ABSTRACT Long recognized as a canonical text in the academic study of religion, F. D. E. Schleiermacher’s definition of religion’s essence as “neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling” in the Reden has been seen as exemplary of an approach that promotes an individualistic and subjectivistic conception of religion inattentive to the kind of power dynamics at play in its use. When read in its original context as an intervention into early German Romantic political discourse, however, the Reden is better understood as a political-theological manifesto that highlights the ongoing significance of religious sociality—and its legal manifestations—for post-revolutionary political reforms. Far from apolitical, the Reden remains relevant for scholars of religion and political theologians interested in moving beyond liberal political framings of the relationship between religion and the political.
ABSTRACT Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi was a Jewish historian who criticized history. Yet, although Yerushalmi is widely read in Jewish studies, his readers have not meaningfully questioned the dominance of history in the field. This article revisits Yerushalmi’s critique of history, attending to the form and rhetoric of his work to reread him as a theorist of secular loss. It elaborates his critique of history as a critique of the Jewish entry into the idioms of secular Western power and an experiment in writing Jewish loss in nonhistorical forms. From his famous critique of history in Zakhor, to the posthumously published story “Gilgul,” Yerushalmi theorized the secular West as irreducibly melancholic. Reading Yerushalmi’s secularization theory as a theory of loss, this article argues that his experiments with nonhistorical forms of writing register a deep pessimism about the possibility of Jewish incorporation into the epistemological and political orders of the secular.
ABSTRACT This article offers a framework for drawing into focus the relational dimensions of religious practices, particularly those that lead away from formal, congregational, and authorized styles of worship. Following the religious trajectories of young queer people in Zimbabwe that involve both ancestral spiritual practices and Pentecostalism, the article suggests that relations with the divine, ancestral, and other spiritual beings are a key dimension of, motivating force, and affective structure of many religious orientations and experiences. The article first analyzes structures of relations, collectively held forms that encourage, permit, and discourage certain ways of relating to the unseen and the otherworldly. Alongside this, it traces the idiosyncratic and improvised styles of relating that people develop beyond established paradigms, which lead away from elite, permitted, and authorized forms. It contends that engaging the webs of relations in which religious subjects are enmeshed promises to enhance our understandings of religion in the contemporary world.
