In 2004 and 2008, South African president Jacob Zuma notoriously declared that his party, the African National Congress, will “rule until Jesus comes back.” The recent national election results favor his prediction with the ANC winning its fifth national election since 1994.
Essays
The Immanent Frame publishes essays reflecting on current events, debates in the field, and other public matters relevant to scholarship in secularism and religion.
The Immanent Frame typically publishes essays by invitation only. To see our open calls for content, click here.
To read essays from our archive that are written by scholars introducing or reviewing a recently published book, click here and here.
Pope Francis and liberation theology
by Brian HamiltonOne year into Francis’s papacy, many observers—both inside and outside the Catholic community—are still holding their breath. He has certainly made a good first impression.
Four patriarchs and a Baptist preacher
by Brittany Pheiffer Noble and Wei ZhuA brief glance back at the history of Ukraine reveals a religiously diverse assortment of leaders.
The forgotten story of the Flushing Remonstrance
by Wei ZhuWalking down Bowne Street in Flushing, Queens, you may see a most interesting sign. “Bowne House; Built in 1661," it reads, "A National Shrine to Religious Freedom.” Flushing is known for many things—the New York Mets, for example, or its Chinatown. It is not, however, known for being the location of one of the first debates over religious conscience and tolerance in the American colonies.
The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts
by Daniel Steinmetz-JenkinsThe last decade has witnessed a veritable scholarly obsession with the subject of political theology: a multifaceted concept with varying meanings ranging from theocracy studies to the origins of contemporary political ideas.
Whose religion? What freedom?
by Helge ÅrsheimReligious freedom has become an international concept: As the scope of the recently concluded Politics of Religious Freedom project attests to, the grammar of religious freedom has spread far and wide, creating a broad and complex field where international norms and procedures frequently clash with deeply embedded local conceptions of law, religion, and freedom.
Vinyl prayers
by John Lardas ModernPrayer may be an act of gratitude after the fact. It may be a weapon, a request to heal the body or boost the brain, an epistemic cry, a meditation, a mediation, a quip, a plea, a means of passive resistance, a wonderful gift from God. Or any manner of combination.Whatever prayer is or has been, it often seems to be bound up in the play of transgression and transcendence. Within the move across, there are the moves against and the moves beyond. Against and beyond simultaneously, continuously, even as a prayer is conceived and uttered, even after it is ignored or answered.
Odd to each other
by Tanya Marie LuhrmannIt is a distinct honor when someone as lettered as Leon Wieseltier takes one on in public, as he does in “Dumbing Religion Down in the New York Times,” published October 24 in The New Republic. He does seem to have written this essay in one of his grumpier moods. He accused me of proselytizing for religion (or, to capture the tenor of the critique, of turning The New York Times into a Pentecostal tent revival, as one of my own readers, Jon Bialecki, pointed out). That’s not my understanding of the intent of my columns or of my work. I see myself as pointing out that an activity which makes many readers of The New York Times spit nails—or at least shake their heads in bafflement—has something to recommend it. I mostly ignore the politics because, while there is much to say about the political swing of many evangelicals, sharp writers like those who appear in The New Republic and The New York Times already say it well. But there is nothing inherently right-wing about evangelical religion and there are a lot of left-wing evangelicals to prove it. My goal, instead, is to follow the lead of one of the great founders of anthropology, Emile Durkheim, who said that we could not understand religion if we began with the premise that religion was founded on a lie. He did not mean that God was real (he was a devout atheist). He meant that if we wanted to understand why religion is so palpably important to so many people, we need not to begin with the assumption that they are idiots.
What is religion in China? A brief history
by Wei ZhuThe complex and ever-changing relationship between the Chinese state and the nation’s religions stretches back thousands of years. While the state never struggled with religious leaders for power, it governed an embedded religiosity in the population, one best described as diffused, non-exclusive, and pluralistic. As a companion to The Immanent Frame's newly launched series of essays on the state of religion in China, this piece embarks on a brief historical survey, outlining the wide variety of beliefs and practices that religion in China encapsulates, and paying particular attention to the events and philosophies that have shaped the policies of the atheist People’s Republic of China.
Occupy Gezi, beyond the religious-secular cleavage
by Ateş AltınorduThe protests in Turkey started on May 27 with a modest resistance movement against the destruction of Istanbul’s Gezi Park and the planned construction, in its place, of a replica of the Ottoman artillery barracks that formerly stood there (which, however, was also to include a shopping mall). The Occupy Gezi movement has since grown exponentially and spread to other Turkish cities, largely in response to police brutality and to the inflammatory speeches of Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The unprecedented scope and duration of the protests—and, even more importantly, the emergent movement’s pluralistic composition and inclusive political style—make it a genuinely new phenomenon in the ninety-year history of the Republic.