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Cyborg or goddess? Religion and posthumanism from secular to postsecularThis article works on the premise that critical posthumanism both exposes and calls into question the criteria by which Western modernity has defined the boundaries between nature, humanity, and technology. Yet the religious, cultural and epistemological developments of what is known as the ‘postsecular’ may signal a further blurring of another set of distinctions characteristic of modernity: between sacred and secular, belief and non-belief. Using Donna Haraway’s famous assertion that she would ‘rather be a cyborg than a goddess’, I consider whether critical posthumanism’s valorisation of cyborg identities is also capable of negotiating this ‘final frontier’ between immanence and transcendence, secular and sacred, humanity and divinity. In essence: is there space for a religious dimension to visions of the posthuman?
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Philosophy of religion as a way of life: Askesis and ethicsPhilosophy as a way of life has been undergoing a revival in recent years. This essay explores how the central idea of the spiritual exercises can be used to develop an account of philosophy of religion as a way of life. It details some of the contemporary uses and trajectories of philosophy as a way of life. Through engaging the religiously inflected philosophies of Karl Jaspers and Simone Weil, this paper argues that their thought can present an account of philosophy of religion as a way of life that is both ethically and transcendentally oriented.
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Nationalising bodies, shifting loyalties: Exhuming the war dead in a changing EuropeThroughout Europe, thousands of national cemeteries contain the bodies of soldiers killed in the two world wars, each carefully divided according to nationality. Yet, as this essay argues, determining the nationality of the dead was never so clear cut. Focusing on burials within Britain, it explores four categories of dead that demonstrate the fluidity of national belonging. The first group are the erroneously identified dead, who had been incorrectly identified during conflict. Second are the unwanted dead. These were the bodies of spies or people branded as traitors, who were stripped of their nationality post-war and barred from national cemeteries. Third are the contested dead; soldiers who died in the uniform of one army, but were later reclaimed by another country. Finally, there are the convenient dead, who were simply assigned a nationality in the wake of conflict. Military cemeteries, as the article concludes, were artificial creations, based not only on national identity, but also on post-war decision making.
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Mesmerism, female identity, and narratives of control in fiction 1840-1900This thesis critically analyses the representation of mesmerism in nineteenth-century fictional literature in respect to its influence on women’s minds and bodies. The thesis encompasses a sixty-year timespan to examine how the relationship between mesmerism and women reflects the patriarchal dynamics and distribution of power and authority in contemporary British, European, and American society. The project seeks to stand alongside existing research on literary mesmerism and gender dynamics, from such scholars as Ann Heilmann, Fiona Coll, and Susan Poznar, by incorporating the analysis into a broader discussion of themes such as control and consent, domesticity and marriage, women’s health, the interplay between physical and psychic identity, and nineteenth-century understandings of ideas that would inform later psychoanalytical concepts such as the id/ego/superego, and sociological concepts such as the Medusa complex. The thesis will conclude by discussing how nineteenth-century attitudes towards mesmerism and its effect on women continues to inform modern-day perceptions of the trance state.
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Later medieval ecclesiastical vestments: Commercial networksThis chapter foregrounds the form and materiality of the St John’s textiles by exploring commercial networks across the period 1300 to 1500.
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The extraordinary and the ordinary: The possibilities and problems of Eberhard Jüngel's HermeneuticsEberhard Jüngel insists on the absolute transcendence of God and on human language as the vehicle for that transcendence. In doing so, he makes claims both about the power of language and the limits of humanity in relation to language. In exploring this tension, the essay will examine whether Jüngel successfully navigates the tension between transcendence and hermeneutics, looking at the ways forward he provides, as well as the questions raised by his solutions. The essay will note the influence of the New Hermeneutic and Heidegger's late work on Jüngel's understanding of metaphors and speech‐events, and bring his insights into critical dialogue with the post‐structuralism of Jacques Derrida and the stress on ordinary language in relation to the divine in Rowan Williams. I will argue that Jüngel's stress on the passivity of the human in relation to the freeness of divine language can challenge Derrida's argument that language is always deconstructive, and that Williams's use of Wittgenstein can bring Jüngel's thought back to the ordinary in productive ways. Both that freeness and that groundedness in language can then allow for more interaction between hermeneutics and transcendence to enable us to think with, but beyond, Jüngel's hermeneutics.
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Monastic avoidance: Piety and ambivalence in pre-2016 TurkeySince the failed coup attempt in 2016, much academic attention has been devoted to the shadowy and now defunct political alliance between the AKP and the Hizmet community. Yet this scholarship only considers Hizmet as the level of its leadership and overlooks the core followers of Fethullah Gülen—mostly hard-working provincial schoolteachers and administrators. How did these individuals experience the movement’s controversial political dimensions (which were public for some years in advance of 2016) and make sense of it in the context of their daily lives of piety and hard work? In this paper, I present retrospective ethnographic observations from fieldwork undertaken in a Hizmet community in Turkey between 2013 and 2015 and argue for their relevance in understanding the community’s trajectory up to and including the present day. Specifically, I observe a tension in the lives of individuals who were committed to ethical Muslim living but were also implicated—if only through association with Fethullah Gülen—in Hizmet’s pre-2016 political agenda. Recent debates in the anthropology of Islam concerning the place of moral ambivalence in Muslim lives provide a starting point (Schielke 2010, Schielke and Debevec 2012, Fadil and Fernando 2015), whereafter I analyse Hizmet as a monastic community and argue that monastic practises allowed my interlocutors to balance competing empirical realities and maintain ethical coherence in their daily lives. I use the term ‘monastic avoidance’ to explain how Hizmet affiliates embedded themselves in tight-knit communities of piety in order to deflect their complicity in larger politico-religious projects that were associated with deception and illegality.
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The Dandy in the pink waistcoat: Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Journal of a Frenchman’This essay considers Charlotte Brontë’s serialised ‘Journal of a Frenchman’ in her ‘Young Men’s Magazine’. It discusses the representation of Parisian life, showing how this missing fragment fits into the series and the wider context of Charlotte’s engagement with the French language and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the latter providing the inspiration for many aspects of the Frenchman’s account of his life.
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Finding faithfulness: how might telling stories of faithfulness generate practices of faithfulness?This thesis is a response to recognition of implicit ethnic values in my multiethnic context, and the challenges they make for flourishing communal relations, especially across our ethnic divides. I develop and test a facilitation model to encourage communication that honours the other/Other in their difference in a church congregation. Finding faithfulness describes this journey towards relational community. It is a practical theology research project in an urban multiethnic congregation in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. It connects scripturally themed questions, an appreciative stance and world café’s hospitality-based facilitative form to create WisdomCafé. Its contribution to the field of practical theology is a methodological framework where substantial engagement with scripture is woven through qualitative empirical research in a unique way. WisdomCafé facilitates discipleship and spiritual growth in multiethnic communities through storytelling and reflection. This search for faithfulness engaged with the judgment parables (Mt. 24:36-25:46),1 stories where all are called to give account to Christ on his return as Judge, found faithful or unfaithful, and invited into or excluded from more responsibility and relationship. From my hermeneutic of relational faithfulness, I identify themes of relational and ethical accountability, which I develop into the questions, stories and reflections for WisdomCafé conversations. These in turn connect with the quest for relational flourishing within and beyond the borders of congregations in multiethnic communities. Results from this small yet rich database saw laypeople taking surprising initiatives to engage in their communities from the ground up. In its mix of scripture, structure, story and reflection, WisdomCafé offers a practical response to questions of relationality, power, creativity, identity and voice. Through its indirect communication style, it bypasses defences to share power and validate voice, renewing personal, communal and cultural dynamics as it encourages recognition of the sacred in one another and in daily practices of life. The original communication model that this thesis describes is of interest to those working to strengthen relationships across boundaries, particularly ethnic and generational, in conversation with experience and scripture. Its framework is applicable to other passages of scripture and methods of interpretation. It offers insight from the margins of cultures into the challenge of welcoming minority voices to speak and provoking the majority/colonial culture to listen.
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Book review: Frank Trentmann, Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022Book review of Frank Trentmann, Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022
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Eldritch theology - A comparative study of Lovecraft as theologianThis study aims to build a cohesive and considered picture of the implicit theology present within Lovecraft’s fiction, using comparative methods of study that value the contrast between Lovecraft’s work and the work of major existential theologians. Arguing along thematic lines, the study looks at five different aspects of Lovecraft’s thought in order to develop an ‘Eldritch Theology’. This theology considers Lovecraft’s presentation of the divine and the idea of ‘Gods’ as both transcendent and fundamentally other as the base of his theology, and Lovecraft’s method of using divine characters as symbols upon which both worldbuilding and major theological beliefs are grounded. This study further considers the nature of religious experience as often confronting and fearful, both within Lovecraft’s presentation and within the experience of real believers, yet nevertheless leading to glimpses of ultimate truth. Religious experiences of this kind not only build a very distinct sense of connection to truth, but also drastically influence the lives and praxis of those individuals who undergo them. Taking into account both the reality of religious experience within Lovecraft’s work and the lives which spring forth from those experiences, the final chapters of this study consider the question of human proximity to truth. To wit, Lovecraft presents our access to truth as at once a pressing and immanent need as well as a futile endeavour which will never see fulfilment. Nevertheless, the human separation from ultimate truth as expressed within his work is a useful and powerful critique of the religiosity of Lovecraft’s day and a continually relevant dialogue partner in our own, suited for the refining and development of theology and religious thought in a pessimistic modern world.
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The Black Archive: LogopolisStructure is the essence of matter, and the essence of structure is mathematics.’ Logopolis (1981) is a mournful epic of cosmic destruction, obsolescence and collapse. This Black Archive investigates the changes before and behind the camera, explores the story’s themes of entropy and rebirth, and places it in the context of a specific moment in the history of computing.
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Reflection: A Novel, with Critical ComponentReflection is a novel which examines Margot Saunders’s life from her childhood to a time when she believes herself to be the victim of sexual assault, through her discovery that the assault never happened – it was a misconstrual of events and facts – and onward to her finding a certain peace with which to go on into the future. The novel covers the time period from 1979 to 2023, and is set in France and various locations in the UK. The critical commentary, divided into three parts, analyses firstly the conception of the novel (from disquiet at the adamance of the ‘Believe Her’ movement which left no space for misunderstanding, memory lapses or human error) and themes of feminism and social conditioning and how these have affected women and girls throughout the decades and various waves of feminist action. The second chapter sets Reflection alongside seven contemporary novels and compares and contrasts the various technical and structural methods used by the four various authors. This chapter discusses three of Ian McEwan’s works: Atonement (2001), On Chesil Beach (2007), and Lessons (2022), as well as Kate Reed Petty’s True Story (2020), The Reader (1997) by Bernhard Schlink, J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (1976), and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992). The third and final chapter looks at the writing process: choices as to structure, voicing, and narrative techniques employed in the writing of Reflection.
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A meeting of peoples: PAS metalwork, material, and documentary evidence for cultural exchange in Anglo-Saxon Shropshire and the Mercian West MidlandsThis paper analyses the intractable and fragmented history of Shropshire from c.500–1050. The written sources for this period are extremely poor in Shropshire’s case but are now being enriched by excavations and, more widely, by PAS finds and sculpture. The concept of ‘persistent places’ in the landscape is used to pursue key sites through specific episodes in Anglo-Saxon Shropshire’s history that can be established by reference to the wider historical events within the emerging kingdoms of England. Through this mechanism, a more detailed picture emerges of how Mercian Shropshire gradually came together so that by the eleventh century, the new shire had been created as a stable entity with rich cultural relationships in the face of external threats from its surrounding polities: Welsh, English and Viking.
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Gathering Young Children’s Unfiltered Thoughts about DisabilityWebinar presented to Virginia University Center for Excellence in Disabilities & Pediatrics. Aim: to examine children’s early understandings of disability and consider approaches that early year’s and primary/elementary practitioners can use to engage children in discussions around concepts of disability.
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How much History is in the Passion Narratives? Violence, Ideology, Historicity, and the Seditious Jesus HypothesisThis article reviews Fernando Bermejo-Rubio’s monograph, They Suffered under Pontius Pilate: Jewish Anti-Roman Resistance and the Crosses at Golgotha (2023). This book is the latest publication arguing for the ‘seditious Jesus’ hypothesis, the idea that Jesus was an armed revolutionary. It is argued that the volume rightly critiques some theological tendency in New Testament scholarship to downplay or ignore violence inherent in the Jesus tradition, but the argument that the men crucified with Jesus were either some of his disciples or sympathetic to his violent cause fails to convince. Despite arguing for historical minimalism in relation to the Gospel material, Bermejo-Rubio builds his case on the material he judges to be historical, but that is better explained by the imagination of the evangelists.
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A reassessment of the Galli and the Archigalli of Magna Mater, their differences and their citizen status in RomeAcademics have regularly debated the question of how the Galli, priests of Magna Mater/Cybele, fit into the Roman social milieu. Several have argued that membership of the Galli was restricted to foreign citizens only (citing Domitian’s legislation) whilst others have argued that the chief priests—the Archigalli—were Roman citizens, while the ‘lower’ Galli were non-citizens, thus separating both within the Cybele cult. These views remain prevalent in modern discussions on the cult, and have not undergone significant scrutiny or analysis. By assessing these views and the existing material and literary evidence for the Galli, this article argues that the Archigalli and Galli were indistinct in terms of behaviour and affiliation. Moreover, this article uses archaeological and literary evidence to suggest that the Galli most likely included Roman citizens among their members, contrasting with the prevailing view of them as foreign residents in Rome.
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Living amongst and with trees: Botanical agency and the archaeology of plant-human relationshipsThe last decade has seen a significant change in the way the humanities have approached the study of botanical life. Termed ‘the plant turn’, this questions traditional views of plants as a largely passive form of life, seeing them instead as living beings capable of acting upon and with other elements of the world. This paper argues that such a perspective offers significant potential for the archaeological study of human-plant relationships. Using a case-study on the lives of trees and humans at the early Mesolithic settlement at Star Carr (UK) it shows that by viewing plants as active participants in past worlds we can achieve a richer understanding of both non-human and human life, and the complex ways they interacted with each other. It also suggests that by making more of this approach, archaeology can help address our own, contemporary relationship with the botanical world.
