Search Results (7)

This paper explores the material culture of religious life on the Greek island of Anafi during the peak tourism season of summer 2023. Through ethnographic fieldwork, the paper examines the public celebration of a number of feasts coinciding with the summer high season: the Transfiguration of Christ, one of the Great Feasts of the Orthodox Church, celebrated on the sixth of August; the Dormition of the Theotokos (Mary the “Birthgiver of God”) on the fifteenth, with evening Supplications to the Theotokos in church on every August weekday leading up to the feast; the feast and commemoration of the immensely popular Saint Fanourios on the twenty-seventh of August, with the main celebration centering on the preceding day’s vespers; and, in September, the major feast of the island: the Nativity of the Theotokos (8 September), which unfolds into four-days-long festivities, due to the main shrine of the island being dedicated to the protectress of Anafi, Panayia Kalamiotissa. This paper focuses especially on the role of commensality and shared meals in maintaining kinship ties and social communion. Ritualized festive eating emerges as a way of consolidating the community of permanent island residents and diasporic islanders returning for summer. The continuity of these embodied practices provides insight into Anafiot identity and lived religion. Ultimately, this paper reflects on how contemporary Orthodox theologians have re-discovered the priority of materiality and the senses in ecclesial life. Full article

Julian of Norwich’s performance within her longer Revelations of Divine Love involves layers of authorizing and devotional steps that frame it as a gift for her community. She presents herself not as an author, but as a revelator, in step with John’s acts of unveiling his visions and dialogue with the divine in the Biblical Revelations. Examining Julian’s act of presenting her visions in writing demonstrates how her daring yet insistently orthodox visions handle issues of spiritual authority and individual faith made urgent by the rise of Lollardy. My work with Julian’s Revelations is the foundation for a wider argument about the interchange between vernacular mysticism and public devotion through their use of affective piety and the performance of spiritual dialogue. In this article, I examine Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Divine Love to determine how it works as contemplative drama. I also look at The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ and The Cloud of Unknowing to set up Julian’s performance of contemplative devotion and the potential pitfalls of a pious English readership. Julian’s revelations demonstrate where interior contemplation is transformed into collective acts of devotion. Full article

This article explores how competing images of Jewish corporeality and gendered identity are emerging in Israel through classical ballet by religious girls and women. It traces the cultural, political, and religious implications of this in the context of masculine Zionist ideals of the valorization of the corporeal. Focusing on a group of pioneering Israeli women it traces how they have reshaped the study of ballet into a liberatory yet modest practice for Orthodox women across a range of Israeli religious communities. The revolutionary efforts that linked the founding of the state of Israel with a new body are viewed through a revised feminist perspective, one within the paradigm of a religious counterrevolution. Just as the laboring body of the secular folk dancer of the Yishuv has stood for socialism, egalitarianism, and muscular Judaism while relegating the religious body to the sidelines, it is possible now to read an image of the return of the religious, via the feminized body of classical ballet, as emblematic of the new Jewish woman of Orthodox communities. I argue that through the study of ballet a politics of piety is operating among Orthodox Jewish women making it a medium through which they are changing assumptions about agency, patriarchal norms, and nationalist politics. Full article

Rebbetzin Batsheva Kanievsky (1932–2011) served as a spiritual guide for many; her prominence and influence were a unique phenomenon in the Haredi (Jewish ultra-Orthodox) community in which she grew up, where women, lacking Talmudic knowledge or other sources of authority, are generally found only at the margins of the public sphere. Her multi-faceted activity was focused on offering blessings and advice. She also innovated a few segulot (magical techniques) and religious rituals. Her leadership is characterized, on the one hand, by the preservation and even strengthening of the existing Lithuanian Haredi ethos, particularly in the context of the wife’s complete self-abnegation for her husband’s Torah study. On the other hand, it fostered emotional and experiential elements that are closer to the ethos of the Hasidic and Sephardi communities and are associated with folk piety and a quasi-magical orientation. Rebbetzin Kanievsky thus created a type of female religious leadership that can be characterized as anti-leadership, in which she embodied the Haredi conception of ideal womanhood. Consequently, she was not perceived as a threat to Haredi values but rather as their promoter. However, this model of leadership enabled her to break, almost despite herself, the limitations of the gender hierarchy of the Haredi community and serve as an almost singular female role model in that community’s pantheon. Full article

Over the last two decades we have seen a proliferation in the number of self-proclaimed Islamic scholars preaching piety to Muslim women. An emerging few of these scholars gaining prominence happen to be women, feminizing what is predominantly a patriarchal domain of dawah (missionary work) and proselytization. Traditionally speaking, Muslim missionaries have never been restricted to a particular moral province, perhaps due to the fact that Islam was never intended as a hierarchical religion with a mosque–state divide. This makes mapping Muslim moral spaces in a hyper-globalized world—one in which shared identities and ideologies transcend territorial boundaries—all the more challenging. Using the firebrand female Muslim tele preacher, Dr. Farhat Hashmi, and her global proselytizing mission (Al-Huda International) as a springboard for discussion, this paper seeks to map out the ways in which modern Muslim women in the post-9/11 British Pakistani diaspora navigate these moral provinces. By juxtaposing the staunchly orthodox impositions of niqab-clad Dr. Hashmi, with the revolt from within Muslim spaces, from practicing, ‘middle-path’ Muslims, this paper critically engages with Saba Mahmood’s concept of the ‘politics of piety’ and its various critiques. In so doing, we reimagine Muslim spaces, as well as the moralization versus multivocality debate surrounding them, and the importance of positioning agency and complex lived realities of women occupying these spaces at the center of our analysis on Muslim moral provinces. Full article

The article focuses on the reclaiming of militaristic ideas and the emergence of specific “militant piety” and “theology of war” in the Orthodox discourse of post-Soviet Russia. It scrutinizes the increasing prestige of soldiering in the Church and its convergence with the army. This convergence generates particular hybrid forms, in which Church rituals and symbols interact with military ones, leading to a “symbolic reception of war” in Orthodoxy. The authors show that militaristic ideas are getting influence not only in the post-Soviet but also in American Orthodoxy; they consider this parallel as evidence that the process is caused not only by the political context—the revival of neo-imperial ideas in Russia and the increasing role of power structures in public administration—but is conditioned by socio-cultural attitudes inherent in Orthodox tradition, forming a type of militant religiosity called “militant piety”. This piety is not a matter of fundamentalism only; it represents the essential layer of religious consciousness in Orthodoxy reflected in modern Church theology, rhetoric, and aesthetics. The authors analyze war rhetoric while applying approaches of Karen Armstrong, Mark Juergensmeyer, R. Scott Appleby, and other theoreticians of the relationship between religion and violence. Full article

This article analyzes Schmemann’s ecclesiology in the context of his attempt to give an assessment of the Church’s attitude to life; as well as the problem of defensiveness in Orthodoxy; reductionism of ecclesial culture; “rejection” of the world and traditionalistic isolation. The author focuses upon the socio-cultural interpretation given by Schmemann to such important categories of the ecclesial language as “piety,” “humility,” “churchliness,” “spirituality,” etc.; showing that in real life these categories express the isolation and stereotypification of Orthodoxy. In the context of “lived” religion, these categories deliver a protective and reductionist message, justifying a kind of anthropological pessimism, “religion of guilt” and psychological self-closure of a person. The theologian juxtaposes two religious traditions: one based on the defensiveness and the other based on a sense of joy; the feeling of God’s presence and affinity to the Kingdom of Heaven. According to the author, the accents put by Schmemann in his ecclesiology can promote the formation of ethics of laity and a more adequate attitude towards the world in the 21st century Orthodoxy. Full article