Search Results (14)

Suffering and theodicy are two interconnected concepts: while the former indicates the embodied personal experience of pain, the latter represents the theological effort to explain the existence of suffering and evil by reconciling them with the idea of a world created by an omnipotent, omniscient, and infinitely good God. From a sociological perspective, the first scholar to address the problematic relationship between these two concepts was Max Weber. The problem of suffering in Weber was linked, first of all, to the process of social rationalization, that is, to the growing predominance of formal rationality in Western social life, the ultimate outcome of which he famously described through the metaphor of the “iron cage” as the existential suffering of modern Western humanity. Subsequently, in his Sociology of Religion, he adopted the concept of “disenchantment” to refer to the cultural rationalization of worldviews as a process characterizing most Asian religions within a broader universal perspective. According to Weber’s comparative investigation, at the origin of all attempts at religious rationalization lies the same universal problem of theodicy, namely the search for an explanation capable of justifying the unequal distribution of the goods of happiness among human beings and the resulting suffering, perceived as unjust. For Weber, the paradox of theodicy consists in the fact that the rationalization of thought (worldviews) and action (conducts of life), in an attempt to confer meaning on and alleviate suffering on the basis of one of the two conceptions of salvation (rebirth or redemption), instead produces the unintended consequence of making the human condition even more vulnerable to the experience of suffering, since it comes to be regarded as morally more outrageous and intellectually more unacceptable. Later, the founders of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer and Adorno, essentially took up and expanded the Weberian thesis of the paradox of theodicy by showing that the second disenchantment brought about by modernity affected the rationalization of metaphysical–religious worldviews through the return of the irrational mythical–magical forces that had once been subjugated and turned into myth by the Enlightenment. As a consequence, the loss of individual freedom, reduced to a mere functional response within modern political and economic bureaucratic systems, comes to coincide with the loss of meaning of any autonomous cultural framework rationally grounded in value orientations. Habermas further developed Weber’s thesis of the loss of freedom by situating the process of social rationalization within a broader paradox that illustrates the contemporary inability of colonized lifeworlds, now completely bureaucratized and technicized, to confer meaning on the subjective experience of suffering. More recently, in the so-called Anthropocene, a non-linear and non-unidirectional dialectic of disenchantment and re-enchantment has emerged, in which the two coexist as constitutive processes of modernity, allowing the paradox of theodicy and suffering to be reconsidered in terms of a new anthropodicy. Full article

This paper argues that the colonial introduction of Christianity in Africa must be understood as a reordering of personhood, moral feeling, and the conditions under which lived experience becomes intelligible, rather than as a change in formal religious affiliation alone. Drawing on scholarship in African philosophy, religious history, European intellectual history, and African psychology, the paper traces how missionary Christianity reclassified African spiritual worlds, recoded suffering and misfortune, and disrupted the transmission of spiritual knowledge across generations. Crucially, it situates this encounter within the longer history of Christianity’s own disenchantment: the suppression, within dominant Protestant and Enlightenment traditions, of enchanted practices that had characterised European Christianity for over a millennium. The missionary traditions that condemned African spirit mediation, ancestral veneration, and ritual healing were carriers of a tradition that had practised structurally analogous things before disciplining them out of its own self-understanding. The paper shows that colonial religion produced layered forms of subjectivity in which ancestral obligation, Christian doctrine, communal personhood, moral anxiety, and therapeutic pluralism coexist in tension. The concept of ontological compression is proposed to name the condition under which parts of the self become unsayable within authorised vocabularies, a condition rendered doubly intense by the fact that the compressing tradition had already performed this narrowing upon itself. Rather than treating African spirituality as residue, superstition, or cultural background, the paper proposes that it should be approached as a living philosophical and psychological archive through which many people continue to interpret suffering, relation, responsibility, and reality itself. Full article

The ongoing academic debate on interpreting the disenchantment and re-enchantment of modern society remains unresolved. This study traces the theoretical genealogies of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment, proposing that enchantment is not a fixed concept but a dynamically evolving and reconstructed process. Focusing on sacred mountain circumambulation—a traditional pilgrimage ritual deeply entrenched in Tibetan cultural contexts—this study employs qualitative methods, conducting semi-structured interviews with 33 contemporary Tibetan youth to examine the manifestations of enchantment within this practice. Findings reveal that, against the backdrop of globalization and China’s social transformation, Tibetan youths’ circumambulation practices exhibit several emerging characteristics in organizational patterns, material preparation, modes of action, degree of ritual participation, and intergenerational differences. Within this pilgrimage activity, the process of disenchantment is evident as Tibetan youth attain higher levels of cultural and educational literacy. Traditional foundations of enchantment, such as taboos associated with sacred mountains and utilitarian motivations, persist. Simultaneously, new forms of enchantment with distinctly modern features—including topophilia and emotional value—are steadily emerging. The results suggest that disenchantment does not entail the demise of enchantment, nor does re-enchantment signify a return to traditional enchantment. Instead, sacred mountain circumambulation embodies the cognitive and perceptual process through which Tibetan youth engage with, understand, and negotiate enchantment via their individual lived experiences. This research not only uncovers the evolving significance of circumambulation in modern society but also offers a fresh perspective on how enchantment adapts and endures within contemporary contexts. Full article

Guo Moruo’s “Rebirth of the Goddesses” is among the landmark works of modern Chinese poetry. Its myth-rewriting amounts to an act of “disenchantment” carried out amid the ruins of “enchantment”. Yet this heroic undertaking is caught in a triple dialectical vortex: in order to disenchant, it must appeal to the primordial “energies” of myth (nature, life, imagination); in order for disenchantment to be effective, it strategically “uses enchantment” (by requisitioning textual canons and ritual authority); and in the end—because of the intensity of rewriting and the depth of political and spiritual investment—it becomes itself a new layer of enchantment (a cycle of re-enchantment). This exposes the core dilemma of China’s modernity project: to build a new order on the ruins of tradition is necessarily a tragic enterprise of rupture and continuity, of disenchantment and re-enchantment at once. Full article

This paper examines postsecularism, magic and disenchantment in the West with an emphasis on Wicca. Following a discussion of postsecularism, it provides a critical overview of the Weberian notion of disenchantment which describes the decline in magic in modernity. Magic, far from disappearing in the postsecular, has been transformed through a process of psychologization. While there is substantial evidence for the persistence of magic in modernity, the question is how it persists. The notion of participatory consciousness is deployed to account for its persistence. Participatory consciousness allows us to understand the ways that everyday life blends secular, spiritual, and religious aspects—a central theme of the postsecular condition. This paper deploys secondary ethnographic data pertaining to phenomenological studies of Wiccan rituals. Wiccans demonstrate an interest in spirituality that aligns with nature. There is a complex relationship between secular and religious ideas with a blending of spiritual practices with modern technology and individualized spiritual paths. Through the performance of rituals, practitioners transition from an ‘ordinary’ to a ‘magical’ worldview—a form of participatory consciousness involving analogical thinking, imagination, meaning and affect associated with an holistic and enchanted worldview where there are meaningful connections between people, events, and objects. Full article

Rewilding is regularly connected to re-enchantment. In some rewilding projects, ecological restoration merges with narratives of wonder, enchantment and spirituality. While rewilding’s association with re-enchantment appears as part of its appeal, it is also criticised as anthropocentric, escapist or naive. This article aims to formulate a thorough conceptual understanding of rewilding as re-enchantment by situating it within the critical framework of (dis)enchantment developed in the early 20th century by Weber and Horkheimer and Adorno. Connecting this framework to contemporary, phenomenologically inspired accounts of enchantment and critiques on the mechanisation of nature, this article aims towards a new perspective on rewilding as a critical discursive practice of re-enchantment. Rewilding, like re-enchantment, can be seen as a valuable attempt to formulate alternatives to the modern paradigm and programme of disenchantment. Situating rewilding within a broader cultural context and historical perspective, this approach allows for assessing rewilding as part of modern (counter-)culture at large. Moreover, through a detailed account of (re-)enchantment in rewilding on a phenomenological, theoretical and relational level, this article gradually develops a conceptual understanding of re-enchantment as a valuable concept for ecological restoration and cultural transformation. Full article

Many scholars have understood conspiracy theories as sense-making mechanisms. Among them, a particular strand further inspected them in parallel with religion and magic. This comparison bears the risk of framing conspiracy theories as irrational interpretations and anachronisms with respect to contemporary ways of explaining reality. This contribution takes off from the reflections of those who have highlighted this risk. It tries to confront the possibility of using the concept of enchantment without implying a normative judgment on the irrationality of conspiracy theories. This paper carries out this effort by closely inspecting Max Weber’s texts. I argue that Weber’s notion of enchantment and disenchantment allows for a punctual use of both, devoid of normative implications. After setting out this non-normative notion of enchantment, this paper examines the characteristics of the enchanted worldview and its usefulness in reading conspiracy theories. Finally, this paper supports this effort using the identified characteristics to systematise a reading of conspiracy-based accounts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Full article

This study investigates how Martin Heidegger’s notion of “the thing” (Das Ding) can help rescue modern disenchantment with regard to its root in the World, a concept developed from “being-in-the-world” presented in Being and Time, and later taken as a participant in the bilateral polemos illustrated in die Gestalt (signifying Being’s strife to disclose itself against the Earth: self-concealing concealment). In Section 1, I analyze the occurrence of disenchantment by critically reviewing several thinkers’ discussions of it, pointing out that “faciality”—which has structured the modern Western understanding of reality—is the cornerstone of ontotheology, as well as the collapse of it: disenchantment. In Section 2, to demonstrate how Heidegger’s rediscovery of usefulness in a de-subjectified discourse of signification has challenged the positivistic view attached to “faciality”, I examine Heidegger’s idea of “readiness-to-hand,” revealing the basic temporal–spatial units composing the “handiness” of categorical beings and its relation to Dasein, progressing thereon to the analysis of a thing-centered worldview of Heidegger’s phenomenology. In Section 3, I demonstrate how this thing-centered worldview has the potential to form a preparative stage for re-enchantment of the World by uncovering the concealed existentiality within things, aligning with Heidegger’s polemos in his philosophy of art. Full article

Secularisation theory proposed that the modernisation of society would bring about a decline in religiosity across the West, leading to ‘entzauberung’ (disenchantment). Eventually, society would be devoid of belief in the transcendent. Some theorists have challenged this by suggesting (with some qualifying factors) that enchantment better describes the secular age we occupy. Charles Taylor suggests that we can perceive the enchantment of a secular age through the human relationship with art. In this article, I suggest that, when present in popular music, black gospel music (in particular) complicates notions of the sacred-secular binary. The sacred-secular distinction was not familiar to West Africans arriving in the New World during the transatlantic slave trade. Music had played a central role in the lives of pre-diaspora Africans, with no differentiation between sacred and secular musicking. Despite some of the historical opposition to secular music in many black-majority churches, gospel music owes its heritage to this West African worldview. In this article, I propose a four-quadrant model that troubles the accepted binaries of sacred and secular. I use the Kingdom Choir’s 2018 performance of ‘Stand by Me’ at the Royal Wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex as a basis for discussing alternative ways of viewing holy-profane, sacred-secular dichotomies. Full article

This contribution looks at the different architectures for the institutions of the European Union in Brussels. Based on the ideas of the sociologist Max Weber, and later the theologian Harvey Cox, of an increasingly secularized, disenchanted urban society, the author first analyzes the earlier buildings for the European Community as an expression of a rationalist, even ‘disenchanted’ architectural strategy. This contrasts with the efforts of the European Union in the 21st century, which attempts to strengthen identification with the European Union by various means. One of these strategies—as the author points out—is to increasingly charge architecture with auratic meaning, in other words, to re-enchant it. Nevertheless, both architectural solutions do not offer a nation-like master narrative but are intended—each in its own manner—to represent a network of many individual parts. Full article

While many literary theories focus on materialistic concerns, less frequently have these theories focused on the spiritual matters arising from such concerns. A cosmological interpretive strategy focuses on such spiritual and cosmic themes rather than ignoring them. This essay’s analysis will focus on using a cosmological interpretive strategy to analyze Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Arthur Miller’s The Man Who Had All the Luck. This strategy will reveal that, rather than merely being focused on spatial and material concerns, these texts also demonstrate a concern with our relationships with nature and the wider cosmos. Through their narratives, both Wilder and Miller address the passage of time and the questions of agency which occur when thinking about time. This analysis will demonstrate how these stories deny economic and historical determinism in favor of an interdependency between humans and the wider cosmos. These texts help reveal reality as a set of interconnected narratives and histories that include each individual, the societies around that individual, nature around those societies, and the wider cosmos within which everything exists. Full article

Shamanism and animism have proven to be useful cross-cultural analytical tools for anthropology, particularly in religious studies. However, both concepts root in reductionist, social evolutionary theory and have been criticized for their vague and homogenizing rubric, an overly romanticized idealism, and the tendency to ‘other’ nonwestern peoples as ahistorical, apolitical, and irrational. The alternative has been a largely secular view of religion, favoring materialist processes of rationalization and “disenchantment.” Like any cross-cultural frame of reference, such terms are only informative when explicitly defined in local contexts using specific case studies. Here, we consider shamanism and animism in terms of ethnographic and archaeological evidence from Mesoamerica. We trace the intellectual history of these concepts and reassess shamanism and animism from a relational or ontological perspective, concluding that these terms are best understood as distinct ways of knowing the world and acquiring knowledge. We examine specific archaeological examples of masked spirit impersonations, as well as mirrors and other reflective materials used in divination. We consider not only the productive and affective energies of these enchanted materials, but also the potentially dangerous, negative, or contested aspects of vital matter wielded in divinatory practices. Full article

For this Special Issue which confronts the ways in which the question of pluralism represents both haunting and promise within modern political theology, I explore the presence of pluralism in the context of the environmental crisis and religious responses to issues such as climate change. Following Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, I suggest that models of disenchantment are misleading—to quote Latour, “we have never been modern.” In engagement with a range of neo-vitalist scholars of enchantment including Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, Isabelle Stengers, Jane Bennett and William Connolly, I explore the possibility of a kind of critical-theory cosmopolitics around the concept of “enchantment” as a possible site for multi-religious political theology collaborations and argue that this is a promising post-secular frame for the establishment of cosmopolitical collaborations across quite profound kinds of difference. Full article

Responding to Max Weber’s dour predictions, we enlist Antonio Gramsci’s optimism to suggest how culture can spike development. Weber’s sociological focus took culture to mean shared beliefs and practices. As a culture that derives from the Protestant Ethic, capitalism waged a “war on pleasure.” Weber warned that this unfeeling rationality would generate an “iron cage” to trap our humanity, but his book has been read, paradoxically, as a manual for the lock down. Gramsci, on the contrary, understood culture in its humanistic sense, as a field of aesthetic pleasure, innovation, and debate. For him, a precondition for transformational social change was the broad engagement of masses as empowered collectives (Weber favored charismatic leaders); and pleasure in idiosyncratic forms of artistic as well as rooted expression was the fuel for participating in personal and shared advances. This pleasure in art and collective interpretation contrasts with the exclusionary rituals of commodified pleasure typical of capitalist consumerism. Gramsci’s confidence in the transformational role of creative culture provides a framework for understanding a new wave of inclusive artistic practices that originate in the Global South and that revive the arts as vehicles for active citizenship. Participatory art can re-enchant today’s sorely disenchanted socio-cultural world of mature capitalism. Full article