Anna Strhan

Aliens and Strangers?: The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals

In this work of qualitative sociology, Anna Strhan offers an in-depth study of the everyday lives of members of a conservative evangelical Anglican church in London. ‘St John’s’ is a vibrant church, with a congregation of young and middle-aged members, one in which the life of the mind is important, and faith is both a comfort and a struggle – a way of questioning the order of things within society and for themselves. The congregants of St John’s see themselves as increasingly counter-cultural, moving against the grain of wider culture in London and in British society, yet they take pride in this, and see it as a central element of being Christian. This book reveals the processes through which the congregants of St Johns learn to understand themselves as ‘aliens and strangers’ in the world, demonstrating the precariousness of their projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness. Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church, Strhan shows how the everyday experiences of members of St John’s are simultaneously shaped by the secular norms of their workplaces and other city spaces and by the moral and temporal orientations of their faith that rub against these. Thus their self-identification as ‘aliens and strangers’ both articulates and constructs an ambition to be different from others around them in the city, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their hopes, concerns and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world.

The metropolis and evangelical life: coherence and fragmentation in the ‘lost city of London’

This article examines the interplay of different processes of cultural and subjective fragmentation experienced by conservative evangelical Anglicans, based on an ethnographic study of a congregation in central London. The author focuses on the evangelistic speaking practices of members of this church to explore how individuals negotiate contradictory norms of interaction as they move through different city spaces, and considers their response to tensions created by the demands of their workplace and their religious lives. Drawing on Georg Simmels ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, the author argues that their faith provides a sense of coherence and unity that responds to experiences of cultural fragmentation characteristic of everyday life in the city, while simultaneously leading to a specific consciousness of moral fragmentation that is inherent to conservative evangelicalism.

Practising the Space Between: Embodying Belief as an Evangelical Anglican Student

Abstract This article explores the formation of British evangelical university students as believers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a conservative evangelical Anglican congregation in London, I describe how students in this church come to embody a highly cognitive, word-based mode of belief through particular material practices. As they learn to identify themselves as believers, practices of reflexivity and accountability enable them to develop a sense of narrative coherence in their lives that allows them to negotiate tensions that arise from their participation in church and from broader social structures. I demonstrate that propositional belief—in contexts where it becomes an identity marker—is bound up with relational practices of belief, so that distinctions between ‘belief in’ and ‘belief that’ are necessarily blurred in the lives of young evangelicals.

The Obliteration of Truth by Management: Badiou, St. Paul and the question of economic managerialism in education

This paper considers the questions that Badious theory poses to the culture of economic managerialism within education. His argument that radical change is possible, for people and the situations they inhabit, provides a stark challenge to the stifling nature of much current educational debate. In Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Badiou describes the current universalism of capitalism, monetary homogeneity and the rule of the count. Badiou argues that the politics of identity are all too easily subsumed by the prerogatives of the marketplace and unable to present, therefore, a critique of the status quo. These processes are, he argues, without the potential for truth. What are the implications of Badious claim that education is the arranging of ‘the forms of knowledge in such a way that truth may come to pierce a hole in them’ (Badiou, 2005, p. 9)? I will argue that Badious theory opens up space for a kind of thinking about education that resists its colonisation by the cultures of management and marketisation and leads educationalists to consider the emancipatory potential of education in a refreshing new light.

'I Want There to Be No Glass Ceiling:€' Evangelicals’ Engagements with Class, Education, and Urban Childhoods

While class has been an enduring focus for sociologists of education, there has been little focus on the interrelations between class, religion, and education, despite widespread public anxieties about faith schools potentially encouraging both social class segregation and religious separatism, which have become more pronounced as the expansion of free schools and academies in England has increased opportunities for religious bodies’ engagement in educational provision. This article explores the importance of class in relation to the intersections of religion and education through examining how an ‘open evangelical’ church engages with children in schools linked with it, drawing on eighteen months’ ethnographic fieldwork with the church, its linked schools, and other informal educational activities run by the church. Through analyzing the everyday practices through which evangelical leaders seek to affect childrens lives and how they speak about their involvements with children, the article reveals the significance of class in this context, providing insight into how evangelicals’ primary aspiration in this setting is for childrens ‘upward mobility’, as their ambitions are shaped through middle-class, entrepreneurial norms, in which developing a neoliberal ethic of individual self-discipline and ‘productivity’ is privileged. Through focusing on the ‘othering’ of the urban poor in these discourses, the article adds to our knowledge of the complex interrelations between evangelicalism and class, and deepens understanding of how secular neoliberal norms become interwoven with an alternative evangelical moral project of forming the self.

Levinas, Durkheim, and the Everyday Ethics of Education

Abstract This article explores the influence of Émile Durkheim on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in order both to open up the political significance of Levinas’s thought and to develop more expansive meanings of moral and political community within education. Education was a central preoccupation for both thinkers: Durkheim saw secular education as the site for promoting the values of organic solidarity, while Levinas was throughout his professional life engaged in debates on Jewish education and conceptualized ethical subjectivity as a condition of being taught. Durkheim has been accused of dissolving the moral into the social, and his view of education as a means of imparting a sense of civic republican values is sometimes seen as conservative, while Levinas’s argument for an ‘unfounded foundation’ for morality is sometimes seen as paralyzing the impetus for concrete political action. Against these interpretations, I argue that their approaches present provocative challenges for conceptualizing the nature of the social, offering theoretical resources to deepen understanding of education as the site of an everyday ethics and a prophetic politics opening onto more compelling ideals for education than those dominant within standard educational discourses.

The labor of Job: The biblical text as a parable of human labor

In this provocative volume, Antonio Negri develops a Marxist reading of the book of Job, exploring the relation between justice and economic value. First published in Italy in 1990, Negri began writing this text in the early 1980s, while a political prisoner in Italy, and he locates his analysis of suffering during this period, developed in this book, as a way of ‘not becoming immersed in the pain and misery of prison’, but instead developing ‘an adequate understanding of repression so as to resist it and to find a way to interpret political defeat as a critique of Power’ (p. xxvii). This reading of Job provides no theodicy, but instead a materialist analysis of how the biblical narrative of Job suggests a way of responding to the incommensurabilities of pain and labour. The text thus contributes to discussion within political philosophy of the extent to which the theory of measure is in crisis, as Negri and Michael Hardt have argued elsewhere. Negri’s theoretical approach draws on the resources of biblical criticism, political science, analytic and continental philosophy, with a nod to liberation theology, and can be compared with recent politico-philosophical readings of the history of Christian thought by Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek, although its original publication in 1990 predates these. In his commentary, Roland Boer describes Negri’s text as a ‘radical homiletics’, a discipline connecting a sacred text with concrete problems, ‘moving from the intricacies of textual analysis to the application to life’ (p. 109). Boer describes the work as radical both in its political analysis of measurement and in its textual reading of Job as ‘pre-eminent document for our time. Job both describes our time and offers a way through the impasse of Left action’. (ibid.) The argument of the book depends on the analogy Negri draws between the injustice Job suffers and the way that contemporary capitalist production positions labour. Both, according to Negri, are supported by theories of measure and equivalence, and he describes those theories in both realms as in crisis. In his introduction, Hardt rightly emphasises the complexity of Negri’s text in developing this analogy, requiring that ‘the reader must tack back and forth not only between legal and economic arguments but also between the ancient scene of the narrative and contemporary capitalist society’ (p. ix). However, because the text is ordered around the structure of the book of Job, Negri weaves together these distinctive theoretical threads into a very readable narrative that progresses via commentary on the biblical text through the themes of the ontology of