Ossetian Ritual Feasts and Transpersonal Experience: Re-Description of a Religion as a Religious Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-88
Author(s):  
Sergei Shtyrkov
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Science ◽  
The North ◽  
Transpersonal Experience ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Religious Systems

Abstract The protest of the North Ossetian nativist religious movement against discourses of dominant institutions in the public sphere involves as its necessary component ‘re-description’ of religion in general and ‘re-constructed’ religious systems in particular. Usually, this means revealing allegedly forgotten ancient meanings of indigenous customs, rituals and folklore texts through the use of various concepts taken from esotericism and/or practical psychology. The language for this re-description is provided by conceptual apparatus developed by New Age movements. Of particular interest in this respect is the language of ‘new science’, ‘alternative history’, ‘transpersonal psychology’, etc., employed as a tool for criticising the established system of Christian-centric understanding of what religion is and what its social functions are.

Secularism, Feminism, and the Public Sphere

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niamh Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Principle ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter outlines major developments shaping contemporary debates about religion and secularism in public and political life and the role of women and feminism therein. It considers, from a gender perspective, debates in normative political theory about religion, secularism, and the Habermasian public sphere. These themes are explored as they are dealt with in feminist scholarship on the critical edges of Enlightenment thinking. The phenomena of the separation of church and state, the progressive “secularization” of modern societies and relegation of religious practice to private domains, and the growing acceptance of gender equality, are no longer presumed to be inevitable and interrelated. This chapter considers what is involved in rethinking secularism as a feminist political principle, in a context of globalization and in contemporary multicultural societies.

Hindi Publishing in Colonial Lucknow

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shobna Nijhawan
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Chief Editor ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
The Public ◽  
The North ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
Canonical Literature ◽  
The Public Sphere

Investigating the emergence of Hindi publishing in colonial Lucknow, long a stronghold of Urdu and Persian literary culture, Shobna Nijhawan offers a detailed study of literary activities emerging out of the publishing house Gaṅgā Pustak Mālā in the first half of the twentieth century. Closely associated with it was the Hindi monthly Sudhā, a literary, socio-political, and illustrated periodical, in which Hindi writings were promoted and developed for the education and entertainment of the reader. In charting the literary networks established by Dularelal Bhargava, the proprietor of Gaṅgā Pustak Mālā and chief editor of Sudhā, this volume sheds light on his role in the development of Hindi language and literature, creation of canonical literature, and commercialization and nationalization of books and periodicals in the north Indian Hindi public sphere. Using vernacular primary sources and drawing on scholarship on periodicals and publishing houses as well as editor-publishers that has emerged over the past two decades, Nijhawan shows how one publishing house singlehandedly impacted the role of Hindi in the public sphere.

The New Science and the Public Sphere in the Premodern Era

1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan C.C. Rupp
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Public Enterprise ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
Major Constituent ◽  
Moral Code ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Public Sphere

The ArgumentThis paper argues that the New Science, which was seen as essentially a public enterprise, was moreover a major constituent of the public sphere in early modern era. In seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Western Europe the sphere of public experimentation, testing, and discussion related to the new science, manifested, itself as a highly diversified, contested, and complex social field.Two general problems arose in constructing this cultural public sphere: the selection of participants in the debate and the inclusion of a heterogenous public in the experimental scene. National authorities employed diverse policies but none denied the necessity of public debate for testing the validity of experimentations. The public sphere had to create its own conditions of existence by imposing manifold regulations in order to make these public meetings possible and enjoyable. These regulations emphasized common interest and the moral code as the most basic condition for rhe sustenance of the public sphere, thus enhancing self-restraint, tolerance, and politeness on the part of both discussants and participants. The more inclusive and heterogenous the public sphere, the more these norms were required. Thus the sphere of public debate constituted by early modern science implied a civilizing process, quite different from and more encompassing than the one analyzed by Norbert Elias

Religion in Latin America’s Public Sphere

2021 ◽  
pp. 152-172
Author(s):  
Gustavo S.J. Morello
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Privileged Position ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Role Of Religion

This chapter investigates the role of religion in Latin America’s public sphere. For respondents, religion and politics share the space where power is traded. The privileged position is to challenge the economic order and to generate peaceful relations among the peoples and defend human dignity. Respondents dislike the use of that power to pursue a partisan agenda and to have a privileged voice over other persons. At odds with the laïcité project, respondents welcome religion in the public sphere when it challenges modernity to include the poor, and advocates for human dignity. Religion is cheered as a countercultural force. However, this acceptance of religion’s presence in the public sphere does not mean a resacralization of it. Respondents prefer to keep the differentiation of social functions.

Feeding and Fasting Bodies

2019 ◽  
pp. 255-272
Author(s):  
Jaita Talukdar
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Feeding And Fasting ◽  
Religious Fasting

Treating women as helpless victims of social conventions or as neoliberal, postmodern subjects to understand “food femininities” obscures the fact that bodies are situated in social hierarchies. Social functions and roles tied to the female body bring about difference in eating and dieting practices. This chapter applies Bourdeusian analysis to the dieting and religious fasting practices of forty-eight women in the rapidly neoliberalizing city of Kolkata, India, to show how structurally rooted dispositions inform rules of engagement surrounding eating. Dieting and religious fasting, though simultaneously self-gratifying and strenuous, took on very different meanings depending on how they enabled women to seek recognition and meaning in their daily lives. The women who dieted projected their bodies onto the public sphere to secure the benefits that the new economic order could bestow, while familial fasts were an embodiment of the collective, material struggles less privileged women encountered on a daily basis.

ALTAR MEDIA'S LIVING WORD : TELEVISED CHARISMATIC CHRISTIANITY IN GHANA

2003 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marleen De Witte
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Spiritual Experience ◽  
The Public ◽  
Religion And Media ◽  
Pentecostal Churches ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Charismatic Christianity ◽  
Being Religious

AbstractIn many parts of Africa, charismatic-Pentecostal churches are increasingly and effectively making use of mass media and entering the public sphere. This article presents a case study of a popular charismatic church in Ghana and its media ministry. Building on the notion of charisma as intrinsically linking religion and media, the aim is to examine the dynamics between the supposedly fluid nature of charisma and the creation of religious subjects through a fixed format. The process of making, broadcasting and watching Living Word shows how the format of televisualisation of religious practice creates charisma, informs ways of perception, and produces new kinds of religious subjectivity and spiritual experience. Through the mass mediation of religion a new religious format emerges, which, although originating from the charismatic-Pentecostal churches, spreads far beyond and is widely appropriated as a style of worship and of being religious.

scholarly journals Rebalancing Religious Policy and the Concept of Public Sphere: Indonesia Cases

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Petrus Richard Sianturi ◽  
Josua Navirio Pardede ◽  
Septian Dwi Riadi
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Functional Differentiation ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Muslim Country ◽  
Legal Research ◽  
The Public ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Social Dynamic ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Advanced Development

As the largest Muslim country, Indonesia is on the way to balancing the order of its people, their religious practice, and how these two are influencing the public sphere. There is an existing regulation called Anti-Blasphemy Law which contains any rule to guarantee that religion and the public sphere do not contradict from one to another. Related to it, this research found that in this digital era with an advanced development on technology, some factors potentially create any form of manipulation on religion which comprises religion itself, social dynamic, and legal instrument. This form of manipulation has also triggered the advancement of the interdependency discourse on religion and the public sphere. In the context of Indonesia, by its characteristic, to separate religion and the public sphere will only create other problems among religious people. Using normative legal research, this paper aims to look at the relevance of the Anti-Blasphemy Law to the socio-structural conditions of Indonesian society. In this research, it is argued that religion and the public sphere (state) should be placed through a form of functional differentiation concept, and found that there is an interdependent relationship between religion and the public sphere, nevertheless, Anti-Blasphemy Law failed to create and maintain this relation. Hence, legal reform on the Anti-Blasphemy Law has become a necessity in ensuring a balanced and harmonious (state) religious life.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document