Inventing Wilderness

Newly available archaeological evidence has once again redefined the “origin” of landscape representations in China, while also providing much richer information about their material media and pictorial context. This chapter focuses on a group of images on bronze artifacts from the fifth to fourth century BCE, which juxtapose scenes of wilderness with scenes of human civilization typified by ritual performances. These pictorial compositions evince many parallels with the Gateways through Mountains and Seas, a mythical/geographical text transmitted from ancient times. Together they propel us to contemplate why the ancient Chinese turned their mind and eye to uninhabited nature and depicted it at this particular moment. Significantly, this was also the time in Chinese history when geographical exploration was actively taking place and had become a central topic in the poetic and religious imagination.

A Racial-Religious Imagination: Syriac Christians, Iconic Bodies, and the Sensory Politics of Ethical Difference in the Netherlands

Since 9/11, political debate over immigration in Europe is often posed as a question of Islam’s distance from Europe’s putatively Judeo-Christian ethical tradition—and therefore a matter of neither explicitly racial nor religious animus. This article interrogates this claim from the perspective of Syriac Orthodox Christians living in the Netherlands, who, despite their conspicuous Christianity, are frequently told by both the state and their neighbors that their ethnoreligious difference is not meaningfully different from Muslim difference. Drawing on fieldwork in the Dutch subprovince of Twente, I analyze both everyday and bureaucratic moments of misrecognition as sites of racialization that illuminate a Dutch racial-religious imagination rooted in post-Calvinist theological anxieties over social reproduction. By showing how minoritized bodies are read as icons of invisible reproductive relations, I deploy the Orthodox Christian doctrine of the holy icon to theorize secular modern racialization as a process of ethical differentiation, classification, and control over reproductive power.

Reimagining Religious Imagination, in Theory and in Practice

Jack Miles, Religion as We Know It: An Origin Story (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2020). T.M. Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). David Morgan, Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2019). Jeffrey J. Kripal, Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

The Spiritual Globe

The Renaissance recovery of Ptolemy’s Geography may have laid the foundations for a scientific cartography, but the new interest in maps, which provided an increasingly sophisticated orientation to the unknown, also opened up a new prophetic space. And the growing knowledge of the globe would engage the religious imagination of many, as salvation moved to a planetary scale and fostered a long-standing desire to bring the entire world and all its peoples under one faith. As a result, spiritual desires themselves contributed to the expansion of cartography. This article traces this emerging apocalyptic cartography not only in Christian but also in Jewish and Islamic contexts. For each tradition, the ultimate goal, deeply felt in the early modern period, was the realization of a Beautiful Ending: the Second Coming of Jesus for the Christians, the arrival of the Messiah for the Jews, and the return of the Mahdi for the Muslims. But, while each tradition drew on similar apocalyptic visions of the End, their dreams of unity were ultimately exclusive. The ideal of the spiritual globe not only united, it also divided the world.

Conversion, apostasy, or hybridity? The terrible, troubled, transformative experience of Paul as exemplar for missiology in an age of multiplicity

Scholars and practitioners alike celebrate the Apostle Paul as an exemplar of Christian mission. But few emphasize how the ministry and practices of the biblical author developed amid incredible intrareligious conflict and relational wreckage. Embroiled in tension over doctrinal and ritual changes, plagued by vitriolic attacks on his character, and caught up in a web of splintered relationships, Paul offers contemporary people of faith a lesson on unity in diversity for mission in an age of hybridity. Embracing the “terrible and troubled” experience of Paul enables us to bring into relief a transformative hermeneutical strategy for negotiating new forms of religious life and multiplicity in belonging. This article will show how competing cultural and religious codes shaped the Apostle’s symbolic universe, causing violence, tension, conflict, and rejection, before reconciling in an ethic of love in hybridity. After making a case for the reclamation of the troubled textual Pauline experience over an idealized picture of early Christian mission, I will argue for the critical importance of Paul’s Damascus Road experience by narratively resituating it from typological “conversion” story to mystical encounter with the Holy Other that catalyzed a new religious imagination for cultivating a revolutionary egalitarian, inclusive pattern of religious life. Then, I will use Paul’s narrative from Galatians and his treatment of holiness in 1 Corinthians to show how ruptures in the Apostle’s journey led him through fractures and failures into spiritual maturity. By welcoming the gendered, classed, and cultic other into fellowship, Paul also found his quintessential theological insights: the new creation and life in the Spirit. Paul’s response to the invitation of the risen Jesus and his record of the missional life that followed offers missiology a way through monocultural approaches and theological exclusivism into a constructive spirituality that unifies radically different factions into one holy, hybrid body.

The Religious Imagination and Contemporary Public Theology

The process of secularization, known as the process of the privatization of religion or its denial from the public square, is a heritage of Modernity. This reality had (and continues to have) important consequences for Christian theology. Hence, the renewal of Christian theology is urgent, and has a lot at stake, especially regarding the need for a renewed Christian message within contemporary society. Though public theology appeared as a normal consequence of the need for the renewal of Christian theology, this renewal is not necessarily present in many of its methods. The rigidity of both of its theological methods and language remains a problem for public theology. This article suggests that the new shift in anthropology should be taken into consideration when constructing a viable public theology nowadays. The category of “religious imagination” is of utmost importance since it takes into consideration the new definition of the human being, which is in line more with postmodernism than modernity. Thus, the article sketches the possible substantial contribution the religious imagination brings towards the revitalization of contemporary public theology. Moreover, the article mentions recent Romanian studies on the imagination, which stresses, even more, the richness hidden within it and its possible usage for the construction of a viable public theology.

Understanding Religion and Politics in Africa: A Call for the Re-enchantment of the Scholarly Imagination

In his 2015 book Christianity, Development, and Modernity in Africa, Paul Gifford argues that Christianity in Africa is bifurcated into an ‘enchanted’ and a ‘disenchanted’ form. He presents the conundrum that the enchanted form is pervasive yet incompatible with modernity and consistently ignored by scholars. In this review article I draw on Gifford’s conundrum as a springboard to propose a new angle from which to analyse religion and politics in postcolonial Africa: one that moves beyond received dichotomies between tradition and modernity, public and private life, or this-worldly and otherworldly concerns. The work of Michael Schatzberg, Peter Geschiere, Ogbu Kalu, and Emmanuel Katongole moves in various ways past the oppositions that undermine Gifford’s work. In dialogue with these scholars, I articulate a plea to scholars of religion and politics in Africa to develop an appreciation for the powerful role of the religious imagination in African and global arenas of power.

Foundations I

The chapter studies the so-called doctrines of universal faith, developed in chapter XIV of the Tractatus theologico-politicus. The theoretical truth or falsity of such doctrines is irrelevant to their purpose. They only serve to structure the collective religious imagination of common people according to a certain practical standard which consists in the exercise of justice and charity alone. It is, however, still necessary that those who profess doctrines of faith should believe them to be true in order for them to fulfill their practical purpose. This insight prompts Spinoza to break with the model of doctrinal minimalism otherwise favored by tolerationist thinkers in his intellectual context. Contrary to them, he maintains that the so-called adiaphora play a significant role in ensuring that people embrace true religion. The argument is at the heart of Spinoza’s cautious and in some respects conflicted defense of religious pluralism.