scholarly journals Global Religious History as a Rhizome: Colonial Panics and Political Islam in German East Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 321-344
Author(s):  
Jörg Haustein
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Global History ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Methodology ◽  
German East Africa ◽  
Academic Debate ◽  
Colonial Encounters

Abstract A Global History of Religion aims to trace connections, controversies, and contingencies in the emergence of “religion” as a global category. Its main intention is to de-center European epistemologies of religion by drawing out a more intricate global and plural genealogy. This is a very complex endeavour, however, especially when one leaves the realm of academic debate and considers the quotidian understandings of “religion” emerging in colonial encounters. Here one is often confronted by vast entanglements of practices, perceptions and politics, which need a historical methodology that foregrounds the plurality, complexity and historicity of all religious epistemes. Drawing on Deleuze’ and Guattari’s philosophical figure of the rhizome, this article sketches such an approach in a conversation between theory and historiographical practice, as it maps out a particular episode in the construction of “political Islam” in German East Africa.

The Problem of the History of Religion in America

1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydney E. Ahlstrom
Keyword(s):  
American Academy ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Subject Area ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Program Committee ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
American People ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
History Of

Half a year before this paper was read before a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion (26 October 1969), the program committee had requested an essay dealing in some comprehensive way with the field of American religious history. Because I would in any case have to be thinking about the introduction to my own “religious history of the American people,” I agreed.The title was sufficiently broad; and goodness knows the problems of this subject area are sufficiently large.1 Aside from innumerable large and small questions of fact there are the countless questions of emphasis and interpretation, not to mention the problem of discerning an overarching theme. I also confess great sympathy with Max Lerner's comment on the ten years he spent on America as a Civilization (1957). “I found when I came to the end of the decade,” he said, “that a number of things I had written about America were no longer valid. The American civilization had been changing drastically right under my fingertips as I was writing about it.”2 The present-day historian's predicament is, if anything, more difficult than Lerner's in that the sixties, by contrast with the fifties, have experienced a veritable earthquake of revisionism which has profoundly altered our interpretation of the entire course of American history. By reason of its screaming moral dilemmas, moreover, the decade had an especially rude impact on long accepted views of religious history. But enough of this: let us consider the substantive questions.

scholarly journals Poblisk v religiološko misel Hjalmarja Söderberga

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (32) ◽  
pp. 357-367
Author(s):  
Nada Grošelj
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Fire Smoke ◽  
History Of ◽  
Century Thought

A Glimpse into the Religious Studies of Hjalmar Söderberg While the Swedish writer Hjalmar Söderberg (1869–1941) gained a worldwide reputation with his fiction, his later studies in the history of religion, with their discussions of daring reconstructions and interpretations of Biblical events, are more obscure. Of his three monographs on religious history, the paper focuses on his début, The Fire of Yahweh (Jahves eld, 1918). The key thesis about the story of Moses as proposed by Markel, the protagonist, claims that the supernatural events in the Book of Exodus which took place on and at the foot of the mountain, and were witnessed by the Israelite crowd from a distance, were in fact an elaborate and spectacular form of pre-Jewish worship in the area. According to Markel, the fire, smoke and thunder accompanying God’s appearances in the Bible were simply a spectacle for the crowd, and these ‘special effects’ might well have been produced by Moses and his successors through gunpowder. The final part of the paper outlines Söderberg’s immersion in his time and in the spiritual and intellectual shifts of the period, as well as his attitude to religion as demonstrated in some examples of his fiction. Keywords: history of religion, Swedish literature, Moses, Bible interpretation, early 20th century thought

“Religion's Engine”: Theorizing Religion and Modernity in Jon Butler's God in Gotham

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-150
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Tweed
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Religious History ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Religion And Modernity ◽  
History Of

After reading Jon Butler's richly documented history of religion in Manhattan, I thought again of one of my favorite images: a 1939 watercolor by Ben Shahn called Self-Portrait among the Churchgoers, in which a photographer stands near a church on Sunday but points his camera toward the street and seems to ignore the gathering worshippers. Some U.S. historians might be relieved they do not need to learn more about those pious pedestrians, or what happens inside, but specialists in religious history might think the photographer has missed all the action. Has he? Well, in one sense, sure. Historians of religion must attend to churches and adherents, as Butler does, but, like Shahn's photographer, Butler also looks out to the wider cityscape. And that approach pays off as he asks how religion confronted “the challenge of modernity” in Manhattan, “the capital of American secularism.” More specifically, he hopes to explain why religion “didn't collapse in modernity's grasp,” as religion theorists like Max Weber and William James predicted.

scholarly journals Another World? East Africa, Decolonisation, and the Global History of the Mid-Twentieth Century

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Ismay Milford ◽  
Gerard McCann ◽  
Emma Hunter ◽  
Daniel Branch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Global History ◽  
East African ◽  
Pan African ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
Postcolonial States

Abstract This article proposes that there is a gap in our current understanding of the globalising and deglobalising dynamics of mid-twentieth-century East Africa, one that might be addressed by consolidating and taking forward recent developments in the historiography of decolonisation. Recent work by international historians has recovered the connected world of the 1940s to 1960s: the era of new postcolonial states, the ‘Bandung moment’, pan-African cooperation, and the early Cold War. Yet East Africa is less prominent in these histories than we might expect, despite the vibrancy of current work on this period in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Bringing these two fields into dialogue, through an explicitly regional East African framework and with a particular focus on individual lives, expands our understanding not only of the ‘globalisation of decolonisation’ but also of the deglobalising dynamics of the following decades that are frequently reduced to a history of global economic crisis.

Transcendence as Reflexive Sacredness

2021 ◽  
pp. 154-194
Author(s):  
Hans Joas
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Global History ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Axial Age ◽  
Fundamental Innovation ◽  
Major Turning Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Universalism

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the debate on the so-called Axial Age. It presents the major contributors from Karl Jaspers on, but also the predecessors in the 18th and 19th centuries. , It explores concepts such as the age of transcendence that have been used to characterize the fundamental innovation of that age. It particularly emphasizes the emergence of moral universalism in that period. The chapter also attempts to bring the different perspectives together by interpreting a reflexive view of the sources of sacredness as a major turning point in the global history of religion.

scholarly journals Exploring similarities between the German and the Dutch ‘ethical’ traditions: Possibilities of the history of religion for a theological approach to Old Testament studies in South Africa

2010 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan H. Vorster
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Religious History ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Israelite Religion ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Diverse Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relevant Factors

This article shows how dialectic theology caused a loss of interest in the history of religion, which was seen as out of touch with the current world. The distinction between theology and the history of religion became increasingly vague. The article focuses on the contribution of Rainier Albertz in his two-volume Religionsgeschichte Israels in alttestamentlicher Zeit (History of Israelite religion in the Old Testament period), 1992. Albertz proposed that the history of religion should be restored to serve as the ‘more sensible discipline for abridging the Old Testament’. This article points out several advantages to this approach, namely a different kind of Old Testament theology, starting from current theological problems and searching through the thematic segments of Israel’s religious history and that of early Christianity for analogous insights relevant to the problems in question. This article develops the argument that Albertz’s suggestions open up possibilities for establishing a vibrant theological environment in South Africa, where theologians from a diverse society can start from different perspectives on current problems, consider the Bible as part of a uniquely defined set of relevant factors and present a kaleidoscope of cross-balancing ‘African’ theological perspectives. The aim of this approach is to enhance the possibilities of Albertz’s suggestions by relating them, in context, to insights from ethical theology in the hope of reviving the debate regarding repositioning the history of religion in a different kind of theological approach. This debate is long in coming: it may already have lost close to 20 years in deserved attention.

The Immigrants and Their Gods: A New Perspective in American Religious History

1988 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay P. Dolan
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Church History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
New Perspective

Twenty years ago Jerald Brauer wrote an essay on the writing of American church history entitled, “Changing Perspectives on Religion in America.” In this essay he noted that “change in perspective marks the writing of the history of religion in America.” After discussing the work of Robert Baird and William Warren Sweet, the two historians whose perspectives most influenced the writing of American church history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, Brauer then directed his attention to a third and new perspective. This new perspective had developed in the post-World War II era and was the result of the work of Sidney E. Mead, Sydney E. Ahlstrom, Winthrop S. Hudson, and others. Brauer described the new perspective by pointing out how it differed from the work of Sweet. It was clear to Brauer, however, that no one historian or school of historians had yet emerged whose perspective was able to dominate the landscape in the manner that Baird and Sweet had. There really was no new single perspective, but a variety of approaches and interpretations. In other words, in the late 1960s the discipline of American church history was in a state of flux, and “a number of young historians” were, in Brauer's words, “anxious to develop a new perspective through which to view the development and nature of Christianity in America.”

The Problem of the History of Religion in America

1988 ◽  
Vol 57 (S1) ◽  
pp. 127-138
Author(s):  
Sydney E. Ahlstrom
Keyword(s):  
American Academy ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Subject Area ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Program Committee ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
American People ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
History Of

Half a year before this paper was read before a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion (26 October 1969), the program committee had requested an essay dealing in some comprehensive way with the field of American religious history. Because I would in any case have to be thinking about the introduction to my own “religious history of the American people,” I agreed. The title was sufficiently broad; and goodness knows the problems of this subject area are sufficiently large. Aside from innumerable large and small questions of fact there are the countless questions of emphasis and interpretation, not to mention the problem of discerning an overarching theme. I also confess great sympathy with Max Lerner's comment on the ten years he spent onAmerica as a Civilization(1957). “I found when I came to the end of the decade,” he said, “that a number of things I had written about America were no longer valid. The American civilization had been changing drastically right under my fingertips as I was writing about it.” The present-day historian's predicament is, if anything, more difficult than Lerner's in that the sixties, by contrast with the fifties, have experienced a veritable earthquake of revisionism which has profoundly altered our interpretation of the entire course of American history. By reason of its screaming moral dilemmas, moreover, the decade had an especially rude impact on long accepted views of religious history. But enough of this: let us consider the substantive questions.

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