Notes from the field (2010)
October 14th, 2010
posted by
Vincent P. Pecora
I write having seen the first installment of God in America, a three-part series produced by PBS that showed some promise. While there is much still to come, I can report that it is not as bad as it might have been. (Is anything?) But it is also much, much worse than it has any good reason to be.
The most egregious problem—and it is really no surprise given the rather large role played by Stephen Prothero in the commentary—is the astonishing insularity. To put it bluntly, America is presented as an exception, once again. More specifically, the more nuanced argument one gets, largely from Prothero, is: America is an exceptional case, religiously speaking, because Americans believed (and still do believe) that they have an exceptional relationship with God.
Tags: American exceptionalism, God in America (PBS), history, religion in the U.S., Stephen Prothero
Posted in Notes from the field (2010) | No Comments »
September 2nd, 2010
posted by
Vincent P. Pecora
By now, everyone has seen the Newsweek poll indicating that a majority of Republicans believes President Barack Obama sympathizes with radical Islamists who would like to impose Shari‘a on the United States. Certainly, political debates in America generally get fairly nasty whenever the defense of “the American way of life” is at issue. And in America, such threats have had a long history of steering the popular imagination back to the question of race. But this time around, the mixture is especially volatile, I think, because race is once again being stirred into a mixture with religion.
Tags: American politics, Barack Obama, fascism, Father Charles Coughlin, Glenn Beck, Islam, populism, race, religion in the U.S.
Posted in Notes from the field (2010) | 3 Comments »
August 31st, 2010
posted by
Hikmet Kocamaner
Before the liberalization of broadcasting in Turkey, the state-owned broadcaster TRT considered Islam a “religion” that could be represented only in a limited, privatized form, rather than a way of life regulated by traditions and practices. However, the transformation of the political scene as well as the liberalization of the media industry in the 1990s have contributed to the reconfiguration of the concept of “religion” and its representation on TV.
Tags: broadcasting, media, neoliberalism, religious broadcasting, religious media, television, Turkey, Turkish Media
Posted in Notes from the field (2010) | No Comments »
August 30th, 2010
posted by
Sarah Shortall
As against Grace Davie’s vision of European secularization as a form of “believing without belonging,” here we see the genesis of a theological justification for an extreme form of “belonging without believing.” It’s one that I think forces us to rethink how we define membership to a religious tradition, by pointing to the possibility that individual will may not be the primary determinant of religious inclusion or exclusion, any more than a hand can repudiate the body to which it belongs. But it is equally worth considering what kind of ideological work such organic metaphors of embodiment perform in authorizing these kinds of inclusivist models, as well as their ambivalent political implications.
Tags: Catholicism, church membership, inclusivism, salvation
Posted in Notes from the field (2010) | 2 Comments »
August 24th, 2010
posted by
David Buckley
In a country as religious as the Philippines, it would be easy to assume that clerics have a significant hand in driving voting behavior. Looking at some recent examples and public opinion data from the Philippines, however, complicates this assumption. It appears, in fact, that the most religious Filipinos are also the most suspicious of clerical involvement in voting.
Tags: Among Ed Panilio, Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, Eddie Villanueva, Iglesia ni Cristo, politics, the Philippines
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August 23rd, 2010
posted by
Alex Eric Hernandez
Tradition dictated that one of Immanuel Kant’s responsibilities as professor of metaphysics at the University of Königsberg was to lead the faculty in a march to the college chapel before worship services and other religious functions. The figurative move from reason to revelation would be thereby embodied in a literal trek towards sacred space. But according to an old—perhaps apocryphal—legend, Kant would dutifully march to the church door in full academic regalia, stop just before entering, and quietly dismiss himself from the service, content to contemplate the moral law he had so forcefully argued lay within us all. We see this same attitude formalized philosophically in his little-read essay, “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trails in Theodicy.”
Tags: Immanuel Kant, philosophy, the sublime, theodicy, theology
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August 21st, 2010
posted by
Hikmet Kocamaner
Television broadcasting has played a significant role in the creation of a public governed by norms of secular reason in Turkey. The state-owned Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) held a monopoly on broadcasting until the liberalization of television and radio broadcasting in the 1990s. . . . TRT represented “religion” only in the form of limited mosque sermon broadcasts on officially designated religious holidays, as well as a 15-30 minute show called “The World of Faith” (“İnanç Dünyası”) played every Thursday evening to mark the beginning of Islam’s day of special worship on Friday. The overall effect of TRT’s demarcating such programming as “religious”—and its dealing with issues only related to “personal faith” in these shows (as emphasized in its title)—was to subtract “religion” from other factors regulating the public lives of Turkish citizens (such as education, politics, high culture, and so on) and to reinforce the notion that Islam is primarily a matter of “faith.”
Tags: Islam, Joan Wallach Scott, religion, Rethinking secularism, secular, television, Turkey, Turkish Media
Posted in Notes from the field (2010) | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
posted by
Joseph Blankholm
In my last post, I made the claim that I wasn’t an atheist. That’s a complicated claim. Atheism, despite being technically no more than contra-theism, is most of the time a philosophy with positive content. It’s usually strict materialism buttressed by other moral and political ideologies (though who could really separate the latter two categories).
Tags: atheism, Gil Anidjar, materialism
Posted in Notes from the field (2010) | 2 Comments »
August 20th, 2010
posted by
David Buckley
In taxi cabs and formal interviews, I’ve been told that the study of secularism in the Philippines is a bit of an oxymoron. Even Catholic clerics and constitutional lawyers admit that the Filipino wall of separation is of indeterminate height. “The Church gets away with a lot here,” as one Catholic subject told me.
Posted in Notes from the field (2010) | No Comments »
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