Word, Image, Sound

This essay introduces the special section “Word, Image, Sound,” a collection of essays on public religion and religious publicities in Africa and South Asia. The essays cover case studies in Myanmar, Zambia, Senegal, Rwanda, and Egypt. The introduction situates the essays in relation to the broader fields of work on the public sphere and publics, especially as they relate to recent work in the human sciences that focus on materiality, the senses, and media.

Public Religion after Genocide

This article explores Pentecostal sounds and voice in postgenocide Rwanda. It centers on the question of why gospel singers were criticized for crossing over into “secular” music after beginning their careers in the church. Joining scholarship that examines the relationship between media and religion, it suggests that in Rwanda debates about the kind of music Pentecostal artists should perform must be contextualized in relation to (1) a Pentecostal “theology of sound,” or the belief that particular music and sound practices bring individuals closer to God; and (2) changes within Rwanda's postgenocide media landscape. The liberalization of the media in 2002, coupled with advances in recording technology, created new possibilities for Pentecostals to become individual “gospel stars,” as opposed to choir members, in ways that they had been unable to before, prompting debates about the nature of the postgenocide Pentecostal voice itself. These debates are considered alongside Pentecostal radio, and within a wider context in which the Rwandan government has become increasingly concerned with policing “noise pollution.” Paying closer attention to the materialities of sound and voice helps us trace the specific ways in which Pentecostalism attempts to “go public” and the kind of public it calls into being.

Imperial Women on Coins and in Roman Cult

After an opening focus on Caligula’s three sisters Drusilla, Agrippina the Younger, and Julia Livilla, the first living women figured and identified on centrally struck coins, the chapter addresses coins as evidence for imperial women, and the connections of imperial women to Rome’s public religion and religious culture. Women themselves determined neither their numismatic depictions, nor the choice of deity or abstraction for the reverse of a portrait coin. Further examination delves into imperial women and imperial cult, as priestesses and as recipients of cult; women in oaths and vows; and reports linking them with Judaism and Christianity. Religion is the arena in which imperial women receive the most visibility and honor, but even here they had little agency and were sidelined.

The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Dutch: Spinoza’s Intervention in the Political-Religious Controversies of the Dutch Republic

This paper outlines the Dutch background of the Tractatus theologico-politicus (TTP) and aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the Theological-Political Treatise. It reads Spinoza’s first main work published anonymously as an intervention in the many political-religious controversies, which began in 1579 and ravaged the Dutch Republic during the first century of its history. The three main topics of these controversies are also the focus of the TTP: I. the freedom to philosophize; II. the relation between Church and State, and III. the nature of public religion, which is defined by a minimal creed. These topics were familiar to the contemporary Dutch reader. The TTP appears to give a theoretical account of what theological-political practice was in the days of Spinoza.

The broken chain of learning: the crisis of religion and belief literacy and its origins

This chapter discusses the loss of religion and belief literacy, which it locates in two public spheres: welfare and education. The period before the loss of religion and belief literacy in Britain and the West was, by its very nature, almost entirely Christian. Although there was a degree of plurality, and an awareness of some other religions, these were largely treated as essentially exotic. Yet, at the very moment that people stopped paying (much) attention to religion and belief, they entered a period of dramatic change. This has meant massive declines in Christianity, increases in other world religions, a huge growth in atheism and non-religion, and a shift towards informal and revival forms of religion and belief, especially associated with varying ideas of spirituality. The resulting challenges of religion and belief literacy are rooted here in the post-war period, in which the deliberate dilution of religious socialisation post-1945 has been followed by the accidental invisibility of religious social action and its disconcerting re-emergence after 1980, and then a striking renewal of religion and belief as a public sphere issue around the turn of the century, and especially after 9/11. What emerges is a tension between a loss of public religion and belief and its subsequent re-emergence after a prolonged period in which it was not really talked about.

Commemorating Vettius Agorius Praetextatus

Late in 384, a leading pagan senator and priest, Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, died shortly before he was to take up the consulship. Senatorial aristocrats produced epigraphic and literary monuments that reveal the continued vitality of pagan religious discourse after the final separation of the traditional cults from Roman imperial power. As urban prefect, Symmachus negotiated one commemorative campaign between the Senate and Valentinian’s court, upholding Praetextatus as a model of non-sectarian civic virtue. This stance brought Symmachus into disagreement with the Vestals and Praetextatus’ wife, Paulina. As an initiative of an ancient Roman priesthood, the Vestals’ now-lost commemoration likely highlighted Praetextatus’ involvement in the civic cults. For Paulina, religion had indeed been her husband’s most important pursuit, but it aimed, beyond the well-being of Rome, at immortality. Attacking Paulina, Christians such as Jerome promoted an alternative aristocratic devotion focused on ascetical humility, rather than on the religious virtuosity, paralleled by political success, of which both pagan and Christian senators boasted. In his first book of Epistles, which was likely published some years later, Symmachus foregrounded Praetextatus’ expertise as a pontifex but ignored his private religious pursuits. For Symmachus, public religion was vital to Praetextatus’ legacy and to the aristocratic world they had shared.