Visions and Viewpoints
“Reestablishing” a Christian America
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Steven Green
The United States has long considered itself to be on the vanguard of promoting religious freedom and equality. Central to achieving that regime – and for maintaining it into the future – was disestablishing official religion in America. The idea that disestablishment of religion was essential for religious freedom and equality was a distinctly American project, and that ideal became a model for a handful of other nation-states. True disestablishment did not occur until the 1940s, however, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally discarded a Christian conception of the state – or at least of the state’s responsibility to maintain a Christian culture – replacing it with an idea of legal secularism. Though a secular model had long been controversial, it has come under increasing attack by religious conservatives, Christian nationalists, Tea Party followers, and Trump supporters who seek to reestablish Christian influences and preferences in American culture (e.g., Muslim travel ban). This trend has found support from the conservative Supreme Court which has been gradually rewriting legal jurisprudence to allow for government favoritism of religion -- whether that is through government use of religious symbolism and government funding of religious activities, or through exemptions for religious actors from regulations and non-discrimination laws -- effectively transforming the secular-reinforcing aspect of the constitutional text. This paper examines this reestablishing trend in the culture and law, and of how it is impacting the international image of the United States and its ability to serve as a model for religious freedom and equality.
Is Nothing Sacred?: Christian Theology and the Rights of the Moon View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Dutney
In February 2021 a draft Declaration of the Rights of the Moon was posted on the website of the Australian Earth Law Alliance (AELA). The conversations that resulted in the Declaration included voices from First Nations, law, ethics, archaeology, economics and ecology. It has been a consciously inclusive, interdisciplinary conversation. The Declaration is deliberately framed as a “draft” intended to initiate a global discussion. In this paper I contribute a religious voice to the discussion, a Christian voice. In particular, I explore the way recent themes in ecological, contextual and post-colonial theology resonate with the discussion around the Declaration. I examine what it may mean, from the point of view of Christian theological ethics, to understand the Moon to be “a sovereign natural entity in its own right”, possessing “fundamental rights, which arise from its existence in the universe”.
Interpreting Joseph’s Dreams: Religious Hybridity in Poema de Yusuf (c. 1300, Spain)
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alexander Korte
The Poema de Yusuf is a 14th-century poem based on the Quranic version of the story of Joseph. Traditionally, this text has been studied in the exegetic tradition vis-à-vis Islamic theology. Nonetheless, in this paper I argue for a critical reapproximation to the text that is more sensitive to the political and artistic realities of the Iberian mudéjar community whence it was crafted. The term mudéjar describes both the communities of Muslims who continued to live in Christian Iberia after the Reconquest, as well as the artistic productions of these communities, which often blended Islamic, Christian, and Hebrew traditions. The Poema de Yusuf is one of the best examples of this cultural hybridity, exemplified by the fact that it was composed in aljamiado (Castilian-Romance using Arabic characters). Dedicated to the Quranic tradition, this literature can be read as a defiant reaction to increasingly hostile policies that restricted mudéjar culture in late-medieval Christian Iberia, including the use of the Arabic language itself. At the same time, the anonymous poet adapted his source material to better align with the artistic currents of the region. I highlight some key characteristics that Poema de Yusuf shares with contemporary Christian narratives of the cuaderna vía tradition, specifically the emphasis on memory and textual interpretation found also in Libro de Apolonio and Libro de Alexandre (c. 1250). My analysis thus highlights the lasting legacy of a dynamic, hybrid mudéjar culture in the Peninsula, and in so doing rejects the myth of the Christian Reconquest.
President Donald Trump - Christian Support and Criticism, and the Issue of Culture War View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kjell Olof Urban Lejon
The purpose of this study is to display the reasons for the support of Donald Trump by Evangelical Christians, but also criticism of Trump from a Christian perspective, both American and from a Nordic perspective. In addition, the author connects the issues involved to the larger topic of the culture war, i.e. the cultural conflict and struggle for control or dominance when it comes to values, beliefs, and practices, in American society.
