Bandits, Militants, and Martyrs: Sub-state Violence as Claim to Authority in Late Antique North Africa

Fourth Century North Africa was a site of intense religious and political conflict. Emerging from a period of persecution and newly legitimized by the Roman state, the Christian Church immediately fractured into two competing camps. Now known as the Donatist schism, this fracture was the result of competing claims to religious authority between two camps of bishops, but the doctrinal debate at its core precipitated a specific form of violence: attacks on clergy and property perpetrated by roving groups of militant bandits. Known as circumcellions, these bands acquired a perverse reputation for religious zeal, a desire for martyrdom, and what their opponents described as the ‘madness’ and ‘insanity’ of their violence. Here I analyze sources produced by both Donatists and Catholics to trace patterns of circumcellion violence. I draw on borderland theory and research on non-state violence to argue that such acts were not mad, but rather the result of strategic efforts to consolidate religious and political power. In this, Donatism and the sectarian violence that accompanied it provide important insights into how banditry and peasant rebellions can se.rve as alternate sources of social and political power, avenues through which heterodox movements challenge the power state and religious hierarchies alike

Paul’s Zeal

The concept of zeal is a complex one in Scripture. It is often linked in the Old Testament to physical violence against those who opposed God and his covenant with Israel. This is the kind of zeal demonstrated by Saul the Pharisee in his persecution of the infant church. The zeal of Paul the apostle, on the other hand, had been transformed by the cruciform zeal of Christ. An appreciation of this transformation sheds new light on some exegetical cruxes in Paul’s writings. It also highlights key differences between the old and new covenants and between proper and misplaced religious zeal.

Religious Zeal, Affective Fragility, and the Tragedy of Human Existence

Today, in a Western secular context, the affective phenomenon of religious zeal is often associated, or even identified, with religious intolerance, violence, and fanaticism. Even if the zealots’ devotion remains restricted to their private lives, “we” as Western secularists still suspect them of a lack of reason, rationality, and autonomy. However, closer consideration reveals that religious zeal is an ethically and politically ambiguous phenomenon. In this article, I explore the question of how this ambiguity can be explained. I do so by drawing on Paul Ricœur’s theory of affective fragility and tracing back the ambiguity of religious zeal to a dialectic inherent to human affectivity and existence itself. According to Ricœur, human affectivity is constituted by the two poles of vital and spiritual desires which are mediated by the thymos. As I show, this theory helps us to understand that religious zeal as a spiritual desire is neither plainly good nor plainly bad, but ambiguous. Moreover, it enables us to acknowledge the entanglement of abstraction and concretion that is inherent to the phenomenon of religious zeal. Finally, this theory helps us to understand why religious zeal, as one possible expression of the human quest for the infinite, is both a promise and a threat. In conclusion, human existence is tragic not in that we necessarily fail, but in that no matter which path we take with regard to our spiritual desires—that of affirmation, rejection, or moderation—we are and remain fallible.

Young people first! The multiple inscriptions of a generational discourse of Muslimness among Italian-Bangladeshi youths

‘Our parents couldn’t teach us the true meaning of what spirituality and faith can be!’. This assertion, made by a 24-year-old youth, epitomises the critical stance of a group of young Italian-Bangladeshi Muslims towards the religiosity oftheir former generation. Based on ethnographic research in Rome (Italy), this article illustrates the apparently oxymoroniccharacteristics of a discourse of Muslimness which, despite stressing the importance of a return to the primary sources ofIslam, combines this attitude with a peculiar emphasis on ‘integration’. I will show how this counter-intuitive combinationis not only inspired by a scholarly concept of ‘European Islam’, but first and foremost it is grounded in the concrete lifeconditions of youths who are both well placed within the Italian society and animated by religious zeal. In this way, I seekto shed light on the mutual entanglement of religious stances and life experiences, and to point up the limits of‘exceptionalist’ and ‘literalist’ approaches to the study of Islam.

Ben Jonson's The Alchemist: Shaping Behavior in the Shadow of the Apocalypse

As portrayed in The Alchemist, Ben Jonson's London grappled with the challenges of a burgeoning urban life and its effects on morality and consumption. While using his authorship as lectern was not unique, Jonson's message, that the order of improving one's status stood to be perverted, was; and in featuring the local preoccupation with alchemy and the apocalypse, he revealed the corrupt and toxic relationship between the city's economic and religious zeal. Martin Luther's sixteenth century idea of a new religion called for man's return to his covenant with God and to simple faith. By Jonson's time however, London faced an additional battle from within, as extreme religion gained ground. Because the play was coterminous with Jonson's audience's lives, they were well-aware that pure-Protestants provoked anxieties to gather believers. In straining to escape their present and to a future marked by heavenly expectations, Jonson's characters evoked his contemporaries’ desires to address their own exigencies. By capturing his audience's attention referencing popular current events, Jonson created a stage for his greater concern, that faith in economic as well as religious transcendence exposed his milieu to divisive radicalism and victimization.

Epilogue: Randomization and Social Policy Evaluation Revisited

This chapter examines the case for randomized controlled trials in economics. It revisits the author’s previous paper “Randomization and Social Policy Evaluation” and updates its message. The chapter presents a brief summary of the history of randomization in economics. It identifies two waves of enthusiasm for the method as “Two Awakenings” because of the near-religious zeal associated with each wave. The First Wave substantially contributed to the development of microeconometrics because of the awed nature of the experimental evidence. The Second Wave has improved experimental designs to avoid some of the technical statistical issues identified by econometricians in the wake of the First Wave. However, the deep conceptual issues about parameters estimated, and the economic interpretation and the policy relevance of the experimental results have not been addressed in the Second Wave.

The Enemy of ‘Ummah: Belief in Jewish conspiracy theories indirectly affected vaccination decisions

In our three pre-registered studies, we aimed to unravel the root cause and societal implications of belief in Jewish conspiracy theories among Indonesian Muslims. Our findings in Study 1 (N=385) confirmed our predictions that symbolic threat and collective narcissism were strongly related to belief in Jewish conspiracy and mediated the association between religious zeal and Jewish conspiracy beliefs. In Study 2 (N=370), we found that Jewish conspiracy beliefs indirectly predicted vaccination refusal and delay through vaccination conspiracy beliefs, and observed no evidence to confirm the moderating role of religiosity in reinforcing vaccination conspiracy beliefs. In Study 3 (N=396), we replicated our findings in Study 2 that belief in Jewish conspiracy theories was strongly related to vaccination conspiracy belief. Also, participants who blamed the Jews for the coronavirus pandemic were inclined to refuse a coronavirus vaccination when it is available. We argue that religiosity might not be directly related to conspiratorial thinking but, instead, activates a sense of outgroup threats among religious individuals making them more likely to endorse Jewish conspiracy theories. Despite the assumption that Jewish conspiracy theories are somehow benign, our findings dispute this premise.

The Lay Saint

This book investigates the phenomenon of saintly cults that formed around pious merchants, artisans, midwives, domestic servants, and others in the medieval communes of northern and central Italy. The book uses the rise of and tensions surrounding these civic cults to explore medieval notions of lay religiosity, charismatic power, civic identity, and the church's authority in this period. Although claims about laymen's and laywomen's miraculous abilities challenged the church's expanding political and spiritual dominion, both papal and civic authorities, the book finds, vigorously promoted their cults. It shows that this support was neither a simple reflection of the extraordinary lay religious zeal that marked late medieval urban life nor of the Church's recognition of that enthusiasm. Rather, the history of lay saints' cults powerfully illustrates the extent to which lay Christians embraced the vita apostolic—the ideal way of life as modeled by the Apostles—and of the church's efforts to restrain and manage such claims.