Early Modern Literature of Crime and Criminals

The literature of crime and criminals in early modern England takes several forms. The main form is the printed pamphlet, typically a short quarto publication of eight to sixteen pages, costing a few pence. Another form is the broadside ballad, usually anonymous, printed on one side of a single sheet and accompanied by an image and an indication of the music to be used. A selection of plays about real-life domestic crime, including the well-known Arden of Faversham, attributed variously in recent years to Shakespeare and Kyd, have also survived. While they are few in number, and less topical than the pamphlets, they have attracted more critical attention than the other forms. The crimes featured in this writing—often involving murder but also including witchcraft, and disproportionally focused on women—were chosen for their sensational value and were in no way representative of the reality of crime in the period. While some pamphlet writers made claims for the truth of their accounts, and rival accounts of the more notable crimes using differing details did appear, the aims and social functions of this writing had less to do with providing information than with reinforcing the authority of the state, its laws, and its Protestant religion. Hence, many accounts of crimes, particularly in the earlier part of the period, are shaped by the need to demonstrate the role of providence in bringing about the discovery of the perpetrators. Crime, conflated with sin, was conceptualized as a moral rather than a social problem; criminals were often regarded as acting under the irresistible compulsion of the devil and once found guilty of a single lapse proceeding inevitably toward actions that damned them to hell. The idea of crime as a secular problem in which social and economic forces had a role to play was beginning to develop and becomes more evident in writing of the later 17th century. Certain crimes emerged as iconic in the period, particularly involving women who killed, and featured in a number of different print forms, for example, the murders by their wives of Arden of Faversham, Page of Plymouth, and George Sanders. The law differentiated by gender in cases of spousal murder; husband-murder was categorized as petty treason, hence punishable by burning at the stake for the wife, while wife-killing (much commoner in actuality but less prominent in literature) was simply homicide. Early modern crime writing largely reflects the structures of power in the society that produced it; evidence of questioning or challenging accepted attitudes toward issues of criminal responsibility does exist, but the era of pioneering journalism was a long way ahead.

Islamic religious education at the heart of the secular problem-space in Belgium

This article aims at providing an answer to why and how, during the entire history of Islamic institutionalization in Belgium, Islamic education has remained at the centre of discussions concerning the place of Islam in Belgian society and in the formation of Belgian Muslim citizens. This question is differently approached in the northern/Flemish and southern/francophone part of the country, depending on specific historical sensibilities. By placing the figure of the Islamic teacher in the longer history of Belgian federalization and school struggles over the ‘soul of the child’, this article will simultaneously provide a reflection on Belgian secularism as a continuous ‘problem-space’ in which new and old ‘secularizers’ and ‘sacralizers’ are constituted and sustain the very question of politics’ relation to religion and vice versa.

The secular problem of evil: an essay in analytic existentialism

The existence of evil is often held to pose philosophical problems only for theists. I argue that the existence of evil gives rise to a philosophical problem which confronts theist and atheist alike. The problem is constituted by the following claims: (1) Successful human beings (i.e. those meeting their basic prudential interests) are committed to a good-enough world; (2) the actual world is not a good-enough world (i.e. sufficient evil exists). It follows that human beings must either (3a) maintain a state of epistemic ignorance regarding the nature of the actual world or (3b) abandon their basic prudential interests. Theists resolve this problem by rejecting (2), only to confront the problem of evil as it is traditionally understood. Successful atheists also reject (2), but without adequate grounds for doing so.

Predation, Pain, and Evil

The classical problem of natural evil holds that the suffering of sentient beings caused by natural processes is an evil for which a divinity is morally responsible. Theodicies either explain natural evil as a punitive imperfection in nature, which humans ought to avoid and/or purify, or as a constituent part of a greater good whereby the evil is redeemed. The environmental ethics literature has taken the latter route with respect to the secular problem of natural evil, arguing that local disvalues such as predation or pain are transmuted into systemic-level ecological goods. The anti-hunting literature takes the former route, arguing that humans should not participate in the predatory aspects of the natural order. The anti-predation literature, furthermore, argues that nature should be redeemed – so far as is technologically and economically possible – of its unsavoury predatory aspects. While all sides of the debate employ strategies analogous to those found in the philosophy of religion, the immanentizing function of secularism moves the target of ultimate moral evaluation away from the divine and onto the natural. Environmental ethics’ teleological approach culminates with nature as a transcendent good, whereas anti-hunting and anti-predation critiques view nature in the here-and-now as riven with evil, requiring humans to distance themselves while decontaminating it.

Habermas’ Wrapped Reichstag: Limits and Exclusions in the Discourse of Post-secularism

Jürgen Habermas’ recent work attempts to find ‘inspiring energy’ in the religious traditions, but without disturbing the rationality and freedoms of enlightenment modernity. Rather, the secular would assimilate the religious like a blood infusion, becoming more vibrant and stronger, but not losing its hard-won advantage. For Habermas, the post-secular problem lies in how best to preserve the secular democratic institutions, and keep them from being ‘violated’ through religiously motivated politics. Habermas criticizes Nicholas Wolterstorff, who would allow the religious to overrun the political, potentially violating vulnerable democratic institutions such as the parliament. Habermas suggests use of an ‘institutional filter’ to protect parliament from violation. Throughout his post-secular writings, he persistently employs Victorian-like innuendo bestowing masculine ‘inspiring energy’, ‘vitality’, and danger onto religion, which runs the risk of ‘violating’ effeminate democratic institutions symbolized by the parliament; thus the prophylactic device, the ‘filter’, which protects her virtue. One is reminded of Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's ‘Wrapped Reichstag’: in contrast to the Bundestag of today, with its glass dome (representing transparency) open to the public, we find in Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's work an enclosed, protective environment, a filter or prophylactic. In this vein, this paper will attempt to tease out from the language, word-choice, metaphors, and discourse of Habermas’ (post)secular dialectics that the religious enters solely on terms set by the secular, and plurality solely on terms set by stability/security.