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By delving into the history of the fetish-object among both modern and contemporary commentators, this book highlights the fetish-object's role as a philosophical and religious concept of the highest significance. Historically, fetishes are implicated in specific struggles for sovereign (political) and/or religious (hierarchical) power, with their interwoven symbols defined as the primary location for transcendence in our world. This book defines the political consequences of fetish-objects within a western cultural, and primarily theological context through a comparative approach of various literatures on fetish-objects—anthropological to the psychological, Marxist to the theological. It reconceives of fetishes as a form of resistance to oppressive structures, something which motivated Christians themselves historically, and shaped our western understanding of the sacraments far more than has been acknowledged. Taking up this conversation likewise holds forth the possibility of reconceptualizing how fetish-objects and sacramental presences both speak profoundly to our late-modern selves. ; https://ecommons.luc.edu/facultybooks/1183/thumbnail.jpg

Giorgio Agamben: Der Gebrauch der Körper. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer 2020. 978-3-10-002451-0

Dietmar Dath: Hegel, 100 Seiten. Stuttgart: Reclam 2020. 978-3-15-020559-4

Am 6. Januar 2019 ist die neue Orthodoxe Kirche der Ukraine mit dem sogenannten Autokephalie-Tomos anerkannt worden. Damit sollten die anhaltenden Diskussionen um die Unabhängigkeit der orthodoxen Kirche in der Ukraine von Moskau beendet werden. Politische Verstrickungen und kirchliche Machtkämpfe führen jedoch dazu, dass die kirchliche Lage in der Ukraine noch viele Jahre konfliktreich bleiben wird.

Las guerras civiles del período tardorrepublicano son un período de profunda agitación política, en el que la cohesión y la viabilidad de la comunidad cívica son severamente cuestionadas. Esto posee significativas ramificaciones religiosas, dado que la relación entre la comunidad y los dioses es desafiada y en ocasiones socavada. No obstante, las afirmaciones relativas a la piedad –el escrúpulo y la observancia religiosa, así como una conexión duradera con los dioses– juegan un papel central en los discursos contemporáneos sobre la guerra civil y sin duda en el funcionamiento de los conflictos militares mismos. Este trabajo traza estas afirmaciones buscando recuperar la centralidad de las preocupaciones religiosas de los sectores en guerra y explorar sus implicaciones políticas e intelectuales. ; The civil wars of the late Republican period are a period of deep political turmoil, in which the cohesion and viability of the civic community are harshly put into question. That has significant religious ramifications, as the relationship between the community and the gods is challenged and at times undermined. Yet claims to piety - to religious scruple and observance, as well as to an enduring connection with the gods - play a major role in contemporary discourses on civil war, and indeed in the running of the military conflicts themselves. This paper charts them by seeking to restore centrality to the religious concerns of the warring parties and explore their political and intellectual implications. ; Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación

The aim of this article is to discuss the notion of vulnerability and suffering as an aspect of animal bodily existence that, despite its negative connotations, is a highly interesting point of convergence for human-animal studies and the branch of aesthetics concerned with the interplay of individual and collective affectivities in the works of art. Arguing for the existence of a cross-species community of affect, the author bases her analyses on Judith Butler's ontology of precariousness and seeks to establish a vital connection be-tween the political and social experience of vulnerability on the one hand, and rituals of mourning inspired by compassion on the other. The argument points to the possibility of charting new trajectories of affect in political praxis and art which do not only establish a cross-species community of suffering, but also bridge the gap between humans and animals as religious subjects, which is conceived here as a profoundly emancipatory ges-ture.

Il rapporto al sacro in tempi d'interminabili guerre confessionali come quelle che travagliarono le Fiandre tra la fine del XVI e la prima metà del XVII secolo assume forme diverse, che raccontano delle priorità e dei bisogni di molteplici soggetti storici. Le devozioni mariane (in particolare quelle sviluppatesi in stretto contatto con il reticolo di santuari dedicati alla Vergine nei Paesi Bassi meridionali e nell'Italia spagnola) si prestano ad un'analisi che vada al di là dalla sola lettura politica e confessionale di devozioni imposte dalle autorità politiche e religiose. In questa prospettiva i libretti di pellegrinaggio forniscono elementi importanti per ricostruire le grandi linee di un accesso al sacro per via femminile, in cui alla Signora degli eserciti dei gruppi egemoni si accompagnano altri volti della Madre di Dio. L'empatia con l'essere umano e con le sue sofferenze é uno degli elementi dominanti, che nello stesso periodo si ritroverà anche in diverse devozioni liminali, contrastate dal Sant'Uffizio.

The region of Ladakh in the Indian Himalayas has recently seen a rise in attacks by stray dogs, some of which have been fatal. The dogs' claims on territory have not gone uncontested in an emotional landscape fraught with anxieties over religious identities as tensions prevail between a Buddhist and a Muslim population. Consideration for the political effects of ethical discourses about dogs in Ladakh reveals how dog population control, and the intricately linked question of dog care have implications for the shaping of an animal ethics as a contentious political question. In the public sphere, some interpret matters related to dogs as a problem of human territoriality, while others foreground animal care as a virtue of Tibetan Buddhists. While these ideas about dogs and their treatment are shaped by a network of local and translocal ideas and practices about animal welfare and about religious identity, the politics of dog ethics in Ladakh is not an exclusively human product. Dogs are also agents of this politics, both in their physical capacity, to define dog-human interactions, as they are capable of being both affectionate and extremely violent, and because they have the potential to act on human's production of meaning and exceed human expectations.

Abstract The article examines the survival strategies and political reactions of indigenous groups in areas of agricultural frontiers that are strongly influenced by cultural symbols, family bonds and land-based responses. It is discussed the unique socio-spatial trajectory of indigenous peoples and, in addition, a typology of the indigenous space is proposed. The analysis is focused on the emblematic example of how frontier making was experienced by the Guarani-Kaiowa of South America. The wisdom and resistance of Guarani-Kaiowa groups derive from the simultaneous ethnicisation of space and spatialisation of culture. They have shown latent geographical agency shaped by religious practices, strong family ties and the ability to internally negotiate the return to their original areas. There are many lessons to be learned, in particular the talent to absorb the increasing and dissimulated brutality of frontier making and, at the same time, voice their political demands, form solid strategic alliances and coordinate land-recovery initiatives.

The creation of new saints often has a political edge; the Catholic Church molds saints' lives to fit its needs, and individual popes have particular priorities in saint-making. In the early modern Church, this was particularly important after the Council of Trent. The Tridentine decrees (1563) instructed bishops to reform the Church but provided few practical suggestions for how to do this. One solution was to hold up exemplary post-Tridentine bishops as models through beatification and canonization. Historians have noted the importance of model bishops but have not fully considered the process of creating them and its implication for the histories of Catholic Reform and of canonization. The case of Cardinal-Bishop Gregorio Barbarigo of Padua (bp. 1664-1697) tells a complicated and interesting story about the intersection of Catholic Reform and canonization. Barbarigo was beatified in 1761 during the Catholic Enlightenment and was finally canonized in 1960, on the eve of the Second Vatican Council. Examining the construction of his image from 1699-1960, this article argues that the Catholic Church in both the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries molded Barbarigo into the model bishop needed at those particular times, in response to the issues facing contemporary bishops and clergy.

This research investigates a neglected topic within both transgender studies and religious studies by analyzing ex-gay movement discourses of &ldquo ; transgenderism&rdquo ; from the 1970s to the present, focusing primarily on the US-American context. The oppression of transgender people in the US and globally is fed and fueled by the religious, scientific, and political discourses of the transnational &ldquo ; ex-gay&rdquo ; movement, which provides the ideological and material foundation of Christian Right politics. Using critical discourse analysis of ex-gay texts, we analyze the implications of these discourses in the individual, interactional, and institutional dimensions of society&rsquo ; s gender structure. This movement is one of the most insidious&mdash ; and overlooked&mdash ; sources of cisgenderism and transmisogyny today, constructing gender variance as sin, mental illness, and danger&mdash ; with catastrophic consequences for transgender people, and those along the transfemale/feminine spectrum in particular. Finally, we discuss the public policy implications of these discourses.

Witness to Marvels traces the development of a unique genre of Sufi-inspired Bengali romances called pir kathas, whose protagonists and plots are wholly fictive. For five centuries these fabulations have parodied indigenous and Hindu textual traditions. Both mimicking and mocking, these parodies adopted a subjunctive tone, exploring a magical world of 'what-if'. They created an Islam-inflected space within a traditional Bengali cultural environment without trying to legislate what ideally 'should be' according to tropes common to Islamic history, theology, and law. The tales' discursive arena, the imaginaire, delineated the realm of possibility for how these tales might exercise the imagination to integrate Hindu and Islamic cosmologies. Tales insinuated themselves into locally relevant discourses through elaborate intertextual connections, subtly shifting presuppositions about the way the world works and what counts as religious authority. As Allah looked on from heaven, the tales routinely assigned Sufi saints, both pirs and bibis, to the pivotal role of avatar, the periodic descent of divinity, equating them to the Hindu god Narayan. Adopting a semiotic strategy to interpret these tales yields a bold new perspective on the subtle ways Islam assumed its distinctive form in Bengal and suggests how we need to reimagine conversion in this region.