Multiculturalism, Morality, and Secondary Secularisation

Starting from secularisation and its social counterpart, namely the institutional roles and functions of religious bodies being replaced by scientific disciplines or rationales, this chapter aims at providing an analytical approach of restorative justice, focusing on chaplaincy interventions in prison and probation settings. A case study of the Circle of Support and Accountability (CoSA) following a structural and moral analysis is provided. CoSA origin and expansion are developed to understand how a religious initiative became within less than two decades a standardised intervention. This process is described as secondary secularisation to illustrate how secular and religious morals find a common ground by building common good through practices.

Struggle for Inclusion

The chapter explores the struggle for inclusion at home and society faced by four young people when they quit the religion they inherited from their parents. Using life-story interviews, it discusses reactions of their families about their decision to quit religion. Furthermore, the chapter sheds light on the ways these young individuals coped with the social problems that they faced after they made a difficult, socially unacceptable choice of switching from their inherited religion. The promotion of symbolic violence in the field and its use by the agents around the participants of this study is discussed through Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and field. The chapter aims to understand and highlight the dilemma faced by the participants due to their decision of conversion in a society which is still not ready for this.

Great Risk for the Kingdom

Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity (“PCC”) has successfully navigated the challenges modernity poses to religion, growing rapidly in the twentieth century. Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, neoliberalism began its ascent to its current hegemonic status. Neoliberalism reconfigures social institutions as marketized practices with a measurable ‘payoff'. PCC adapted to this challenge in the form of a “growth churches,” adopting many of the characteristics of neoliberalism. In adopting a homogenous model and method of ‘best practice' in order to facilitate growth; offering a ‘prosperity' theology that fits well with the development of human capital; and endorsing the universalization of risk through modelling “pastorpreneur” leadership, it is argued in this chapter that growth churches are a paradigmatic example of a late modern religious phenomenon accommodating neoliberalism in a largely uncritical manner. The chapter concludes with some observations that critique this association between neoliberalism and growth churches.

The Passion of Port Talbot

This chapter examines a dramatic reinterpretation of The Passion narrative which took place in Port Talbot in 2011. It explores the roots of the drama (within the medieval mystery tradition and the local context), its production, and the impact which the drama had upon the town, to consider how this reinterpretation, whilst primarily secular in conception and content, might nevertheless have opened a ‘religious space' for the community. The production of The Passion of Port Talbot is discussed in the light of an analogous ‘theo-dramatic' understanding of how God acts in the world. The chapter goes on to explore whether in the impact of The Passion, traces of the sacred might be discerned, embedded within the apparently secular, and that in the ‘religious space' opened up by this production, the transformative power of a community's spiritual and religious heritage might have been activated.

Religion and the Social Economy

This chapter presents “elective affinities” between, on the one hand, strands in contemporary religiosity that seek to rediscover or reinterpret older religiosities in a contemporary context and idiom (e.g. liberation theology, multi-faith activity, the SBNR - spiritual but not religious - phenomenon, and the new monasticism), and, on the other hand, the contemporary phenomenon of the social economy (social business, social enterprise, and the sharing economy). As the social economy occupies a space between the values of capitalism and the strategies of socialism, rooted in a civil society that strives to maintain a freedom from both the economy and the state, so these religious phenomena occupy a space between secularisation and sacralisation, between a separation of church and state and a subsumption of state under church. They are all concerned with social justice now (rather than after the revolution), and bear witness to a potential for religious and societal transformation.

Religious Themes in Contemporary Art

The relationship between art and religion, evident throughout the entire history of art, can be deciphered at two levels – that of the essence of art, and that of the actual theme the artist approaches. The mystical view on the essence of art, encountered from Orphic and Pythagorean thinkers to Heidegger and Gadamer, believes that art is a divine gift and the artist – a messenger of heavenly thoughts. But the issue of religious themes' presence in art arises especially since modern times, after the eighteenth century, when religion starts to be constantly and vehemently attacked (from the Enlightenment and the French or the Bolshevik Revolution to the “political correctness” nowadays). Art is no longer just the material transposition of a religious content; instead, religion itself becomes a theme in art, which allows artists to relate to it in different ways – from veneration to disapproval and blasphemy. However, there have always been artists to see art in its genuine meaning, in close connection with the religious sentiment. An case in point is the work of Bill Viola. In Romanian art, a good example is the art group Prolog, but also individual artists like Onisim Colta or Marin Gherasim, who understand art in its true spiritual sense of openness to the absolute.

Offerings

The chapter will discuss the key role that offerings play in everyday life in Asian and Byzantine traditions, and the ontological and eschatological beliefs behind it. Other examples of metaphysical gifts are discussed, like the Biblical notion of sacrifice, which is present both in the Old and the New Testament, that is in the Avraam-Isaac episode and Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, respectively. Some relevant pagan rituals will also be mentioned, before reflecting on what all these have in common. Since they are observed through a personal journey, and reflected upon through philosophical analysis, findings do not claim to have the ‘objectivity' of an anthropological study. Instead, they might lead to a kind of practical understanding similar to that, which narratives or images provide. Indeed, Andrey Tarkovsky's last film, Sacrifice, will serve as an illustration of the existential and, at times, eschatological meaning of the range of acts of giving that we discuss – from spiritual gifts, to offerings, and ultimately to sacrifice.

The Alchemy of Religion

This chapter provides some practical examples of legendary historical figures whose profound religious convictions have produced radical, but always beneficent changes in society in three main areas of human endeavour: social reform, science and music. Considerable stress is placed upon the fact that religion, properly understood and applied, has nothing to do with blind belief, wars or an opiate effect on society, its immense uplift of the human condition accruing from the thoughts, words and deeds of those great persons who have engaged with religion in its universal meaning, unshackled from rigid orthodoxy, sectarian attitudes and dogma..

Literary History as National History

This chapter argues that the roots of Persian culture are in Persian poetry. The high esteem in which classical Persian poetry is held among Iranians is well known. This rich literary tradition provides enormous resources for a distinct Persian identity. However, unlike the commonly held perception that Iranian identity is a pre-Islamic construct with deep roots in the Persian cultural heritage of the Great Persia, this chapter reasserts the status of classical Persian poetry as an Islamic literary tradition, one that has had an enormous influence on Iranian society and culture. The creation of a distinct Persian Islamic identity has historically been a “cohesive force,” and this essential Islamic element must be recognized and acknowledged before any verdict about Persian identity can be reached. The chapter discusses the vast influence of Islamic mysticism on classical Persian poetry and its subsequent shaping of Iranian culture.

Religion, Church, and Public Space

The present text is divided into three chapters and deals with the intrinsic religious dimension of man as being of communion from an ontological viewpoint and in relation with God, her Creator and Supporter in this mundane existence. This existence is open to eternity as a real personal and communitarian communion in the dynamics of spiritual growth. For Christians, the Church is the path of genuine and redeeming communion with God the Trinity as shown in the foundational biblical metanarrative, typologically interpreted by Christian theology, and spiritually experienced by practicing believers. Sacramentally, this happens through prayer, through the reading of the holy text, and the liturgical and Eucharistic gathering that celebrates the real sacrament of God's presence for us. The relation between the Church with the State in modern and postmodern times testifies to the change in mindset that has occurred by means of the ideological absolutisation of the state and the theoretical marginalization or atomization of religion. On the one hand, this shows the inconsistency of the project and on the other hand, the impossibility to fight with the religious soul of humanity, the religious dimension inherently and intrinsically structured in the ontological relationship between human and divine, in any mundane historical context.