Basel Mission and Revolutions in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century China: Debating Societal Renewal

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-30
Author(s):  
Tobias Brandner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Body Part ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Taiping Rebellion ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Basel Mission

Abstract This article analyzes how the Basel missionaries interpreted the nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutionary changes in China. After a short historical overview, it assesses the different aspects and roots of what implicitly constituted the political theology of the Basel Mission. In the body part of the essay it analyzes documents written by missionaries (letters, reports written to the home committee) to understand how the missionaries saw the epochal changes that they witnessed: the Taiping Rebellion in the nineteenth century and the political changes taking place between 1911–1949. A final section considers how timely the past Basel missionaries’ political views are in present-day China and how they are reflected in parts of recent Chinese political theology.

Bare Life and the Resurrection of the Body

2019 ◽  
pp. 344-364
Author(s):  
Gavin Flood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Value Of Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Life Itself

Vital materialism imbues life with positive value and interfaces with environmentalism. But there is another kind of vitalism in which the political colonizes life in a way that brings into question the value of life itself and brings life into proximity with nihilism. We might call this a dark vitalism, which we see emerging in the European body politic in the twentieth century. While this stream of thought can be read as an attempt to heal the past through creating a utopian and messianic future, it nevertheless negates the values of life and undermines its healing project because fundamentally locked into a form of nihilism, thereby negating life-affirming values. By contrast, spiritual philosophies of life offer a counter-narrative to the dark vitalism that has held such a grip on nations in the last hundred years.

How they made us believe their truths: Monumental art in public spaces before and after the fall of communism (the case of Slovakia)

Human Affairs ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabína Jankovičová ◽  
Magda Petrjánošová
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Before And After ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The One

AbstractThis paper is concerned with monumental art in Slovakia before and after the fall of Communism in 1989. Generally, art in public spaces is important, because it influences the knowledge and feelings the people who use this space have about the past and the present, and thus influences the shared social construction of who we are as a social group. In this article we concentrate on the period of Communism and the formal and iconographic aspects that were essential to art at that time. We also look at the political use of art—the ways in which explicit and implicit meanings and ideas were communicated through art to the general public. We touch also on the present situation regarding the perception of “Communist art”. In the final section we discuss the state of affairs of the last twenty years of chaotic freedom in the post-socialist era. On the one hand, since there is no real cultural politics or conception for artworks in public spaces at the level of the state many artworks simply disappear, often without public discussion, and on the other hand, some actors use their political power to build monuments that promote their private political views.

scholarly journals Political Theology and Secularization Theory in Germany, 1918–1939: Emanuel Hirsch as a Phenomenon of His Time

1987 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Stroup
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Past ◽  
Secularization Theory ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Heavy Burden ◽  
Totalitarian Regimes

According to Goethe, “writing history is a way of getting the past off your back.” In the twentieth century, Protestant theology has a heavy burden on its back—the readiness of some of its most distinguished representatives to embrace totalitarian regimes, notably Adolf Hitler's “ThirdReich.” In this matter the historian's task is not to jettison but to ensure that the burden on Protestants is not too lightly cast aside—an easy temptation if we imagine that the theologians who turned to Hitler did so with the express desire of embracing a monster. On the contrary: they did so believing their choice was ethically correct. How could this come to pass in the homeland of the Reformation?

The Challenge of September 11 to Secularism in International Relations

2002 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Philpott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
International System ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Public Religion ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Generation ◽  
Authority Structure ◽  
Islamic Revivalism

The attacks of September 11, 2001, highlight the general absence of attention to religion in international scholarship. The absence is understandable, for it arises from the secularized nature of the authority structure of the international system, described here as the “Westphalian synthesis.” Over the past generation, though, the global rise of public religion has challenged several planks of the synthesis. The sharpest challenge is “radical Islamic revivalism,” a political theology that has its roots in the early twentieth century and that gave rise to al-Qaeda. If international relations scholars are to understand the events of September 11, they ought to devote more attention to the way in which radical Islamic revivalism and public religion shape international relations, sometimes in dramatic ways.

scholarly journals Nostalgic Utopianism: The New Zealand Values Party’s 1972 Blueprint

Te Kaharoa ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Moon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Material Progress

Although the manifestos or policies of most New Zealand political parties aspire to improve some aspect of the country, few have matched the Values Party’s 1972 Blueprint for the utopian form and extent of the changes it promised to being into effect. And unlike the policies of most other New Zealand political parties in the twentieth century, the Values Party proposed that material progress ought to be stopped at some point, echoing the notion of the stationary state which John Stuart Mill devised in 1848.   However, the Blueprint’s distinctly utopian orientation was not only necessarily subversive of the political status quo in the country, but simultaneously rejected the past and present in favour of a radically transformed future, while (seemingly paradoxically) drawing on a nostalgic interpretation of aspects of New Zealand’s colonial era as a thematic source of its utopian construct for the country. This article examines these dimensions of the Blueprint, and how the inherent flaws in practically all utopian movements similarly undermined the Values Party’s programme for a utopian New Zealand.

scholarly journals Russian Liberal of the Beginning of the 20th Century in Politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 28-43
Author(s):  
F. A. Gayada
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
Short Time

The article examines the political views and practices of Russian liberals in the early twentieth century. Russia’s political destiny of this period directly depended on building constructive relations between the authorities and society. Liberal ideas had a significant impact on the educated public. At the same time, the constructive cooperation between the liberals and the government was the most important condition for the possibility of application of these ideas in domestic political practice. The article examines the political experience of the two largest liberal political parties in Russia – the Cadets and the Octobrists. The author comes to the conclusion that the Russian liberal politician of the early twentieth century could not get out of the role of an idealist oppositionist. He was incapable of recognizing the existing realities and the need for political compromises, which were often perceived as a sign of impotence or immorality. The liberals perceived themselves as the only force capable of bringing Russia to the right, «civilized» path. In the opinion of the liberals, this path was inevitable, therefore, under any circumstances, the liberal movement should have retained its leading role. In the spring of 1917, the liberal opposition was able to defeat its historical enemy (autocracy), but retained power for a very short time. The slaughter of the state machine, which the liberals themselves did not intend to preserve, led them to defeat. Thus, the state was the only guarantor of the existence of a liberal movement in Russia. 

Whose Justice? What Political Theology?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Slotte
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The Political ◽  
Value Judgments ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Legal Concepts ◽  
Articles Of Faith ◽  
Theological Thought

This chapter contributes to scholarship that has suggested that a good deal of twentieth-century internationalism was faith-based, even if this remained tacit. It offers insights into religious attitudes underpinning twentieth-century internationalism and the formation of international legal concepts and institutions. It looks at how religiously framed matters and articles of faith were given a ‘secular’ reinterpretation during the early twentieth century, in the name of peace and a just international order, and offers an account of the political theology that this reconceptualization of ‘the sacred’ in terms of ‘the secular’ expressed. It shows that liberal theological thought, with an optimistic outlook on man and history, a progression narrative, and an attempt to mediate between theology and the epistemological demands of the positive sciences—inter alia through dismissal of traditional metaphysics and turning to ‘ethics’/value judgments and ‘vocation’—formed the framework within which internationalist Christian action in this period was to a large extent grounded.

The securitization audience in theologico-political perspective: Giorgio Agamben, doxological acclamations, and paraconsistent logic

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. A. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Paraconsistent Logic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
The Past ◽  
Active Audience ◽  
Political Perspective ◽  
Copenhagen School ◽  
Securitization Theory ◽  
Referent Object

Over the past two decades, securitization theory has developed into a robust literature of cases and critiques. The vast majority of the attention paid to securitization has been to the securitizing actor and the referent object, leaving the audience – the body that determines the fate of a securitizing move by accepting or rejecting the securitizing actor’s request – undertheorized. The audience is presented as a problematic contradiction, because as a collectivity called by the securitizing actor it appears to be a passive body, critiqued thereby as potentially irrelevant. On the other hand, both the original Copenhagen school formulation of securitization theory and many of its current theorists reaffirm the agency of the audience to actively determine the success or failure of the securitizing move. This article turns to political theology for guidance, and explains the contradiction of the passive/active audience through homology to the ekklesia and the acclamation of ‘amen’ in liturgical doxology. The fact that the congregation is passive recipient of a call does not negate the essential and substantial role that it must actively play, just as the contradiction of the passive/active description of the securitization audience is not a problem of illogic, but a paraconsistent truth.

Literature as an Agent for Social Change: The Case of Caitlin Davies’s Place of Reeds and The Return of El Negro

Imbizo ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fetson Anderson Kalua
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Past ◽  
Natural Scientists

This article considers two of Caitlin Davies’s novels on Botswana, Place of Reeds and The Return of El Negro, as exemplifying the ways in which literature addresses issues of justice within the postcolonial context. A narrative which see-saws between history, journalism and anecdotal reporting, Place of Reeds exposes the underbelly of Botswana society, particularly with regard to the country’s mistreatment and marginalisation of its minorities and women. Paradoxically, El Negro is a story about an unidentified Southern African man whose body was clandestinely taken to Europe by natural scientists who put it on display, subjected it to scrutiny, and used it as a specimen for scientific research. In the years leading up to the end of the twentieth century, the body was brought back and buried in Botswana’s capital of Gaborone. What Caitlin Davies’s second text does is to lay bare the violence of colonialism. Using Homi Bhabha’s concept of a vernacular cosmopolitanism, a notion which he uses to suggest that global progress should be determined from the perspective of those people who have suffered all manner of injustices in the past, this article argues for and shows the extent to which Davies’s fiction bears witness to the role that literature plays in addressing issues of social justice in society.

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