This article engages with Michel Foucault’s idea of confession as the central Christian strategy of subjection or subjectivation and the link he proposes between confession and obedience. The article also wishes to show how confession can become counter-conduct. I apply Foucault’s conceptions to early modern Lutheran confessionalism, elucidating how the confessional apparatus of the orthodox Lutheranism of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden strived to mold obedient subjects who are able to conduct themselves. I also examine the transformation and overthrow of these (...) subjectivation techniques in Radical Pietism, analyzing a dissident confession of faith by the Radical Pietist Peter Schaefer, who exemplifies perfect subjection, constituting himself as a perfectly obedient subject, and yet a failure of subjectivation in the sense of submission, insofar as for him, obedience becomes a strategy of empowerment. (shrink)

Working within an Archerian morphogenetic framework, I suggest that we need to pay more attention to practices. Instead of the mainstream focus on practice as action, I argue that we should pay attention to practices as a key structural and cultural element of analysis. Practices cannot be simply read-off from beliefs, that is, they are not an inevitable practical counterpart to belief. Although belief is relevant, it does not provide the full explanation for the presence of practices. Therefore, the same (...) or similar beliefs can result in significantly different practices depending on factors such as advances in technology and changes in modes of dissemination of theological doctrine. To illustrate my argument, I consider historical work on comparative religious practices, specifically the distinction between rituals and routines. A focus on the latter, as the conditions of possibility for the former, leads to some implications for the thesis of the morphogenesis of contemporary society. An analysis of the relationship between religious rituals and routines stresses the importance of placing both in their wider cultural and structural context. (shrink)