Pamela E. Klassen

Ritual Appropriation and Appropriate Ritual: Christian Healing and Adaptations of Asian Religions

This article analyzes the uses of the past for liberal Christians who borrow from Asian healing‐related practices such as yoga, Buddhist meditation and Reiki. It focuses on questions of historicity, both in the ways liberal Christians validate their syncretism by drawing connections to the Christian past, and in the way that longer histories of orientalism and colonialism shape current Christian interactions with Asian religions. Centred on the narratives of three North American Anglicans, and informed by attendance at their various healing services, meditation groups, yoga classes and Reiki sessions, this article is evidence of a wider liberal Christian embrace of difference via ritual. The article argues that these liberal Christians use “ritual proximity” to bring together symbols, acts and memories from various times and cultures, thus constructing new lineages of religious inheritance within webs of Christian ritual.

Fantasies of Sovereignty: Civic Secularism in Canada:

To ask whether the postcolonial is postsecular demands asking for whom, where, and when? To that end, what follows is a reflection situated in two Canadian contexts, separated by time and place, but both connected to the ‘colonial secular’. Engaged in the public deliberation and storytelling of civic secularism, through which political legitimacy is achieved through comparing religions, these two contexts are twenty-first century Québec and early-twentieth-century British Columbia. More specifically, I consider two moments in which the state (or its agents) exerted its authority in order to reshape bodily practice and stories of place: the debate over the ‘secular charter’ in Québec and the founding of the railway town of Prince Rupert on Tsimshian land. These acts of negotiation and law-making turned to religious forms of legitimation in a way that was at once ambivalent, comparative, and forgetful of the historical founding of the state’s own power. That is, in forming their ‘natural sovereignty’ over others, states often forget that their claims to power are, in part, acts of pretending.

The Politics of Protestant Healing: Theoretical Tools for the Study of Spiritual Bodies and The Body Politic

Spirituality and healing are a potent combination that is as likely to provoke skeptical critique as convinced testimony. Claims that physical healing may occur as a result of spiritual conviction or influence have long been problematic for most medical institutions, while lucrative for some religious ones. In this paper, I argue that scholars of religion who seek to study the confluence of spirituality and healing ethnographically must attend carefully to this tension between skepticism and testimony. As concepts or claims, both spirituality and healing are not exact, fully quantifiable, or fully measureable. The question for the ethnographer, who seeks to set spirituality and healing within cultural and political contexts, then becomes: what forms of legitimation do those testifying to the healing powers of spirituality use to make sense of it, and what forms do skeptics use to render claims of spiritual healing literally incredible? Answering this question requires that any scholar studying the confluence of spirituality and healing attend to how political economies and social imaginaries shape the practices of legitimation that support and constrain spiritual healing. 1 At a broader level of interest for the readers of Spiritus, I hope to show that ethnographic approaches to the study of “Christian spirituality” must resist naturalizing the category of spirituality as an “authentic” expression of lay or lived religion. The Christians with whom we interact as ethnographers may privilege spirituality over religion by posing practice over prescription, or by explicitly framing spirituality as a more genuine form of human experience than the ossified, institutional structure that is religion. As scholars, however, we must acknowledge that the concept of religion and spirituality share twinned, Christian-inflected genealogies within contested national myths, colonial and postcolonial politics, and academic disciplines. Part of the work of ethnographers is to ask why people in particular times and places give accounts of themselves and their societies in the ways that they do, and to set competing accounts in comparative perspective. In North America in particular, spirituality and healing are both powerful tropes that Christians have used to imagine, discipline, and change their communities and their bodies; neither spirituality nor healing come to us as natural categories. 2

Fending Off Foreclosure: Options for Thinking about Bodies, Religion, Medicine, and Secularity

How do we know what time we live in? Which words should we use to describe our age or the eras of those who lived before us? An immanent secular age or an entrepreneurial gilded age, the last gasps of late capitalism or the fresh bloom of neo-liberalism, trajectories of evolutionary progress or cycles of greed and violence ending in apocalyptic destruction: as scholars who write, we can never quite capture the time of our worlds with our words. Especially when we add the suffix “ization” to a term, as in secularization or medicalization, we are making arguments about time with recourse to a kind of linearity that may verge on teleology. Similarly, when our categories for understanding that which we seek to explain—categories such as religion, secular, medical—take on a life of their own, we are at risk of forgetting that words are organizational tools put to use by people (including scholars) in diverse ways. Categories are not actors unto themselves. The editors of this special issue have set themselves the important task of “bringing bodies to the forefront of conversations about secularism.” They do so by collecting a group of six essays that attend to particular sites where the contested categories of medicine, science, faith and religion are deployed by people in the service of varying, and often contending, therapeutic ideals and etiologies. The juxtapositions within and between these essays provoke fascinating categorical questions: a story of an early twentieth-century Mexican-American faith healer whose local colleagues and/or rivals were medical doctors, makers of therapeutic “electric belts,” and Chinese herbalists; a quirky but revealing reading of the morality of medical work in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 The Scarlet Letter vis-

Suppressing the Mad Elephant: Missionaries, Lamas, and the Mediation of Sacred Historiographies in the Tibetan Borderlands

The late-nineteenth century was a time of Protestant missionary enthusiasm for the “great closed land” of Tibet. Their prodigious, oftentimes proto-ethnographic, writings continue to provide scholars with archives that document missionary perspectives on Inner Asian society and religion, but few sources have yet emerged that allow for these to be read alongside Tibetan accounts of Christian-Buddhist encounters. This article undertakes such a parallel reading of four accounts of an unsuccessful attempt by the British missionary Cecil Polhill to convert an eastern Tibetan Buddhist abbot, Māyang Paṇḍita, in late 1889. Understanding these texts as conflicting sacred historiographies, we note that these Christian and Buddhist writers shared a commitment to writing and to particular modes of emotional, material, and logical mediation as the “correct” path to religious certainty. Differences in genre, however, lead more to mockery and misunderstanding than to each side’s desired transformation of the other..

Mentality, Fundamentality, and the Colonial Secular; or How Real Is Real Estate?

What is a mentality, and when does it become a fundamentality? Technically speaking, these two words may not be etymologically linked, but their overlap is instructive for those pondering the meanings and effects of the ‘secular’. A language of mentalities and imaginaries infuses writing about both fundamentalism and the secular. While scholars have often characterized a fundamentalist ‘mindset’ as one lacking in self-reflexivity or openness to democratic deliberation, so, too, have they turned to a language of mentality and related concepts — sensibilities, imaginaries, world views — as the dominant frame for explaining what the secular is, and how its power works (Marty, 1994; Derrida and Habermas, 2004; Taylor, 2007). Susan Harding, writing specifically of mid-twentieth-century US ‘secularity’ in its relation to ‘fundamentalism’, described the ‘modern secular imaginary’ as a ‘hegemonic social mentality, a sensibility and code of etiquette’ (Harding, 2009: 1283). Sociologist Jose Casanova offers a more precise definition, distinguishing the secular as a ‘modern, epistemic category’ from secularization as a social and historical process that worked to define and set apart ‘religion’ within civic and political institutions. Secularism, in turn, he described as a world view or ideology that can be both a principle of statecraft and a broader, taken-for-granted, modern doxa (Casanova, 2009).

Comptes rendus / Reviews of books: The Lord for the Body: Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in canada, 1880-1930 James Opp Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. x + 274 p

pas tout a fait aussi simples » (Marcel Simon et Andr6 Benoit, Le Judaisme et le Christianisme antique, d’Antiochus Epiphane à Constantin [Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1968 ; 19944], 91 ). Les deux realisateurs n’ont donc fait qu’adopter et radicaliser, de fa~on plus ou moins consciente, les theses hypercritiques d’un Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) et des th6ologiens de 1’Ecole dite de Tubingen, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860) et Walter Bauer (1877-1960), dont les positions