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Between Postsecular Society and the Neutral State: Religion as a Resource for Public Reason

Maureen Junker‐Kenny

in Religious Voices in Public Places

This chapter compares John Rawls's and Jürgen Habermas's concepts of ‘public reason’ in their starting points and methods as the framework for the role accorded to religious convictions within ... More

This chapter compares John Rawls's and Jürgen Habermas's concepts of ‘public reason’ in their starting points and methods as the framework for the role accorded to religious convictions within democratic opinion- and will-formation. Differences identified as crucial for the place of comprehensive doctrines are: the understanding of the tasks imposed by pluralism; the status and scope accorded to morality; autonomy as the normative basis of democracy; the public/private distinction; the relationship between reason and consensus; and the hermeneutical or critical function of philosophy. Habermas's new move to accept religious contributions to public reason is based on his understanding of democracy as a learning project and on his appreciation of their motivating and critical potential over against the pathologies of liberal societies. His demand for mutual ‘translation’ between secular and religious fellow-citizens is evaluated theologically. It needs to be developed to encompass the relations between reason, revelation, and inculturation, as well as practical reason and its hope for the highest good, to allow for the creativity of new cultural syntheses.Less

Conclusion: Austria’s Jewish Past and the Future

Lisa Silverman

in Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars

The conclusion returns to a number of the figures whose narrative histories thread through it and describes their fates after 1938. It also suggests possible directions for applying the lens of ... More

The conclusion returns to a number of the figures whose narrative histories thread through it and describes their fates after 1938. It also suggests possible directions for applying the lens of Jewish difference to key interwar figures whose work lies beyond the scope of this study, in areas such as music, philosophy, and architecture. This concluding chapter reinforces the argument that in Austria between the wars, the terms of Jewish difference played a crucial—if often unrecognized—role in the shaping of culture. It suggests that the self-understandings of Austrian Jews between the wars had as much to do with knowing when not to appear “Jewish” as they did with embracing traditional mainsprings of Jewish culture. Ultimately, recognizing these polarities as part of the same socially constructed order can help us understand how the intensification of Jewish difference after the Monarchy’s collapse reflected the significance of its imagined boundaries both for Austrian cultural creativity and for the toleration of brutal acts of injustice.Less

Rooted Cosmopolitans: The Cultural Creativity of the Second Generation

Fred Rosenbaum

in Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area

Even after the Gold Rush had become a distant memory, the ethnic diversity, physical beauty, and venturesome spirit of the San Francisco Bay Area continued to set it apart. In the late nineteenth ... More

Even after the Gold Rush had become a distant memory, the ethnic diversity, physical beauty, and venturesome spirit of the San Francisco Bay Area continued to set it apart. In the late nineteenth century an almost Mediterranean ethos prevailed. Theaters, restaurants, and bars were more numerous per capita than they were back East—and morals looser. In converted lofts around Montgomery Street, a bohemian subculture took root, not merely tolerated, but in some ways imitated throughout the city. Even nearby Chinatown was no longer as forbidding as it had been a generation earlier. The arts flourished as young people in particular sought to express the exuberance they felt. Jews were highly visible as patrons of the arts and impresarios, as consumers of culture and critics. Jewish cultural creativity was often rooted in revolt against the older generation's Victorian mores. Once unleashed from the constraints of bourgeois convention, many of the homegrown artists displayed quirky and irreverent behavior. Gertrude Stein, who made a cult out of non-conformity, is the best known.Less

Introduction: understanding media rights

Richard Haynes

in Media Rights and Intellectual Property

This book is about media rights and intellectual property. It discusses law and how it shapes certain aspects of the media industry and examines aspects of media practice that are heavily dependent ... More

This book is about media rights and intellectual property. It discusses law and how it shapes certain aspects of the media industry and examines aspects of media practice that are heavily dependent on the protection, exchange and enforcement of certain legal rights that broadly come under the heading of intellectual property. It analyses the connection between cultural creativity and economics and how politics, power and the philosophy of property rights influence and shape the structure of the global media economy. It also considers how new media technologies are presenting immense challenges to age-old regimes of copyright and trademarks and how the contemporary media industry is coping with such dramatic change. Part One explores theoretical issues in media rights, focusing on the rudiments of intellectual property law and how they relate to the media industry. Part Two presents case studies in media rights, with chapters on music and copyright, broadcasting rights to sport, independent television producers and media rights, celebrity and image rights, and intellectual property and the Internet.Less

Chone Shmeruk: The Man and his Work

Israel Bartal

in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 15: Focusing on Jewish Religious Life, 1500-1900

This chapter is a commemoration of Professor Chone Shmeruk of the Hebrew University. In his scholarly work Shmeruk bridged remote eras and combined several disciplines into a unified world of Jewish ... More

This chapter is a commemoration of Professor Chone Shmeruk of the Hebrew University. In his scholarly work Shmeruk bridged remote eras and combined several disciplines into a unified world of Jewish cultural creativity. He mastered literature, history, and linguistics, knew them thoroughly, and sensed their finest interrelations. This great intellectual figure was at home in many cultures. His erudition knew no boundaries. His studies covered almost every European culture in the vast territory from the Rhine to the Urals. He was well versed in the German, Russian, and of course Polish cultures, as well as in Jewish culture in its linguistic diversity. This broad horizon enabled Shmeruk to see the whole cultural picture as a unified one. Shmeruk’s scholarship transcended political borders and crossed disciplinary limits.Less

Introduction

in Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology

This chapter is dedicated to the German anthropologist and second director of the institute, Adolph Jensen, whose work is little known in the United States. Jensen's concern for cultural history, ... More

This chapter is dedicated to the German anthropologist and second director of the institute, Adolph Jensen, whose work is little known in the United States. Jensen's concern for cultural history, especially for the development and function of myth and ritual, had led him to the problem of cultural creativity—a problem that American anthropologists, with the possible exception of Alfred Kroeber, have tended to avoid. Today's anthropologists have been less concerned with imaginative processes than with the product of the imagination. This chapter also concern with openness and closure, with the way in which one constructs, wittingly or unwittingly, horizons that determine what one experiences and how it is interpreted what is experienced. The scientific approaches to society, culture, and the psyche, should meet appropriate epistemological and methodological standards. It explores the ways in which people regulate and evaluate their associations with one another at both communal and intimate levels of life.Less

Natural Burial and Cultural Memory

Douglas J. Davies

in Mors Britannica: Life Style & Death Style in Britain Today

Three innovative individuals drive this chapter through their imaginative provision of UK funerary and memorial practice. Ken West fostered woodland, natural, green or ecological burial; David ... More

Three innovative individuals drive this chapter through their imaginative provision of UK funerary and memorial practice. Ken West fostered woodland, natural, green or ecological burial; David Childs’ dream-like vision led to the National Memorial Arboretum; Headmaster Anthony Hudson drove the building of a national memorial for the dead of the Falklands War at Pangbourne College. These exemplify bottom-up and top-down forms of social force, creativity, and mobilization of cultural capital amidst the British Establishment. ‘Natural burial’ takes precedence through descriptions of the Church of England’s Barton Glebe site near Cambridge and the opening of woodland sites near Durham and Liverpool, while the National Memorial Arboretum and the Falklands memorial provide complex ritual–symbolic cases of cultural memory in sites devoid of dead bodies. Ideas of semiotic allure, sacrality of place, and of reciprocity theory all contribute to this chapter’s theoretical analyses.Less