UMI Number: 3319553 This study is a historical ethnography of religious diversity in post-revolutionary Nicaragua from the vantage point of Catholics who live in the city of Masaya located on the Pacific side of Nicaragua at the end of the twentieth century. My overarching research question is: How may ethnographically observed patterns in Catholic religious practices in contemporary Nicaragua be understood in historical context? Utilizing anthropological theory and method grounded in Weberian historical theory, I explore Catholic ritual as contested politico-religious (...) cultural terrain. The patron saint celebration of Masaya becomes a contested symbol in 1999 as those who carry Saint Jerome in street procession refuse to honor a sitting president, challenging his right to rule. The deep Marian devotion of the Nicaraguan people is reflected in the household and neighborhood celebrations of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, while nation-building elites have a long history of claiming the Virgin as patron saint of the nation. While these traditional Catholic saint celebrations figure in imagining a nation, three "new" Catholic movements also compete for attention, while the polity is increasingly exposed to Protestant and Pentecostal groups. When Anastasio Somoza Debayle was overthrown in 1979, ending the 40-year family dictatorship, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) ruled for a decade with the attention of the world placed on its religion of revolution, the Christian base community and liberation theology. At the same time, however, two other movements began growing quietly. They, like liberation theology, draw their justification from the second Vatican Council. In Masaya, Catholic Charismatic Renewal and the Neocatechumenal Way are "exemplary" prophetic movements gaining ground within the Catholic Church in competition with the "ethical" prophets of the Christian base community. Selectively adopting "protestant-like" forms of worship through these modern movements, the Nicaraguan Roman Catholic Church reacts to the challenge to its cultural hegemony coming from evangelical competitors. New history is continuously being made as people in this part of Nicaragua struggle over the direction of their country within a complex terrain of religious competition. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how concern with agency, expressed in the idea that history is the doing of agents, shapes both Kant’s and Hegel’s conceptions of history and, by extension, the roles they accord philosophical historiography.

Recent critiques of normative universalism have helped entrench a dichotomy between formalist universal egalitarian claims (typical of the liberal tradition) and particularist attention to cultural difference (in contemporary communitarianism, and in more or less postmodernist approaches). Focusing on the work of Richard Rorty and Iris Marion Young, this article explores whether, and how, we might find space for a universalism which avoids problems encountered by the formalist model. I argue that, while both Rorty and Young reject ‘Enlightenment’ universalism, the approaches (...) of both contain covert universalist assumptions. They thus represent different forms of ‘soft’ universalism: approaches which are fallibilist about current moral knowledge but which hold out the possibility of genuinely inclusive pan‐human normative frameworks. The trouble with both is that neither, in the end, provides a persuasive basis for their own position – one which avoids an ultimate arbitrariness about the winning out of one normative conception (be it humanitarian or not) over another. I suggest that recourse to ontology, and the kinds of metaphysical claim deemed outmoded in the mainstream of social and moral philosophy, provide such a basis. I argue too that a conception of human being as relational, and of the flourishing of the individual as requiring relations with others, is the best‐placed candidate to do the work required. (shrink)

This article is a response to some of the criticisms made of How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions? by Gerstenberger, Post and Riley. In particular, it focuses on two issues of definition – that of capitalism and the capitalist nation-state – which arise from the book’s ‘consequentialist’ claim that bourgeois revolutions are defined by a particular outcome: the establishment of nation-states dedicated to the accumulation of capital.

This essay examines some of the arguments in David Deutsch's book The Fabric of Reality , chief among them its case for the so-called many-universe interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM), presented as the only physically and logically consistent solution to the QM paradoxes of wave/particle dualism, remote simultaneous interaction, the observer-induced 'collapse of the wave-packet', etc. The hypothesis assumes that all possible outcomes are realized in every such momentary 'collapse', since the observer splits off into so many parallel, coexisting, but (...) epistemically non-interaccessible 'worlds' whose subsequent branchings constitute the lifeline-or experiential world-series- for each of those proliferating centres of consciousness. Although Deutsch concedes that his 'multiverse' theory is counter-intuitive, he none the less takes it to be borne out beyond question by the sheer observational/predictive success of QM and the conceptual dilemmas that supposedly arise with alternative (single-universe) accounts. Moreover, he claims the theory resolves a range of longstanding philosophical problems, notably those of mind/body dualism, the various traditional paradoxes of time, and the freewill/determinism issue. The essay suggests on the contrary, that Deutsch unwittingly transposes into the framework of presentday quantum debate speculative themes from the history of rationalist metaphysics, often with bizarre or philosophically dubious results, and that he rules out at least one promising rival account, namely Bohm's 'hidden variables' theory. It goes on to consider reasons for resistance to that theory among proponents of the 'orthodox' (Copenhagen) doctrine, and for the strong anti-realist, at times even irrationalist bias that has characterized much of this discussion since Bohr's debates with Einstein about quantum non-locality, observer-intervention, and the limits of precise measurement. Finally, the contrast is pointed out between Deutsch's ontologically extravagant use of the many-worlds hypothesis (akin to certain ideas advanced by speculative metaphysicians from Leibniz down) and those realist modes of counterfactual reasoning- e.g. in Kripke and the early Putnam- which deploy similar arguments to very different causal-explanatory ends. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new organizational metaphor, the ‘Biophilic Organization’, which aims to counter the bio-cultural disconnection of many organizations despite their espoused commitment to sustainability. This conceptual research draws on multiple disciplines such as evolutionary psychology and architecture to not only develop a diverse bio-cultural connection but to show how this connection tackles sustainability, in a holistic and systemic sense. Moreover, the paper takes an integrative view of sustainability, which effectively means that it embraces the different emergent tensions. Three (...) specific tensions are explored: efficiency versus resilience, organizational versus personal agendas and isomorphism versus institutional change. In order to illustrate how the Biophilic Organization could potentially provide a synthesis strategy for such tensions, healthcare examples are drawn from the emerging fields of Biophilic Design in Singapore and Generative Design in the U.S.A. Finally, an example is provided which highlights how a Taoist cultural context has impacted on a business leader in China, to illustrative the significance of a transcendent belief system to such a bio-cultural narrative. (shrink)

Within cultural history there is a widespread eschewal of speculative reasoning. This article notes the complicity of the general postmodern avoidance of metanarratives with Anglo-Saxon empiricism and locates the major problem facing cultural history in postmodernism's conflation of trajectories and teleologies. Any discussion of the directionality of history is imputed to be a full-blown teleology. Using previous discussions from different fields, the difference between a teleology and trajectory is defended and, after clarifying certain confusions, it is argued that trajectories, as (...) following the working of generative mechanisms, are necessary to theorize in order to make interesting progress within the field of cultural history. (shrink)

The central strength of the Hegelian dialectical tradition is that reason is not divorced from its own internal limits in the name of a reason free from ideological mediation and constraint. This article holds onto this insight in the examination of the recent returns to religious categories in political philosophy and political theory. In this respect the article follows a two-fold logic. In the spirit of Hegel and Marx, it seeks to recover what is 'rational in religion'; and, at the (...) same time, examines the continuing entanglements of politics with religious categories. That this is an atheistic and materialist project is not in a sense strange or anomalous. On the contrary, it is precisely the 'secularisation' of Judeo-Christian categories in Kant, Hegel and Marx's respective theorisation of history, that provides the dialectic ground of the atheistic recovery and invocation of Judeo-Christian thought in recent political philosophy. Consequently the discussion of religion, or 'religion beyond religion', here, has very little to do with the spread of obscurantism and anti-rationalism in the global upsurge of reactionary Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms, neo-Pagan mysticisms, and other retreats from the real, or with the left-liberal denunciation of religion in the recent writings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Rather, 'religion' here, in its Judeo-Christian legacy, is that which embodies the memory or prospect of a universal emancipatory politics. (shrink)