Creating one's identity is an on-going process, which is greatly dependent on language. Having this idea as a starting point in the study of religiosity, sharing self-reported experiences can be seen as an integral part in constructing one's religious identity and personal conviction. In this article, I would like to present the idea of bringing together narrative research and the psychological approach to the study of religious experience with the help of personal experience stories about God's guidance told by Christian (...) believers who are members of a charismatic revival movement. (shrink)

In Against the Spiritual Turn: Marxism, Realism and Critical Theory Sean Creaven sets out to reject Christian theism on materialist grounds. This paper critiques Creaven’s argument from a critically realist Trinitarian Christian standpoint. His failure to engage with Christian theologians, philosophers and biblical scholars, on the a priori ground that since Christianity is inherently irrational Christian scholarship must also be inherently irrational, effectively locks his argument in a vicious intellectual circle. His self-imposed alienation from Christian scholarship generates an ideologically driven (...) thesis of questionable academic integrity. This methodological failure is exacerbated by his preference for inductive and deductive reasoning over a critically realistic retroductive epistemology. (shrink)

The essay seeks to single out, describe, and analyze the main semiotic features that compose the fundamentalist understanding of authoriality. Given a definition of authoriality as the series of semiotic dynamics that induce a reader to posit a genetic relation between an author and a text, the fundamentalist authoriality is characterized as displaying six main traits. First, centrality of the written text: in order to postulate a perfect coincidence between a transcendent intentio auctoris (intention of the author) and an immanent (...) intentio lectoris (intention of the reader), fundamentalist exegetical and juridical hermeneutics must be anchored to a stable message, canonized into a written verbal text or into a corpus of written verbal texts. Second, fundamentalist authoriality rests on the assumption of the immutability and mono-centrism of the religious semiosphere that irradiates from the written text. Third, literalism, infallibility, and non-contradiction are attributed to the relation between the written text, its exegetical hermeneutics, and the pragmatic normative orders to which it gives rise. Fourth, fundamentalist authoriality rules out any potential duplicity of the operations that ‘extract’ meaning from religious texts. Fifth, the assumption of the immutability of the religious text leads to exclusion of any operation that might alter the form of both its expression and content, hence to stigmatization of translation. The sixth feature of fundamentalist authoriality encompasses all the previous ones: in fundamentalism, a religious text is not actually a text anymore, but a mirror, whose passive reflection of the exegete’s mind undermines the semiotic nature of the relation between the reader and the text. (shrink)

The psychology of religion has a vital role to play in understanding religiously motivated violence, and thus contributing to its prevention. Psychological pathology alone fails to explain either terrorists’ actions or the fundamentalist religiosity that is co-opted as its legitimation. Normal social psychological processes such as uncertainty reduction, terror management, social identity, meaning making (through religion), in combination with cognitive factors such as intratextuality and low integrative complexity, provide a more adequate understanding of the radicalization of young people, some of (...) whom go on to commit violence against hated out-groups. (shrink)

In this article, I will focus on two lines of discussion: the first is the rise of post-secularist discourses and theories; the second is the frequent (and recent) attenuation of John Dewey's naturalism. If it is important for me to note the curious weakening of his naturalism among many contemporary pragmatists, it is in order to better respond to the theories of the "post-secular society". By returning to many of Dewey's texts, too often omitted from the discussion for the sole (...) benefit of A Common Faith, I will show that they provide a powerful antidote to contemporary post-secularism, by not ceding on the affirmation of a strong anti-surnaturalism, a guarantee of the realization of the democratic ideal and of the "scientific attitude" promoted by Dewey. (shrink)