ABSTRACT
Emotions have moved center stage in many contemporary debates over religious diversity and multicultural recognition. As in other contested fields, emotions are often one-sidedly discussed as quintessentially subjective and individual phenomena, neglecting their social and cultural constitution. Moreover, emotionality in these debates is frequently attributed to the religious subject alone, disregarding the affective anatomy of the secular. This volume addresses these shortcomings, bringing into conversation a variety of disciplinary perspectives on religious and secular affect and emotion. The volume emphasizes two analytical perspectives: on the one hand, chapters take an immanent perspective, focusing on subjective feelings and emotions in relation to the religious and the secular. On the other hand, chapters take a relational perspective, looking at the role of affect and emotion in how the religious and the secular constitute one another. These perspectives cut across the three main parts of the volume: the first one addressing historical intertwinements of religion and emotion, the second part emphasizing affects, emotions, and religiosity, and the third part looking at specific sensibilities of the secular. The thirteen chapters provide a well-balanced composition of theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches to these areas of inquiry, discussing both historical and contemporary cases.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|58 pages
Historical intertwinements of religion and emotion
chapter Chapter 3|18 pages
Emotion and the popularization of anti-Jewish discourse in early modern Europe
chapter Chapter 4|21 pages
Guilt or masked shame? Reinhold Niebuhr’s diagnosis of the Christian self
part II|100 pages
Affects, emotions, and religiosity
chapter Chapter 5|23 pages
From serene certainty to the paranoid insecurity of salvation
chapter Chapter 9|22 pages
The metaphorics of indescribable feelings in contemporary Christian contexts 1
part III|72 pages
Sensibilities of the secular