In Gabriel García Márquez’s story “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,”¹ the children of a fishermen’s village on a desert like cape find the body of a drowned man, a man of abnormal size, washed up on the beach. The children don’t know what to do with the giant dead man. All afternoon they play with the corpse, until somebody happens to see what they are doing. The men then carry the body to the nearest house. They wonder why the corpse is so huge. Has the seawater gotten into his bones? Did he continue to grow after death?...

From Bali to New York City and from Mumbai to Madrid, images of religion have become fused with scenes of violent protests against the political order. Islamic activists in the Middle East, Christian militia in the United States, Jewish zealots in Israel, and Buddhist militants in Sri Lanka exemplify the many rebellious challenges to the secular state that have erupted around the world. They have employed religion as a way of legitimizing the power of antiauthoritarian movements. In none of these cases is religion the sole cause of violence—these are movements for political empowerment, not theological contests. Yet religion...

Two theses that are intimately related to the idea of authority are political theology, associated with the name of Carl Schmitt, and moral theology, associated with Elizabeth Anscombe (though she never used the expression). Political theology is the claim that key notions in modern secular political doctrines are unwittingly moored in theological and teleological world views. These notions in their secularized versions make no sense and can be validated only within the theological frame for which they were designed. “Sovereignty” and “authority” are paradigmatic cases of such key notions. Moral theology is a parallel claim. Key moral notions concerning modern...

It is a truism that global forces have greatly heightened social instability, economic distress, and cultural uncertainty in the contemporary world. The widespread phenomenon of religious revival is said to be part of the picture. How should one explain the resurgence of religion across the world—as a cry of misery, an assertion of identity, a revolt against the uncertainties produced by modernization? It is evident that how we try to explain it will determine our expectation of its promise and its threat. But there is also the question of exactlywhatwe are required to explain, of how we...

Since the early days of the British colonies, the Anglo inhabitants of North America have been fond of claiming for themselves a sense of uniqueness. Whether a “city on a hill” or making the world “safe for democracy,” this sense has often been expressed as a national mission or vocation.¹ Although scholars of American history and culture over the past twenty years have criticized “American exceptionalism” as uncritical and nationalistic, the idea is still powerful among many Americans today. But determining what the mission might be is no less conflicted than the question of whether there is one at all....

You may not have noticed it yet, but, according to some observers, democracy has arrived in the Middle East. It came as part of the shock and awe of the American invasion in Iraq and resulted in elections there that were declared a success. Now it is spreading all over the Middle East. Some years ago we saw a large anti-Syrian demonstration in Beirut on our television screens. Our commentators said that this was another sign of the coming of democracy, a process of transformation of the Middle East that was started by the American invasion of Iraq. No longer...

From 1988 until the late 1990s, people on Bougainville Island were immersed in a vicious war that destroyed nearly all infrastructure and social services. Foreign reports almost unanimously analyzed the crisis as a sociopolitical conflict. However, religion, particularly Catholicism, played a major role during and after the crisis. Catholic devotions and revelations were deeply intertwined with “traditional” concepts and beliefs, as well as with the politics of the crisis. Furthermore, people believe that peace was achieved through prayers, especially pleas directed to Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. Indeed, the Bougainville crisis was conceptualized as a Holy War, and by...

The complexity of ongoing political moves and a strong overlap between religious and political powers in Senegal, a country where democracy and secularism are being reinvented from day to day by various actors, is an excellent example of the dynamic interplay between religious and political power. This dynamism has been especially interesting since Adboulaye Wade, who claims membership in the Mourids, the largest of the religious Sufi brotherhoods in Senegal, was elected president in March 2000. Indeed, it threatens to create a new paradigm for the relationship between religious and state power in Senegalese politics.

In Senegal, with its strong...

Sharia has been a complex and powerful symbol throughout the modern history of the Sudan. Centered on the place of Islamic law, orsharia, in the legal system are a series of issues concerning the complex relations between religion and politics.¹ Sharia has disrupted any boundaries between religion and politics that colonial or modern secularist actors have attempted to construct or elaborate. It has refused to become a “religious law” for the private sphere only. In the postcolonial period, sharia has always to some extent been used by some political grouping or other to advance its cause. Since law is...

On January 30, 2009, fifteen heavily armed individuals stormed the Tiferet Israel Synagogue in the Mariperez neighborhood of Caracas, Venezuela. They held down the two guards, robbed the premises, and proceeded to desecrate the temple, throwing the Torah to the floor, along with other religious paraphernalia, and painting anti-Semitic slogans on the walls. Among the signs, one could read: “Out, Death to All”; “Damned Israel, Death”; “666” (the Mark of the Beast in Revelation), together with a drawing of the devil; “Out Jews”; “We don’t want you, assassins”; a Star of David indicated as equal to a swastika, etc.

This...

The small town of Lourdes, nestling among the lovely foothills of the French Pyrenees, is the site of the world’s most famous Marian sanctuary, receiving an estimated six million visitors every year. Bernadette’s visions of Mary in 1858 are formally given as the principal reason for this “site of memory.”¹ Though remembrance is certainly a major motive for undertaking a pilgrimage to Lourdes, often the official remembrance of Mary’s appearances to Bernadette is not the primary focus of the pilgrims’ devotions. Lourdes evokes and answers different kinds of memories and appears to be especially helpful for remembering pain in personal...

Discourse about the Muslim “veil” and the wearing of headscarves in public places in Western countries has made its way into the heart of contemporary Western history and identity. However, as Markha Valenta argues, the arguments are hardly about the “veil” itself.¹ She beautifully reveals that at the heart of the debate is the West’s own current crisis of identity and historical destiny. The most urgent and contested discussions are in fact located in Continental Western Europe.² Though English-speaking nations in the West share the same prejudices, “this has not generated the same level of distressed debate, which is part...

“Elena” is an episode from my video workNothing Is Missing,a multiple-screen video installation (2006–7). Briefly, visitors are invited to sit in armchairs or on sofas around them a number of women speak to someone else. The women have been filmed in their own homes, in a number of different countries from which currently migrants frequently come to what is called “the West”: the Near or Middle East, Africa, Middle or Eastern Europe. The interlocutors are people close to them, intimates, the relationship with whom has been interrupted due to the migration of the women’s children: a grandchild...

What happens to a musical genre when it moves from local Pakistani and Indian Sufi shrines to global venues and media? What happens to the notions of surrender and powerlessness that are connected with this genre in its original Sufi context when it enters the world music scene? What happens to the submission of the participant musicians to strict religious supervision when they become divas on national and international platforms? What happens to the belief in spiritual power transmission at shrine rituals when it is used as an idea in the construction of national identity and as a selling point...

Artistic silence has always been entangled with various forms of power. Silence has often been imposed on artists in all major religious traditions in both the Orient and the Occident. Mystical traditions seem especially disaffected with speech (e.g., the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, Jakob Boehme, and Meister Eckhardt, and parallels in Zen, Taoist, and Sufi texts), and the radical wings of monotheist religions have tended to suppress or at least curb all forms of human expression by calling for iconoclasm, rejecting the imitation of nature, and prohibiting (certain) music. In the twentieth century, however, appeals for silence have come...

One of the key Hollywood action heroines of the 1980s and 1990s is Lieutenant Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) of the science fiction film seriesAlien.More than any other genre, the science fiction film has served to reinforce stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity; it is a subspecies even more thoroughly dominated by males than the Western is.¹ The character of Ripley has had a profound influence on the genre of the action film, to such an extent that she may serve as the prototype for a new female lead that differs from the typical science fiction and...