Critical Research on Religion

This study investigates the relationships between religious fundamentalism, collective identity, and individuality. The questions addressed in this research are: Who is joining fundamentalist student organizations? Why and how are they doing so? And, how do these organizations maintain their collective identity in the face of ever-growing individualism? To gain an adequate understanding of the fundamentalist characteristics of such organizations, we first explored the existing theoretical literature. Then, we performed a qualitative case study of two student organizations at the University of Guilan: the Basij and Welayat Lovers. Our findings indicate that although these organizations strongly tend to define and impose a unified collective identity on their members, some important social trends, such as the expansion of secularist higher education and rising levels of students' knowledge, skills, and their reinforced individuality, leave little room for the growth of a fundamentalist collective identity.

Focusing on some contemporary Islamic reformers’ solutions, in particular, Abolkarim Soroush, Mohsen Kadivar, and Fazlur Rahman, to concrete issues in Muslim societies, this article examines two different methodological strategies of alternative readings of the Sunna: an archeological one and a genealogical one. In the archeological perspective, the holy text has been considered as a repository of answers to all sorts of questions. Through a pathological analysis, this view suggests solutions to correct distortions and looks for new windows seeking an original interpretation of the Qur’an. The genealogical view, on the other hand, puts aside this pathology and instead insists on the idea of the contingency of any interpretation. Regardless of accuracy and validity, according to the genealogical view, all interpretations have addressed temporal and contextual questions. What is important in this perspective is not returning to an original source for finding the exact message of Allah, or correcting previous interpretations, but recurrently referring to an open-ended text in order to explore the futures of the Qur’an.

As part of a larger project, this paper serves as an overview that examines how “ai” 愛 (love) as an affective concept made its way into the Chinese vocabulary, how it gained popularity at specific junctures in modern Chinese history, and the ways in which it has been adapted as a marker of modernity and a political discourse in Republican (1911–49) and Communist China (1949–) in distinct ways. Although literary scholars have noted the significance of the shaping of love as an affective concept for the project of Chinese modernity, they mainly focus on the conceptions and interpretations of love in the literature, and with a time frame from late imperial (1368–1911) to Maoist China (1949–76). The few studies about love in post-Mao era usually attribute the sources of such affect to Christianity. My paper makes a fresh contribution in three aspects. First, I take a longer historical perspective, from the 1910s to the 2010s, and dedicate, secondly, a large part of my study to the decisive impact from revolutionary radicalism to popular religions on the formation of the discourse of state propaganda and everyday politics, rather than manifestations in the literature and sources from Christianity. Third, I study some of the most controversial political figures in modern China, including Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), Mao Zedong (1893–1976), and Xi Jinping (1953–), rather than intellectuals and writers only.

In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch claims that the Russian Orthodox Christian Church was theologically more open towards the ideas of October than its Western counterpart. The remark is intriguing, but Bloch does not offer any detailed explanation except to say that Orthodoxy considers the revelation “unconcluded.” This article is an attempt to provide a slightly more detailed background to Bloch’s remark and present some elements of Orthodox Christianity and its utopianism by way of comparative critical hermeneutics, a method that looks at the interpretative differences between Orthodox and Western Christianity with respect to some basic shared dogmas and their de-alienating and alienating effects.

This is a response to Russell McCutcheon’s (2018) book chapter titled “On Concepts and Entities: Varieties of Critical Scholarship” in which he criticizes the value-driven approached advocated in previous editorials of Critical Research on Religion. This response points out that critical religion (the approach of McCutcheon and others) is also value-driven and not non-normative as he claims, but that this is what makes it critical.

Russell McCutcheon is one of the foremost proponents of what he calls “the critical study of religion,” that is, the shift to reflect critically on the concepts used in the academic study of religion, who invented them, and why. The critical study of religion leads to the realization that the concepts with which we think were invented by particular people, at a particular historical location, for a particular purpose. What are the philosophical implications of this? McCutcheon defends a debunking or non-realist answer and contrasts this with my realist approach, and he is right to do so. This paper argues that those involved in the critical study of religion therefore face a choice between a non-realist and a realist metaphysics, that McCutcheon’s arguments against realism fail, and that those who wish to offer any kind of materialist account in which religious social structures shape human agency and subjectivity should adopt a critical study of religion that is also realist.