Contemporary Views
Asynchronous Session
Religion in a Scientific Age View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Agga Wansa
The relationship between religion and science is the subject of continued debate in philosophy and theology. To what extent are religion and science compatible? Are religious beliefs sometimes conducive to science, or do they inevitably pose obstacles to scientific inquiry? The interdisciplinary field of “science and religion”, also called “theology and science”, aims to answer these and other questions. It studies historical and contemporary interactions between these fields, and provides philosophical analyses of how they interrelate.
Religious Leadership and Power Abuse: Effects on Nigeria’s Development View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Muonwe, Chioma Maureen Udemba
Nigeria is reputed for having a teaming population of deeply religious men and women. Religion appears to have permeated all aspects of its life and existence, thus exercising enormous influence and control on its social, political, and cultural life. It has actually become a thriving enterprise, even to the point of being commercialized. Rarely have researches on religion in the continent been directed to critically questioning the relationship between religious leadership and power, whether as ‘soft’ or as overt power. Yet it is clear that religious leadership cannot be divorced from the issue of power. The palpability of power exercised over the populace by religious leaders is glaring. It could and has been used to good effect, as well as for fuelling crisis and impoverishment of the masses. This paper concentrates on the examination of Christianity and interrogates the relationship between Christian leadership and power in Nigeria. It investigates how Christian leaders have understood and utilized their power as mutual empowerment, but also as a manipulative instrument, thus fuelling the popular Marxist ideology of religion being the opium of the masses. The authors work on the hypothesis that proper management of power by religious leaders has a long way to go in influencing development in Nigeria both on the personal, social, political, and economic levels/realms. They discuss how Christian religious leadership could be steered toward service-oriented endeavour, anchored on social prophecy and mutual empowerment. The methodology employed is a hermeneutical-critical analysis of existing literature on the subject matter.
Southern Comfort in the Age of Jim Crow : Representing Soul Food in Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anton Smith
Defining the relationships among food, spirituality, representation, and identity has been a formidable but necessary undertaking in African American literature. Exploring such connections involves reconfiguring traditional boundaries, specifically those related to America’s reductive notions about the consumption patterns and spiritual beliefs of African Americans. This paper shows that soul food involves more than the pleasure of eating and feeding. African Americans use soul food as an essential tool to trace their “roots” and forge communal ties. First, I briefly outline how soul food emerged as a culinary practice in the United States and explain its development in a society that historically devalued African American humanity and intellectual abilities. From there, I examine two sermons from Ralph Ellison’s second novel Juneteenth where preachers embraced soul food not only to remember the fevers and deaths of the Middle passage and the subsequent destruction of African language and culture but also to celebrate the acquisition of a new identity. He represents soul food as a form of Southern comfort and cultural resistance. Through this culinary practice, Ellison illustrates how African Americans creatively took care of their souls while as they combatted discrimination and second-class citizenship. Ralph Ellison believed that African Americans could persevere, even thrive in spite of racism and inequality. Ellison felt that blacks were more than the sum of their circumstances. From Ellison’s point of view, African Americans had a rich culture that deserved recognition, admiration, respect and above all, remembrance.
"Religious Belief Has No Place Here": Between the Religious and the Secular in Greek Orthodox Organizations View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hannah Howard
The Orthodox Church of Greece - through its NGO and in cooperation with international aid agencies, other NGOs, and the Greek state - runs multiple shelters, schools, and food distribution projects in its capacity as a practical arm of contemporary government and civil society. While this seems on the surface to be the insertion of religious practice into the public sphere, these projects are instead wrapped up in a process of secularization themselves. In fact, in many of these spaces, actors nominally employed by the Church of Greece model their work itself as truly secular or irreligious. Based on 10 months of participant observation and interviews over the course of my dissertation fieldwork, this paper focuses on the employees of a teen migrant shelter and an adult migrant school. I look at the ways in which the institutionalized care of the Church is secularized in order to fit itself into the larger humanitarian and charitable landscape of Greece. Further, I consider the methods employees use to distance themselves from both the larger Church and religious practice while remaining employees of it. Finally, I highlight the ways in which religious symbols and ideologies still slip through the cracks of the organization’s secularized fortifications. In so doing, I offer an important reflection on the blurriness of the boundaries between the secular and the religious in modern national Churches.
Encountering Religious Difference in University: The Impact of Education on Students' Pluralism Orientation and Appreciative Attitudes View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alyssa Rockenbach
Drawing on data from the Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey (IDEALS) conducted in the United Kingdom, this paper explores how students’ attitudes toward religious diversity change during university and the role of educational experiences in producing change. One thousand students attending university in the UK participated in two waves (2021 and 2022) of survey data collection, allowing a longitudinal assessment their pluralism orientation (i.e., global citizenship, goodwill toward people of other religions, appreciation of interreligious commonalities and differences, and commitment to interfaith leadership and service) and appreciative attitudes toward eight groups (i.e., Atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and religious people). Paired t-tests and multivariate regression analyses were employed to examine the nature and predictors of change. The findings suggest that students do make appreciable gains in pluralism orientation and appreciative attitudes during their time in university. To some degree, their attitudes are related to identities they hold (e.g., gender, race sexuality, religion, political ideology), but aspects of their university experience play a noteworthy part in the process of change as well. The type of institution attended—that is, whether it was religiously affiliated, secular, or traditional elite—surfaced across numerous regression models, suggesting that contextual factors make an important contribution. Moreover, students who perceived their university as religiously diverse, felt safe and supported to express their perspectives, and encountered people and ideas who challenged their stereotypes and assumptions were more inclined than those who did not to grow more pluralistic and appreciative of religious difference.
Classifying Muslims - but How? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fadime Apaydin
Recent studies have pointed out the game-changing role of the 19th century, when Western values and modernity began to dominate the Islamic world, in attempts to classify Muslims. Historically, in general, Muslims have been classified as Sunnis, Shiites, Hanafis, Malikis, Mu‘tazilis or Ash'aris, based on their differing perspectives on certain issues, particularly the theological and legal differences. However, when it comes to the 19th century, despite a broad consensus among Muslims on the major Islamic sources such as the Qur'an and Hadith, the need to cope with the challenges of modernization has led to the emergence of new perspectives that prioritize reason in the interpretation of Islamic sources. In this regard, not only Muslim scholars but also Western intellectuals have attempted classifications of the contemporary Muslim world. However, the intellectual diversity of the Islamic world makes it difficult to define Muslim society within the limits of a single, widely recognized classification or typology. This paper examines how scholars classify Muslims and the arguments behind those classifications, with a focus on calls for Islamic reformation, employing a qualitative methodological design. To gain a better understanding of how Muslims are classified, the paper focuses on the classifications developed by scholars with different cultural backgrounds: John O. Voll and William E. Shepard (non-Muslims / outsiders) and Tariq Ramadan and Yahya Fozi (Muslims / insiders). The outcomes demonstrate that the proposed classifications are, in essence, typological approaches to how Islam manifests among Muslims, and Muslims are increasingly seeking reason-oriented solutions to their concerns.
