The purpose of my research was to understand the role that the novel played in the development of religious toleration in eighteenth-century Britain. In my first chapter, I draw on an archive of polemical texts, legal documents, correspondence, sermons, and novels to reconstruct the historical and ideological transformations that occurred between the English Civil War (1642) and Catholic Emancipation (1829). I demonstrate the centrality of anti-Catholicism to the construction of British identity and arguments for the toleration of Protestant Dissenters. Throughout my dissertation, I argue that the novel served as a site for the articulation of new concepts and identities, and functioned as a mechanism for transforming readers’ subjectivities. One of the most important transformations to which the novel contributed was the elaboration of the concept of tolerance as a supplement to toleration. As an individual, private affect, tolerance depoliticizes religious difference, shifting emphasis away from the existential threat that toleration could potentially pose to the state and established church. The most surprising finding of my research was the extent to which novelists drew on a contemporary theological discourse of charity in developing this idea. My readings demonstrate the need for an understanding of secularization that would see it not only as a separation out of church and state, but also as a set of corresponding changes within religion, and a process whereby religious ideas are brought into what we normally think of as secular political ideas, like tolerance. Daniel Defoe plays a pivotal role in my dissertation, as both a prolific polemicist and one of the first novelists. My second chapter explores his polemical arguments for toleration, before moving on to examine how the political philosophy he develops in them informs the Robinson Crusoe novels (1719-1720). I argue that the liberty of conscience that Crusoe offers is tenuous and fragile in the first novel because of contradictions in Defoe’s political thought. In The Farther Adventures (1720), he is able to offer a more robust vision of toleration, by placing the relationship of charity between the Protestant Crusoe and a French priest at the center of his novel. In chapter three I shift my focus to the formal features of the Crusoe novels, arguing that the first novel urges its readers to undergo a series of identifications that lead them toward the charitable tolerance that the second novel thematizes. The second novel disperses the narrative function between characters, highlighting the role of perspective in religious knowledge. My fourth chapter argues that in Sir Charles Grandison (1753), Samuel Richardson demonstrates that tolerance can function as a bulwark, rather than a threat, to British identity. Richardson simultaneously offers a positive representation of Catholic characters and shows how tolerance in the face of intolerance can found a new identity secured by a dynamic of moral and epistemological condescension. My final chapter turns to an exploration of how the Gothic novel could mediate changes in the political and ideological context at the end of the eighteenth century, as toleration was first being extended to Catholics in Britain. I argue that Lusignan (1801) represents Catholic monasticism in a way that makes it not only newly tolerable, but also newly desirable for British readers. At the same time, the novel demonstrates more forcibly than any of the preceding texts, the secularizing negotiations that not only Catholicism, but religion itself, underwent during the increasing modernization and liberalization of Britain through the eighteenth century.

This dissertation establishes that the methods used to generate social and political criticism are just as important as the ideas expressed. This proposition is explored in both the ideas and methods of the Indian political psychologist Ashis Nandy. For over thirty-five years Nandy has contributed extensively to a number of debates within a global academic culture, and as a public intellectual in India. His critique of Indian secularism has produced intense controversy, and is a dynamic case to explore this relationship between critique and method, and by extension the identity of the critic. This case study also allows for an analysis, of what is widely accepted, as the confronting features of his critique. In radically questioning the ways in which the ideology of secularism operates in Indian political culture, and in defining concepts of Indianness, Nandy contests dominant political ideas and ideals. Further, he confronts the role these ideas and ideals play in foreclosing understandings of national identity, national integration and Indian democracy. I argue that this confrontation demonstrates a critical and psychoanalytic engagement with the constituting features of Indian political culture, and political identities. This case study also provides a context to consider the implications of this approach for understanding and representing the identity of the critic. / Much criticism of Nandy and his work is based on beliefs that he represents the intellectual basis of anti-secularism and anti-modernism in India. According to these accounts Nandy carries forward a threatening and disruptive quality. This is evident, it is claimed, in his calls to return to a regressive traditionalism. These responses represent his ideas and his identity within a particular ideological and intellectual framework. This takes place though, at the expense of engaging with the methods operating in his work. The focus on the disruptive and threatening features of Nandy and his work creates a series of over-determined responses that undermine recognition of his psychoanalytic approach. I argue that the location of agitation and fascination for critics is in Nandy’s willingness to confront accepted identities, meanings, fantasies, projections and ideals operating in politics, and in working through the complexities of subjectivity. This aptitude for working with external and internal processes, at the border between culture and psyche is where the psychoanalytic focus of his work is located. The psychoanalytic focus, in working with and working through the complexities of human subjectivity, produces a confronting self-reflexivity that can disarm critics. Nandy’s psychoanalytic reading of secularism is the starting point for theorising and characterising the method, or mode of critique operating across his work more broadly. / This dissertation argues that Nandy’s approach or method is characterised by a psychoanalytic mode. The psychoanalytic mode of engagement is illustrated in his capacity to generate critical analytic perspectives that rupture and regenerate subjectivity, including his own. This dissertation demonstrates Nandy’s psychoanalytic commitment, and argues the importance of this approach. Therefore, this reading of Nandy and the methods that are employed to develop this inquiry, build a case for the importance of psychoanalytic concepts, as a necessary interpretive mode for social and political criticism.

On December 9, 1905, newspapers announced the French Third Republic had passed the Law on the Separation of the Churches and the State. This law dissolved the complex relationship that had existed between the French state and the Catholic Church and ended the public role of religion. However, while religious conviction seemed to be on the wane within the French metropole, public discourse in the early twentieth century regarding the impending French seizure of Morocco consistently referred to the French populace as “Christians” while the Moroccans were collectively labeled as “Muslim savages.” This thesis argues that the French media, government, and other public figures generated the concept of a “Christian France” in order to underline the moral and civilizational superiority of a supposedly unified French civilization in relation to the inhabitants of Morocco.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 1999. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 203-207).

Säkularismus ist in Indien spätestens seit den Assembly Debates Ende der 1940er Jahre ein Schlüsselbegriff in öffentlichen Debatten und ein zentraler Wert der Verfassung und der nationalen Identität. Als Gegenkonzept zu Kommunalismus, insbesondere Hindunationalismus, und Gewalt wird Säkularismus in Indien vorrangig als Toleranz und equal respect for all religions konzipiert. Die akademische Debatte über Säkularismus erscheint in Indien ausgesprochen normativ, emotional und politisiert. In der von mir untersuchten Kontroverse, die um die Frage kreist, inwieweit es sich bei der Kategorie Säkularismus um ein hegemoniales, westliches Konzept oder eine indigene Tradition handele, stehen sich zwei Lager oder „Clans“ gegenüber. Während die postkolonialistischen Säkularismus-Kritiker T.N. Madan und Ashis Nandy diese in ihren Augen fremde, imperiale Kategorie ablehnen und Säkularismus in Indien als gescheitert betrachten, unternehmen die Säkularismus-Befürworter Rajeev Bhargava und Romila Thapar den Versuch, säkulare Wurzeln in der indischen Tradition zu rekonstruieren und Säkularismus damit in Indien anschlussfähig zu machen. Interessanterweise beziehen sich alle vier Wissenschaftler in ihren Texten auf die tolerante Religionspolitik des Maurya-Königs Ashoka (3. Jh. v. Chr.) und des Mogulherrschers Akbar (16. Jh. n. Christus). Während Bhargava und Thapar darin eine Art Proto-Säkularismus sehen, geht es Nandy und Madan darum, die indische Toleranztradition von der Vorherrschaft der Säkularismuskategorie zu befreien. Ihnen schwebt eine tolerante „ghandianische“ Staatspolitik vor, die nicht unter dem Label Säkularismus läuft, sondern auf alten, indischen Traditionen und der gelebten, auf Religion basierenden Toleranz des Volkes gründet. Alle vier Wissenschaftler bekennen sich in ihren Texten über den Säkularismus explizit zu ihren politischen Positionen und verstehen sich gleichzeitig als Wissenschaftler und Aktivisten. Beide Lager, sowohl Madan und Nandy, als auch Thapar und Bhargava, engagieren und echauffieren sich in der Kontroverse über Säkularismus und die Anwendbarkeit dieses Konzepts im indischen Kontext in einem bemerkenswerten Ausmaß. Ziel meiner Arbeit ist es, Antworten auf die Frage zu finden, weshalb die untersuchte Debatte so hochgradig emotional ausfällt und was die Wissenschaftler antreibt, so leidenschaftlich am Säkularismus festzuhalten oder diese Kategorie genauso vehement abzulehnen.

No description available.

The Swedish state and educational system are secular, so to say they do not depend on the former protestant state church anymore. Many people in Sweden are also secular. Even so, in school teachers meet students with a religious faith. The purpose of this study is to examine how teachers without a religious belonging experience the encounter with religious students. The method used was semistructured interviews with five teachers in a upper secondary school in a multicultural suburb of Stockholm. In this school, most students have a religious faith and the majority are Muslims or Christians. The prevalent discourses about religion and secularism in Sweden today are found through the teachers speech about the teachers and the students living in two different worlds. The dichotomy is more clearly expressed by the less religious teachers. The meaning of the double assignment of the curriculum is interpreted differently by the different teachers and the teachers have experienced conflicts of values regarding the following subjects: freedom of speech, sexuality (including homosexuality and gender equality), antisemitism and intolerance. The teachers use discussions and debates to handle the conflicts. In their statements, the teachers place the conflicts of value in a public sphere, not in an individual, which means they do not hesitate to act against unscientific approaches and/or antidemocratic views. Thus, the conflicts of values can be used as tools to foster democracy, tolerance and human rights. The teachers believe that they have the assignment to change the students religiously anchored values, but not to influence them to become secular.

This thesis is concerned with the ideas of two of the most prominent thinkers within the 'fundamentalist' religious movements that have become so prominent over the last few decades in Pakistan and India; Maulana Maududi of the Muslim Jamaat-I-Islami and M.S. Golwalkar, of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Though both are now dead, their ideas live on in the thinking and deeds of others. This thesis explores a comparison of the ideas of these men and their radical/fundamentalist ideologies with a focus on the way they viewed the relationship between religon and the state. Others have established that such a comparison between significant individuals, who lived in the same historical timeframe, and in this case the same geographical and political contexts, offers valuable insight into the situations/nations in which they were directly involved.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Faculty of the Divinity School, March, 2001. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Faculty of the Divinity School, March, 2001. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.