The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought

This chapter presents Slavophilism as having laid the foundations for the further development of Russian religious philosophy. The leading Slavophile thinkers in this respect were Aleksei Khomiakov and Ivan Kireevsky. Two main principles guided their religious thought: the compatibility of faith and reason, and the defence of human freedom, dignity, and personhood. Their signature religious-philosophical concepts are sobornost, faithful or believing reason, and integral personhood. The chapter explores the different sources of their religious thought, prioritizing their own faith and religious experience. Khomiakov and Kireevsky were convinced that human beings, through integrating faith and reason and achieving spiritual wholeness, could apprehend reality in its ontological or noumenal depths, in a way that abstract rationalism could not. This intuition of being came to be hailed as the distinctive ontologism of Russian religious philosophy. It provided a foundation for the development of Russian philosophical personalism. The Slavophiles, especially through the concept of sobornost, also emphasized the communal nature of personhood: persons realize themselves through free and loving interaction with each other. For Khomiakov and Kireevsky, the ideal community was the Church.

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THE POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF JUSTICE HUGO BLACK

Journal of Law and Religion ◽

10.1017/jlr.2020.10 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 35 (1) ◽

pp. 79-101

Author(s):

Brett Bertucio

Keyword(s):

Political Theology ◽

Legal Reasoning ◽

Political Life ◽

Establishment Clause ◽

The Political ◽

Religious Thought ◽

Religious Convictions ◽

Religious Membership ◽

The Impact ◽

The Ideal

AbstractAssociate Justice Hugo Black is often considered one of the giants of twentieth-century American religion clause jurisprudence. Especially regarding the Establishment Clause, Black sought to leave his mark on precedent. Previous biographers and legal scholars have noted the influence of his own religious convictions on his legal reasoning. I extend this line of inquiry but argue that Black's decisions enshrine a more concrete, substantive view of religion and political life than has previously been acknowledged. By drawing primarily on archival research regarding Justice Black's reading, correspondence, and religious membership, I argue that we can best understand his religious thought as a species of political theology, one I term syncretic civic moralism. In brief, Justice Black viewed the ideal religion as one free of doctrinal claims and primarily supporting prosocial behavior and civic loyalty. After outlining the impact of his theology on his landmark opinions, I conclude by suggesting some of the consequences of Black's theo-political jurisprudence for contemporary American establishment debates.

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VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND THE VARIETY OF RELIGIOUS FORMS

Victorian Literature and Culture ◽

10.1017/s1060150318000116 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 46 (2) ◽

pp. 517-529

Author(s):

Mark Knight

Keyword(s):

Jacques Derrida ◽

Victorian Literature ◽

Charles Taylor ◽

Judith Butler ◽

Center Of Gravity ◽

First Century ◽

Modern World ◽

Giorgio Agamben ◽

Religious Thought ◽

Stanley Fish

Literary studies is not theonly discipline to show a new enthusiasm for religion in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. When Stanley Fish suggested back in 2005 that religion might become the new theoretical center of gravity in the humanities, his declaration was cited frequently and may have proved a little too convenient for those, like myself, who wanted to see a major theoretical realignment in the humanities’ attitude to religion. But, the reality is that Fish is just one of a number of other prominent theorists in the last twenty years or so to have shown a new appreciation for the theoretical resources that religious thought makes available. Although the term religion is understood very differently across thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Sabo Mahmood, Charles Taylor, and Slavoj Žižek, they share a refusal to accept crude notions of the secularization thesis, with its commitment to seeing religion as an irrelevance in the modern world, and are instead determined to see religion as more than just an antiquated ideology that needs to be unmasked.

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The Strange Career of Fair Play, or, Warfare and Gamesmanship in the Time of Victoria

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199593736.013.26 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 267-283

Author(s):

Lara Kriegel

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Victorian Literature ◽

Home Front ◽

Fair Play ◽

Crimean War ◽

Victorian Culture ◽

Boer War ◽

The Great War ◽

Late Victorian Literature ◽

The Ideal

Wars fought overseas had an indelible imprint on the Victorian home front and its cultural formations. In their responses to the Crimean War (1854–6), writers of middlebrow fiction promulgated the ideal of muscular Christianity, wherein might was deployed for purposes of right. This notion found popular expression in the ideal of the games ethic, which had at its core the quintessentially British notion of fair play. This became a preoccupation within late Victorian literature for young people, as well as a recurring motif in the popular press, particularly during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). Although it would be subject to reversal during the Great War (1914–18), this idea would endure well into the twentieth century. As it traces the career of fair play, this essay seeks to understand the contours of Victorian culture in the later nineteenth century and the reverberations of Victorian values into the twentieth century.

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Light Through Darkness: The Ideal of Human Perfection in the Zohar

Harvard Theological Review ◽

10.1017/s0017816000009962 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 81 (1) ◽

pp. 73-95

Author(s):

Elliot R. Wolfson

Keyword(s):

Human Disease ◽

Point Of View ◽

Religious Thought ◽

Divine Omnipotence ◽

Modern Thought ◽

Phenomenological Point ◽

The Ideal

One of the perennial, and more vexing, problems in religious thought and philosophy has been the questionunde malum. In ancient, medieval, and modern thought, the issue has been viewed mostly in its theological context. From the perspective of traditional monotheistic theology, the problem thus presents itself: If God is truly all good and all powerful, then why would God cause or even allow evil, whether natural (e.g., earthquakes, floods, human disease) or moral (murder, rape, and the like), to exist? Inasmuch as the existence of evil, at least from the phenomenological point of view, is an indisputable fact, it would seem that either divine omnipotence or benevolence must be limited.

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Unity and Disunity in Javanese Political and Religious Thought of the Eighteenth Century

Modern Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0026749x00010015 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 26 (4) ◽

pp. 663-678 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

M. C. Ricklefs

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Intellectual History ◽

Political History ◽

The Political ◽

Religious Literature ◽

Religious Thought ◽

Middle Years ◽

Historical Reality ◽

History Of ◽

The Ideal

A central problem in both the political and the intellectual history of Java is the disparity between the ideal of a unified state and the historical reality of fragmented power and authority, between the image and the reality of pre-colonial Javanese political history. An investigation of views held by literati of the kingdom of Mataram before the middle years of the eighteenth century can elucidate this problem. Turning from historical-political to religious literature in Javanese may help to resolve it.

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A Survey of Materialism in Thought and Communication

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.554 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Kathleen E. Feyh

Keyword(s):

Social Life ◽

Critical Study ◽

Early 20Th Century ◽

Communication Studies ◽

Religious Thought ◽

Ancient India ◽

The World ◽

Historical Developments ◽

Human Sense ◽

The Ideal

Materialism emerged as the beginning of philosophical (as opposed to mystical or religious) thought in ancient India and Greece around the 6th century bce and has from the beginning been associated with the investigation of the world in its complexity beyond the relatively immediate appearance of phenomena to human sense and thought. The thinkers whose concepts inform contemporary materialist approaches to critical communication studies can be traced through historical developments of materialist thoughts in antiquity, the premodern and modern eras, and leading up to the present day. Familiar, emerging, and potential discussions of the nature and formation of consciousness in natural and social life inform the critical study of communication, particularly rhetoric. Particular attention is paid to the relation of materialism and varieties of Marxist and post-Marxist thought, and these are situated within debates in the field of critical communication studies, particularly rhetoric. Concepts originating from the early-20th-century USSR, associated with “creative” Soviet philosophy and activity theory, are less familiar (to this field) but are pertinent to the area of materialist thought. While this area of philosophy has not yet developed deeply or been promulgated widely in communication studies, it is suited to participate in the current conversation about materialism in communication, consciousness, and practice. Its chief contribution is a treatment of the ideal in materialism that resists both reduction and dualism. It also brings to the fore important questions about the place of human activity, including thought, in the material world.

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