Religious and military architecture represented the core of early modern Portuguese architectural and artistic culture. Churches and fortresses are still the main architectural and symbolic landmarks of Portuguese history, closely related to the country’s maritime explorations and its colonial empire. Thus, religious architecture still plays a crucial role in the Portuguese landscape and cultural environment. Foremost among these is the monastery of Jerónimos near Lisbon. Its construction spanned the entire 16th century, yet in the 19th and 20th centuries, historiography fixed its image as an icon of the so-called Manueline style, associating it with the Portuguese maritime power developed during the reign of Manuel I (1495–1521). Since the late 20th century, Portuguese scholars have rethought the vision, challenging the term Manueline and unveiling the manifold artistic and architectural confluences and transformations. This is evidenced by the main chapel’s reconstruction by architect Jerónimo de Ruão in the latter half of the 16th century under the regency of the Queen Catherine of Austria. Her architectural patronage served as a model of patronage for women as the powerful Princess Mary of Portugal, who commissioned the main chapel of the church of Luz, and the very wealthy Simõa Godinha of African birth, who sponsored the current main chapel of the church of Conceição Velha (ex-chapel of Holy Spirit).
The vast religious complex of the Order of Christ, as well as the balanced architecture of the chapel of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception, both situated in Tomar, reflected the circulation in Portugal of 16th-century Italian architectural treatises, which contributed to the cultural renewal of architects as João de Castilho or sculptors as Nicolas Chanterene. The architectural works of Francesco da Cremona in Northern Portugal and of Miguel de Arruda in Évora also spread the Renaissance architectural culture. In the 16th century, monumental portals and grand retables share a similar taste for magnificence and sculpted details, while in the 1580s, the architecture painted on the ceiling of the Jesuit church of Saint Roque in Lisbon was a very disruptive pictorial experimentation.
During the Union of Iberian Crowns (1580–1640/1668), the consolidation of the classicist erudition of Portuguese architects underpinned the building of main churches as São Vicente de Fora in Lisbon or the Jesuit church in Coimbra (after the Jesuits’ expulsion from Portugal in 1759, it was transformed into the New Cathedral). Simultaneously, from the latter half of 16th century through the 17th century, simplified typologies of religious architecture proliferated in both Portugal and its colonial territories. Coined for the first time (1972) by George Kubler as “plain architecture”—rendered in Portuguese as arquitetura chã (1988)—this concept gained significant traction among scholars but was subsequently rethought by José Eduardo Horta Correia. Simplified patterns, the resource economy, and the use of models by Serlio’s treatise characterized a panoply of buildings, from the extensive horizontal mass of the Santa-Clara-a-Nova monastery in Coimbra to the classicist erudition of the chapel of Onze Mil Virgens in Alcácer do Sal, encompassing the five new cathedrals (Leiria, Portalegre, Miranda do Douro, Angra do Heroismo, and Goa) built during this time.
The shift toward Baroque sensibility and culture gradually unfolded within 17th-century Portuguese architectural spaces. On one hand, they maintained exterior sobriety, increasing the opulence of the interior decorations thanks to magnificent gilded wood-carved grand retables and walls covered by azulejos. On the other hand, certain central-plan sacred spaces exhibited externally curved and undulating walls, as seen in the church of Sant’Engracia in Lisbon. It was built by the architect João Antunes, who also was used to designing colored marble retables with Solomonic columns. His art aimed to change the artistic and architectonic Portuguese tradition prevalent up to that time.
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Churches, Grand Retables, and Ceiling Paintings in Portugal during the 16th and 17th Centuries
Giuseppina Raggi
Article
Civil Religion in America
Raymond Haberski, Jr.
Civil religion in America has no church, denominations, or institutional center, and it cannot be traced to a single origin story. And yet, it operates as a religion in ways familiar to Americans—it has priests and pastors, altars and sacrifices, symbols, institutions, and liturgies. So, what, then, is civil religion? The term originates with the 18th-century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who proposed that the French nation needed a civil religion to replace the “unholy” alliance between the Catholic Church and the monarchy. Rousseau explained in book 4 of his Social Contract that he hoped a “purely civil profession of faith” would satisfy what he viewed as the popular need for something to believe in, to give one’s allegiance to, and even to give up one life’s for—a transcendent, unifying point of reference that existed beyond politics and in place of a denominational (most likely Christian) church. Thus, in philosophical terms, civil religion is the appropriation of religion for political ends. The American version of civil religion, though, differs from Rousseau’s idea by incorporating the nation’s Christian heritage more deeply into an understanding and judgment of America.
In the American context, civil religion had to accommodate the country’s variety of faiths and Enlightenment rationalism, but was just as deeply influenced by the power of popular and elite religiosity to order American life. Thus, American civil religion has echoed Protestant values and assumptions, while enshrining the mythic nature of the Puritans, founding fathers, and common people who gave their lives in wars and conquest. Moreover, while Americans do not pray to their nation, they have no trouble praying for their nation; they see presidents and preachers as both serving in capacities that minister to the people in times of crisis, and they invest sacred meaning in events and documents to help them imagine that America is as much an idea as it is a place. Over time, American civil religion has also provided a narrative for a set of ideals, statements of purpose, and symbols to which all Americans, in theory, can appeal.
Sociologist Robert N. Bellah (1927–2013) explained in a famous and significant essay titled “Civil Religion in America,” for the winter 1967 issue of the journal Daedelus, “American civil religion is not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality.” He contended that Americans could call upon not only a common creed of ideals but also their civil religion to evaluate their nation’s actions. In parlance that became popular following World War II, the United States was a nation “under God,” meaning, as Bellah argued, “the will of the people is not itself the criterion of right and wrong. There is a higher criterion in terms of which this will can be judged; it is possible that the people may be wrong.”
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Civil Rights Movements and Religion in America
Paul Harvey
In the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century, black Christian thought helped to undermine the white supremacist racial system that had governed America for centuries. The civil rights revolution in American history was, to a considerable degree, a religious revolution, one whose social and spiritual impact inspired numerous other movements around the world. Key to the work was a transformation of American religious thought and practice in ways that deftly combined the social gospel and black church traditions, infused with Gandhian notions of active resistance and “soul force,” as well as secular ideas of hardheaded political organizing and the kinds of legal maneuverings that led to the seminal court case of Brown v. Board of Education.
The civil rights movement had legislative aims; it was, to that extent, a political movement. But it was also a religious movement, sustained by the religious power unlocked within southern black churches. The historically racist grounding of whiteness as dominant and blackness as inferior was radically overturned in part through a reimagination of the same Christian thought that was part of creating it in the first place. In similar ways, the Mexican-American farmworkers’ movement drew on the mystic Catholic spirituality of Cesar Chavez and brought to national consciousness the lives and aspirations of an oppressed agricultural proletariat that lacked the most elementary rights of American citizens.
American civil rights movements drew from, and were in part inspired by, the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian independence movement. Gandhi’s movement deeply influenced black Americans who visited India from the 1930s to the 1950s and who brought home with them a mixture of ideas and practices deriving from sources as diverse as Gandhi and the 19th-century American progenitor of nonviolent civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau. American civil rights movements subsequently became a model for any number of freedom movements internationally, notably including the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. There, religious figures such as Desmond Tutu became international symbols. Also, the black American freedom struggle based in the American South moved protestors in places as diverse as Czechoslovakia under Soviet domination and Chinese students staring down tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
In the post–civil rights era, some suggested that America had moved into a “post-racial” era, despite the overwhelming statistics documenting racial inequality in American society. Thus, activists who have mined the connection between religion, civil rights, and social justice will have plenty of work to do in the future. The struggle continues through such contemporary venues as the #blacklivesmatter movement.
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Class and Religion in America
William A. Mirola
Scholars pursuing questions on the links between religion and social class typically examine several distinct sets of dynamics. A main research focus has addressed how religious beliefs, behaviors, and experiences vary across different social class contexts. Studies in this tradition draw on quantitative and qualitative data to illustrate such differences. Statistical studies have demonstrated economic and educational differences in patterns of an array of religious beliefs, religious service participation, and other religious behaviors, and especially social and political attitudes on everything from gay rights to gun control to political party preference. Qualitative work typically delves into the lived religious experiences of individuals from different classes as well as examining the ways in which religious expression is itself shaped by class cultures.
A significant portion of this type of research examines how religion impacts the life and work experiences of those at the bottom of the class hierarchy, the working and nonworking poor. Here the way that faith shapes how poor people view the challenges of their lives and their views of the larger society are particularly central concerns. Addressing a second related set of questions, researchers also examine how participation in religious communities contributes to forms of social mobility in terms of socioeconomic status indicators. Statistical analyses dominate in this area, illustrating how denominational affiliation and measures of religious belief and practice predict views regarding income and wealth accumulation, educational attainment, and occupational choice. Another distinct area of scholarship examines the role religion has played in shaping the history of capitalism and the dynamics of the traditionally understood industrial working classes and the organized labor movement. Here, too, scholars examine how working-class individuals use religion as a way to understand their work and the evolution of global capitalism. Labor historians in particular have examined historical and contemporary instances in which religious leaders and organizations play active roles in industrial conflicts.
Whichever route one takes to explore religion and social class, studying their intersections has been of longstanding interest to social scientists, historians, religious studies scholars, and theologians for more than a century. This article bridges these approaches and provides an overview of their complex intersections in contemporary social contexts.
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The “Classic” Age of Christian Worship, 4th–6th Century
John F. Baldovin
The 4th–6th centuries can be considered a classic period in the development of Christian worship. During this time many of the liturgical forms that are still recognizable today were consolidated: the architectural disposition of church buildings, the shape of the Eucharist and the various traditions of the eucharistic prayer, the rites of initiation, the annual liturgical cycle (calendar), and the rites associated with ordination, weddings, the anointing of the sick, penance, and the burial of the dead. This was the period in which the great diversity and variety that characterized the first Christian centuries gradually settled into the basic structures that are familiar today. At the same time, it was the period of the development of the great rites of Christian worship that were centered on the major cities of the Roman Empire: Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, Edessa, Jerusalem, and Rome. The new diversity of these rites often corresponded to the various languages in which they were celebrated: Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Latin.
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The Cold War and American Religion
Dianne Kirby
American propaganda cast the Cold War as one of history’s great religious wars, between the godless and the God-fearing, between good and evil. It was a simplistic depiction that was supported and promoted in the highest echelons of government and by the leaders of America’s key institutions. During the course of the presidencies of Harry S. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, U.S.-Soviet rivalry was transformed from a traditional great power struggle into a morality play that drew on firmly entrenched notions rooted in the American past, above all American exceptionalism and its sense of mission. Truman made religion America’s ideological justification for abandoning America’s wartime cooperation with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower used religion to persuade the world that America was a force for good in the international arena. The resulting anti-communist crusade was to have profound consequences for Christian America, contributing to both religious revival and religious repression in the early Cold War period. Over time it caused irrevocable alterations to America’s religious landscape. The anti-communist dynamic unleashed embraced anti-liberalism and was a factor in the rise of the Christian Right and the decline in America’s mainstream churches. In addition, the image of a godless and evil enemy dictated an irreconcilable conflict that precluded the very modes of diplomacy and discourse that might have helped avoid the worst excesses, costs, and consequences of the Cold War.
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Commerce, Consumerism, and Christianity in America
Dana Logan
American Christianity and commerce are bound together by their mutual history. In colonial America, Puritans excelled at the skills of capitalism, and in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, Christian corporations have tied together religious and corporate culture. Even when corporations and churches have maintained a distinct boundary between faith and the market, American religion and capitalism seem to be uniquely compatible. Ministers and gurus use mass media to disseminate their message (via TV, radio, bookstores). Religious folk in the United States tend to act like consumers, choosing their theologies and churches based on their individual needs and desires, rather than relying on tradition to dictate their religious practices. Selling and buying in the American marketplace share many similarities with Christian categories of piety and evangelization. Further, corporations and religious communities have since the early 20th century collaborated in politics and social movements. In much of the scholarship on Christianity and commerce in the United States, this relationship is discussed as a strategic partnership between two distinct spheres of life: religion and the market. Recent scholarship, however, has questioned this neat division, arguing that the fluid relationship among commerce, consumption, and Christianity in the United States emerges from the historical co-development of capitalism and religion. If Christianity and the market in the United States look very similar, or are particularly friendly, it is because they were never separate to begin with.
Article
The Common Core Thesis in the Study of Mysticism
Ralph W. Hood Jr.
The common core thesis contends that mystical experience is an ultimate non-sensuous experience of unity of all things. It can be identified within major faith traditions, whether explicitly religious or not. Its roots are in the work of William James who explored mystical experience outside the limits imposed by what he perceived as only a provisional natural science assumption of the newly emerging discipline of empirical psychology. Following the explicit phenomenological work of Walter Stace, the phenomenology of a universal core to mystical experience has been operationalized and an explicit psychometric measure developed to allow empirical assessment of the claim to a common core to mysticism. It is the linkage of psychometric approaches to the work of James and Stace that is now known explicitly as the common core thesis. The common core thesis needs to be delineated from the perennialist thesis popularized by Aldous Huxley in which there is postulated not only a common core experience, but also values and practices claimed to be associated with this experience if not directly derived from it. Psychometric and empirical evidence for the common core thesis is substantial and continues to accumulate. The common core thesis is restricted to mystical experience and assumes that this experience seeks to express itself in various faith traditions, whether religious or not, but is not restricted to or defined adequately by the culture or language with which this experience is interpreted. Unlike the perennialist thesis, the common core thesis does not assume that any common theology, philosophy, or practice necessarily follows from mystical experience.
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The Comparative Study of Mysticism
Michael Stoeber
The comparative study of mysticism began in the mid-19th century, with the development of the modern meaning of the word, which had begun to be used as a substantive, with the classification of “mystics” in the 17th century. This differed from the traditional Greek Christian use of the adjective mystikos, to qualify rituals, scriptures, sacraments, and theology as “mystical” contexts of the human encounter with the Divine. This modern shift highlighted the personal experience of ultimate Reality, rather than the sociocultural context. Certain individuals claimed to encounter the Divine or spiritual realities more directly, separate from traditional mediums of religious experience. The study of this phenomenon tended in the early 20th century to focus on the psychology and the phenomenology of the personal experience, generally described as an altered state of consciousness with specific characteristics, processes, stages, effects, and stimulants. This emphasis on common features influenced the development of perennialist and traditionalist theorists, who saw evidence of the same experiential origin, fundamental principles, or epistemology among major world religions. Some essentialist views of mysticism argued that a pure consciousness-experience of undifferentiated unity or non-duality is the core feature of all mysticism, in contrast to other religious experiences. Reaction to these positions led to contextualist or constructivist views of mysticism, which presume the sociocultural character of mysticism. In its most extreme form, the contextualist perspective suggests that all mystical experiences among traditions are different, given diverse socio-religious categories that overdetermine the experience. In turn, some critical scholarship has proposed qualifications to contextualism within the context of a general acceptance of many of its tenets, even among many theorists with essentialist tendencies.
Up to the late 20th century, much scholarship in the area tended to downplay the sociocultural features of mysticism, emphasizing the psychological dynamics and an individual, disembodied, and radically transcendent ideal. This brought into question the relationship of morality to mystical experience and raised concerns about the status of entheogens—the use of psychoactive drugs in religious contexts. Interest in the comparative study of mysticism has also extended into the area of neuroscience, where researchers explore electro-chemical brain states associated with mystical experience, in proposing evidence of a mystical neurological substrate. But the essentialist/contextualist debate also moved the comparative study of mysticism beyond issues of epistemology, consciousness-states, ontology, and cognitive neuroscience, broadening the field to include other aspects of religious experience. Some studies have brought feminist concerns to bear on the discussion, insofar as women’s mysticism has been overshadowed and even repressed by men, and was seen to preclude legitimate experiential possibilities of a more embodied character. Related scholarship in history and depth psychology has focused creatively on the nature and significance of erotic elements of mysticism in comparative studies, with special attention to associated physical phenomena and their transformative dynamics. Similarly, more embodied features of comparative mysticism are the subject of transpersonal psychology, which draws on many humanistic disciplines and supports participatory approaches to the field. Transpersonal psychology remains open to claims that the ego can be transcended in movements into higher states of being that ideally involve personal/spiritual enhancement and integration. Also, some more recent proponents of new comparative theology advocate methods that engage the scholar in specific beliefs or practices of another tradition, and include subsequent clarification and elaboration of one’s own perspective in light of such comparative study, in exploring phenomena related to comparative mystical experience.
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Confucian Mysticism
Judson B. Murray
Confucian mysticism is a subfield in academic areas of study including Chinese thought, Chinese religions, Confucian studies, and comparative mysticism. Important topics examined in this subfield include, first, a view of the human self that is fundamentally relational, both in an interpersonal sense and because Confucians presuppose various correlations and an integration between, on the one hand, the matter–energy, capacities, processes, and activities comprising the self and, on the other, the elements, forces, patterns, and processes of the world it inhabits. One paradigmatic way Confucians conceptualize the interrelation between the self and the cosmos is their idea and ideal of the “unity of Heaven and humanity.” The Confucian mystical self, provided failings such as unbalanced emotions, selfish desires, and self-centeredness are effectively curtailed, contributes vitally to, because of its profound reverence for life, the generative and life-sustaining process of change that pervades and animates the cosmos. Second, practitioners use various techniques of religious praxis in combination to form multifaceted training regimens aimed at self-cultivation and self-transformation. Examples include a form of meditation called “quiet-sitting,” rituals, textual study, “investigating things,” self-examination and self-monitoring, filial piety, and “reverent attentiveness.” Third, training in these practices can achieve the different mystical aims, experiences, and transformations they seek, all of which relate to the overarching ideal of the unity of Heaven and humanity. These objectives, broadly speaking, include self-understanding, accurately grasping the “principles” of things and affairs, effortless moral virtuosity, “forming one body with all things” (and other types of Confucian mystical union), and exemplifying “sincerity.” Accomplishing them collapses the conventional divide separating several specious dichotomies, such as thought and action, self and other, humankind and nature, internal and external, the subjective and the objective, and moral ought and is. Fourth, the influence that precedent and tradition exert in Confucianism has prompted scholars to devote attention both to notable continuities and to intriguing innovations in comparing ancient mystical ideas, practices, experiences, and aims to later expressions and elaborations of them.
At present, much of the scholarship on Confucian mysticism contributes to efforts attempting to provide rich and nuanced analyses of the tradition’s core doctrines, practices, experiences, and ethical and religious aims, by viewing these subjects through the lens of Confucianism’s mystical and spiritual dimensions. Less scholarly attention has been devoted to identifying and explicating the possible contributions that studying Confucian mysticism can make to the scholarship on theories of mysticism and comparative mysticism. Scholars of mysticism have not yet availed themselves of the wealth of data, the possible additional perspectives on contested issues, and the new trajectories for future research that Confucianism offers to these fields. Also, few studies employ the definitions, categories, and theories that have been developed in the contemporary study of mysticism as a methodology for studying Confucian mysticism.
Article
Constitutions and Islamic Law
Christie S. Warren
The Constitution of Madinah, written by the Prophet after his flight from Mecca and arrival in Madinah (622 ce/1 ah), is considered by many to be the first written constitution. Nevertheless, and although Islamic law has developed in rich detail since then in a number of other areas, constitutionalism remains a comparatively underdeveloped area of Islamic law. Only recently has this started to change.
Since 2011 and in part due to events of the so-called Arab Spring, the topic of Islam and constitutions has been the subject of heightened interest. In recent years, a number of Muslim-majority countries, including Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Palestine, have embarked upon constitutional processes, and the relationship between Islam and the state has been debated in each of them. A variety of models has emerged over time; whereas in Saudi Arabia the Qur’an serves as the constitution itself, in Egypt Shari’ah is the principal source of legislation. Similarly, while the 2012 draft constitution of Libya states that Islam shall be the state religion and Islamic Shari’ah the main source of legislation, the constitution of Iraq provides that no law contradicting established provisions of Islam may be enacted. Language in the Afghan constitution is even more precise and states that Afghanistan is an Islamic republic, that no law shall contravene the tenets and provisions of Islam, and that in the absence of specific constitutional or legislative language governing the disposition of a case, courts shall implement principles of Hanafi jurisprudence.
In similar fashion, academic scholarship analyzing the relationship between Islam and constitutionalism has increased in scope and vibrancy in recent years. Historically, scholarship in this field tended to focus on issues relating to governance and administrative structures in Muslim-majority countries—not on normative constitutional principles. More recently, Islamic perspectives on constitutional norms have become the focus of significant scholarship. Some constitutional issues of recent academic interest include state sponsorship of a particular religion to the exclusion of others, freedom to practice Islam and other religions, and options for articulating the role of Shari’ah within constitutional frameworks, including the use of supremacy and repugnancy clauses, the role of Shari’ah as a source of legislation, “Shari’ah checks” to ensure that legislation does not contravene Islamic law, review by Shura Councils, and the role of the judicial branch in interpreting Islamic law. Additional constitutional issues impacted by defined relationships between Shari’ah and the state include human and women’s rights, protection of religious minorities; criminal law and hudud punishments; finance law and restrictions on charging interest; rights of freedom of association, expression, and expression; and provisions governing marriage, divorce and inheritance.
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The Construction of Muslim Families, Interfaith Marriage, and Religious Education in Mexico
Ruth Jatziri García Linares
Fieldwork conducted in the Islamic Center of the North (Centro Islámico del Norte, or CIN) in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, between 2015 and 2017, yielded several findings. First, it examined the reasons for women’s conversion to Islam; second, it looked at the ways these women and their husbands raise their children under Islamic religious precepts. Thus, the author seeks to shed light on how this conversion and child-rearing take place within both Muslim and interfaith homes, dividing her discussion into three parts. The first contextualizes the women and men who make up these families and households and also discusses the Muslim community settled in Monterrey, of which they are members. The second provides an outline of interreligious and Islamic marriages, as well as what Islam has to say about marriage between Muslims and people of other religious faiths. The last section consists of a series of examples taken from interviews with Muslim women who are members of the CIN in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. The narratives provide insight into how religious values are transmitted to children and young people, as well as the ways in which marriages initially considered interreligious sometimes become completely Islamic.
Article
Contemporary Pagan, Wiccan, and Native Faith Movements
Chas S. Clifton
Paganism is based largely in an Enlightenment-era rejection of Christianity and Romantic-era ideas of the individual experience, emotion, and creativity, combined with a search for true ethnic culture in the lore and practices of the pre-Christian past and a rejection of universal transcendental religion, in favor of the local, the particular, the polytheistic, and the animist. Particularly in the United States, Pagans have challenged governmental accommodations for existing religions by demanding equal status in public spaces. Contemporary Pagan groups began forming in the 1930s, but the largest, Wicca, emerged in the United Kingdom in the early 1950s.
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Contemporary Visual Art and Religion
Dominic Colonna
Contemporary visual art that uses themes and symbols of particular religious traditions has the potential to alienate both those who are adherents of those traditions and those who are non-adherents. Such art is often characterized as sentimental, superstitious, naïve, exclusivist, or triumphalist by modern standards of judgment. At the same time, efforts to avoid exclusivism or triumphalism in contemporary visual art can render the meanings of works so vague that it is hard to identify a work with any particular religion. For these reasons and more, the art world tends to disparage the benign use of religious themes and symbols in art and tends to accept works that are transgressive—that is, art that transgresses the boundaries of religious decorum.
Material and visual culture studies provide ways for the art world to find value in and analyze the use of religious themes and symbols in contemporary visual art. These approaches have widened the scope of works that might be identified as contemporary visual art: popular, mass-produced, and folk art are all within the purview of analyses of contemporary visual art. These studies examine how religious themes and symbols function in religious communities and in the wider communities of which they are a part. Even when studying the function of visual and material culture within a particular religious tradition, these studies tend to identify common or essential themes in different religions. The contemporary preference for being “spiritual but not religious” emerges in the identification of common religious themes and symbols.
Contemporary theological approaches to the study and appreciation of contemporary visual art are “insider” methods that religious adherents use to assess critically the value of the use of religious themes and symbols in modern culture. These insider methods identify orthodox uses of religious themes and symbols in contemporary visual art, not only to identify negatively that which is unorthodox or heterodox, but also to identify works of art that celebrate religious beliefs, make traditional beliefs relevant, and help to shape new ways of engaging the wider community. Theological methods often incorporate the work of material and visual studies scholars. Like these scholars, theologians seek to affirm the value of unique religious beliefs in an increasingly pluralistic world.
Article
Contextualizing the Proud Boys: Violence, Misogyny, and Religious Nationalism
Margo Kitts
One of the most strident voices in the US alt-right scene in the early 21st century belongs to the Proud Boys. Although born only in 2016, the group shares sentiments with older accelerationist groups who seek to return the United States to what they see as its pristine origins. “Alt-right,” “alt-lite,” and “white” are disputed terms among the group’s various chapters, but xenophobia and misogyny are two pervasive themes. Similarly to other voices on the alt-right, the Proud Boys vary in the degree to which they will accommodate racialist Christianity and/or a romanticized Nordic spiritualism. However, to the extent that religion can be made to serve the establishment of a white ethnostate, even the most atheistic among them have come to see religious tolerance as a pragmatic necessity. What is most religious about them, however, can be understood as resembling European metapolitics, which exploits atavistic dreams, mythic symbols, and eschatological values to foster a cultural awakening to nativist dreams. The Proud Boys version of this nativist dream is their aspiration to return to a purported Judeo-Christian ethical foundation for Western civilization, together with a Greco-Roman model of the Republic.
Article
Conventual Visual Culture in Ecuador
Carmen Fernández-Salvador
Women have been typically excluded from the study of colonial art from Quito, except for a few salient names, among them Isabel de Cisneros, the daughter of celebrated painter Miguel de Santiago. Other than Cisneros, indeed, other women artists did not sign documents such as contracts or testaments. More importantly, the artistic canon has focused on sculpture and painting, and thus women’s artworks, usually described as miniature, has been traditionally deemed as a lesser form of art. Other than Cisneros, however, there is ample evidence that other women engaged in artistic creation. Estefanía de San José Dávalos, a member of the Creole nobility, may have learnt to paint along with other arts such as singing or playing musical instruments. Estefanía entered the convent of El Carmen Moderno in Quito, where she probably continued to practice the art of painting. Sister María de la Merced, from the convent of La Concepción, in Cuenca, signed a painting depicting the Virgin of Mercy, while the Clarise nun Gertrudis de San Ildefonso may have practiced drawing to translate her visionary experiences, as an act of obedience to her confessor. As Estefanía, María de la Merced, and Gertrudis, other nuns silently made many of the anonymous works that are still preserved in nunneries. Artmaking was probably connected to Christian piety and devotion, as it accompanied spiritual exercises. Shaping a conventual visual culture, aesthetic similarities are evidenced between painting and other forms of artistic creation practiced by women, such as embroidery, manuscript illumination and the making of devotional objects.
Article
Conversions to Islam in Mexico
Camila Pastor
Conversion to Islam in Mexico has accelerated in the early 21st century, thanks to both increased migration from Muslim-majority countries and the expanding global, regional, and local networks among Islamic religious communities. Despite there being no mosques in the country until the 1980s, official figures from Mexican censuses show the number of Muslims doubling between 2000 and 2010 and again in 2020. Though many communities were built in urban centers, outreach and proselytizing activities have extended into rural regions as well and have included Shia and Sufi as well as Sunni groups. Thus, the establishment of Muslim communities in Mexico has become a transnational phenomenon, with implications for the wider diaspora. This is demonstrated through an exploration of the historiography and ethnography of Islam and by drawing from data collected during the Ethnographic Census of Muslims in Mexico (2011–2014) and using interviews with converts, migrants, and diplomatic personnel to identify some of the core characteristics and consequences of Mexican Islam as convert Islam.
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Cosmic War
Mark Juergensmeyer
A “cosmic war” is an imagined battle between metaphysical forces—good and evil, right and wrong, order and chaos—that lies behind many cases of religion-related violence in the contemporary world. These transcendent spiritual images have been implanted onto the social and political scene, magnifying ordinary worldly conflict into sacred encounter. There is nothing specific to Christianity, Islam, or any other religion about this idea of cosmic war. Every religious tradition contains images of grand battles that have a divine valence to them. Hence every religion has some kind of mythic or legendary scenario of warfare that can be transported into contemporary conflict and elevate a social or political confrontation into cosmic war.
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The Cosmological Vision of Martin Luther
Mickey L. Mattox
Martin Luther was not an original contributor to the study of cosmology, and if one were to judge only by his explicit remarks on the matter, it would seem to have been of little interest to him. He was, however, every bit a man of his times, and as such he assumed what educated people of his times assumed, including in the matter of the nature and structure of reality. The world in which he came of age was informed by a compelling vision of the universe as a whole. Astronomical observation and mathematical calculation in the traditions of Aristotle and Ptolemy had long since combined with philosophical and religious speculation to render Luther’s world a coherent “cosmos” (Gk. kosmos, “order” or “world”), at the center of which reposed a stationary sphere, the earth. This world was surrounded at ever-increasing heights by the heavenly spheres, each of them thought to be wheeling in at tremendous rates of speed that increased as one moved up through their heights: first the moon, then the planets, the stars, and ultimately the prime mover. This long-traditional view of the cosmos rendered reality itself an arena of intense motion and beauty.
Taken in a broad scientific and aesthetic sense, cosmology provided not only an interpretation of the heavens but also an imaginative lens through which to experience and understand one’s self and one’s world. Though he quibbled over some of the details, Luther clearly viewed himself and his world through that very lens. During his university studies in Erfurt for the bachelor and master of arts degrees, he read cosmology as a subject covered in the integrated approach to learning set forth in a curriculum based on the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). In combination with other later medieval notions—such as the understanding of the human body and its four humors or the sublunar sphere and its four constituent elements (earth, water, air, fire)—cosmology became for Luther what it was for all his educated peers, that is, a world view. Thus, while Luther was not a cosmologist per se, the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmos provided a set of background beliefs that informed his theology and world view at every level. He also developed a distinctive understanding of the reality and exercise of power and authority, both on the earth and in the heavens.
Article
Council on American-Islamic Relations
Vincent F. Biondo III
The Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) is the premier civil rights organization for Muslims in the United States. Founded in Washington, DC, in 1994 with an emphasis on public relations and media communications, over two decades it has expanded to about two hundred employees at thirty-two offices in major US cities in nineteen states, according to its official website. The organization emphasizes that it is structured so that these offices operate independently. In addition to tracking hate crimes, these offices provide or arrange for legal services in areas such as civil rights, immigration, and homeland security. The story of the organization’s growth and success reveals key issues for American Muslim involvement in politics, including those surrounding the First Amendment and the intersection of religion and race. In 2016, the National Board named its first female Chair, Roula Allouch, a lawyer from Cincinnati, who in the University of Kentucky’s Law School alumni magazine was described as “the only Muslim in her class,” and a person who “knows how to put people at ease . . . to break down misconceptions [and] seek peace.” The CAIR Board has become more diverse and representative since its founding and has ventured into defending non-Muslims from civil rights violations.
Today CAIR describes its mission on its national website and in many state office annual reports as follows: “To enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.” While it is primarily a civil rights organization, since its founding the organization’s leaders have found it necessary to counter misinformation by introducing educational information about Islam. Key civil rights efforts it has engaged in include support for thousands of immigration and religious discrimination cases every year, documenting hate crimes in annual reports, and challenging anti-shari’ah legislation. CAIR further leads educational efforts by coordinating diversity training sessions, a public library project, and media appearances.
