The growth of American multi-ethnic Evangelical Christian churches (MECs) since the 1990s places them in a position to develop processes that create meaningful discussions about racial injustice in their congregation and the larger community. This progress faces real barriers, given the complex history of racism in American society and the nature of American Evangelicalism. Early attempts of racial reckoning relied too heavily on a passive approach, centered on contact, empathy, and prejudice reduction. Recent social psychological research on the contact hypothesis shows that the passive approach is insufficient to meet the demands for racial justice. Recent advances in deliberative democratic theory highlight what meaningful racial justice requires. Mary Scudder’s concept of ‘uptake’ argues that profound listening is missing from most work on democratic deliberation. Chantal Mouffe’s ‘agonistic pluralism’ and Danielle Allen’s ‘justice by means of democracy’ similarly show that talking and listening are insufficient goals of the deliberation process. This article explores how incorporating lament into the MEC congregation is one way of moving beyond a reliance on contact and empathy alone.
Amid the upheavals of music in the twentieth century, a new approach emerged for rendering the sacred in concert music: the use of silences, both real and analogical, to unveil spiritual meaning and activity in the world around the listener. Composers prevailed upon silences both literal and analogical in their music to affectively direct their listeners’ attention to the ostensible presence of the divine active in the world around them. A key inciting factor for the emergence of such music seems to be historical suffering or political oppression, whether written amid such instances, or responding to it after the fact. In the use of silence to explore spiritual meaning and encounter, such music often doesn’t directly engage the stark realities within which it emerges. Rather, it guides its listeners’ attention to a more essential divine meaning or address which itself operates as an answer to such contexts. This article examines three orchestral works to this end: Arvo Pärt’s 2008 Symphony No. 4 (‘Los Angeles’); Henryk Górecki’s 1976 Symphony No. 3 (‘Sorrowful Songs’); and James MacMillan’s 2002 Symphony No. 3 (‘Silence’). It examines each composer’s relationship with political and social engagement and considers the way their respective theological commitments express differing approaches to manifesting silence as an instantiation of divine presence and meaning in response to instances of historical suffering and political injustice.
Prophet Muhammad declared that only two women had reached ‘perfection’, yet many men had done so. What did he mean by this? How could there be just two perfect women? Analysis of the statement in Qur’an commentaries demonstrates that even though Prophet Muhammad used ‘perfection’ in a technical sense to denote prophethood—meaning that there were many male prophets but only two female ones—most Qur’anic exegetes used far less reliable versions of this saying to argue that ‘perfection’ entailed general moral excellence, thus women were ontologically inferior to men. In this interpretation, they followed the lead of analysts of Prophet Muhammad’s sayings (ahadith) who had come to the same conclusion even though it contradicted more reliable versions of the hadith. It is this interpretation, based on shaky evidence, that is prevalent in both exoteric and mystical Qur’an commentaries. The commentaries of the mystic Ibn ‘Arabi, nevertheless, buck this trend. Ibn ‘Arabi argues that Prophet Muhammad referred to prophethood by the term ‘perfection’. Yet true perfection is the ontological perfection of manifesting the divine Names in which both men and women participate equally.
Religious harm is a rapidly emerging area of inquiry that challenges the assumption that religious involvement is universally beneficial. This study presents findings from a large-scale qualitative analysis of 333 individuals who completed a survey asking about experiences of religious or spiritual harm. The research identified nine overarching themes: a profound sense of emotional distress; experiences of delayed development and destabilised sense of self; mental and physical health damage; relational damage; pervasive impacts on faith/spirituality; material and financial costs; the chronic and pervasive nature of impacts; having the impacts compounded by misunderstandings; and personal growth and resilience. The study highlights the need for more research within therapeutic and religious settings, and calls for greater recognition of religious harm in clinical practice and community discourse. This research contributes to a growing body of literature seeking to address religious harm as a serious and complex phenomenon.
Emma Quilty, Witch Power: Hexing the Patriarchy with Feminist Magic. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2025, pp. 208, AUD$41.95, ISBN 9781509564460 (hbk).
