Anna Strhan
University of York, Sociology, Faculty Member
- Sociology, Sociology of the Body, Religion, Media, and Culture, Social Theory, Material Culture Studies, Anthropology, and 11 moreAnthropology of Christianity, Sociology of Religion, Evangelicalism, Anglicanism (Anglicanism), Anthropology of Religion, Cities, Urban Anthropology, Sociology of Children and Childhood, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, Georg Simmel, and Anthropology of ethics and moralityedit
- My research interests lie in the relations between religion, secularism, ethics, and moral life. My work draws togeth... moreMy research interests lie in the relations between religion, secularism, ethics, and moral life. My work draws together approaches from sociology, anthropology, and philosophy to explore how religion, ethics, and values interact with the social world.
I joined the University of York in 2018, having previously worked at the University of Kent. My first PhD was primarily philosophical, examining the implications of the work of Emmanuel Levinas for how we think about the relations between subjectivity, ethics, and education. This was the subject of my first monograph, Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility. After completing my PhD, I decided to move into the sociology of religion and completed a second PhD which developed my interests in morality and ethical life through an ethnographic study of a large conservative evangelical congregation in London. My book, 'Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals,' was based on this research and was shortlisted for the British Sociological Association/BBC Thinking Allowed Ethnography Award in 2016. I took up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Kent in 2012, followed by a lectureship in 2015.
My most recent monograph, 'The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism,' was published in 2019, drawing on Leverhulme Trust funded ethnographic fieldwork carried out with three contrasting evangelical churches in the UK. The book advances understanding of how some faith communities seek to maintain religious commitment across generations against a backdrop of greater detachment from religion among younger age groups across Europe, and examines how evangelicals engage with children across the spaces of home, church, and broader political life.
My current book project (with Rachael Shillitoe) is entitled 'Growing Up Godless: Nonreligious Childhoods in Contemporary England,' and is under contract with Princeton University Press. The rise of the avowedly non-religious - especially amongst younger age cohorts - across many formerly Christian liberal democracies has prompted growing research interest in ‘non-religion’, atheism, and other forms of so-called ‘unbelief’. Yet although we know that growing numbers of children are growing up non-religious, we know little about how this change is taking place in everyday life, or its significance for children and their families. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with children, parents, and schoolteachers, our book addresses this gap through examining how, when, where, and with whom children learn to be non-religious, and considers what this means both for children and their parents.
From January 2022, I am leading a three-year Leverhulme Trust funded project, 'Becoming Citizens of ‘Post-secular’ Britain: Religion in Primary School Life,' together with Peter Hemming (Surrey), Sarah Neal (Sheffield), and Joanna Malone (York). This study aims to investigate the role of religion in the work that schools do to foster notions of citizenship and national identity, how children and their parents experience these processes, and what this means for children’s sense of belonging in wider society.edit
Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and philosophy, along with ethnographic case studies from diverse settings, this volume explores how different disciplinary perspectives on the good might... more
Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and philosophy, along with ethnographic case studies from diverse settings, this volume explores how different disciplinary perspectives on the good might engage with and enrich each other. The chapters examine how people realize the good in social life, exploring how ethics and values relate to forms of suffering, power and inequality, and, in doing so, demonstrate how focusing on the good enhances social theory. This is the first interdisciplinary engagement with what it means to study the good as a fundamental aspect of social life.
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What does it mean to grow up as an evangelical Christian today? What meanings does ‘childhood’ have for evangelical adults? How does this shape their engagements with children and with schools? And what does this mean for the everyday... more
What does it mean to grow up as an evangelical Christian today? What meanings does ‘childhood’ have for evangelical adults? How does this shape their engagements with children and with schools? And what does this mean for the everyday realities of children’s lives? Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork carried out in three contrasting evangelical churches in the UK, Anna Strhan reveals how attending to the significance of children within evangelicalism deepens understanding of evangelicals’ hopes, fears and concerns, not only for children, but for wider British society. Developing a new, relational approach to the study of children and religion, the book invites us to consider both the complexities of children’s agency and how the figure of the child shapes the hopes, fears, and imaginations of adults, within and beyond evangelicalism.
The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism explores the lived realities of how evangelical Christians engage with children across the spaces of church, school, home, and other informal educational spaces in a dechristianizing cultural context, how children experience these forms of engagement, and the meanings and significance of childhood. Providing insight into different churches’ contemporary cultural and moral orientations, the book reveals how conservative evangelicals experience their understanding of childhood as increasingly countercultural, while charismatic and open evangelicals locate their work with children as a significant means of engaging with wider secular society. Setting out an approach that explores the relations between the figure of the child, children’s experiences, and how adult religious subjectivities are formed in both imagined and practical relationships with children, the book situates childhood as an important area of study within the sociology of religion and examines how we should approach childhood within this field, both theoretically and methodologically.
The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism explores the lived realities of how evangelical Christians engage with children across the spaces of church, school, home, and other informal educational spaces in a dechristianizing cultural context, how children experience these forms of engagement, and the meanings and significance of childhood. Providing insight into different churches’ contemporary cultural and moral orientations, the book reveals how conservative evangelicals experience their understanding of childhood as increasingly countercultural, while charismatic and open evangelicals locate their work with children as a significant means of engaging with wider secular society. Setting out an approach that explores the relations between the figure of the child, children’s experiences, and how adult religious subjectivities are formed in both imagined and practical relationships with children, the book situates childhood as an important area of study within the sociology of religion and examines how we should approach childhood within this field, both theoretically and methodologically.
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In this ethnographic exploration of everyday religious lives in London, Anna Strhan examines what it means to hold on to a strong religious identity in a secular city, focusing on a conservative evangelical church, ‘St John’s’. The book... more
In this ethnographic exploration of everyday religious lives in London, Anna Strhan examines what it means to hold on to a strong religious identity in a secular city, focusing on a conservative evangelical church, ‘St John’s’. The book describes how members of St John’s see themselves as increasingly countercultural, moving against the grain of wider culture in London and in British society, yet they also take pride in this, and see it as a central element of being Christian. Providing more nuanced understanding of conservative forms of religion than simplistic portraits of evangelical ‘others’, Strhan opens up new understanding of how evangelicals find ways of negotiating anxieties, sensitivities, vulnerabilities and human frailties that characterize social life more broadly.
Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church, the book offers unique insight how the experiences of conservative evangelicals are simultaneously shaped by secular norms and by 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. Moving beyond stereotypes of conservative evangelicals as reactionary fundamentalists, the book reveals the practices through which the members of St John's learn to understand themselves as 'aliens and strangers' in the world, and demonstrates the precariousness of projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness.
Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church, the book offers unique insight how the experiences of conservative evangelicals are simultaneously shaped by secular norms and by 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. Moving beyond stereotypes of conservative evangelicals as reactionary fundamentalists, the book reveals the practices through which the members of St John's learn to understand themselves as 'aliens and strangers' in the world, and demonstrates the precariousness of projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness.
Research Interests: Religion, Christianity, Sociology, Social Theory, Sociology of Religion, and 20 moreCultural Geography, Anthropology, Ethics, Cultural Sociology, Material culture of religion, Subjectivities, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Urban Anthropology, Anthropology of Christianity, Urban Studies, Sociological Theory, Urban Sociology, Evangelicalism, Sociology of Everyday Life, Secularisms and Secularities, Georg Simmel, Anthropology of ethics and morality, Religious Studies, Cities, and Anthropology of Religion
This is the first book to explore how religious movements and actors shape and are shaped by aspects of global city dynamics. Theoretically grounded and empirically informed, Religion and the Global City advances discussions in the field... more
This is the first book to explore how religious movements and actors shape and are shaped by aspects of global city dynamics. Theoretically grounded and empirically informed, Religion and the Global City advances discussions in the field of urban religion, and establishes future research directions.
David Garbin and Anna Strhan bring together a wealth of ethnographically rich and vivid case studies in a diversity of urban settings, in both Global North and Global South contexts. These case studies are drawn from both 'classical' global cities such as London and Paris, and also from large cosmopolitan metropolises - such as Bangalore, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Singapore and Hong Kong – which all constitute, in their own terms, powerful sites within the informational, cultural and moral networked economies of contemporary globalization.
The chapters explore some of the most pressing issues of our times: globalization and the role of global neoliberal regimes; urban change and in particular the dramatic urbanization of Global South countries; and religious politics and religious revivalism associated, for instance, with transnational Islam or global Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity.
David Garbin and Anna Strhan bring together a wealth of ethnographically rich and vivid case studies in a diversity of urban settings, in both Global North and Global South contexts. These case studies are drawn from both 'classical' global cities such as London and Paris, and also from large cosmopolitan metropolises - such as Bangalore, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Singapore and Hong Kong – which all constitute, in their own terms, powerful sites within the informational, cultural and moral networked economies of contemporary globalization.
The chapters explore some of the most pressing issues of our times: globalization and the role of global neoliberal regimes; urban change and in particular the dramatic urbanization of Global South countries; and religious politics and religious revivalism associated, for instance, with transnational Islam or global Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity.
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From recent sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, to arguments about faith schools and religious indoctrination, this volume considers the interconnection between the actual lives of children and the position of children as... more
From recent sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, to arguments about faith schools and religious indoctrination, this volume considers the interconnection between the actual lives of children and the position of children as placeholders for the future. Childhood has often been a particular site of struggle for negotiating the location of religion in public and everyday social life, and children's involvement and non-involvement in religion raises strong feelings because they represent the future of religious and secular communities, even of society itself. The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood addresses wider questions about the distinctiveness of childhood and its religious dimensions in historical and contemporary perspective.
Divided into five thematic parts, it provides classic, contemporary, and specially commissioned readings from a range of perspectives, including the sociological, anthropological, historical, and theological. Case studies range from Augustine's description of childhood in Confessions, the psychology of religion and childhood, to religion in children's literature, religious education, and Qur'anic schools.
- Religious traditions covered include Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, in the UK and Europe, USA, Latin America and Africa
- An introduction situates each thematic part, and each reading is contextualised by the editors
- Guidance on further reading and study questions are provided on the book's webpage
Divided into five thematic parts, it provides classic, contemporary, and specially commissioned readings from a range of perspectives, including the sociological, anthropological, historical, and theological. Case studies range from Augustine's description of childhood in Confessions, the psychology of religion and childhood, to religion in children's literature, religious education, and Qur'anic schools.
- Religious traditions covered include Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, in the UK and Europe, USA, Latin America and Africa
- An introduction situates each thematic part, and each reading is contextualised by the editors
- Guidance on further reading and study questions are provided on the book's webpage
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Emmanuel Levinas (1906 - 1995) is widely considered one of the most influential and provocative thinkers of the last century. Renowned for his thesis that ethics is first philosophy and his concepts of the ‘Other’ and the ‘face’, Levinas... more
Emmanuel Levinas (1906 - 1995) is widely considered one of the most influential and provocative thinkers of the last century. Renowned for his thesis that ethics is first philosophy and his concepts of the ‘Other’ and the ‘face’, Levinas thematizes teaching as central to his conception of subjectivity. While his writings in this area continue to gain influence within broad aspects of educational theory, their political relevance has been somewhat overlooked.
Levinas, Subjectivity, Education examines how the philosophical writings of Levinas lead us to reassess the concept of education, paving the way for a new understanding of ethical and political responsibility. Offering a new interpretation of Levinas’s philosophy that addresses the importance of the figure of the teacher in his writing, Anna Strhan demonstrates the challenge of his work for contemporary debates on autonomy, marketization, and political subjectivity in education. She draws also on Levinas’s writings on religion - both to analyse its practical implications within religious education and to consider how this philosophy relates to his pedagogy. By broadening the interpretive aspects of Levinas’s educational writings, Levinas, Subjectivity, Education sheds important new light on the on-going relevance of one of the towering figures of twentieth-century philosophy.
Levinas, Subjectivity, Education examines how the philosophical writings of Levinas lead us to reassess the concept of education, paving the way for a new understanding of ethical and political responsibility. Offering a new interpretation of Levinas’s philosophy that addresses the importance of the figure of the teacher in his writing, Anna Strhan demonstrates the challenge of his work for contemporary debates on autonomy, marketization, and political subjectivity in education. She draws also on Levinas’s writings on religion - both to analyse its practical implications within religious education and to consider how this philosophy relates to his pedagogy. By broadening the interpretive aspects of Levinas’s educational writings, Levinas, Subjectivity, Education sheds important new light on the on-going relevance of one of the towering figures of twentieth-century philosophy.
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This Reader brings together a selection of key writings to explore the relationship between religion, media and cultures of everyday life. It provides an overview of the main debates and developments in this growing field, focusing on... more
This Reader brings together a selection of key writings to explore the relationship between religion, media and cultures of everyday life. It provides an overview of the main debates and developments in this growing field, focusing on four major themes:
- Religion, spirituality and consumer culture
- Media and the transformation of religion
- The sacred senses: visual, material and audio culture
- Religion, and the ethics of media and culture.
- Religion, spirituality and consumer culture
- Media and the transformation of religion
- The sacred senses: visual, material and audio culture
- Religion, and the ethics of media and culture.
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This article examines how non-religious children experience acts of collective worship and prayer in primary school settings and analyses how they negotiate religion and their non-religious identities in these events. Drawing on... more
This article examines how non-religious children experience acts of collective worship and prayer in primary school settings and analyses how they negotiate religion and their non-religious identities in these events. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork examining non-religious childhoods and collective worship in three English primary schools, the authors explore how non-religious children demonstrate their agency when confronted with particular boundaries and concepts related to religion and non-religion in school contexts. Attending to the experiences, perspectives, and practices of non-religious children adds to our understanding of the varieties of non-religion, which has to date largely focused on elite, adult populations. Focusing on non-religious children’s experiences of prayer reveals how these children did not experience tensions between praying to God and their non-religious identities and articulated their own interpretations of these practices, deepening understanding of the lived realities of non-religious cultures and identities.
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The rapid rise of those identifying as 'non-religious' across many countries has prompted growing interest in the 'religious nones'. A now burgeoning literature has emerged, challenging the idea that 'non-religion' is the mere absence of... more
The rapid rise of those identifying as 'non-religious' across many countries has prompted growing interest in the 'religious nones'. A now burgeoning literature has emerged, challenging the idea that 'non-religion' is the mere absence of religion and exploring the substantive beliefs, practices and identities that are associated with so-called unbelief. Yet we know little about the micro-processes through which this cultural shift towards non-religion is taking place. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study, this article examines how, when, where, and with whom children learn to be non-religious, and considers the different factors that are implicated in the formation of non-religious identities. While research on religious transmission has demonstrated the importance of the family, our multi-sited approach reveals the important role also played by both school context and children's own reflections in shaping their formation as non-religious, suggesting a complex pattern of how non-religious socialization is occurring in Britain today.
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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... more
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 children's 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 children's '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.
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This article examines the growing scholarly interest in urban religion, situating the topic in relation to the contemporary analytical significance of cities as sites where processes of social change, such as globalization,... more
This article examines the growing scholarly interest in urban religion, situating the topic in relation to the contemporary analytical significance of cities as sites where processes of social change, such as globalization, transnationalism and the influence of new media technologies, materialize in interrelated ways. I argue that Georg Simmel’s writing on cities offers resources to draw out further the significance of “the urban” in this emerging field. I bring together Simmel’s urban analysis with his approach to religion, focusing on Christianities and individuals’ relations with sacred figures, and suggest this perspective opens up how forms of religious practice respond to experiences of cultural fragmentation in complex urban environments. Drawing on his analysis of individuals’ engagement with the coherence of God, I explore conservative evangelicals’ systems of religious intersubjectivity to show how attention to the social effects of relations with sacred figures can deepen understanding of the formation of urban religious subjectivities.
Research Interests: Religion, Sociology, Social Theory, Sociology of Religion, Cultural Geography, and 14 moreUrban Geography, Anthropology, Cultural Sociology, Urban Anthropology, Anthropology of Christianity, Urban Studies, Urbanism, Urban Sociology, Evangelicalism, Spatial Theory, Georg Simmel, Religious Studies, Cities, and Anthropology of Religion
This chapter’s point of departure is returning to that familiar question: what is the place of religion in education in predominantly secular Western societies, and what does that mean for educational ethics. As relations between religion... more
This chapter’s point of departure is returning to that familiar question: what is the place of religion in education in predominantly secular Western societies, and what does that mean for educational ethics. As relations between religion and education are often problematized, with faith and reason set up as polarized opposites, this chapter troubles perceptions of religion as somehow at odds with the spirit of Enlightenment or as a reaction against a disenchanted, rationalized modernity. Enlightenment rationalism is often presented as the ‘autonomous adversary of “revealed religion” (Rose 1995: 127): if the path to ‘maturity’ or Enlightenment is about becoming determined by one’s own mind, this has been seen as at odds with a religious ethic of submission to a divine Other. In this Enlightenment narrative of education as the progressive development of autonomy, children are implicitly heteronomous, and religion is seen as posing a threat to their developing autonomy. The ‘ethic’ of this secular Enlightenment narrative of education appears diametrically opposed from religion. I argue, however, that attending more closely to the interconnections between belief, practice, knowledge, and emotional sensibilities within both religious and non-religious forms of education, might help move beyond ideas of ‘religion’ as opposed to ‘Enlightenment’ and the pernicious ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, towards a more pluralistic sensibility. I draw on the work of William Connolly to suggest that we might find resources for this educational ethics within Kant’s philosophy. Examining the significance of humility and ethical self-cultivation for Kant, and its affinities with Muslim pedagogical practices, we find alternative ways of thinking about ethical co-existence within the philosophical tradition usually taken as determining the intellectual landscape for secularist attitudes towards religion, morality, education and public life.
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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... more
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 paralysing 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.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Sociology, Social Theory, Anthropology, Philosophy, and 12 moreEthics, Education, Philosophy of Education, Continental Philosophy, Émmanuel Lévinas, Stanley Cavell, Levinas, Sociological Theory, Educational Philosophy, Educational Theory, Emile Durkheim, and Anthropology of ethics and morality
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... more
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 Simmel’s ‘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.
Research Interests: Religion, Sociology, Sociology of Religion, Geography, Urban Geography, and 13 moreAnthropology, Urban Anthropology, Anthropology of Christianity, Urban Studies, Urbanism, Sociological Theory, Urban Sociology, Evangelicalism, Secularisms and Secularities, Georg Simmel, Religious Studies, Geography of Religion, and Anthropology of Religion
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... more
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 broader social structures. I demonstrate that propositional belief – in contexts where it becomes an identity marker – is bound up with relational practices of belief, such that distinctions between “belief in” and “belief that” are necessarily blurred in the lives of young evangelicals.
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This thesis is an ethnographic study of the everyday religious lives of conservative evangelical Christians in London. Conservative evangelicalism has attracted increased public attention in recent years as a number of Christian groups... more
This thesis is an ethnographic study of the everyday religious lives of conservative evangelical Christians in London. Conservative evangelicalism has attracted increased public attention in recent years as a number of Christian groups have become increasingly visible in arguing that Christians are being marginalized in British society as their lifestyles are threatened by universalizing processes associated with modernization. Seeking to move beyond simplistic stereotypes of evangelicals that arise from polarizing media narratives, I explore how members of a large conservative evangelical congregation experience and find ways of negotiating concerns, uncertainties and human frailties that shape social life more broadly. My central argument is that their experience of God as coherent and transcendent, mediated through word-based practices, both responds to and intensifies their consciousness of internal moral fragmentation, binding them more closely in their sense of dependence on God and each other.
Situated in debates about subjectivity and modernity in the sociology of religion, the anthropology of Christianity and urban theory, I analyse how conservative evangelicals faith is patterned through their being shaped as modern, urban subjects according to norms of interaction internalized outside the church and their development of moral and temporal orientations that rub against these. Their self-identification as 'aliens and strangers in this world thus, I argue, both articulates and constructs a desire to be different within the metropolitan contexts they inhabit, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their habituated modes of practice, hopes and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world. I demonstrate how focusing on both their embodied, word-based practices and their experience of the personality of God helps develop understanding of this form of religious intersubjectivity and its social effects, and argue that this approach opens up new avenues for understanding evangelicalism, lived religion and everyday ethical practice.
Situated in debates about subjectivity and modernity in the sociology of religion, the anthropology of Christianity and urban theory, I analyse how conservative evangelicals faith is patterned through their being shaped as modern, urban subjects according to norms of interaction internalized outside the church and their development of moral and temporal orientations that rub against these. Their self-identification as 'aliens and strangers in this world thus, I argue, both articulates and constructs a desire to be different within the metropolitan contexts they inhabit, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their habituated modes of practice, hopes and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world. I demonstrate how focusing on both their embodied, word-based practices and their experience of the personality of God helps develop understanding of this form of religious intersubjectivity and its social effects, and argue that this approach opens up new avenues for understanding evangelicalism, lived religion and everyday ethical practice.
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Bruno Latour’s understanding of different modes of existence as given through prepositions offers a new approach to researching “secularism,” taking forward attention paid in recent scholarship to its historically contingent formation by... more
Bruno Latour’s understanding of different modes of existence as given through prepositions offers a new approach to researching “secularism,” taking forward attention paid in recent scholarship to its historically contingent formation by bringing into clearer focus the dynamics of its relational and material mediations. Examining the contemporary instauration of secularism in conservative evangelical experience, I show how this approach offers a new orientation to studying secularism that allows attention to both its history and its material effects on practice. This shows how Latour’s speculative realism extends and provides a bridge between both discursive analysis of religion and secularism and the recent turn towards materiality in empirical study of religion.
Research Interests: Religion, Sociology, Social Theory, Sociology of Religion, Anthropology, and 12 moreCultural Sociology, Material culture of religion, Theory of Religion, Anthropology of Christianity, Religion, Media, and Culture, Speculative Realism, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Comparative Secularism, Secularisms and Secularities, Bruno Latour, Religious Studies, and Anthropology of Religion
This paper examines the recent shift towards the dominance of the study of philosophy of religion, ethics and critical thinking within religious education in Britain. It explores the impact of the critical realist model, advocated by... more
This paper examines the recent shift towards the dominance of the study of philosophy of religion, ethics and critical thinking within religious education in Britain. It explores the impact of the critical realist model, advocated by Andrew Wright and Philip Barnes, in response to prior models of phenomenological religious education, in order to expose the ways in which both approaches can lead to a distorted understanding of religion. Although the writings of Emmanuel Levinas have been used in support of the critical realist model by Wright, here I consider how his and Slavoj Žižek’s writings on religion might challenge the dominance of the critical realist approach and provide a conceptual framework through which it might be possible to develop an alternative approach to religious education that attends to the complexity, ambiguity and demanding nature of engaging with religious traditions.
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This paper examines how Heidegger’s view that language is poetry provides a way of conceptualising religious language. Poetry, according to Heidegger, is language in its purest form, in that it reveals Being, whilst also showing the... more
This paper examines how Heidegger’s view that language is poetry provides a way of conceptualising religious language. Poetry, according to Heidegger, is language in its purest form, in that it reveals Being, whilst also showing the difference between word and thing. In poetry, Heidegger suggests, we come closest to the essence of language itself and encounter its strangeness and impermeability. What would be the implications of viewing religious language in this way? Through examining Heidegger’s view that poetry is the purest form of language, I suggest that it would also be possible to view religious language as ‘poetry’ in this way, in that it also shows the transcendence of what cannot be brought to presence in language, except as concealed. Such a view of religious language leads to the view that it is not a special, unique or distinctive category of language, but rather a mode of language that, like poetry, can draw our attention to the inarticulable relationship between word and world that Heidegger argues pervades all forms of language.
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This paper explores the relationship between language, subjectivity and teaching in Emmanuel Levinas’s 'Totality and Infinity.' It aims to elucidate Levinas’s presentation of language as always already predicated on a relationship of... more
This paper explores the relationship between language, subjectivity and teaching in Emmanuel Levinas’s 'Totality and Infinity.' It aims to elucidate Levinas’s presentation of language as always already predicated on a relationship of responsibility towards that which is beyond the self, and the idea that it is only in this condition of being responsible that we are subjects. Levinas suggests that the relation with the Other through which I am a subject as one uniquely responsible is also the scene of teaching. Through examining these ethical conditions of subjectivity, I suggest that this notion of the self as oriented towards the Other in a relation of passivity presents a challenge to many of the standard topoi of teaching and learning and invite us to consider the nature of teaching in a provocative new manner.
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This paper considers the questions that Badiou’s theory of the subject poses to cultures of economic managerialism within education. His argument that radical change is possible, for people and the situations they inhabit, provides a... more
This paper considers the questions that Badiou’s theory of the subject poses to cultures 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 climate. 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 Badiou’s 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)? In this paper, I argue that Badiou’s theory opens up space for a kind of thinking about education that resists its colonisation by cultures of management and marketisation and leads educationalists to consider the emancipatory potential of education in a new light.
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With the publication of 'A Common Word' in October 2007, both Christian and Muslim leaders have in recent years highlighted the contemporary significance of the commandment to love the neighbour as a starting point in working towards a... more
With the publication of 'A Common Word' in October 2007, both Christian and Muslim leaders have in recent years highlighted the contemporary significance of the commandment to love the neighbour as a starting point in working towards a meaningful peace between these religious traditions. In this paper, I propose that Emmanuel Levinas’s presentation of obligation towards the neighbour in a relation of proximity in Otherwise than Being provides a provocative reinterpretation of this commandment, extending its appeal by suggesting that the demand of responsibility towards the neighbour and the possibility of peaceful relations is a transcendental condition of subjectivity rather than understanding it as a commandment addressed to members of the Abrahamic religions. Levinas’s conceptions of illeity, vulnerability and proximity as preconditions for society and justice provide a challenge to how we think about relations with others in education, particularly for considering the nature of inter-faith and intra-faith dialogue. Levinas’s vision of loving the neighbour is not sentimentalised but admits of the potential violence found in the approach of the neighbour whilst at the same time presenting the obligation of responsibility to the neighbour as bringing the possibility of peace.
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Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Drawing on sociological theories of embodiment and rationalization, this chapter examines the relationship between listening practices, rationality and subjectivity in conservative evangelicalism. Drawing on fieldwork from an... more
Drawing on sociological theories of embodiment and rationalization, this chapter examines the relationship between listening practices, rationality and subjectivity in conservative evangelicalism. Drawing on fieldwork from an eighteen-month ethnographic study of a large conservative evangelical Anglican congregation in London, I describe how members of this church are formed as ‘listening subjects’ through specific embodied practices, which involve not only listening but also visuality and bodily co-presence. I show how within conservative evangelical culture, there is a strong emphasis on rational practice and autonomy in tune with Enlightenment ideals of subjectivity, and consider how this intersects with members of the church’s participation in highly rationalized forms of practice outside the church. This emphasis is held simultaneously with an expressed desire for the subjection of the will to God and an orientation towards time that disrupts narratives of ‘secular’ progress, contributing to their self-identification as ‘aliens and strangers’ in the world and articulated sense of being out of step with urban modernity. I argue that conservative evangelicals’ body pedagogic techniques and learnt self-identifications develop an orientation towards transcendence that increases the sense of tension they see between their norms and those of ‘the world’. This ‘anxious transcendence’ is both modern and unmodern.
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Research Interests:
This chapter examines evangelical Anglicans’ understandings of childhood and family life, and how these shape their sense of the relation between their faith and wider culture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with conservative... more
This chapter examines evangelical Anglicans’ understandings of childhood and family life, and how these shape their sense of the relation between their faith and wider culture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with conservative evangelical and charismatic evangelical Anglican congregations in London, I explore both how these churches seek to form children within the context of everyday church life and the meanings that childhood has for adults within the church. I consider how their location of their work with children in the context of Anglicanism shapes their temporal orientations towards understanding the relation between Christianity and Britain and indexes a sense of a nostalgic Christian past. I show that while there are significant differences in how these different types congregation conceive of the place of children within the church and family life, both articulate hopes and moral ambitions that through their engagements with children local families will ‘return’ to the church.
Research Interests: Religion, Christianity, Sociology, Sociology of Religion, Anthropology, and 13 moreSociology of Children and Childhood, Social Sciences, Parenting, Anthropology of Children and Childhood, Anthropology of Christianity, Children and Religion, Evangelicalism, Religious Studies, Childhood studies, Youth and Religion, Theology and Religious Studies, Sociology of the Family, and Anthropology of Religion
Although many theological works are written by and for adults, scholars can use objects of everyday life to assess how religion is taught to and understood by children. Toys provide a hands-on way for young practitioners of religion to... more
Although many theological works are written by and for adults, scholars can use objects of everyday life to assess how religion is taught to and understood by children. Toys provide a hands-on way for young practitioners of religion to learn their religion’s values and goals. In this article, I overview the tools scholars have used for analyzing toys, and then look at recent ultra-Orthodox (“Haredi”) Jewish engagements with the toy industry. While many forms of Judaism see modern life and religion as compatible, Haredi Jews tend to separate themselves from modern society. Thus in the past Haredi communities have often rejected certain modern toys because of the secular values the toys convey. Recently, however, Haredi Jews have changed their tactics and started creating their own toys, ones that reinforce rather than undermine their religious traditions. These toys draw the line between women's spaces and men's spaces, and provide an alternative vision of American Judaism. Here American Judaism revolves around adherence to Jewish law in the home, the synagogue, the book room, and helping people, not through "cultural" Judaism. Toys represent one example of fundamentalists’ ability to adapt modern forms even as they adhere to a traditional way of life. FOR CORRECTED COPY SEE LINK
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What is the significance of the concepts of ‘life’ and ‘death’ for different religious and non-religious groups? This chapter aims to draw out deeper understanding of practices of connection and separation between religious and... more
What is the significance of the concepts of ‘life’ and ‘death’ for different religious and non-religious groups? This chapter aims to draw out deeper understanding of practices of connection and separation between religious and non-religious groups through examining affinities between how different Christian and non-religious groups engage with notions of ‘life’ and ‘death’, drawing on qualitative sociological research. Although questions of life and death might appear perennial concerns for religion, I explore here the particular contemporary significance of ideas of ‘life’ and ‘death’ within the moral landscapes of different religious and non-religious groups. The chapter considers the significance of the idea of ‘life’ for an ‘open’ evangelical church, the Sunday Assembly, and the School of Life, and practices of reflecting on ‘death’ in Death Cafés, drawing this together with Georg Simmel’s writing on life and its interrelations with death. I conclude by suggesting that attending to modes of practical engagement with ideas of ‘life’ and ‘death’ across these different religious and non-religious groups, rather than focusing solely on the propositional content of beliefs about life and death, opens up opportunities for reflection on common existential grounds of experience, moving beyond assumptions that relations between these groups are necessarily antagonistic.
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Research Interests: Sociology, Philosophical Anthropology, Human Values, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Sociology of Ethics and Morality, and 8 moreAnthropology of ethics and morality, Social Suffering, Classical and Contemporary Social Theory, Anthropological Theory, The Anthropology of Hope, Anthropology of Religion, Sociolology of Morality, and Morality and Personhood
Religion and the Global City - call for chapters Abstracts are invited for a volume on Religion and the Global City, edited by David Garbin and Anna Strhan (University of Kent, UK). The volume will explore how religious movements and... more
Religion and the Global City - call for chapters
Abstracts are invited for a volume on Religion and the Global City, edited by David Garbin and Anna Strhan (University of Kent, UK). The volume will explore how religious movements and actors shape and are shaped by particular aspects of global socio-spatial landscapes. These might include (but are not limited to): migration, transnationalism, multiculturalism and superdiversity, urban interconnections and nodes, media and publics, socio-economic polarization, centre-periphery dynamics, urban restructuring, privatization, globalized convergent geographies and architectural aesthetics, urban economies and city branding, and modes of urban visibility and invisibility.
The focus of the book will be Religion and the Global City - not simply religion in the city - and will adopt a non-reductive stance in exploring ‘global city’ dynamics of religious presence, in both Global North and Global South contexts. The proposal for this volume has been invited for a new Bloomsbury Academic book series, ‘Place, Disruption and Religion’.
We welcome empirically-grounded case study chapters, comparative approaches, or chapters exploring connections between religious global city spaces within wider cartographies. Theoretical chapters critically engaging with the relevance of a global city lens to make sense of contemporary religious lifeworlds will also be considered.
Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words no later than 5 January 2015 to David Garbin (D.Garbin@kent.ac.uk) and Anna Strhan (A.H.B.Strhan@kent.ac.uk). Accepted chapters in full (6000-7000 words) will be due by 1 November 2015.
Abstracts are invited for a volume on Religion and the Global City, edited by David Garbin and Anna Strhan (University of Kent, UK). The volume will explore how religious movements and actors shape and are shaped by particular aspects of global socio-spatial landscapes. These might include (but are not limited to): migration, transnationalism, multiculturalism and superdiversity, urban interconnections and nodes, media and publics, socio-economic polarization, centre-periphery dynamics, urban restructuring, privatization, globalized convergent geographies and architectural aesthetics, urban economies and city branding, and modes of urban visibility and invisibility.
The focus of the book will be Religion and the Global City - not simply religion in the city - and will adopt a non-reductive stance in exploring ‘global city’ dynamics of religious presence, in both Global North and Global South contexts. The proposal for this volume has been invited for a new Bloomsbury Academic book series, ‘Place, Disruption and Religion’.
We welcome empirically-grounded case study chapters, comparative approaches, or chapters exploring connections between religious global city spaces within wider cartographies. Theoretical chapters critically engaging with the relevance of a global city lens to make sense of contemporary religious lifeworlds will also be considered.
Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words no later than 5 January 2015 to David Garbin (D.Garbin@kent.ac.uk) and Anna Strhan (A.H.B.Strhan@kent.ac.uk). Accepted chapters in full (6000-7000 words) will be due by 1 November 2015.
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Call for papers for panel at EASR Conference, Helsinki, 28 June - 1 July 2016.