Sarah Bachelard describes crisis as a turning point during which all previous frameworks collapse. The narrative structure of the resurrection reveals the influential role of narrative in reintegrating such crises back into a place of meaning and wholeness. Using the resurrection narrative as an interpretive framework for Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried reveals how "story truth" acknowledges the transcendent meaning that lies beyond all texts and circumstances, and so reintegrates crisis and redeems meaning for Tim and his fellow soldiers. The transcendent and transformative qualities of story truth illustrate the latter's innately spiritual nature, even within secular texts. Story truth thus carries postsecular conversation past mere "openness" to transformation through the process of reintegration and redemption. By evoking the qualities of surprise and recognition associated with the resurrection, story truth especially illustrates that theology can elucidate such transformative processes and ought to play a key role in both spiritual and postsecular thought.

Habermas’s work since the turn of the millennium is characterized by an increased interest in the role of religion in politics. One of the most significant theses of this so-called “religious turn” is captured by Habermas’s institutional translation proviso, which calls on citizens to participate in translating religious contributions to public dialogue into a secular language purportedly accessible to all. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the translation proviso with a view both to the political inclusion of religious citizens and to the renewal of the normative resources required for democratic self-determination. By way of a critical engagement with the work of Immanuel Kant and Charles Taylor, I argue that, despite being limited as a solution to both problems, Habermas’s institutional translation proviso is nonetheless preferable to available alternatives. To that extent, I maintain that it is an indispensable feature of democratic politics in pluralist societies.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the regular practice of Christmas music in the American public schools came to be. If we understand the historical evolution of this practice, we can better understand our conditions of possibility for the future. Christmas in America is both a religious and cultural holiday. The sacred/secular binary, often used as a lens for analysis, is problematic due to the multitude of religious and cultural meanings that constitute the American Christmas. I utilize genealogical methods to trace the relationships between elements that have conditioned and constrained the practice of Christmas music in the public schools. These elements include the lack of established Christmas traditions and music at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the development of a regular canon of Christmas music in the churches, Sabbath school Christmas exhibitions, and public examinations as a technology of eighteenth century education. I contextualize these elements amongst the cultural history of the American Christmas, which includes a focus on the family, children, gift giving, goodwill, and community. This cultural history is set against a backdrop of nostalgia and ritual that frames Christmas practices. From this perspective, I trace varied examples of Christmas music in the public schools, starting with the nineteenth century end-of-term exercises. Into the twentieth century, I describe different practices, including Christmas music as worship service, variations on the sacred/secular binary, and public school music in the community. Based on this inquiry, I suggest reflexive questions for music teachers when considering Christmas music in the public schools. I also recommend suggestions in place of the current NAfME position statement. I propose that Christmas music be considered a postsecular genre in America. Applying a postsecular lens allows for acknowledgement of the persistence of the sacred/secular divide, in relation to the wide array of other elements that results in a blurriness of the dichotomy. Through application of this lens, the practice of Christmas music in the American public schools becomes both more difficult and more thoughtful.

This dissertation examines the manners in which dancing in Lucumi religious rituals, as a practice in cosmological embodiment, destabilizes and/or subverts normative secular values and structures, and considers what this subversion reveals about the development of civil discourse and participatory parity in the United States. In particular, this dissertation focuses on the destabilization of the public/private binary, the use of secularization by religious communities for their own benefit, the unsettling of the boundaries of the category of religion, and the exposure of the fallacy of secularism as a hallmark of the liberal nation state. The theoretical foundations of the study are in Carribeanist anthropology and postsecularism. Dance and performance ethnography are the primary methods used to analyze two cases studies. The first case study takes place at a Lucumi religious drumming ceremony, known as a tambor, held in the basement of a private home in New York City. The second case study takes places at a Haitian Vodou drumming ceremony held at Riis Beach, in Queens, New York. The findings taken from these case studies suggest that embodiment plays an important, yet often unacknowledged role, in the development of civil discourse, and supports the postsecular argument that in a society defined by plurality, religion(s) offers substantial material in service of the creation of moral frameworks. Dance, in particular, allows bodies and ideas to bridge spaces and ideologies, thus contributing to how individuals perform their identity in society, and to how society envisions itself as a whole. / Dance

The increasing prominence of faith-based organisations (FBOs) in providing welfare in the UK has typically been regarded as a by-product of neoliberalism, as the gaps left by shrinking public service provision and the contracting out of service delivery have been filled by these and other Third Sector organisations. In this way, FBOs have been represented as merely being co-opted as inexpensive resource providers into the wider governmentalities of neoliberal politics – a process that allows a particular secularised form of religion in the public realm. In contrast FBOs working outside the financial and regulatory frameworks of government are understood to resist co-option and maintain the integrity a faith-motivated approach - an approach commonly assumed to be ideologically coercive and tainted by proselytising self-interest. This thesis challenges these conventional accounts of FBOs and the bifurcation of third sector welfare providers into “insiders” and “outsiders”. Drawing upon in-depth ethnographic research with FBOs providing drug rehabilitation services in the UK – and with the clients of these services – this thesis illustrates how neoliberalism can be co-constituted through the involvement of FBOs, which can offer various pathways of resistance in and through the pursuit of alternative philosophies of care and political activism. I critically question the difference faith makes in the processes of care and welfare in FBOs, critiquing the varied ethics of care derived in part from theological belief, and emphasise the relationships of care embodied and performed within organisational spaces as to complicate oversimplified stories of neoliberal co-option, proselytisation and social control. Equally, I argue that some accounts of secularisation of FBOs overlook a broader rapprochement between secular and faith-based ethical motivations, which can solicit new political and ethical spaces that run counter to, and sometimes actively resist, neoliberal (and religious) governmentalities. By drawing attention to the ethical agency of staff and clients in these spaces of care and regulation, this thesis paves the way for a more nuanced understanding of the geographies of faith, welfare and neoliberalism.

Studying the overlaps between religion and politics in human geography is no longer a niche pursuit. Now, a plethora of literature in the discipline covers various facets of the topic, analysing the role of religion in contexts ranging from welfare contracts to geopolitical imaginations. Furthermore, investigating the religion/politics interface has been enhanced in recent years by increasing theoretical innovation in religious geography, incorporating poststructural epistemologies into the subdiscipline. This shift has directed geographers to the fluid construction of practices and places through the everyday lives of religious subjects and communities. Despite these developments, I argue that studies at the religion/politics interface still lack an epistemology that can adequately comprehend emerging empirical work in geography and associated disciplines that highlights the blurring of religious praxis into activism. Geographers have rarely represented the mechanisms that produce the heterogeneity of religious involvement in politics, putting the new poststructural epistemologies in the subdiscipline to work by categorising religious subjects and communities as homogeneously progressive or regressive, or focussing instead on the affective atmospheres and internal dynamics of faith communities. In this thesis I argue that in order to understand religious involvement in activism, geographers of religion need to begin to blend poststructural epistemologies that attend to the everyday fluidity of religion with epistemological work on networks in activist geographies. This is necessary work because these two realms are beginning to intermingle on the ground, consequently highlighting the production of religious subjectivities between religious and activist practices. In response to this gap between theory and empirics, I turn my attention to faith communities that embody elements of a postchristendom ethos, flattening religious hierarchies, welcoming difference, and engaging beyond themselves through social justice activism. By addressing this context I can underscore the knowledges that geographies of the religion/politics interface have missed so far, examining the multiple factors at play in the formation of faith community raison d’êtres, the accommodation of difference in faith communities, and how religious subjects negotiate their praxis between religious and activist spaces. By drawing attention to these issues and developing an epistemology to deal with them, this thesis develops more nuanced ways of producing knowledge about religious subjectivities and communities as they relate to activism.

Taking Saba Mahmood's question 'Can secularism be other-wise?' (2010) as the starting point for a critical-historical investigation of the 'secular body' (Asad 2003; Hirschkind 2011), my thesis develops in two stages. In the first, I argue that current works of secular theory - particularly A Secular Age (Taylor 2007) - tend to rely on an excessively rationalistic conception of Enlightenment thought for the construction of their central conceptual categories (e.g. the 'immanent frame', 'buffered self', or 'modern exclusive humanism'), thus reinforcing a double-binary linking rationality to Euro-American secularity, and emotion to subaltern 'religion'. Against Taylor and others, I emphasise the contradictory, 'assembled' nature of Enlightenment discourse, and point to alternative, more body-centred strands of thought in key figures of the seventeenth-eighteenth-century French Enlightenment, such as Descartes, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Helvétius, and Holbach. Against common perceptions, and drawing on a range of philosophical works, institutional reports, and stage plays in French and in translation, I suggest these figures in some ways reinstated emotion and the body against the rationalistic tendencies of the past. Insofar as 'the secular' was shaped by the Enlightenment, it emerged out of a conscious project of nationalist cultivation, based fundamentally on manipulating the body and emotions. In the second stage, I consider the way Orientalist representations of non-Western religions meshed with prevalent theories of political manipulation to generate an affective system of anti-Catholic propaganda geared towards the national good. Though existing critiques of Taylor tend to focus on the importance of religious (i.e. Christian) constructions of Oriental religions for the genealogy of secularity (e.g. Mahmood 2010), I suggest a distinctively secular form of Orientalism emerged in the eighteenth century, in which anti-religion, racism, and nationalism merged into a powerful weapon of republican discourse, congruent with ambient theories of emotion. The aesthetic manipulation of racist and Orientalist tropes in Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721) and Voltaire's Le Fanatisme (1741), for example, can be read as a practical response to existing theory on the power of images to regulate people's passions in the national interest.

This thesis is an attempt to contribute a fresh perspective on marriage and related subjects, making use of public theology in dialogue with the Christ narrative. The phenomena of post secularism, postmodernism and film hermeneutics are explored. Critical hermeneutics are used as a point of departure. This study aims to bridge the gap between the Christ narrative and public theology as it surfaces in the cinema. In Chapter 2 the terms of the concepts public theology and posttheism are investigated. Public theology is understood as the contribution of people in the public sphere participating in “God-talk”, as an exponent of post theism. Chapter 3 investigates the historical development of marriage. This investigation shows that social-political and philosophical influences caused different forms and models of marriage to evolve. It becomes clear that it is practically impossible to define one specific form of marriage that dominated history. Chapter 4 is divided into two parts. The first part explores New Testament texts related to the themes of marriage and relationships. It is shown that these New Testament texts are part of a broader context and therefore cannot be applied directly to marriage in modern times. On the other hand the Christ narrative, seen as an ancient biography, does outline important values applicable to marriage, intimacy and sexuality. These values were identified and are used in following chapters to define intimate relationships. The investigation of biblical models in the second part of this chapter shows that biblical models of marriage were also rooted within a historical situation. Certain values that are found within these models can still serve as guidelines for relationships, while others are influenced by an androcentric background. Chapter 5 is a theoretical investigation using Gerhard Ebelings’ “new hermeneutics” as model, applied to the field of the public theology of film. From a hermeneutical perspective recent films with biblical themes are important to communicate the gospel and morals in our times as the postmodern generation is primarily influenced by visual media. In Chapter 6 three films are discussed as examples of film hermeneutics and public theology: Roepman, As it is in heaven and Les misérables. Similarities with the Christ narrative surfaced, for instance: critique is expressed against destructive ideologies; selfless acts are commendable and unconditional love and acceptance, forgiveness, faith and hope are essential for an authentic existence. These films do not focus on ethical dogmas about marriage, intimacy and sexuality, although some ethical values can be derived. In the concluding chapter a bifocal melting of horizons, based on the findings of the research, are described. Both the public theology of film hermeneutics and the Sache Jesu highlight the importance of the inner values that constitute a meaningful relationship. The study argues that the church should reconsider their traditional view on marriage and sexual relationships by emphasizing the values found in the Sache Jesu instead of concentrating on enforcing the outward form of wedlock. In doing so, the church will help postmodern and postsecular people to again understand the meaning of a loving relationship in the presence of God. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / lk2014 / New Testament Studies / PhD / Unrestricted

This thesis explores the ways in which Christian faith ‘adds value’ to the ‘carescape’ and ‘caringscapes’ of statutory hostels for people experiencing homelessness in the United Kingdom. The ways that a distinctively Christian organisational ethos is created and experienced through the material, regulatory and performative dimensions of space, place and subjectivity, are explored through a case study of the Salvation Army’s contemporary statutory accommodation services for single homeless people. Drawing upon Cloke’s notions of ‘theo-ethics’ and Conradson’s concept of ‘therapeutic landscape experience’, the links between spirituality, care and ‘value added’ are examined from the perspective of staff, volunteers and service users. This analysis extends the debate on the potential for faith-based organisations to make a distinctive and valuable contribution to care for people experiencing homelessness, by foregrounding the spiritual and emotional dimensions that texture these organisational landscapes of care. A feminist epistemological approach is taken to illuminate the nuances of care-giving and care-receiving, with particular attention paid to the emotional and spiritual sensitivities underpinning social interactions, and how these dimensions are perceived, narrated and experienced from a variety of perspectives. Using an ethnographic methodology, this study involved the undertaking of 91 semi-structured interviews, a six-week period of participant observation in a specific Salvation Army Lifehouse, and attendance at four professional social service and chaplaincy conferences run by the Salvation Army UK. The research findings suggest that Christianity adds value to these institutional spaces of care in a highly nuanced way, dependent on one’s subjectivity. A second observation is that the potential for faith to add value within statutory arenas of care for the homeless is being compromised due to the pressures associated with the incumbent neoliberal contract culture within which Lifehouses are embedded. A third contribution concerns the potential for a faith-based organisation to act as a crucible for the emergence of postsecular rapprochement: it is suggested that an intersectional approach to analysing this socio-spatial process is necessary, due to the strategic role that gender, age, sexuality and race were revealed to play in fostering, or dissipating, the affective relationships that underpinned fragile moments of rapprochement.

This study's main aim is to contribute with an insight regarding how employees of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) experience religion as a component of development work in religious contexts. The study focuses on whether or not religion is given enough space within Sida's development work and if the policies of Sida are enough to cover the needs in religious contexts. To answer these questions we have interviewed six employees of Sida which holds experiences of development work in religious contexts. The results show a lack of knowledge and encouragement of these questions within Sida and that the interviewees experience religion as a complex concept. The study also shows that the interviewees find policies, methods and tools within Sida as inadequate to cover the needs of religion in development work. In order to highlight and to problematize the results, the study has mainly been inspired by the secularization, the post-secularization and the sacralization theories that focuse on the role of religion in the public sphere. / Syftet med uppsatsen har varit att bidra med enförståelse för hur anställda på Sida upplever religionsfrågor som komponentinom utvecklingssamarbete i religiösa kontexter. Det vi frågat oss är vilkaupplevelser och behov av att arbeta med religionsfrågor som finns samt omreligionsfrågor ges tillräckligt med utrymme inom Sidas utvecklingssamarbete ireligiösa kontexter. För att svara på uppsatsens frågeställningar har vi utförtsex kvalitativa intervjuer med anställda på Sida som har insikt i deraslångsiktiga utvecklingssamarbete och erfarenhet av arbete i religiösakontexter. Studiens resultat visar att intervjupersonerna upplever att religionfår bristande uppmärksamhet och uppmuntran inom Sida samt att de uppleverreligion som ett komplext begrepp. Studien visar även att intervjupersonernaupplever att Sidas policyer, metoder och verktyg inte tillräckligt täcker debehov som finns av religion i utvecklingssamarbetet. I vår analys avintervjumaterialet har vi utgått från teorier om sekularisering,postsekularisering och sakralisering som belyser utvecklingen av religionensroll i den offentliga sfären.