The author argues that this representation of Hasidism was essential to the Zionist effort to restore a sense of unity across the Jewish diaspora as purely religious traditions weakened—and that Buber's anthologies in turn played a vital part in the broad movement to use cultural memory as a means to reconstruct a collective identity for Jews. As the author unravels the rich layers of Buber's vision of Hasidism, Buber emerges as one of the preeminent thinkers on the place of religion in modern culture.

This book began its journey with two texts and two conjectures. The texts were chosen to represent two alternative models for listing the names of God: an open-ended list and a closed series of seventy-two names. Both lists presume to be exhaustive. Their respective understandings of “all,” however, are not identical. If they both comply with the axiom of monotheist onomatology that the single divinity has many names, each reflects a different position as to exactly how many they are. Theology vouches for an infinite number. Magic counters with seventy-two, the numerical equivalent of finitude. The central pronouncement of Christian theology on the naming of God—attributed to the authority of St. Dionysius the Areopagite—endorses the infinite list of names as the most adequate “name” for the unnamable divinity. It may be concluded that the theological vision emerging from the text of Dionysius presents an asymmetrical system of order that posits its “beyond” as its condition of possibility—a transcendent divinity exempt from the order it generates. The idea of order presented by the amulet The 72 Names of the Lord is based on an entirely different principle.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by “the disenchantment of the world.” Max Weber’s statement remains a dominant interpretation of the modern condition: the increasing capabilities of knowledge and science have banished mysteries, leaving a world that can be mastered technically and intellectually. And though this idea seems empowering, many people have faced modern disenchantment. Using intimate encounters with works of art to explore disenchantment and the possibilities of re-enchantment, this book addresses questions about the nature of humanity, the world, and God in the wake of Weber’s diagnosis of modernity. It focuses on a handful of artists—Walter De Maria, Diller and Scofidio, James Turrell, and Andy Goldworthy—to show how they introduce spaces hospitable to mystery and wonder, redemption and revelation, and transcendence and creation. What might be thought of as religious longings, the book argues, are crucial aspects of enchanting secularity when developed through encounters with these works of art. Developing a model of religion that might be significant to secular culture, it shows how this model can be employed to deepen interpretation of the art we usually view as representing secular modernity.

Ana de San Bartolomé (1549–1626), a contemporary and close associate of St. Teresa of Àvila, typifies the curious blend of religious activism and spiritual forcefulness that characterized the first generation of Discalced, or reformed Carmelites. Known for their austerity and ethics, their convents quickly spread throughout Spain and, under Ana's guidance, also to France and the Low Countries. Constantly embroiled in disputes with her male superiors, Ana quickly became the most vocal and visible of these mystical women and the most fearless of the guardians of the Carmelite Constitution, especially after Teresa's death. Her autobiography, clearly inseparable from her religious vocation, expresses the tensions and conflicts that often accompanied the lives of women whose relationship to the divine endowed them with an authority at odds with the temporary powers of church and state. Last translated into English in 1916, Ana's writings give modern readers insights into the nature of monastic life during the highly charged religious and political climate of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Spain.

Early Christian monastic spiritual practices of self-formation became increasingly popular in late medieval and early modern Catholicism. Now, for the first time in the history of Christian spirituality, religious orders, first and foremost among them Franciscans and Jesuits, trained devout people, men and women, lay and religious, in practices of meditation, introspection, and subjectivization. Thousands, if not ten of thousands of lay people now acquired techniques of self examination that enabled them to pursue life goals and transform themselves. The book examines four of the major spiritual practices of the period, traces their history, diffusion, and the challenges they presented to clerical authority. Spiritual direction and general confession, two of the practices of self-formation discussed in the book, served as safety belts to guarantee that practitioners remained subjected to the teachings of the church. But spiritual exercises, general examination of conscience, and general confession supplied practitioners with techniques of self-construction and self -affirmation. Using insights from Michel Foucault's later work on practices of truth-telling and subjectivization, the book proposes the first systematic investigation of the complexity of subjectivization in early modern Catholicism as both a mechanism of self-formation and of subjugation

Beheading the Saint analyzes the genesis and transformation of national identity in Québec from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, with specific attention to the secularization of French Canadianness during the 1960s’ Quiet Revolution. Zubrzycki does so by tracing the symbolic career of St. John the Baptist, the national patron saint, in processions, parades and protests, which, she argues, contributed to the articulation of a new, secular Quebecois identity. She extends her analysis of nationalism, religion and secularism in Québec by examining recent debates on immigration, the reasonable accommodation of religious minorities’ practices, and the place of religious symbols in the public sphere.

This book explores the rise of insight meditation (vipassanā) as a widespread lay movement in Burma during British colonial rule. It does this through a study of one of its key architects, the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923). His life and work shows that mass meditation emerged out of the relationship between two spheres of action, the study of Buddhist doctrine and the effort to protect the Buddhist religion. In terms of doctrinal study, Ledi empowered a wide range of people to participate in the longstanding elite practice of in-depth study, focusing particularly on the Buddhist philosophical texts, the Abhidhamma. He tied this study to the second sphere, protective efforts, by arguing that such study empowered a person to safeguard Buddhism. He then presented meditation as another way to insure Buddhism’s safety— not to mention as a means to spiritual attainments— and he standardized and simplified meditation methods for lay people using the Abhidhamma. By allying insight practice in this way to study and protection, he set in train the collectivization of practice and the acceptability of lay control of its teaching, now hallmarks of modern Buddhism across the world. This analysis challenges the common assumption that colonialism forced the Burmese to entirely reconceive their traditions, for it shows that Ledi and other Burmese responded to the pressures of colonialism on pre-colonial terms. Thus, in explaining why mass meditation started in Burma, the book also extends into the pre-colonial past our understanding of sources for a form of Buddhist modernity.

Despite popular images of priests seeking enlightenment in snow-covered mountain temples, the central concern of Japanese Buddhism is death. For that reason, Japanese Buddhism's social and economic base has long been in mortuary services—a base now threatened by public debate over the status, treatment, and location of the dead. This book explores the crisis brought on by this debate and investigates what changing burial forms reveal about the ways temple Buddhism is perceived and propagated in contemporary Japan. It offers an account of how religious, political, social, and economic forces in the twentieth century led to the emergence of new funerary practices in Japan and how, as a result, the care of the dead has become the most fundamental challenge to the continued existence of Japanese temple Buddhism. Far from marking the death of Buddhism in Japan, the book argues, funerary Buddhism reveals the tradition at its most vibrant.

Imbued with character and independence, strength and articulateness, humor and conviction, abundant biblical knowledge and intense compassion, Katharina Schütz Zell (1498–1562) was an outspoken religious reformer in sixteenth-century Germany who campaigned for the right of clergy to marry and the responsibility of lay people—women as well as men—to proclaim the Gospel. As one of the first and most daring models of the pastor's wife in the Protestant Reformation, she demonstrated that she could be an equal partner in marriage; she was for many years a respected, if unofficial, mother of the established church of Strasbourg in an age when ecclesiastical leadership was dominated by men. Though a commoner, Schütz Zell participated actively in public life and wrote prolifically, including letters of consolation, devotional writings, biblical meditations, catechetical instructions, a sermon, and lengthy polemical exchanges with male theologians. The complete translations of her extant publications, except for her longest, are collected here, offering modern readers an opportunity to understand the work of women in the formation of the early Protestant church.

The essays in this book offer a profile of religion and its relationship to consumption in the modern period. Together they demonstrate how religion manifests in efforts to mass-produce relations of value. Through essays on specific commodities, celebrities, and industries, this book shows how much of consumer life is itself a religious enterprise, religious in the sense of enshrining certain commitments stronger than almost any other acts of social participation. Whereas earlier scholars took as a given the perpetuity of denominated, sectarian religions, this books turns to those practices, businesses, and persons seemingly unhooked from denominational life, such as the universal labor of parenting or the practice of binge viewing, and observes the kinds of social concession and sectarian resistance these practices convey. Using the marketplace as the primary archive of religion, this book shows how certain forms of social life reappear in culture as ways to think through and enact principles.

Images of suffering male bodies permeate Western culture, from Francis Bacon's paintings and Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs to the battered heroes of action movies. Drawing on perspectives from a range of disciplines—including religious studies, gender and queer studies, psychoanalysis, art history, and film theory—this book explores the complex, ambiguous meanings of the enduring figure of the male-body-in-pain. Acknowledging that representations of men confronting violence and pain can reinforce ideas of manly tenacity, it also argues that they reveal the vulnerability of men's bodies and open them up to eroticization. Locating the roots of our cultural fascination with male pain in the crucifixion, the book analyzes the way narratives of Christ's death and resurrection both support and subvert cultural fantasies of masculine power and privilege. Through readings of works by Georges Bataille, Kaja Silverman, and more, it delineates the redemptive power of representations of male suffering and violence.

Providing a new history of the study of religion, Empire of Religion locates knowledge about religion and religions within the power relations of imperial ambitions, colonial situations, and indigenous innovations. The book uncovers the material mediations—imperial, colonial, and indigenous—in which knowledge about religion was produced during the rise of an academic study of religion between the 1870s and the 1920s in Europe and North America. Focusing on one colonial contact zone, South Africa, as a crucial site of interaction, the book shows how imperial theorists such as Friedrich Max Müller, E. B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, and James Frazer depended upon the raw materials provided by colonial middlemen who in turn depended upon indigenous informants and collaborators undergoing colonization. Reversing the flow of knowledge production, African theorists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, S. M. Molema, and H. I. E. Dhlomo turned European imperial theorists of religion into informants in pursuing their own intellectual projects. By developing a material history of the study of religion, Empire of Religion documents the importance of African religion, the persistence of the great divide between savagery and civilization, and the salience of complex mediations in which knowledge about religion and religions was produced, authenticated, and circulated within imperial comparative religion. Empire of Religion shows how knowledge about religion and religions was entangled with imperialism from European empires to the neoimperial United States.

American Christians value the feeling of emptiness and seek to cultivate it, believing that the more profoundly they experience emptiness the greater their longing for God and the nearer they draw to their goal of feeling spiritually filled by God. Emptiness must precede fullness. Americans practice bodily disciplines as a way of representing, prompting, and intensifying their feelings of emptiness. They cognize and cultivate the feeling of emptiness through fasting, bloodletting, silence, labor, and other activities undertaken as forms of self-denial. Americans feel the emptiness of time and space. They conceive of the geographic space of America as empty, and in their making of place they play with complex representations of emptiness and fullness. Americans imagine the emptiness of earthly time in contrast to the fullness of eternity, often complicating that understanding by asserting that empty, earthly time is empty precisely because it is filled with corruption. They are keenly aware of the dangers of empty words, empty doctrines, and empty beliefs, and are on constant guard against them. The energetic pursuit of the feeling of emptiness, the radical denial of self, places individuals and groups in challenging circumstances as they attempt to create and maintain identities. Americans build Christian ingroup identity by asserting what they are not, by pushing off from other groups whom they identify as competitors in the religious marketplace. Disestablishment fosters such competition among groups by providing a social setting in which numerous foils can be identified and group identity constructed via negativa.

This book reads translation history through the lens of Jewish–Christian difference, which, conversely, it views as an effect of translation. Subjecting translation to a theological-political analysis, the author asks how the charged Jewish–Christian relationship—and more particularly the dependence of Christianity on the texts and translations of a rival religion—has haunted the theory and practice of translation in the West. Bringing together central issues in translation studies with episodes in Jewish–Christian history, the book considers a range of texts, from the Bible to Elie Wiesel's Night, delving into such controversies as the accuracy of various Bible translations, the medieval use of converts from Judaism to Christianity as translators, the censorship of anti-Christian references in Jewish texts, and the translation of Holocaust testimony. It ultimately reveals that translation is not a marginal phenomenon but rather a crucial issue for understanding the relations between Jews and Christians, and indeed the development of each religious community.

The rootless Jew, wandering disconnected from history, homeland, and nature, was often the target of early twentieth-century nationalist rhetoric aimed against modern culture. But following World War II, a number of prominent French philosophers recast this maligned figure in positive terms, and in so doing transformed postwar conceptions of politics and identity. This book explores this figure of the Jew from its prewar usage to its resuscitation by Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. Sartre and Levinas idealized the Jews' rootlessness in order to rethink the foundations of political identity. Blanchot and Derrida, in turn, used the figure of the Jew to call into question the very nature of group identification. By chronicling this evolution in thinking, this book ultimately reveals how the figural Jew can function as a critical mechanism that exposes the political dangers of mythic allegiance, whether couched in universalizing or particularizing terms.

The events of 9/11 had a profound impact on American society, but they had an even more lasting effect on Muslims living in the United States. Once practically invisible, they suddenly found themselves overexposed. By describing how Islam in America began as a strange cultural object and is gradually sinking into familiarity, this book illuminates the growing relationship between Islam and American culture as Muslims find a homeland in America. Rich in ethnographic detail, it is an up-close account of how Islam takes its American shape. The book traces American Muslims' progress from outsiders to natives and from immigrants to citizens. Drawing on the philosophies of Simmel and Heidegger, the book develops a novel sociological approach and offers insights into the civil rights activities of Muslim Americans, their increasing efforts at interfaith dialogue, and the recent phenomenon of Muslim ethnic comedy. It is both a portrait of American Islam and a groundbreaking study of what it means to feel at home.

This book is an historical exploration into the origins of the the Kāmasūtra, a treatise on sexual-erotic pleasure, and the Nātyaśāstra, a treatise on theater, music, dance, and aesthetic pleasure in classical India in engagement with Michel Foucault. It argues that the courtesan together with her two closest male companions, her patron the dandy consort, and her teacher and advisor the dandy guru were at the very origins of these texts universally recognized as two of the mainsprings of culture in classical India. The courtesan, more than her two male associates, embodied in her singular persona the highest and grandest symbols of both erotic and aesthetic pleasure. She holds the historical key to the secrets of how erotics and aesthetics came to be so deeply and abidingly intertwined in classical India. The book takes its start form the contrast between ars erotica or erotic arts and scientia sexualis or the science of sexuality that Foucault placed at the center of his first volume of the History of Sexuality. The Kāmasūtra and its twin, the Natyasastra, are located within the intellectual horizon opened up by this contrast. The book argues that contrary to the common assumption that the discourse erotic-aesthetic pleasure (Kāma) failed to give birth to a larger vision of society, in the Kāmasūtra there is embedded a vision of the city based on art and aesthetic pleasure grounded in love as the necessary historical condition for the possibility of a discourse of erotics.

What did Protestants in America think about capitalism when capitalism was first something to be thought about? The Bible told antebellum Christians that they could not serve both God and mammon, but in the midst of the market revolution, most of them simultaneously held on to their faith while working furiously to make a place for themselves in a changing economic landscape. This book explores this paradoxical partnership of transcendent religious values and earthly, pragmatic objectives, ultimately concluding that religious and ethical commitments, rather than political or social forces, shaped responses to market capitalism in the northern states in the antebellum period. Drawing on diverse primary sources, the book identifies three distinct Christian responses to market capitalism: assurance from clerical economists who believed in the righteousness of economic development; opposition from contrarians who resisted the changes around them; and adaptation by the pastoral moralists who modified their faith to meet the ethical challenges of the changing economy. Delving into the minds of antebellum Christians as they considered themselves, their God, and their developing American economy, the book provides an intellectual history of an important development in American religious and economic life.

God Being Nothing: Toward a Theogony challenges and contests traditional understandings of God in favor of a God in process: a God determinately unfinished. The author deconstructs and radically re-envisions what monotheistic and trinitarian mean. Letting go of the traditional trinitarian doctrine of divine persons, the author reimagines the Trinity as three loci of relational potency, exploring the creational relations within and between each trinitarian locus as potencies of interrelationality, only some of which are actualized in time. The three loci addressed are theogony, or primordial Godhead vis-à-vis God-aborning; cosmogony, or God-aborning vis-à-vis temporal creation; and anthropogony, or humanity vis-à-vis God-aborning. The book’s ultimate implication is that all of Being and Nonbeing is aborning together in interrelation and interdependence—God, creation, humanity—in an ongoing project of theo-logo-anthropo-gony. To the extent that this divine reality is actual, it is unfinished, imperfect, still in the course of an ongoing living-dying process, one that implicates all things existent and inexistent, temporal and eternal. The Trinity, the Godhead, is not fully formed, not aboriginally perfected, but actively self-generated in concert with processes ongoing in time, in which we participate. Hence, to think the human person, the world, and God is to participate simultaneously in anthropogony, cosmogony, and theogony.

Theravada is one of the three main branches of Buddhism. In Asia it is practiced widely in Thailand, Laos, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. This ethnography opens a window onto two communities of Theravada Buddhists in contemporary America: one outside Philadelphia that is composed largely of Thai immigrants and one outside Boston that consists mainly of white converts. The book first provides a historical overview of Theravada Buddhism and considers its specific origins here in the United States. It then brings the findings to bear on issues of personal identity, immigration, cultural assimilation, and the nature of religion in everyday life. The work is a systematic comparison of the ways in which immigrant and convert Buddhists understand, practice, and adapt the Buddhist tradition in America. The men and women in this story speak directly to us in this work, both in their personal testimonials and as they meditate, pray, and practice Buddhism.