Abstract
Whilevarious book series on Religion and Society already exist, most tend to beEuro-centric or have a North American focus. The proposed series would promotecontemporary scholarship on the Asia-Pacific Region, particularly studies thatgive attention to the interaction and mutual transformation of religions acrossnational boundaries and beyond their country of origin. This would be amultidisciplinary series that includes both historical and contemporaryethnographic studies, which would contribute to our understanding of thetraditional and changing roles of religion in multiple socio-political contextsin the region. Especially welcome would be comparative studies that expand theframe of analysis beyond the nation-state and those that address emergingissues and trends related to globalization, such as religious pluralism andsocial conflict over the re-emerging public role of religion, transnationalreligious movements, and Asian religions in diaspora communities.
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Notes
- 1.
On Aristotle and the public sphere, see Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, “Politics, Speech, and the Art of Persuasion: Toward an Aristotelian Conception of the Public Sphere,” The Journal of Politics Vol. 61, No. 3 (Aug., 1999), 741–757. According to Aristotle, citizens share some responsibility in deliberating on the full range of domestic and international issues: ways and means, war and peace, national defense, imports and exports, and legislation (The Rhetoric 1359b20), and that in a democracy processes of judging and of arriving at moral knowledge are collective in nature (746).
- 2.
Gramsci’s most popular idea, the concept of hegemony, refers to how a class exerts influence over other classes in such a way that they will follow its political and economic project. It comes from the need to answer the question; when faced with a system when so many people are exploited and alienated by a tiny elite, how does the ruling class maintain its rule? Gramsci answered: “…two major superstructural ‘levels’: the one that can be called ‘civil society’, that is, the ensemble of organisms commonly called ‘private’, and that of ‘political society’ or ‘the state’. These two levels correspond on the one hand to the functions of ‘hegemony,’ which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of ‘direct domination’ or command exercised through the state and ‘juridical’ government.” (http://marxisttheory.org/antonio-gramsci-theories-of-hegemony-civil-society-and-revolution/#return-note-635-6; accessed February, 2016).
- 3.
On a comparison of the two, see Melissa Yates, “Rawls and Habermas on religion in the public sphere,” Philosophy & Social Criticism vol 33, no. 7 (2007), 880–891.
- 4.
“Religion in the public sphere: Taking religion seriously,” http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/03/05/taking-religion-seriously/ (accessed February 2016).
- 5.
Chambers (ibid.) characterizes the “added value of religion” for Habermas in three forms, all of which mitigate against a steady depletion of meaning in public debate: (1) religious arguments, appeals and images can be allies in struggles against system domination (e.g., marketization, instrumentalization, and bureaucratization) and dogmatic naturalism (e.g., denials of free will and neuroscience replacing ethics); (2) secular philosophy, especially moral philosophy, is enriched by encounters with religion (moral and existential truths embedded in religious understandings are translated and incorporated into secular philosophy, which can be revitalized through a continued engagement with religious views and understandings); and (3) certain moral insights still elude adequate secular or profane articulation (e.g., such things as our obligations to past or long-dead victims of deep injustice and cruelty); that is, sometimes religion helps us articulate and think about deep moral feelings even when we are not religious believers.
- 6.
Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. by Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), 2 [originally published in German as Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985)].
- 7.
These were noted previously in Welter, “Confucian Monks and Buddhist Junzi: Zanning’s Topical Compendium of the Buddhist Clergy (Da Song Seng shilue 大宋僧史略) and the Politics of Buddhist Accommodation at the Song Court,” in Relationships between the Buddhist saṃgha and politics in Chinese history (Leiden: Brill, in press) Thomas Jüelch, ed.
- 8.
“Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, No. 25/26 (1990), 75.
- 9.
Michele Dillon, “Jürgen Habermas and the Post-Secular Appropriation of Religion: A Sociological Critique,” in Philip Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, and John Torpey eds. The Post-Secular in Question, New York: NYU Press (2012), 250–251.
- 10.
These “subaltern counterpublics,” as Nancy Fraser (ibid, 67) refers to them, represent “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”
- 11.
As described in Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), esp. 73–88.
- 12.
The meaning of fohua is related to the traditional Buddhist mission of jiaohua 教化, teaching and transforming (i.e., converting and civilizing), a term with both Buddhist and secular implications.
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Welter, A. (2017). The East Asian Public Sphere: Concluding Remarks and Theoretical Considerations. In: Welter, A., Newmark, J. (eds) Religion, Culture, and the Public Sphere in China and Japan. Religion and Society in Asia Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2437-5_10
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