Surely this was not how most of its philosophers wanted liberalism or pluralism to turn out: a world in which steel gates have to be thrown up to protect life and property, and clothing torn off to protect both its wearers and its witnesses. When John Rawls wrote about how to construct political institutions and values able to reconcile social order with "the fact of pluralism," he counseled us to derive our approach to political justice and fairness from dispositions implicit in everyday interaction rather than from grand theological or philosophical schemes. Only by elevating "fundamental intuitive ideas" of fair play, social cooperation, and common sense to the level of organizing political principles could we avoid either endless bloody strife or—what seemed to him nearly as bad—a mere modus vivendi, a tense and always temporary stalemate in which balances of group and self-interest kept people from each others' throats while they waited for their own to reclaim the upper hand.
Latest posts
The multilingual Jewish blogosphere
by Ayala FaderWhen new media are introduced into religious communities, they often become sites for struggles over the very nature of mediation. In the new millennium, for example, some nonliberal (ultra-Orthodox) Jews in Brooklyn began to blog, creating debates about publics and alternative forms of authority and expression. In this essay I examine how the community vernaculars—nonstandard varieties of Yinglish and Yiddish, along with Standard English and Yiddish—were used in blogs to challenge the legitimacy of contemporary nonliberal Judaism, what bloggers called “the system.” I also explore how blogging practices were gendered and what kinds of publics—religious, secular, or otherwise imagined—were created through gendered language choice.
Overlapping senses of salvation
by Eric Hoenes del Pinal
With a Guatemala’s history of social and political instability, the place of religion in public life is often fraught with tensions and ambiguities, especially with regard to the nature of morality. These issues tend to crop up when the practices of competing religious institutions exit the relatively circumscribed spaces of churches and enter into erstwhile public spaces. The following examples, drawn from my own fieldwork and that of two other ethnographers of Christianity in Guatemala, illustrate these tensions and suggest that greater attention to the sensory dimensions of public religiosity can shed light on the varying ways that religious actors imagine and engage with public spaces.
CFP: Religious and Political Values
by Wei ZhuOn November 26-28, 2014, Adyan and the Lebanese American University will host a conference on “Religious and Political Values" in Byblos, Lebanon.
Constructing the Jewish public space: Community, identity, and collaboration
by Andrew BuckserThe construction of space constitutes one of the primary ways through which religions create templates for behavior. As they construct their physical spaces, religions create models of the ideal, places within which adherents can visualize and enact religious principles in a concrete way. Anthropologists have often discussed this process in terms of sacred space—edifices such as temples, churches, synagogues, and mosques can be seen as spatial embodiments of religious ideas, allowing worshipers to physically act out what are ordinarily abstract notions. Communal religions often extend this to the space of daily living, constructing living spaces, workplaces, and communal spaces that mimic those of the ideal world, allowing members to approximate in this dimension the virtues that will be fully realized in the world to come. Anthropologists have written extensively about this process, examining the construction of space in religious organizations ranging from churches to monasteries to ethnoreligious enclaves.
Short skirts and niqab bans: On sexuality and the secular body
by Jennifer A. Selby and Mayanthi L. Fernando
Introduced in Québec in March 2010, Bill 94 proposed requiring women to unveil their faces if they wanted to work in the public sector or access public services, including hospitals, universities, and public transportation. The bill was eventually tabled and was followed in November 2013 with Bill 60, which demanded in more generalist language the removal of conspicuous religious signs in order to dispense or use public services in the province. These Québécois bills—which have not passed—echo the logic of the April 2011 French law targeting the niqab (face veil) and banning the “dissimulation of the face” in public spaces. Both French and Québécois proponents of these laws cited gender equality and women’s emancipation—which they deemed foundational to French and Québécois values—as their primary goal. Despite Québec’s long insistence that it espouses a third path between Canadian multiculturalism and the French Jacobin model, Québec and France have increasingly converged to promote a model of secularism in which liberty and equality are articulated as sexual liberty and sexual equality. In fact, these niqab restrictions represent a broader secular-liberal discourse—what Joan W. Scott calls “sexularism”—that posits secularism as the best guarantor of women’s sexual freedom and sexual equality and, therefore, as that which distinguishes the West from the woman-oppressing rest, especially from Islam.