Social Science Research Council

The Jewel of Medina, written by Sherry Jones, is a fictionalized account of the life of A’isha, youngest wife of the prophet Muhammad. The book was dropped by Random House for fear of a fundamentalist backlash, picked up by a British publishing house whose main publisher subsequently had his home office firebombed, and finally published in the US. Without having read it people have been offended by its content, while others have defended Jones’ First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Is the book controversial? Yes. Is it any good? Not surprisingly, no, says the New York Times review.

In response to the violence between Muslims and Christians that took place is northern Nigeria last week, The Nigerian Daily Sun ran two op-eds on the entho-religious roots of this violence. Chris Ngwodo writes the first of these.

Most people assume that the December holiday season is all about the big three: Christmas, Channukah, and Kwanzaa, all of which involve bright lights and the potential for burns, both emotional and physical. The first problem here is that Kwanzaa is, in fact, not a religious holiday at all. And, acccording to the Foundation for Pluralism, December this year marks a festive season for Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, Jews, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and all of your run-of-the-mill pagans and Christians. Atheists have also gotten involved, as we have already covered, getting media coverage and a ton of publicity for their December shenanigans. Below we round up some of the religious aspects of the day, as well as some truly entertaining holiday cheer.

Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration has been controversial, to say the least. People of all religious and political persuasions have voiced opinions since the announcement, and more commentary appears every day.

Charles Taylor: If the human relation to religion and to God is not as shallow as the mainstream theory thinks, then what would happen in many cases is religion would be recomposed in new forms that meet the new situation. And that is in fact what I would argue has happened in the West. So this is a much more adequate theory to understand this historical and sociological reality, but what it required is a deep understanding of the place of religion in human life. So I would claim that there’s a single discourse and it’s made up of elements that look as though they are drawn from three disciplines, but in fact they cohere together as a single discourse. The three discourses would be philosophy, history and sociology. You can’t do sociology without history, history without sociology, and you can’t do either without a proper philosophical understanding of human motivation. So the whole thing hangs together from those three sources. [...]

From the vertiginous summit of his virtue, and against all evidence to the contrary, Heraclitus informs us that “it is wise, listening not to me but to the logos, to agree that all things are one.” Thus, with far greater subtlety than his ancient Stoic heirs, and long before his greatest modern disciple, Nietzsche, Heraclitus enjoins an affirmation of the whole world. But many aspects of this world are hard to affirm—conflict, suffering, death—and he does not ignore them, nor does he dismiss them with the sort of pat theodicy that has given other immanent spiritualities a deserved reputation for insensitivity. Instead, he makes them integral to his paradoxical worldview. [...]

“That it cannot break time and time’s greed—that is the will’s loneliest misery.” Thus spoke Zarathustra. To try to escape this misery, according to him and his ventriloquist, Nietzsche, the will can travel one of two roads: it can fashion an eternity, with the promise of a redemption there, outside of time; or it can reconcile itself to this greed, somehow working through it, seeking a redemption here, in the midst of time. The first road is that of transcendence; the second, of immanence. When we decide for ourselves which road to travel—not only in grand moments of crisis and conversion, but also in humble moments every day of our lives—we implicitly answer the paramount question of our losing battle with time: how shall we overcome this, the will’s loneliest misery? [...]

It was difficult all along to conceive of religion (its ritual practices, mystical unions, or attractions and immersions of any other kind) without at the same time postulating or affirming a distancing—reflective or speculative, in case hypothetico-skeptical—stance vis-à-vis the world and life-world in all its worldly aspects. Religion, throughout the text of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, meant “engagement” and “disengagement” in theoretical, practical, and, more broadly, existential matters at once. To the very heart of religious belief there belongs not only an affirmation, but also a suspension of belief in the cosmic, social, or subjective matrices and fabrics of which we are made up. Our being-in-the world, qua believers, is, after all, if not exactly other-worldly, not-quite-of-or-out-of-this-world. [...]

Mark Juergensmeyer blurbs Religion Beyond a Concept.

Charles Taylor suggests in A Secular Age that the “default option” in modernity is “unbelief” or “exclusivist humanism,” both of which make up the major positions or viewpoints that the secular “immanent frame”—both in its open and closed or “spun” variety—solicits and fosters. But this seemingly unproblematic observation merits further scrutiny. [...]