Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession

Negotiating the boundaries of the secular and of the religious is a core aspect of modern experience. In mid-nineteenth-century Germany, secularism emerged to oppose church establishment, conservative orthodoxy, and national division between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Yet, as historian Todd H. Weir argues in this provocative book, early secularism was not the opposite of religion. It developed in the rationalist dissent of Free Religion and, even as secularism took more atheistic forms in Freethought and Monism, it was subject to the forces of the confessional system it sought to dismantle. Similar to its religious competitors, it elaborated a clear worldview, sustained social milieus, and was integrated into the political system. Secularism was, in many ways, Germany's fourth confession. While challenging assumptions about the causes and course of the Kulturkampf and modern antisemitism, this study casts new light on the history of popular science, radical politics, and social reform.

Es teatro vuestra oración: Santa Teresa’s performed confession in Juan Mayorga’s La lengua en pedazos

Juan Mayorga’s La Lengua en Pedazos (2010) strikes at the heart of the compositional circumstances of St Teresa's Libro de la Vida– staging, and arguably heightening the origins of her rhetorical strategies, the sense of awareness of readership and potential censure we encounter within the Libro de la Vida. His inquisitor refuses to be complicit in the tacit agreement that the word spoken in the theatrical space can conjure new realities –insistent on underscoring the textual origin of the visions painfully and partially offered up for his and our scrutiny. I will suggest that the persistent undertow towards a meta-commentary on the unmaking and remaking of the autobiographical text creates an unresolved tension between Teresa’s eloquent ability to take the spectator to a place beyond language, and our awareness that we are in the presence of a consummate performer, the textual source for the script itself produced with a supreme awareness of audience scrutiny. The play reflects ongoing lines of inquiry in our evolving understanding of the cultural production of Teresa and other holy women of the Early Modern period.

Whose sins do the Brethren confess? The problem of sin as the problem of expiation

Among Brethren fisher families in Gamrie, northeast Scotland, professional clergy and written liturgy are held to be blasphemous denials of the true workings of the Holy Spirit. God, I was told, chooses to speak through all born-again (male) persons, unrestricted by the vain repetitions of lettered clerics and their prayer books. In this context, confession of one’s own sin is a private and pointedly interior affair. In Gamrie, not only did every man seek to be his own skipper, but also his own priest. Yet, much of Brethren worship is given over to ritualised acts of confession. So whose sins do the Brethren confess, and to what end? This article argues that among the Brethren of Gamrie, such acts involve confessing not one’s own sin, but the sins of a ‘sick’ and ‘fallen’ world. More than this, by attending to the sociological (as opposed to theological) processes of confessing the sins of another, we see a collapse in the distinction between confiteor and credo that has so dogged anthropological studies of Christianity. In Brethren prayer and bible study, as well as in everyday gossip, the “I confess” of the confiteor and the “I believe” of credo co-constitute one another in and through evidences of the ‘lostness’ of ‘this present age’. But how, if at all, does this solve ‘the problem of sin’? This article suggests that, with the ritual gaze of confession turned radically outward, Brethren announcements of global wickedness enact (in a deliberate tautology) both a totalising call for repentance from sin, and a millenarian creed of the imminent apocalypse. Here, the problem of ritual can be understood as the problem of (partially failed) expiation.

Establishing the ‘Truth’ of the Matter: Confessional Reflexivity as Introspection and Avowal

The conceptualisation of reflexivity commonly found in social anthropology deploys the term as if it were both a ‘virtuous’ mechanism of self‐reflection and an ethical technique of truth telling, with reflexivity frequently deployed as an moral practice of introspection and avowal. Further, because reflexivity is used as a methodology for constructing the authority of ethnographic accounts, reflexivity in anthropology has come to closely resemble Foucault’s descriptions of confession. By discussing Lynch’s (2000) critical analysis of reflexivity as an ‘academic virtue’, I consider his argument through the lens of my own concept of ‘confessional reflexivity’. While supporting Lynch’s diagnosis of the ‘problem of reflexivity’, I attempt to critique his ethnomethodological cure as essentialist, I conclude that a way forward might be found by blending Foucault’s (1976, 1993) theory of confession with Bourdieu’s (1992) theory of ‘epistemic reflexivity’.