Fear of a Black planet: Climate apocalypse, Anthropocene futures and Black social thought

In recent years, images of climate catastrophe have become commonplace. However, Black visions of the confluence of the Anthropocene and the apocalypse have been largely ignored. As we argue in this article, Black social thought offers crucial resources for drawing out the implicit exclusions of dominant representations of climate breakdown and developing an alternative account of the planet’s future. By reading a range of critical race theorists, from Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates, we propose a rethinking of the climate apocalypse. The African American theoretical and cultural tradition elaborates an image of the end of the world that emphasises the non-revelatory nature of climate catastrophe, warns against associating collapse with rebirth, and articulates a mode of maroon survivalism in which the apocalypse is an event to be endured and escaped rather than fatalistically expected or infinitely delayed.

Religion, Platonist Dialectics, and Pragmatist Analysis: Marcus Tullius Cicero’s Contributions to the Philosophy and Sociology of Divine and Human Knowing

Whereas Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Augustine are probably the best known of the early Western philosophers of religion, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) also played a particularly consequential role in the development and continuity of Greco-Latin-European social thought. Cicero may be best known for his work on rhetoric and his involvements in the political intrigues of Rome, but Cicero’s comparative examinations of the Greco-Roman philosophies of his day merit much more attention than they have received from contemporary scholars. Cicero’s considerations of philosophy encompass much more than the theological issues considered in this statement, but, in the process of engaging Epicurean and Stoic thought from an Academician (Platonist) perspective, Cicero significantly extends the remarkable insights provided by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Although especially central to the present analysis, Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods (1972) is only one of several texts that Cicero directs to a comparative (multiparadigmatic and transhistorical) analysis of divine and human knowing. Much of Cicero’s treatment of the philosophy of religion revolves around variants of the Socratic standpoints (i.e., dialectics, theology, moralism) that characterized the philosophies of Cicero’s era (i.e., Stoicism, Epicureanism, Academician dialectics), but Cicero also engages the matters of human knowing and acting in what may be envisioned as more distinctively pragmatist sociological terms. As well, although Cicero’s materials reflect the socio-historical context in which he worked, his detailed analysis of religion represents a valuable source of comparison with present day viewpoints and practices. Likewise, a closer examination of Cicero’s texts indicates that many of the issues of divine and human knowing, with which he explicitly grapples, have maintained an enduring conceptual currency. This paper concludes with a consideration of the relevance of Cicero’s works for a contemporary pragmatist sociological (symbolic interactionist) approach to the more generic study of human knowing and acting.

The Shift toward Secular Ideology

Following the rise of the state, religion served to legitimate societies’ institutions, practices, and unequal distributions of income, wealth, and privilege. However, emerging capitalism and its expanding bourgeoisie in Western Europe challenged the Catholic Church’s monopoly on truth and meaning, opening space for secular legitimation. The science of political economy increasingly evolved as a principal body of social thought legitimating inequality. This transfer from religion to political economy begins with the mercantilists and is mostly complete by the end of the nineteenth century. Political economy’s principal inequality-legitimating doctrines include the utility of poverty, the justice of the invisible hand, the Malthusian population doctrine, the wages-fund doctrine, and the trickle-down thesis. Most of these doctrines take on more of a patina of “natural” science in the late nineteenth century when the neoclassical revolution in economics attempted to sever economic science from morality and politics and express itself technically with calculus.

The Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE)

This chapter describes the work of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE), its evolving relationship with central institutions of the European Union, and with its partners in the Catholic world. The chapter then considers particular challenges, both intrinsic (arising from the character of COMECE itself) and extrinsic (focusing on those entailed by the EU’s culture of secularity). For example, the Treaty of Lisbon assures religious organizations, like non-religious ones, both access to and dialogue with EU institutions. COMECE’s advocacy, however, is necessarily grounded in Catholic beliefs and principles, in particular those of Catholic social thought. Such foundational principles cannot be coherently articulated in the language of secularity alone.

The Backlands are Everywhere but not in the City Discourses on sertão and the City in Brazilian Literature

This article analyses two examples of Brazilian literature, João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande sertão: veredas and João Antônio’s “Abraçado ao meu rancor”. Whereas the first narrates the sertão, “Abraçado ao meu rancor” is entirely dedicated to the metropolis of São Paulo. This article aims to display a series of resemblances between the two pieces that tend to disrupt an old but still active axiom of Brazilian social thought: the dichotomy between the country (sertão) and the city. The analysis begins by building up the distinction between the sertão and the city as it appears in most Brazilian literature and literary criticism. This opposition leads to a series of other constitutive polarities, such as development/underdevelopment, nature/culture, faith/reason. Through a reading of Rosa’s novel and Antônio’s story, this article will then juxtapose the sertão and the city showing how oppositions that have sustained so much of the Brazilian social thought are categories that need to be deconstructed.

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL EDUCATION OF ORTHODOX RUSSIAN SOLDIERSIN THE LATE XIX - EARLY XX CENTURIES

One of the consequences of the Great Reforms of Alexander II was the radical transformation of the Russian Imperial Army. At the same time, the development of social thought in Russia created the conditions for the penetration of social democratic propaganda into the soldier’s environment. As a result, the moral and psychological state of soldiers and discipline in the Russian army began to decline steadily at the turn of the century. Understanding of this problem stimulated the military department to make significant efforts aimed at working with personnel. However, due to a number of reasons, the planned results were not fully achieved.

From Neo-Kantianism to Durkheimian Sociology

The phenomenon of sacrifice was a major problem in nineteenth-century social thought about religion for a variety of reasons. These surfaced in a spectacular way in a German trial in which the most prominent Jewish philosopher of the century, the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen, was asked to be an expert witness. The text he produced on the nature of Judaism was widely circulated and influential. It presents what can be taken as the neo-Kantian approach to understanding ritual. But it also reveals the ways in which neo-Kantianism avoided becoming relativistic social science. In this case, it came to the edge and stopped. Cohen’s account is compared to the similar, but ‘empirical’, account of the same material in Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, which completed the transition.