Theorizing Modernities Articles

Inequality, Masculinity & Modernity


In the weeks and months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, speculation swirled over the attackers’ possible motivations. The pseudo-religious zeal of Mohammed Atta’s final letter to his comrades was only one aspect of it. Attention also centered on the attackers’ possible socioeconomic motivations. Theirs was not a problem of absolute poverty, of course, but of relative poverty. In their new environs, they could never quite fit in culturally—or perhaps religiously, morally, or spiritually—given the marginalization of immigrants that persists in many European countries even among immigrants who aspire to “assimilate.”

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Truth & Reconciliation Amid Sexual Violence


M. CHRISTIAN GREEN

Like many universities around America, Notre Dame recognized Sexual Assault Awareness Week at the end of last month (February 20-27) in a world in which sexual violence against women and girls—and sometimes men and boys—remains a persistent evil. As one of the world’s oldest forms of violence, present throughout the ages, particularly in situations of conflict and war, sexual violence seems distinctly anti-modern from both religious and secular perspectives. How is it that sexual violence remains such a blot on human nature, human society and, particularly, the relationship between men and women?

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The “Mormon Menace”


Nineteenth-century America saw a nationwide campaign to tame the “Mormon menace.” Promoted by an alliance of religious and secular individuals, institutions, and ideals, it even led President Rutherford B. Hayes to recommend stripping Mormons of their citizenship. Although Contending Modernities will focus primarily on Mormonism’s fellow subjects of modern opprobrium—Islam and Catholicism—it is important to consider such other “shadow cases” as we examine the complex dynamics of religion in modernity. The deep pluralism characteristic of the modern age has posed, and will continue to pose, a substantial challenge to the largely Euro-American-Protestant construct of secularism that dominated much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Catholicism and Feminism

Series:

About twelve years ago, I gave a paper at a conference on “Women’s Health and Human Rights” at the Vatican. A highlight of the event was a special audience for the conference participants with Pope John Paul II. To the surprise and delight of his listeners, he benignly proclaimed “Io sono il Papa feminista”— “I am the feminist pope.” And Pope John Paul II meant it. He repeatedly called for the development of a “new feminism” which would honor and celebrate the “feminine genius” in all walks of life. At the same time, it is safe to say that many people don’t share the late Pope’s easy association of feminism and the papacy.

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The Jesuit Role in the Emergence of a Catholic Modernity

Series:

Near midnight, on Saturday evening, October 14, 1854, a mob of one hundred men in the small shipbuilding town of Ellsworth, Maine, attacked Fr. John Bapst, a Jesuit priest. Bapst had stopped in Ellsworth, hearing confessions for much of the day, en route to a sick call in a nearby town. Carrying lanterns and torches, the members of the mob surrounded the modest home of a Mr. Kent, an Irish immigrant, where Bapst was known to be staying. Kent at first denied that Bapst was inside. “We know he is, and we must have him,” yelled the mob.

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Orsi Contra Ecclesiam


In Citizens, Simon Schama’s narration of the French Revolution, he describes the revolutionary government’s suppression of the popular rebellion in the Vendée. Far more than a military maneuver, he recounts, the operation sought “the wholesale destruction of an entire region of France.” In a “sinister anticipation of the technological killings of the twentieth century,” the revolution’s armies exterminated women, children, entire villages, and ultimately some one third of the inhabitants of the region. Among the massacres’ chief targets was the Catholic Church….

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Contending Complexities

Series:

Last spring, when Scott Appleby phoned me about the launch of Contending Modernities, I was immediately intrigued. I have worked for many years in various forums of Muslim-Christian relations so I knew that Scott was proposing a project of significant scope and consequence. I am grateful to the University of Notre Dame for undertaking this initiative and hope that I can offer a few words that may prove helpful as the project progresses.

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Islam and Modernity


As the world becomes increasingly interconnected through technological advances, we are now beginning to appreciate the differing experiences of the world’s many cultures in their encounters with the complex of institutions and ideas that we identify as modernity. In particular, we have the new concept of “alternative modernities,” a term which goes a long way in representing the diversity of the world in encountering new realities.

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“McFootball” in New York?: a Muslim Reaction to the CM Launch

Series:

Before departing for the launch of “Contending Modernities: Catholic, Muslim, Secular,” I got another one of those random emails: “Tony Blair’s Sister-in-Law Converts to Islam,” apparently after having a spiritual experience in Iran. A few years ago, Tony Blair announced his own conversion to Catholicism. This prompted me to reflect that one never seems to hear announcements of anyone’s “conversion” to “secularism.”

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An Unlikely Conversation: a Catholic Reaction to the CM Launch

Series:

A college president who is a Catholic and a scholar of Islam cautions that a scholarly project on Catholicism and Islam should not ignore “rapture-ready Christians,” Sufi Muslims, or Christian women who have joined the “Women Aglow” movement. A woman who converted from Catholicism to Islam while a teenager, then became a scholar of Islam and wears a head scarf to boot, criticizes modernity for attacking family and community.

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