Saeculum–Ecclesia–Caliphate: An Eternal Golden Braid

The secular state, the church, and the caliphate are associations that each hold universal aspirations, at least implicitly. While the universal aspirations of the church and caliphate may be obvious enough, every state seeks dominion over the whole world. (“Secular” describes states that limit their vision to this world, as opposed to the transcendence to which both the church and caliphate appeal.) As an essay in Catholic speculative theology, Griffiths asks two questions: Whether Catholic theology supports or discourages the variety of political orders, and whether these orders could be ranked in terms of goodness from a Catholic perspective? In response to these questions, Griffiths appeals to two aspects of St. Augustine’s political thought: Political rivalries serve the common good; and the principal indicator of the degree to which a state serves the common good is its explicit service to the god of Abraham. The United States (a secular state) is compared with ISIS (an attempted caliphate).

The Secular Pilgrimage of Orthodoxy in America

With the notable exception of the Russian mission in Alaska, for the most part the Orthodox Church did not come to America as mission but followed its people’s departure from the homeland, often under extremities of war, social upheaval, or natural disaster. There was no preparation for coming here. They left behind historical Orthodox cultures and were immersed immediately into a society that the Orthodox faith had no role in shaping, a secular society that bafflingly was also religious, though not in any familiar way. Through conversation with theologians and public intellectuals like Schmemann, Parsons, Herberg, Berger, and Berry, this essay first traces the lineage of secularism back to Christianity. The unmooring of virtue from the transcendent, more specifically from the salvific sacrifice of Christ, has yielded secularism as a “step-child” of Christianity. In response, many Orthodox Americans turn to ethnic identity as a means of imbuing daily life with the faith. This, however, is more a sign of a dying church than a means of sustaining its life. The challenge is to renew a sense of the sacred, a liturgical worldview, within the pluralism of American society.

What Difference Do Women Make? Retelling the Story of Catholic Responses to Secularism

The boundaries drawn by secularism have limited religion to the “private” realm, not merely the arena of conscience and belief but also family structure, intimacy, and (women’s) sexuality. The Catholic Church, particularly through the intellectual and administrative influence of John Paul II, has advanced its counter-cultural stance on these issues based on the realist personalist philosophy of Jacques Maritain. However, if we introduce women as thinkers and protagonists into the story of the Catholic responses to secularism in Europe, how does it change? Not only women, but what happens if we pay attention to how gender and sexuality are threaded into the narrative? What differences emerge? Looking to the life and works of Raïssa Maritain, especially her celibate marriage and adoptive kinship network, we see a personalist and deeply Christian understanding of intimacy that consciously distances itself from heterosexual, procreative complementarity.

Secularism: The Golden Lie

In contemporary rhetoric, secularism, modernity, and atheism are invoked as the end of a linear narrative of historical progress, but with the anthropological insights of Bruno Latour regarding scientific atheism, Graham Ward argues that secularism and modernity are abstract, mythological concepts, a “golden lie” upon which the modern state is built (as in Plato’s Republic). Latour recognized the exclusion of the concept of “God” in scientific investigation, while at the same time scientists raised the level of “fact” to that which is absolutely true (i.e., outside of time and space). In a similar way, the demythologizing project of the Enlightenment sought to exclude religious traditions and history from the modern, secular state, but in the process, it developed a new mythology of the anti- or a-religious that began circa 1500. Instead, the basic concepts of this worldview, such as the “immanent frame,” the “buffered self,” disenchantment, and “exclusive humanism” imply their own falsehood. Even the French laicité has shifted from an antagonism toward religion to an attempted neutrality for the sake of inclusivity and the bureaucratic state.

Conscience and Catholic Identity

How does a faith community that understands morality as objective and universally valid operate in a secularized world without lapsing into moral fundamentalism? The reactive, oppositional, hermetic character of religious fundamentalism extends to a faith community’s moral convictions and commitments, disposing religiously fundamentalist communities to moral fundamentalism as well. Catholic debates about conscience illustrate internal struggles over the moral presuppositions of modernity and secularism and their import. Taking Catholic responses to the anti-LGBT attack on the Pulse nightclub as an example, Weaver argues that conscience is closely bound with personal and communal moral identity. Catholic responses to secularism and modernity involve morally freighted choices about what to emphasize, defend, and adapt; who to include, empower, or marginalize; and how to interpret internal plurality, external influences, and alternative modes of thought. Indeed, Catholic responses to fundamentalism, secularism, and modernity enact conscience, as individuals and communities decide what sort of ecclesial community the church will be.

Fundamentalists, Rigorists, and Traditionalists: An Unorthodox Trinity

Living with paradox and uncertainty is inevitable for those who are ordered and mastered by the God who is Absolute Mystery. Fundamentalism is not a traditional religious way of being, nor is it an orthodox mode of religiosity. Educated and formed epistemologically under the banner of techno-scientific modernity, fundamentalist actors approach religion with a rational and instrumental view. In response to their modern anxiety, they turn to absolutism, dualism, and millennialism to persuade their secular and religious peers of the urgency of the situation for religion in the world. Indeed, the fundamentalist mode of religiosity in the twenty-first century is critically engaged with secularism. The antidote to fundamentalism, then, is stubborn, principled and creative fidelity to the religious tradition in all its mystery, complexity, nuance, fluidity, and richness. Therefore, the retrospective emphasis on tradition of Orthodox and Catholic Christians makes “fundamentalism” a non-starter. Instead, Appleby argues that we may more accurately speak of “rigorists” and “traditionalists” among the Orthodox, which movements have been marked by their rejection of modernity and not just selective use or rejection of modern ideas and technologies.

A Secularism of the Royal Doors: Toward an Eastern Orthodox Christian Theology of Secularism

The opposites, sacred and secular, are in an ‘original’ or ‘polemical unity’ in Christ and do not have their reality except in Him in a polemical attitude toward one another bearing witness in this way to their common reality and unity in the God-Man. History’s movement consists of divergence and convergence from and toward Him. One cannot, therefore, understand secularism and the secular and secularization apart from the fact that the secular is what is continuously being accepted and becoming accepted by God in Christ. Influenced by the work of Bonhoeffer, Bulgakov, and Richard Kearney and invoking Orthodox liturgy and iconography, Gallaher points to a church that images Christ and the Trinity by manifesting itself in kenosis. He argues for a move from an Orthodox anti-secularism that simply denounces and shakes its fist at the West to a positive Orthodox theology of secularism that tries to see how Orthodoxy might witness boldly to Christ in the modern pluralistic and secular West.

Confession and the Sacrament of Penance after Communism

As regards the sacrament of penance in Russia there are both quasi-fundamentalist tendencies and those offering the potential to move away from fundamentalism. On the one hand, one sees strict literalism, an emphasis on purity, and the desire to return to a previous ideal from which advocates believe members have strayed (e.g., confession before communion, confession to a spiritual elder). On the other hand, it is important to note that the post-communist Russian attempts to return to or to revive authentic confession were mediated by the very context in which the “recovery” occurred. Russian “fundamentalism” as regards confession and communion was the reconfiguration of the original meaning of the Russian practice of confession. Additionally, diversity of opinion has not been altogether rejected, and other confessional practices, in particular written confession, signal that new forms altogether might arise. In short, although the Russian Orthodox Church after the fall of communism approached confession in a way that might seem to be fundamentalist, the presence of diverse opinions and practices suggests that the potential for moving away from fundamentalism is there as well.

Resolving the Tension between Tradition and Restorationism in American Orthodoxy

The entire history of the Orthodox Churches in America could be cast as an ongoing battle between “tradition” and “restorationism.” Tradition has a content but is also constantly changing in response to new surroundings in a manner that seeks to maintain core structures and behaviors. Restorationism is an attempt to restore a (largely imagined) past or, in the cases of many converts to Orthodoxy, a return to that imagined past. These two poles of American Orthodoxy have been in tension with one another throughout its American history. This article surveys restorationist movements within American Orthodoxy in the twentieth century, often led by converts, and their survival or failure within the Orthodox Church. Herbel argues that restorationism focused on behaviors or modes of being and a restorationism that recognizes value in one’s past have a greater chance of successful incorporation into the larger Orthodox Church.

Collectivistic Christianities and Pluralism: An Inquiry into Agency and Responsibility

This essay addresses the relationship between religious traditions, secularisms, and fundamentalisms by looking at collectivistic Catholicisms in the communist and post-communist Croatia and Poland. In response to both theorists of modernity and critics of secularism—who present modernity as a process of secularization and religion as modernity’s other—Jakelić advances the idea of ‘collectivistic religion,’ to refer to religions that are public in manifestation, historically embedded, constitutive of specific group identities—next to linguistic, territorial, cultural, or national identities—and defined in part by the presence of religious (or non-religious) others. On the one hand, she considers the collectivistic Catholicisms that reject the cultural and moral pluralism of modernity but, in the process, end up espousing one of modernity’s aspects—its homogenizing impulse. On the other hand, she traces two instances in which collectivistic Catholicisms in Croatia and Poland affirm the links between Catholicism and national identities but remain open to their Muslim and secular others respectively.