Patterns of Religious Education Policy in Switzerland. The Long Arm of Distanced Christians?

In spite of its different cantonal jurisdictions and traditions, the development of religious education in Switzerland over the past decade has taken a common direction: the state has assumed a more active role in the field of religious education in public (state-run) schools. In this article, we ask the question: How do key social actors interpret these reforms and how do these interpretations relate to the social structure of religion in Switzerland, in particular with respect to the majority category of the so-called distanced Christians? Drawing on qualitative interviews with members of the schools’ teaching staff, school administrators, and church representatives, the article highlights a dominant interpretative pattern that frames the socially accepted representation of religion in public schools. Thus, rather than addressing the pedagogical dimension of religious education, we discuss the significance of this pattern for the debate on the public presence of religion in Switzerland and Europe.

Identity, Philosophy, and the Problem of Armenian History in the Sixth Century

History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East gathers together the work of distinguished historians and early career scholars with a broad range of expertise to investigate the significance of newly emerged, or recently resurrected, ethnic identities on the borders of the eastern Mediterranean world. It focuses on the "long late antiquity" from the eve of the Arab conquest of the Roman East to the formation of the Abbasid caliphate. The first half of the book offers papers on the Christian Orient on the cusp of the Islamic invasions. These papers discuss how Christians negotiated the end of Roman power, whether in the selective use of the patristic past to create confessional divisions or the emphasis of the shared philosophical legacy of the Greco-Roman world. The second half of the book considers Muslim attempts to negotiate the pasts of the conquered lands of the Near East, where the Christian histories of Hira or Egypt were used to create distinctive regional identities for Arab settlers. Like the first half, this section investigates the redeployment of a shared history, this time the historical imagination of the Qu'ran and the era of the first caliphs. All the papers in the volume bring together studies of the invention of the past across traditional divides between disciplines, placing the re-assessment of the past as a central feature of the long late antiquity. As a whole, History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East represents a distinctive contribution to recent writing on late antiquity, due to its cultural breadth, its interdisciplinary focus, and its novel definition of late antiquity itself.

The Gender of Chinese Christianity: Evaluating a New Research Perspective

This paper will discuss how the gender perspective can be applied to the study of the Early Modern Jesuit China mission. I will show that the category of gender provides a promising research perspective on Sino-Western cultural exchange, for it brings to the forefront important aspects of social life in the “contact zone” of Chinese Christian communities. I will argue that through the intercultural contact initiated by the Jesuit China mission, gender roles started to shift slightly on both sides. On the one hand, the Jesuits adopted the Confucian ideal of the separation of the sexes (nannü zhi bie), building for example separate Churches for women, something unknown in Europe. On the other hand, Chinese Christians were urged to reconsider aspects of their traditional gender norms, when for instance some men left their concubines in order to become Christian. The paper will be divided in three parts. First, it will focus on the history of concepts and discuss what gender relations meant in the context of the Early Modern China mission. Then it will turn to the representation of female religiosity in Jesuit Annual Letters and show how the gender perspective can lead to a re-evaluation this source genre. Finally, it will reflect on how the gender perspective can give us fresh insights into well-known paradigms on Sino-Western relations, taking the accommodation paradigm as an example.

God, the WTO – and hunger

Considering that endemic hunger is a consequence of poverty, and that food is arguably the most basic of all human needs, this book chapter shows one of the more prominent examples of rules and policy fragmentation but also one of the most blatant global governance problems. The three monotheistic religions Judaism, Christians and Islam are surprisingly unanimous about God’s prescriptions on hunger or, put theologically, on what can be said, or should be said, about the interpretations and traditions which, taken together, form the respective and differentiated traditions, identities and views of these beliefs on how to deal with poverty and hunger. A clear social ethos, in the form of global needs satisfaction, runs through both Jewish and Christian texts, and the Qur’an (Zakat). It confirms the value inversion between the world of the mighty and that of the hungry. The message is clear: because salvation is available only through the grace of God, those who have must give to those who have not. This is not charity: it is an inversion of values which can not be addressed by spending 0.7% of your GDP on ODA, and the implication of this sense of redistributive justice is that social offenders will be subject to the Last Judgement. Interestingly, these religious scriptures found their way directly into the human rights treaties adopted by the United Nations and ratified by the parliaments, as a legal base for the duty to protect, to respect and to remedy. On the other side the contradiction with international trade law is all the more flagrant, and it has a direct bearing on poverty: systematic surplus food dumping is still allowed under WTO rules, despite the declared objective ‘to establish a fair and market-oriented agricultural trading system’. A way forward would be a kind of ‘bottom up’ approach by focusing on extreme cases of food insecurity caused by food dumping, or by export restrictions where a direct effect of food insecurity in other countries can be established. Also, international financing institutions need to review their policies and lending priorities. The same goes for the bilateral investment treaties and a possible ‘public interest’ clause, at least in respect of agricultural land acquisitions in vulnerable countries. The bottom line is this: WTO rules cannot entail a right to violate other, equally binding treaty obligations when its membership as a whole claims to contribute to the Millennium Development Goals and pledges to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.

Reactive Co-Radicalization: Religious Extremism as Mutual Dicontent

Extremist rhetoric and behaviour, including violence, emanating from those fearing and opposed to Islamic extremism—and typically generalising that to Islam or Muslims—is undeniable. Equally, there is evidence of Muslim rhetoric that fires up fears of a threatening West and antipathy to religious ‘others’ as damned infidels, including Christians and Jews who are otherwise regarded as co-religionists—as ‘peoples of the Book’. Mutual discontent and antipathy abound. On the one hand, Islamic extremism provokes a reactionary extremism from parts, at least, of the non-Muslim world; on the other hand, Muslim extremism appears often in response to the perception of an aggressive and impositional colonising non-Muslim world. ‘Reactive Co-Radicalization’, I suggest, names this mutual rejection and exclusionary circle currently evident, in particular, with respect to many Muslim and non-Muslim communities. This article discusses reactive co-radicalization as a hermeneutical perspective on religious extremism with particular reference to two European cases.