Religionizing Christianity: Towards a Poststructuralist Notion of Global Religious History

By relying on poststructural theory, this article will demonstrate how a consistent historicization can help us increase our understanding of how religious contexts changed in light of colonialism and globalization during the nineteenth century. While it is well known that such changes took place in non-Western regions, the article will show – by example of German liberal theology – that it was also in the so-called West that common systems of knowledge were transformed against the backdrop of global entanglement. On the basis of some prominent protagonists of so-called Culture Protestantism (Kulturprotestantismus), I will demonstrate how global debates led to a certain re-conceptualization of Christianity as a world religion in the late nineteenth century. By identifying different traditions such as Christianity or Buddhism as equivalent, those theologians supported the emerging global awareness of religion as a universal aspect of human life and a category sui generis.

Conductive Preaching: Narratology, Homiletics, and the Poststructural Turn

This paper traces the major shifts that have taken place in the field of homiletics over the last century, focusing especially on the formation of the “New Homiletic,” a reversal of the movement of preaching from deduction (essay-like) to induction (story-like). Next, the paper engages the so-called poststructural turn in literary theory and philosophy, articulating the ways that these developments challenge the movement of homiletics. Lastly, in critical conversation with the history of homiletics as well as the impact of poststructural theory, this paper offers a new way of conceiving the movement of preaching as neither deductive nor inductive, but conductive.

Satire

Although scholars generally agree that satire cannot be defined in a categorical or exhaustive way, there is a consensus regarding its major features: satire is a mode, rather than a genre; it attacks historically specific targets, who are real; it is an intentional and purposeful literary form; its targets deserve ridicule on the basis of their behavior; and satire is both humorous and critical by its nature. The specificity and negativity of satire are what separates it from comedy, which tends to ridicule general types of people in ways that are ultimately redemptive. Satire is also rhetorically complex, and its critiques have a convoluted or indirect relation to the views of the author. Satire’s long history, which is not straightforwardly linear, means that it is impossible to catalogue all of the views on it from antiquity through to modernity. Modern criticism on satire, however, is easier to summarize and has often made use of ancient satirical traditions for its own purposes—especially because many early modern theorists of satire were also satirists. In particular, modern satire has generated an internal dichotomy between a rhetorical tradition of satire associated with Juvenal, and an ethical tradition associated with Horace. Most criticism of satire from the 20th century onward repeats and re-inscribes this binary in various ways. The Yale school of critics applied key insights from the New Critics to offer a rhetorical approach to satire. The Chicago school focused on the historical nature of satirical references but still presented a broadly formalist account of satire. Early 21st century criticism has moved between a rhetorical approach inflected by poststructural theory and a historicism grounded in archival research, empiricism, and period studies. Both of these approaches, however, have continued to internally reproduce a division between satire’s aesthetic qualities and its ethical or instrumental qualities. Finally, there is also a tradition of Menippean satire that differs markedly in character from traditional satire studies. While criticism of Menippean satire tends to foreground the aesthetic potential of satire over and above ethics, it also often focuses on many works that are arguably not really satirical in nature.

Qualitative Inquiry in the Making: A Minor Pedagogy

This article builds on Mazzei’s concept of minor inquiry to advance the concept of a minor pedagogy. We do so by folding poststructural theory into the evidence of experience, spotlighting a collective enunciation of the pedagogical event among individuated concepts, speakers, and moments. These pedagogical events are at once quotidian and more than one. In this spacetime individuation falls away, and the production of qualitative research expertise becomes a function of the entanglement of human and more-than-human pedagogues. At the level of the everyday, we recount our experiences in a doctoral program as professor and advisor (Lisa) and student and advisee (Laura). These experiences are selections from our (continuing) joint encounters with qualitative inquiry instruction. Enfolding these everyday pedagogical-theoretical practices of qualitative inquiry produces minor pedagogy, and minor pedagogy produces these folds. As such, minor pedagogy is a pedagogy of the ontological turn.

Behaving Badly: Critiquing the Discourses of “Children” and Their (Mis)Behaviours

Discourses of children as deficient and deviant are common within the education system and shape the ways in which educators interact with and respond to children. To illustrate this, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of a provincial policy document that directs schools in the development of Codes of Conduct. Drawing on poststructural theory, we demonstrate the ways in which the discourses within policy construct and reify particular identities of the child and of misbehaviour and how these discourse influence conceptions of behaviour “management.” We argue for a reconceptualization of the identity of the child as a contextualized and socially embedded being. In doing so, we articulate an opening for ethical engagements with children that rely on our responsibility for the other.

Construction of Meaning that Signals the Radical Ideology in Poem “Nggahi Dana”

This research aimed to describe the construction of meaning that signals the radical ideology in poem “Nggahi Dana,” which is often recited in the folk games known in Dompu regency. The meaning construction was approached using hermeneutic theory of Hans-George Gadamer and other theories, namely poststructural theory and literature sociology. The research used qualitative method with analytical description character. Data were collected through field observations with recording-video technique. Data were later transcribed with bookkeeping. Data interpretation was made using literature method. Results indicate that ideology construction in the poem “Nggahi Dana” in Dompu regency relates to societal value, philosophy, norm, religious belief, sentimentality, ethical rule, knowledge or perception about world and ethos.

Masculinity, Poststructuralism, and Recovery: Moving beyond Theory to Practice

This article seeks to explore how poststructural theory can be applied to therapeutic spaces to evoke conversations around masculinity and identity. By breaking down complicated language and creating accessibility of ideas, poststructural theory has a variety of uses at the practical level. This article provides an entry point for how frontline workers can begin to apply poststructural language to begin exploring complicated themes of identity.

“Pitching a virtual woo”: Analysing discussion of sexism in online gaming

Issues of sexism and gender-based harassment have been divisive within online gaming communities with contested understandings of the presence of these issues, prevailing explanations and potential solutions. This report was prompted by the discrepancy between problematic representations of women observed in online gaming community discussions of these issues and women’s rich and complex accounts of their gameplay. Poststructural theory facilitated exploration of the construction of women gamers as important in the reproduction of and resistance to problematic gendered discourses. Analysis illustrates the politics of (in)visibility that women gamers negotiate: limited possibilities for women as “active” subjects and little recognition of women’s desires in gaming motivations. Findings highlight a need to engage with both the re-inscription of women as denoting a “secondary status” and the poverty of discursive resources available in discussion of these issues for transforming existing understandings.