Search Results (22)

The Samoan general election of 2021 provoked an unprecedented constitutional crisis. It represented yet one more symptom in a shaking of the foundations—not just in politics but within the very nature of Samoan society. The nation’s past stability had resided in the cultural virtue of respect, which permeated its key pillars—the church, law and fa’a Samoa (the customary Samoan way of life). There had been several tremors prior to the election. These had involved court cases involving the church where the Congregational Christian Church Samoa was shown to be in the wrong. These tremors and the more substantial shaking brought about by the constitutional crisis pose several awkward questions as regards the way in which the Christian faith and the Samoan cultural way of life–fa’a Samoa—are commonly regarded as more than complimentary. They also call into question the church’s default practice of silence in the face of public issues. Is it now time to nurture and encourage the public role of the faifeau (minister) for the sake of the common good in a time of significant change? In the absence of a prophetic theology, the tremors and shaking of the foundations signify the necessity of taking some further steps in the development of a local public theology. Full article

Between the 16th and 17th centuries, the conservative characteristic of rural environments and mountain communities represented one of the main worries of the Larian Church, which, despite the work of reform of religious customs undertaken by the order of preachers in the late Middle Ages (not unrelated to the genesis of the accusation of diabolic witchcraft), it found itself confronted with the shortcomings (from the interference of the laity in religious life to suspicious devotions via the mixture of the sacred and magical animistic legacies) originating from decades of neglect in the management of valley parishes and the laxity of the secular clergy. This concern had to be reconciled, from the first decades of the sixteenth century onward, with the need to counter the Protestant presence. The “singular” way in which diocesan ordinaries sought in the aftermath of the Tridentine Council to re-establish orthopraxy in the only diocese in the peninsula subject to secular authorities of the Reformed faith, and in which an Italophone Protestant community was permanently present for several decades, represents an important case study for understanding the anomaly of the local bishop’s courts (and the inquisition) transformed during this time from bitter enemies of the secta strigiarum into “witch lawyers”, and for illuminating the deeper reasons for the limits of the fight against superstitions in the entire peninsula. Full article

In 1309, the parish church of Harewood in Yorkshire, England, was invaded by a group of armed parishioners opposing the decisions of the church courts. The story of this invasion and the ways in which Church and State attempted and failed to remove it demonstrate how an apparently local quarrel could be part of national political events and of the intertwining of the laws of Church and State. It also demonstrates, importantly, a largely overlooked aspect of the relationship between the laity at a local level and the Church as an institution. Full article

From its foundation in 1622, the Congregation de Propaganda Fide held supreme jurisdiction over all missionary activities of the Catholic Church at the global level, with authority coming directly from the pope. Its main goals were the expansion of the Catholic faith, the reaffirmation of papal spiritual primacy, and the promotion of Indigenous clergy throughout the world, which put Propaganda Fide in direct competition with secular rulers who also wanted to control missionary activities in their overseas territories. This article will examine one such conflict, namely that regarding Portugal and its royal patronage system in China. The Historical Archive of Propaganda Fide in the Vatican City holds extensive material concerning Portuguese patronage and China, which has remained relatively unknown and understudied. Through an examination of several of the most significant documents, such as the formal terms sent by the Portuguese court to the Holy See, the response of Propaganda Fide, and the final declaration of the Holy See, which would become the cornerstone for all future decisions over the patronage system, it is suggested that these negotiations about China are in fact central to a wider shift in global Catholic policy and politics in the field of missionary activity. Full article

This paper builds upon and extends Christian and legal scholarship on the civil rights movement by illuminating a climate of religious freedom that served as a catalyst for and was integral to the success of the spirited activism of the civil rights movement. To date, scholars have not extensively considered how the expansion of religious freedom in church and state jurisprudence both directly and indirectly created a climate that contributed to the success of the CRM, and how advancements in civil rights impacted the broader revolution occurring in constitutional rights. The climate of religious freedom included court support for evangelizing in residentially exclusive areas, exemptions for conscientious opposers from participating in oath swearing and other ceremonies, and exemptions from other general laws that unduly inhibited the free exercise of religious rights. Full article

A growing number of Protestant missionaries engaged in vernacular education in the late nineteenth century. To meet the demands of the new era, Christian church education faced challenges not only in its curriculum design but also in the way it presented new knowledge. Previous studies have focused on church education at the tertiary level while overlooking the elementary level. This article discusses vernacular church education and vernacular textbooks at the elementary level in the late Qing, with specific reference to Youxue baoshen yaoyan 幼學保身要言 (The Human Body for Children). It argues that the demand for spreading new knowledge urged Protestant missionaries to compile vernacular textbooks and present Western knowledge in the local settings. Vernacular church education should be regarded as the precursor of indigenous education proposed by the late Qing Court. The local dialect, Cantonese in this case, bridged the linguistic gap between new terms and children’s cognition and became an effective means of presenting new knowledge. Vernacular textbooks had an unparalleled significance in the cultural sphere of dialect writing, since the language of textbooks could drastically influence the writing and reading habits of the young generation and further influence people’s attitudes towards dialects and dialect literature. Full article

In the diverse multiethnic setting of colonial New Spain, women faced challenges in separating themselves from marriages they considered unendurable. The Catholic Church, which exercised hegemony over definitions of marriage in the colony, controlled access to permanent, formal separation or “ecclesiastical divorce”, while secular courts offered shorter-term separations generally aimed at reunifying couples. Outside of these options, flight, concealment, and bigamy, or “self-divorce,” offered the only recourse for women seeking to leave an untenable relationship. While it is well known that few women sought (and even fewer were granted) ecclesiastical divorce, it is clear that many women sought separation through formal and informal means. Using ecclesiastical petitions for divorce, this paper investigates the experience of deposit (depósito) for New Spain’s separated women. Deposit was likely a primary goal of women’s divorce petitions. Moreover, the hegemony of marriage was less complete in reality than in ideology; the number of single women in the colony is now known to be vast, and their networks substantial. Building on Bird’s and Megged’s insights on separation and singleness, this paper argues that studying deposit reveals a custom that offered women of all classes a substantial degree of respite and agency in separation, particularly in the early colony, when institutional options were less formalized. Sometimes, depósito permitted lengthy separations that blurred into permanency, while at other times it served as a crucial safety valve. Nonetheless, the practice was a contested terrain on which husbands also sought to exercise power and control. Deposit, therefore, was a highly ambivalent form of “separation” in Latin America. This was undoubtedly true both in the early-colonial period and thereafter, but as colonial society matured and institutional deposit became more possible and common, men’s power was enhanced. Studying the practice before the late seventeenth century therefore reveals some of the ways that early colonial societal flux authorized female agency. Full article

In Italy, the debate regarding the presence of crosses and crucifixes in public places is long-standing and involves their detractors, supporters and defenders. Over time, these conflicting positions have gained media resonance, becoming a sociopolitical controversy that has led to lawsuits at various levels, including the European Court of Human Rights. In the social sphere, the issue has oscillated between the recognition of the universal value of religious symbols and advocacy for secularism, even in open spaces such as mountaintops. During the last few decades, several initiatives have been undertaken in the Italian Alps, driven by ecological concerns and opposition to the presence of crosses on the mountains. These initiatives have resulted in collective actions against the positioning and erection of crosses, and there have even been attempts to diversify the Italian peaks. By providing a historical overview of the Christianisation of Italian mountaintops and focusing on the mobilisation against the presence of crosses, this article contributes to the understanding of the role of such symbols in Italian public opinion, which is intertwined with the vitality of the Catholic Church and the sociopolitical implications of these initiatives. The research questions will investigate the process of legitimisation and delegitimisation of Christian symbols. The cross on the mountaintop serves as an example of culturalised religion, where this cultural object can become a “passive religious symbol,” polarising claims for the defence of the natural environment and the sustainability of religion in the mountains. Full article

Divorce emerges as a phenomenon in counterpoint to marriage, both terms representing processes or phases of interaction punctuated by moments of completion and transition to further phases. We can make an initial distinction between divorce, viewed as undoing of preceding phases, and marriage, viewed as prospective of moving into a new relationship. Both divorce and marriage may carry different meanings depending on the wider culture in which they occur. Where marriage comes into being via a series of reciprocal transactions of wealth objects, divorce correspondingly consists of the undoing of such transactions, with the aim of creating a new order of relationships. This process can, in turn, itself vary as it turns on emotional manifestations between the parties involved, sometimes connected with the presence of offspring, as in the case of the Nuer people of South Sudan, among whom a wife does not shift to her husband’s settlement place until the couple have a child. The question of transactions goes with the significance of the wider kin networks in which marriages and divorces are regulated. All in all, our paper examines a counterpoint between legal and emotional aspects of both marriage and divorce, raising issues about what a marriage is and what constitutes a divorce, together with nuances of ritual processes that mark pathways between these categories. We draw on ethnography from Pacific cultures, especially Papua New Guinea, and from Africa, to explore these processes. Full article

To curb the spread of COVID-19, houses of worship in the State of New York were legally required to limit attendance at religious ceremonies. Two religious communities—the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and the Orthodox Jewish organization, Agudath Israel of America—asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. This article provides a theological interpretation of the Court’s decision to grant these communities injunctive relief, thus freeing them from the State’s restrictions on religious attendance. Drawing upon the Catholic tradition, and especially the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the article offers a sustained virtue-based analysis of the Court opinion and of the relationship between church and state more generally. Full article

As they impact the condition of religious groups, and in fine that of the very individuals composing them, state-church relationships are an important dimension of religious freedom. The way states interact with religious groups, communities, and associations has a decisive impact on the religious condition of their members, in their effort to develop their religious beliefs or practices. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to explore the European Court of Human Rights’ regulation of state-church relationships. The research focuses on ECtHR’s judgments issued on article 9, either autonomously or in connection with article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It also considers cases adjudicated upon article 2 of Protocol I to the Convention. For optimal consistency with Europe’s social evolution, however, special attention was given to those cases issued from early 2011. The article argues that behind the margin of appreciation granted for states to enact any system they see fit, the Court puts forward limits they cannot trespass. Indeed, the systems adopted have to abide by the values underlying the Convention as a whole. The article argues said values materialize a global framework that unifies states into one European global approach, thus giving a further illustration of the oligopolistic Pluralism that the Court develops in its regulation of individual religious freedom. Full article

On the 9th of October, 1170 Pope Alexander III resided in Anagni, which had been the ancient residence of the court of the Popes for at least two centuries. He wrote to two influential local archbishops for help in pacifying King Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket, who had been in dispute for six years. Sensing Becket’s looming tragic fate, Alexander III began slowly to encircle the archbishop with rhetoric of the new martyr of Libertas Ecclesiae. When he had to flee from Rome besieged by factions led by Frederick I, the pope found refuge in Segni, where he canonised Thomas Becket on 21 February 1173. However, it was in faithful Anagni that he settled on and off from March 1173 through the following years (November 1176; December 1177–March 1178; September 1179). It was here that he decided to elaborate a powerful speech in images. In an oratory in the crypt of the grandiose cathedral, Alexander III had the last painful moments of the Archbishop’s death painted in a program imitating that of St. Peter’s in the Vatican. Becket thus became the new imitator of Christ, the new Peter, the new martyr on the altar of the Church of Rome. Full article

This paper presents a contextual use of the innovative drawing techniques that involved architecture and painting in the Qing court during the first half of the eighteenth century. At this point architectural linear perspective in painting (quadratura) and stage design had become common fields of experimentation for the Chinese and Jesuit artists missionaries. In this conceptual context, Western quadratura was developed in China by Giovanni Gherardini. (1655–1729), and especially by Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), who is remembered as an extraordinarily versatile architect–painter. The focus of this paper is on the “illusory mural paintings of architectural perspective in Nantang Church” (Beijing), which has now disappeared, and which spread the influence of the Western Renaissance. The imported Western linear perspective and the fundamentals of architectural drawing facilitated the systematization and dissemination of the quadratura as an unknown technique in China. Based on the text described by the contemporary scholar Yao Yuan Zhi, an original interpretation of the architectural perspective mural paintings in Nantang Church is proposed. These paintings provide an important case study of Sino-European collaboration in the eighteenth century from different points of view: the representation of the light in drawings and the fact that the concept of shadow in some respects was unknown to the Chinese artist. Full article

U.S. constitutional jurisprudence precludes the direct government funding of religious activity. At the same time, the jurisprudence surrounding the U.S. First Amendment Religion Clauses has evolved to support the general inclusion of religious entities in programs through which a government advances some overarching public interest, such as health care or social services, but does not involve the Government in advancing religion per se. Moreover, the most recent U.S. Supreme Court cases hold that it is a violation of the First Amendment to exclude a religious actor, solely because it is religious, from a general public program and funding on equal terms with secular actors. Pandemic relief from the federal government has been made available to houses of worship (churches, mosques, synagogues, etc.) to mitigate the economic impact of government lockdown orders and public health restrictions on assembly, by offsetting loss of revenue and avoiding the suspension or termination of employees. The extension of such relief sits precisely at the crossroads of debated legal questions about whether such assistance is aid to religion—prohibited—or neutral disaster relief on equal terms with other community-serving entities—permitted. This article concludes that the inclusion of houses of worship is constitutional, given the trend and direction of U.S. law, although the matter will continue to be debated as the effects of the pandemic recede. Full article

The question of LGBTQ+ inclusion in churches is rapidly becoming an open conversation in congregations and denominations seeking answers in policy and practice. As society is engaging the question of LGBTQ+ rights in the courts, denominations are addressing LGBTQ+ inclusion, and as increasing numbers of LGBTQ+ Christians come out in their faith communities, church members and their churches, with their religious structures, are called on to take positions, often in the absence of agreement. In background research and 97 interviews with leaders and members of 21 congregations in three denominations, a research team discovered processes, models for conversation, and resources to address the risks of division and changes in membership and finances. In the following article, the authors include findings and resources from congregations, process models, and suggestions and possibilities for families of faith considering how to move forward in addressing one of the more pressing and divisive issues in the church. Full article