Sermons as Practical and Linguistic Performances: Insights from Theory and History

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-144
Author(s):  
Abdulkader Tayob
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Historical View ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Marking Time

Abstract Sermons lend themselves to ambiguous identification in the study of religions. On the one hand, they are easily recognisable practices, delivered on particular days of the week, or when special occasions or needs arise. They are usually given in clearly defined places at clearly defined times. They are given by designated or recognized individuals that vary according to the respective religious traditions. On the other hand, sermons are speech performances that may and often do vary from one occasion to the next. While prone to a certain formalism, sermon speech acts are open to variation from time to time, and from preacher to preacher. To extend the possibilities offered by sermons for reflection and analysis, I explore some of the theoretical insights suggested for sermons in ritual studies and from the history of sermons within religious traditions. There is no consensus within ritual studies, but there are some useful ideas and suggestions that cover and extend the practices and speech acts that constitute sermons. More significantly, I found the longue durée of the sermon in the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to be more resourceful. The historical view of the sermon in comparable religious traditions brings forth enduring elements such as reading texts, employing rhetoric, producing effects (including affect), signifying and challenging authority, and marking time and space. More than the theoretical models for rituals from anthropology and religious studies, this historical perspective brings out the value of the practices and speech elements that constitute sermons.

Karl Polanyi’s Anthropological Theory of Economy

Naukratis ◽  
2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astrid Moller
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Economic Organization ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Use Of Resources ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One

In accordance with the hermeneutical principles laid down in the introduction, this chapter will be devoted to an account of the theoretical models underlying the analysis and interpretation of the source material. Karl Polanyi’s empirical observations resulted in a series of ideal-types such as can be employed for the evaluation of the evidence from Naukratis in the following chapters. Polanyi’s works do not form one single, complete theory of economy; rather, they should be seen—as Sally Humphreys has put it so aptly—as sketches of areas within largely unexplored territory. It is of course true that George Dalton went to great lengths to develop Polanyi’s ideas further; the fact nevertheless remains that they continue to be far from accepted as paradigms for all further research in the field of economic anthropology or economic history. Indeed, such continuations of Polanyi’s approach have served only to limit unduly the openness that is the very advantage of his ideal-types. It is for this reason that one should return to Polanyi himself and employ his original ideas. His work has been taken up by only a few within the realm of the economic history of classical antiquity, something due partly to his own—problematic—statements on the subject of Greek history, and partly to lack of interest shown for anthropological approaches within ancient history. Polanyi disagreed with the view that markets were the ubiquitous form of economic organization—an attitude regarding the notion of the market as essential to the description of every economy—and also with the belief that it is the economic organization of any given society which determines its social, political, and cultural structures. For his part, Polanyi contended that an economy organized around the market first came into being with the Industrial Revolution, and that it was not until then that the two root meanings of the word ‘economic’—on the one hand, in the sense of provision with goods; on the other, in the sense of a thrifty use of resources, as in the words ‘economical’ and ‘economizing’—merged.

A Dictionary of Sikh Studies

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pashaura Singh
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
South Asian Studies ◽  
Northern India ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

Over 350 entries This new dictionary provides accessible definitions of the terms that the growing number of students of Sikhism will encounter. It covers beliefs, practices, festivals, sacred sites, and principal languages, as well as the social and religious processes through which Sikhism has evolved. A major focus is the teachings of the founder of Sikhism, Gurū Nānak, and doctrinal developments under subsequent Gurūs. Incorporating the 500-year history of Sikhism, from its birth in northern India to its more recent spread around the world, it covers the interplay between the Sikh tradition and other religious traditions, including Hindu and Sufi. It is an invaluable first reference for students and teachers of Sikhism, religious studies, South Asian studies, philosophy, and the related disciplines of history, sociology, and anthropology, as well as for all practising Sikhs and anyone with an interest in Sikh religion and culture.

Al Fārūqī between the History of Religions and Islamic Theology

Numen ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 230-250
Author(s):  
Abdulkader Tayob
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Islamic Theology ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract Ismāʿīl Rājī al Fārūqī (1921–1986) played a considerable role in the academic study of Islam as it was developing in North America in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper is a critical examination of how he employed the categories of religion and religious studies in his scholarly, dialogical, and Islamist work. The paper follows his ideas of religious traditions, their truth claims, and ethical engagement in the world. For Al Fārūqī, these constituted the main foundations of all religions, and provided a distinctive approach to the study of religions. Al Fārūqī was critical of the then prevailing approaches, asserting that they were either too subjective or too reductionist. He offered an approach to the study of religions based on a Kantian approach to values. Al Fārūqī’s method and theory, however, could not escape the bias and prejudice that he tried to avoid. Following his arguments, I show that his reflections on religion and its systematic study in academia charted an approach to religions, but also provided a language for a particular Islamic theology that delegitimized other approaches, particularly experiential ones, in modern Islam.

Social Democracy in East-Central Europe: Success by Default?

2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-112
Author(s):  
Hubert Tworzecki
Keyword(s):  
Economic Transition ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
East European ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Lower House ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Almost Continuous

In the parliamentary elections of 2001, Poland's ex-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) won more than three times the number of votes than any other party, registering its best result since 1989 and simultaneously delivering a crushing blow to the ruling Solidarity-led coalition, which not only lost power but also failed to win any seats in the lower house of parliament. If at the time of communism's collapse someone had gazed into a crystal ball and predicted that Solidarity's heirs would suffer from almost continuous disarray and the SLD would emerge as the country's most successful political party, he would have been dismissed as a crank. For a number of reasons, ranging from the country's strong religious traditions, to a political culture that saw the communist system and its servants as a basically alien force, to a long history of political contestation of communism, culminating in the rise of the Solidarity movement in 1980, Poland was the one East European country in which such a result must have seemed particularly unlikely. Further, given Poland's singularly dismal economic performance under communist rule (hardly conducive to nostalgic feelings), as well as the country's relative success with market reforms in the 1990s, one could not easily explain the ex-communist left's electoral gains as simply the result of a backlash against the consequences of economic transition.

The History of the Academic Study of Religion in Universities, Centers, and Institutes in India

Numen ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-39
Author(s):  
Vasudha Narayanan
Keyword(s):  
Religious Education ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Higher Education System ◽  
Formal Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
The University

India is home to more than 800 million Hindus and has a massive higher education system that is overseen by the University Grants Commission (ugc). Despite this, there are hardly any departments of religion or Hinduism in India, but the ugc, even though it has a secular mission, funds universities with explicit religious affiliations. This article traces the reasons for these paradoxes and discusses the apparent lacuna of religious studies departments by looking at the genealogy of the study of religion in India. It initially looks at the contested terrain of nineteenth-century educational institutions. The work of British missionaries, Orientalists, and government officials form the imperial context to understand Charles Wood’s momentousDespatch(1854), which, on the one hand, argues for secular institutions but, on the other, tries to accommodate the work of the Orientalists and the missionaries. Wood recommends a system in which government subsidies, secular education, and universities with overt religious profiles become interlocked, but the formal study of religion is bypassed. Finally, I reconsider what the “dearth” of religious studies and the “absence” of Hinduism departments reveal about the construction of religion in India itself. The lack of conceptual correspondence between “religion” and “Hinduism” as taught in Western academic contexts does not preclude the formal study of religion in India. Instead, the study of religion is conducted within particularized frameworks germane to the Indic context, using a network of unique institutes. Reflection on these distinctively Indian epistemological frameworks push new ways of thinking about religious education and the construction of religion as an object of study in South Asia.

scholarly journals Anastasians of Altai krai. The history of the family estates settlements and their current realities

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 56-59
Author(s):  
I. V. Oktyabrskaya ◽  
◽  
Z. M. Chirkina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Main Concept ◽  
Altai Region ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
Reading Clubs ◽  
The One

The Anastasia movement (“Ringing Cedars of Russia”, the Anastasians) was born in Russia in the mid-1990s under the influence of the publication of V. Megre’s works. It developed from reading clubs and festivals to big projects of family estates and the form of political party. In the Altai region (Altai krai) we can registrate 12 settlements at different stages of formation. In religious studies, the anastasians are considered as the one of the new religious movements that is based on the ideology and practices related to Slavic neo-paganism. In Russian Ethnology/anthropology there are attempts to characterize the Anastasians in terms of subculture, as a community with a complex identity that includes a quasi-ethnic plane. Their culture is based on the natural peasant economy. The main concept of self-organization is the idea of family estates.

scholarly journals Bureaucracy and Emotions - Perspectives across Disciplines

Administory ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-19
Author(s):  
Peter Collin ◽  
Robert Garot ◽  
Timon De Groot
Keyword(s):  
Historical Science ◽  
Sociology Of Emotions ◽  
Critical View ◽  
The Public ◽  
Historical View ◽  
Public Servant ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Emotional Aspects ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

Abstract In traditional administrative models the public servant is emotionally conceptualized in a specific way, namely as a rationally acting and emotionally abstinent person. However, these are also models of observation that are strongly guided on the one hand by normative ideas and on the other by historical master narratives that focus on the development of a specifically occidental rationality. In particular, the emotional turn in historical science inspires us to take a critical view of such assumptions. But other approaches developed in other scientific disciplines also stimulate us to sharpen our historical view of the emotional aspects of bureaucracy: in jurisprudence “Law and Emotions” and in sociology “Sociology of Emotions”. This article presents these scientific approaches and tries to sound out their usefulness for the history of administration. In this way, it also serves as an introduction to this volume of the journal Administory.

Visual Arts: Modern Art

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Art History ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
19Th And 20Th Century ◽  
20Th Century Art

The dominant histories of 19th- and 20th-century art in the West have tended to depict modernism as making deep and decisive breaks from religious thought, practices, and institutions. There are good reasons for scholars seeing the history this way. On the one hand, the development of modern art coincided with major sociocultural shifts that deeply reshaped not only religion (as established religious traditions became increasingly contested and pluralized) but also the functions of art itself, which thrived in forms and spaces that seemed significantly detached from religious subjects, patronage, and purposes. On the other hand, there were also significant theoretical factors shaping the ways that religion was presented—or often conspicuously not presented—in the writing of modern art history. An especially strong secularization theory (a sociological thesis positing that a society’s modernization necessarily entails its secularization) has tended to dominate the scholarship of modernism, coupled with a heavy reliance on critical models that privilege highly suspicious hermeneutics (in the lineages of Marxian, Nietzschean, and Freudian critical theory), which tend to dismantle whatever “religious” content persists in modern art into questions of social power, ressentiment, sublimated desire, and so on. In all these ways, religious traditions became largely invisible and unreadable in the history of modernism, even in cases where they were important factors. Since the 1990s, however, several of the key historical and theoretical underpinnings of this depiction of modernism have been increasingly called into question, and a more complicated, ambiguous picture is emerging—one in which modern art and religion remain deeply entangled in fascinating and confusing ways. There are various ways of identifying and understanding these entanglements, which require not only careful reexamination of the particularities of the histories involved but also reconsideration of the interpretive assumptions and priorities through which those histories are construed. There are at least five focal points where the nexuses of art and religion are being reexamined and brought more clearly into view in the histories of modernism—namely, through object-oriented, practice-oriented, artist-oriented, context-oriented, and/or concept-oriented studies of particular instances in those histories. These focal points provide concrete loci for perceiving and exploring the functions, formations, and effects of “religion in modern art”—an inquiry which also can be reversed to explore examples of “modern art in religion,” including instances where major artworks are situated in churches, cathedrals, synagogues, and other religious contexts. There are, however, varying ways that scholars interpret what they find at these focal points and how they discern the larger implications of these particular entanglements of art and religion in the history of modern and contemporary art. These differences are clarified by recognizing at least four interpretive horizons—anthropological, political, spiritual, and theological—within which scholars are understanding these focal points and rereading these histories. Though often diverging in the accounts they produce, these four horizons (and the potential interplay between them) are vital for a continued rethinking of the relations between modern art and religion.

The Study of Yoruba Religious Tradition in Historical Perspective

Numen ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 240-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob K. Olupona
Keyword(s):  
Belief Systems ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conducting Research

AbstractThis essay presents an overview of past and recent scholarship in Yoruba religion. The earliest studies of Yoruba religious traditions were carried out by missionaries, travellers and explorers who were concerned with writing about the so called "pagan" practices and "animist" beliefs of the African peoples. In the first quarter of the 20th century professional ethnologists committed to documenting the Yoruba religion and culture were, among other things, concerned with theories about cosmology, belief-systems, and organizations of Orisà cults. Indigenous authors, especially the Reverend gentlemen of the Church Missionary Society, responded to these early works by proposing the Egyptian origin of Yoruba religion and by conducting research into Ifá divination system as a preparatio evangelica. The paper also examines the contributions of scholars in the arts and the social sciences to the interpretation and analysis of Yoruba religion, especially those areas neglected in previous scholarship. This essay further explores the study of Yoruba religion in the Americas, as a way of providing useful comparison with the Nigerian situation. It demonstrates the strong influence of Yoruba religion and culture on world religions among African diaspora. In the past ten years, significant works on the phenomenology and history of religions have been produced by indigenous scholars trained in philosophy and Religionswissenschaft in Europe and America and more recently in Nigeria. Lastly, the essay examines some neglected aspects of Yoruba religious studies and suggests that future research should focus on developing new theories and uncovering existing ones in indigenous Yoruba discourses.

The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in the English Courtroom

1999 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tal Golan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Expert Testimony ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Scientific Communities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Law Courts ◽  
The One ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The ArgumentThis paper provides a historical perspective to one of the liveliest debates in common law courts today — the one over scientific expert testimony. Arguing against the current tendency to present the problem of expert testimony as a late twentieth-century predicament which threatens to spin out of control, the paper shows that the phenomena of conflicting scientific testimonies have been perennial for at least two centuries, and intensely debated in both the legal and the scientific communities for at least 150 years.

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