Social Science Research Council

At TPMCafe, Daniel Levy reviews the Obama administration’s efforts to-date in confronting the Israel-Palestine conflict:

This was not a good week for the Obama administration’s Middle East peace efforts. Speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in Jerusalem last Saturday, Secretary Clinton seemed to be praising the distinctively partial limitations that Israel was willing to implement on settlement non-expansion. During the following days in Morocco and Cairo, she walked those remarks back, but the damage had been done.

By Thursday, the American-sponsored Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was sufficiently exasperated to announce that he will not be standing for re-election, and all week the media and political commentary on the U.S. approach was scathing about America’s efforts—even by Middle East standards.

Speaking to the Washington Post, I described the U.S. approach of the past days as amateurish—a perhaps harsh, but unfortunately apt, label. On the positive side, I think the administration folks are themselves aware that this is not going swimmingly. The overall administration scorecard on Middle East peace is slipping into the red.

Continue reading at TPMCafe.

Eboo Patel at The Faith Divide:

I’m writing from Toronto, where last night I gave a plenary address on Muslim-Jewish cooperation to the Biennial conference of the Union for Reform Judaism. Backstage after the address, my friend Rabbi David Saperstein gave me a grim look and said, “The shooter had a Muslim name.”

He called his wife who works for NPR, and his face got more grim as I heard him say:

“Are you sure he was a Muslim? Are you sure he was a Muslim?”

He hung up the phone and turned to me. “This is our worst nightmare.”

Rabbi Saperstein knows there will be a thousand voices broadcasting the news that a Muslim opened fire at Fort Hood in Texas yesterday—the implication being, of course, that this act represents Islam. He knows how distorting that perception is for Muslims, and how dangerous that distortion is for America.

[...]

But a Muslim did not do this. Killers do not deserve the honor of a religious label. The man who killed a group of brave American soldiers deserves one name and one name only: murderer.

Read the full piece here.

In the latest issue of Social Movement Studies, Deana A. Rohlinger and Jill Quadagno offer an explanation for cooperation and conflict in the US conservative Christian political movement:

Despite the burgeoning literature on coalition work, very little is known about the cooperative potential within social movements. Drawing on archival, interview, and secondary data, we examine cooperation and conflict in the US conservative Christian political movement from 1970 to 1994. We highlight how framing, political elites and intramovement dynamics within the conservative Christian political movement altered the cooperative potential over time. Specifically, we find that the conservative Christian political movement initially had a strong coordinative potential and even engaged in organization building as a way to formalize cross-denominational cooperation. However, as the evangelical wing of the movement sought to build and consolidate its political power, it began to frame issues in ways that reflected a particularized world view regarding the role of the state in fostering a moral society. Other conservative Christian organizations responded by couching their understanding of political issues in their own faith traditions, creating divisions within the movement and ultimately making cooperation impossible. Conceptually, this research broadens how we think about cooperation and points to the importance of specialization and political elites to cooperation within movements.

Read the full article in Social Movement Studies (subscription required).

Communicative ethics in action

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Charles Kurzman discusses the demonization of social scientists and their work in post-revolutionary Iran, and its intensification in the wake of this summer’s civic upheaval. The other side of this story is the fact that, as Kurzman notes, the work of social and political theorists such as Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas has found an eager, though not uncritical audience, among many Iranian students and citizens:

Max Weber is not alone in being blamed for the unrest in Iran. Other social theorists, like Jürgen Habermas, John Keane, Talcott Parsons, Richard Rorty, and unspecified feminists and poststructuralists have also been accused of “threatening national security and shaking the pillars of economic development.”

What links this group of scholars, it appears, is their belief that an independent civil society, beyond the reach of the state, is necessary for the development of democracy and human rights. This view is particularly pronounced in Habermas’s concept of the public sphere: free spaces for the exchange of ideas among autonomous institutions and individuals. Where the public sphere is weak, society is vulnerable to domination by the state—a concern that Habermas borrowed from Weber.

In 2002, Habermas toured Tehran at the invitation of some of his admirers in the reform movement. (In his opening statement, the show-trial prosecutor actually invoked Habermas’s brief visit as evidence of a plot to secularize Iran.) While generally approving of Habermas’s ideas, many social scientists in Iran have criticized him for relying solely on Western historical experience as the basis for the development of the public sphere. Habermas received an earful during his travels from young Iranian intellectuals who offered an Islamic interpretation of the public sphere. Must a society rid itself of religiosity, as Habermas suggests, in order to develop a “rational” public discourse? Are Western notions of religious tolerance unique to Christianity? Can traditional Islamic institutions, such as study circles and charitable foundations, contribute to the formation of a robust public sphere?

Read the entire essay here.

Religion Dispatches interviews Anna L. Peterson, author of Everyday Ethics and Social Change: The Education of Desire:

What’s the most important take-home message for readers?

That ethics is not disconnected from ordinary activities. This means a couple of things. First, almost nothing we do is “value neutral.” We can’t separate out the times we are acting “morally,” and the rest of our lives. Second, it means that ethics are not something constructed or articulated in the abstract and then applied, in a top-down fashion, to concrete circumstances. Rather, ethics are created in and through ordinary practices. This means we ought to think more carefully, perhaps, about the ethics we enact (or not) on a daily basis. In the end, I think, movements for social change seek to transform everyday life so it becomes safer, less oppressive, and more joyful for more people (and other creatures). So it makes sense that the roots of a radical ethic for social change can be found in the best parts of our everyday lives.

This relates to the social role of religion. Religion has often provided this “second language,” as Robert Bellah and his colleagues call it, as an alternative way of thinking about big questions. In a society that is both religiously pluralistic and secular, it is important to look for alternative sources of this second language.

Continue reading at Religion Dispatches.

Over at the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan warns against taking yesterday’s shooting at Fort Hood as cause for increased suspicion and vilification of the Muslim-American community:

Denial of these Islamist currents, even within the military, is dangerous and foolish. But equally, over-reacting to them is dangerous and foolish. The cycle of sectarian distrust and division can happen here as well as over there. Reducing all of us to these atavistic identities only exacerbates the problem and drags us further into the cycle of medieval religious conflict. And the task of threading our way through this political minefield is immense.

If I thought we couldn’t do it, I’d despair. But I believe we can, and have since this war broke out on September 11. We need to remember that we are not fighting for Christianity over Islam or even the West over Islam. We are fighting to retain an open democracy, where all religions can coexist, where religion is separate from politics, where toleration is a civic virtue. This requires attention to the real and dangerous Islamist threat—and in that respect [Bruce Bawer's] and [Michelle Malkin's] warnings against p.c. denial are perfectly valid and important. But it also requires insisting that our membership in society is based on a citizenship devoted to core ideas, not a citizenship based on raw religious or ethnic identity.

Continue reading here.

Controversy has erupted over a decision by Missouri tax authorities to require yoga centers to collect and pay a sales tax on yoga classes. Yoga instructors argue they should be exempt from the tax “because the lessons include spiritual elements”:

An Ohio Department of Revenue spokesman, Mike McKinney, explained Ohio taxes gym, recreation and sports club memberships, not the classes offered. A West Virginia Department of Revenue spokeswoman, Kimberly Osborne, said sales taxes are collected from yoga studios.

Missouri said it will consider religious exemptions to the sales tax on a case-by-case basis. Farnen said the revenue letters were sent to yoga and Pilates businesses, not Hindu temples.

A Hindu chaplain from Reno, Nevada, Rajan Zed, said that taxing yoga classes, which often include physical poses and meditation, could be considered “religious infringement.” He said that yoga is one of six systems in Hindu philosophy that traces its roots back thousands of years. Hindu scriptures outline ways to practice the discipline, he noted.

Yoga is often practiced in cultural halls within a temple complex, Zed said. But, he didn’t think it should matter if yoga was being practiced in a yoga center or by a temple. “I still think it’s a spiritual practice, yoga,” he said. “It doesn’t matter, the campus where it’s held.”

Read the full AP report.

At the Rock and Theology blog, scholars explore “the relationship between ’secular’ rock and ’sacred’ theology, and related matters of faith and culture today.” As part of a larger project on this topic, Tom Beaudoin takes to the blog to reflect on interconnections between culture, music and theology. A sampling:

My (yes, so-called) generation, those of us born in the mid-to-late 60s through 1980 or so, and finding our bearings as kids and adolescents during the 70s and 80s, has known for some time that we are a relatively smaller group sandwiched between two mammoth generations. It is interesting to consider the way in which it falls to us to hold together—insofar as we want to speak to a broad segment of our culture—the spiritualities and secular music practices of the Baby Boomers, on the one hand, who are now up to 20 years our senior, and the Millennials on the other, who are now up to 20 years our junior. There is now an interesting three-generation circuit of faith and culture in which the immersion in popular culture practices, and the crisis of religious institutions, and the quest for a liveable spirituality, are all more or less taken for granted. Will we be able to speak of a distinctive contribution to the history of theology, at least in the West, from my generation?

Learn more about the blog and the larger project of which it is a part.

Morgan Meis writes, at The Smart Set, about Søren Kierkegaard’s love life, and the faith that drove him from it:

Kierkegaard was a dissembler and a clown. He had a Christ complex and a club foot. He looked great in an overcoat with a turned-up collar. Much of his adult life was spent mentally obsessing over a woman. Catullus had his Lesbia. Dante had his Beatrice. Petrarch had his Laura. Kierkegaard had his Regine. She appears in some form or another in all of his writing. The reader can be forgiven for not recognizing Regine as Isaac in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, but that’s the way Kierkegaard saw her.

By all accounts, Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen were genuinely in love. The two were affianced in 1840. But by 1841, Kierkegaard had decided to call it off. Thus begins the great mystery of his life. Why did Kierkegaard choose pain and despair over happiness? The answer, I’m sorry to tell you, is the complete works of Søren Kierkegaard.

Continue reading at The Smart Set.

Anthropologist Maurice Bloch has a weighty obituary essay in the Guardian on the life and thought of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died on October 30th. He discusses Lévi-Strauss’s lonely status as a self-described structuralist and the debts the more fashionable post-structuralists owe to him:

The individual subject, the self-obsessed innovator or artist so dear to much western philosophy, had, therefore, no place for Lévi-Strauss, and indeed repelled him. He saw the glorification of individual creativity as an illusion. As he wrote in Tristes Tropiques: “the I is hateful”. This perspective is particularly evident in his study of Amerindian art. This art did not involve the great individualistic self-displays of western art that he abhorred. The Amerindian artist, by contrast, tried to reproduce what others had done and, if he was innovating, he was unaware of the fact. Throughout Lévi-Strauss’s work there is a clear aesthetic preference for a creativity that is distributed throughout a population and that does not wear its emotions on its sleeve.

This central philosophical tenet of his approach has often been forgotten, partly because of some subsequent writers, such as Foucault or Derrida, who although they acknowledged his influence, were bizarrely labelled as post-structuralists, as though they differed from him in this respect.

Read more at the Guardian.