The Rhetoric of Sexual Difference in French Reproductive Politics

What kind of rhetoric frames French reproductive policy debate? Who does such policies exclude? Through an examination of the “American import” of gender studies, along with an analysis of France’s Catholic heritage and secular politics, I argue that an unwavering belief in sexual difference as the foundation of French society defines the productive reproductive citizen. Sylviane Agacinski is perhaps the most vocal public philosopher who has framed the terms of reproductive policy debate in France, building an oppositional platform to reproductive technology around anthropological assertions of sexual difference. This paper engages with Agacinski to examine rhetorical claims of sexual difference and how such claims delayed passage of France’s revised bioethics legislation that extends access of assisted reproductive technology (ART) to “all women.” Though the “PMA pour toutes” [ART for all women] legislation was eventually passed, such rhetoric motivated the explicit exclusion of all trans person from its extension, thus hardly permitting ART to all women.

The Abduction of Preaching. Priest's Speech in the Structure of a Political Myth

This article offers an analysis of hybrid forms of religiousness arising from the interaction between the orthodoxy discourse and the political discursive environment. These forms are the result of attempted redirecting of the secular politics' tasks to the clergy and the church audience, that is, attempted political secularization of the Church.A precedent was the project to legitimize within the Russian Orthodox Church the so-called Maidan theology, which served as ideological accompaniment to the 2014 coup d'etat in Kiev. Since then, manifestations of political secularization have become regular.In September 2019, several dozen Orthodox priests published an open letter on the topic of the detention of street rioters during the Moscow City Duma election campaign. The letter had an emphatically political nature, as it was aimed at supporting people who were not simply seeking to state their views, but provoked the police to use force, escalating the conflict. The signatories of the appeal willingly or unwillingly joined this position, which at that time and in those circumstances meant direct interference in the political conflict. They had one important thing in common: they saw their own social role outside the church as more important than their servitude at church.The synthesis of Christian preaching and political propaganda is formed by stealing the language (in the sense established by Roland Barthes) of the Orthodox thought and is, therefore, doomed to create a hybrid, internally contradictory narrative that has nothing to do with authentic Christianity. This phenomenon can be characterized as the hijacking of the language of Christian preaching and the transfer of its sacred function into the sphere of the political. The most important task for Orthodox Christians is to purify, authenticate and naturalize the language of church mission, separating it from the influence of pseudo-Christian stylizations of secular politics and ideology.

Liberal Catholics, American Conservatives

This chapter refers to Garry Wills who expressed that the Second Vatican Council was less about religious freedom than liturgical anarchy. It discusses the reform of the Mass, by which the council launched Roman Catholicism into the agony of lost symbols and debased associations. It also conveys a theology of the sacrament that the council destroyed by introducing vernacular languages, turning the priest around to face the congregation, and placing the communion wafer in the hands of recipients. The chapter discusses liturgical reforms that liberated the priests from the years of theology learned in Latin by rote. It explains the council's reset of the church's outlook on social pluralism and secular politics as a feature that was already evident in American Roman Catholicism.

Healing a Divided Church, 1130–1135

This chapter describes how in the first years of the 1130s, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux became a European figure, involving himself in the ecclesiastical and secular politics of his time and influencing them to a greater or lesser degree. He dedicated himself to solving the perilous situation in which there were two popes at the same time in the Western Church. By 1138, he had been to Italy a number of times and had traversed what today is France. These journeys must have been grueling for an individual with gastric problems and with a firm commitment to the prayer life of the monastery. At the same time as Bernard missed the daily office, he was separated from the brothers he loved in Clairvaux, both his brothers in the flesh and his spiritual brethren, who looked to him for spiritual guidance and inspiration.

The Greek Orthodox Church in between Greece and America

This chapter records how the hegemony of the Greek Orthodox Church was extended during the 1940s. It reflects back on the church's close entanglement with the world of secular politics. It also assesses the astute ways that Archbishop Athenagoras courted both the Greek and the US governments in order to strengthen the status and the influence of Orthodoxy in America in the 1940s. The chapter describes the wartime conditions in the United States during the 1940s that have eroded religiosity throughout the country. It looks into Greece's entry into the war on the side of the Allies, which meant that the Greek Orthodox Church identified with the Greek nation and could openly support the homeland.

The History of the Ahmadi-Caliph Relationship

This chapter discusses the distinctive theology of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, before exploring the historical processes through which the Ahmadi–caliph relationship became the dominant mode by which members of today's Jamaʻat attempt to evidence their Muslimness. In the early twentieth century, the second caliph directed a series of massive expansions to the Jamaʻat system and institutionalized key relationships of devotion, including a new scheme in which Ahmadis were encouraged to give their lives in service as waqf, an Islamic term normally reserved for endowments of property. The chapter also explores the ambivalent political aspirations of the Ahmadiyya caliphate. Described by his followers as nonpolitical, the caliph nevertheless follows a Sufi tradition of exercising a spiritual sovereignty that overlaps with and potentially encompasses worldly power. The chapter then shows that the Ahmadi-caliph relationship is understood to have its own political trajectory leading to the establishment of a new world system in which conventional secular politics are rendered defunct.