Illumine, Vol. 08, No. 1 (2009)
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Item Notes on contributors(Illumine, 2009) Sheedy, Matt; Bubel, Katharine; Redden, JasonItem Illumine: Vol. 8 No. 1 (2009)(Illumine, 2009)This is the full issue of Illumine, Vol. 8, No.1 (2009).Item Articulating religious change: Bini the prophet, the seer(Illumine, 2009) Redden, JasonThe transmission of Christianity among Indigenous people without the involvement of European or Euro-North American missionaries has been well documented in the North American ethnographic and historical records. In the North American West, the convergence of Christianity and Indigenous religious practices is manifest in the Indigenous prophet traditions in the early nineteenth century. Although these prophet traditions predate direct contact with Euro-North Americans, much scholarship has maintained that their growth and development is explained not by Indigenous or Christian religiosity but by more fundamental material or psychological phenomena, most oft en connecting the prophet tradition to the indirect eff ects of colonial invasion. Following the oral narratives on Bini, the Witsuwit’en prophet, collected by Marius Barbeau in the 1920s, I suggest that the prophet tradition is not only a response to colonial pressures but also serves as a powerful idiom for articulating religious change and thus is a fundamentally local means of religious transformation.Item The prophetic vision of beauty: The ethical intersection of literature and theological aesthetics(Illumine, 2009) Bubel, KatharineIn his 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature lecture, Russian author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn asserted that the famous utterance of Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin, “Beauty will save the world,” was not the issue of vain hope or foolish romanticism, but rather “prophecy.” Th is paper will investigate the way in which Solzhenitsyn’s ethical claim concerning literature intersects with theological aesthetics, especially in the latter’s assertion that beauty must be recovered from its decline beneath the amorphous sublime and re-associated with the good and true. Solzhenitsyn’s challenge was primarily addressed to the global community of authors, calling them to off er a collective moral “fi eld of vision” for humanity through their literary art. I will locate the ethical import of this literary “field of vision” in its relation to self-knowledge, and then explore theological aesthetics’ claim that the identity of the human being is revealed, judged and affi rmed in an encounter with the beauty of Christ.Item Introduction(Illumine, 2009) Siebert, MelanieItem Religion in the public sphere: The limits of Habermas’s proposal and the discourse of “World Religions.”(Illumine, 2009) Sheedy, MattSince 2001, Jürgen Habermas has turned increasingly toward questions on the role of religion in the public sphere. Modifying his earlier position, Habermas now argues for the equal inclusion of religious voices in the political public sphere and urges for the recognition among secular citizens that we are living in a “post-secular” world that must become adjusted to the continued existence of religious communities. Such a process requires that secular citizens undergo a “cognitive dissonance” when confronting religious claims and attempt a “translation program” to discover the profane truth content contained within. While there is much to commend this position, I argue that Habermas’s model is unnecessarily constrained by his narrow understanding of “religion” as a normative category, and that he privileges a Euro-hegemonic conception of “world religions” while circumscribing the parameters for how discourse on religion—both in philosophy and in the public sphere—ought to proceed.