What does it<i>feel</i>like to be post-secular? Ritual expressions of religious affects in contemporary renewal movements
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Authors
Publication Date
2018-05-27Journal Title
International Journal of Philosophy and Theology
ISSN
2169-2327
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Volume
79
Issue
3
Pages
295-310
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
AM
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Richman, N. (2018). What does it<i>feel</i>like to be post-secular? Ritual expressions of religious affects in contemporary renewal movements. International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 79 (3), 295-310. https://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2018.1434011
Abstract
This paper seeks to problematise and complexify scholarly
accounts of contemporary emotional repression in Western contexts
by presenting counterevidence in the form of two examples
of post-secular collective affectivity and their ritual expressions. It
argues that both narratives of emotional repression and expression
fail to capture the non-linear complexity of processes of
cultural transformation, which have resulted in the simultaneous
expression and repression of ritualistic affects that are products of
our evolutionary embodied history. Drawing on insights from
affect theory, this paper seeks to illustrate how contingent yet
nonetheless residual ritualistic affects have become repressed in
the nominally secular public sphere in modernity. This has presented
certain obstacles to the open communal display of religious
ritual, and, as a corollary, the expression of certain religious
affects, which have subsequently re-emerged in post-secular ritual
spaces that are both publically private and privately public, carved
by contemporary renewal movements. Two of these ‘formations of
the post-secular’ are explored here: the Sunday Assembly, a secular
church, and Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries, an international
Pentecostal Deliverance church.
Sponsorship
Arts and Humanities Research Council Studentship
All Soul's College Scholarship
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2018.1434011
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/329727
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Licence URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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