Table of Contents Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle & John W. M. Krummel: Editorial John W. M. Krummel: Introduction to Miki Kiyoshi and his ‘Logic of the Imagination’ Miki Kiyoshi: Myth (translated by John W. M. Krummel) Abstract: “Myth” comprises the first chapter of the book, The Logic of the Imagination, by Miki Kiyoshi. In this chapter Miki analyzes the significance of myth (shinwa) as possessing a certain reality despite being “fictions.” He begins by broadening the meaning of the imagination to argue for a logic of the imagination that involves expressive action or poiesis (production) in general, of which myth is one important product. The imagination gathers in myth material from the environing world lived by the social collectivity. Its formation of images (Bilder) expresses the pathos of a people vis-à-vis their environment, but myth also contains elements of logos in the form of intellectual representations and figures. And their combination becomes expressed externally by stimulating and guiding action. In this way Miki argues that myths contain both emotive and kinetic elements, which by moving people to action, are capable of making history. Thus rooted in the symbiosis between individual and social and between society and environment, myth possesses a “historical creativity.” And he also argues that myths can be present with a sense of reality at any epoch in history, even today, wherever and whenever their primeval power is felt to function, “drawing out” a new reality, a new world, out of the natural world. Guanjun Wu: The Lacanian Imaginary and Modern Chinese Intellectuality Abstract: Jacques Lacan’s theorization of the imaginary has been regarded generally as an organic part of the crucial development of psychoanalytic theory in its post-Freudian stage. This article situates the Lacanian imaginary in the context of contemporary discussions of ‘theory after poststructuralism’, arguing that it moves radically beyond the poststructuralist terrains of deconstruction and discourse-analysis, and is able to offer new insights on various studies. Especially, it can help (re)examine some aporias in the field of Sinology. This article devotes its main body to demonstrating that the Lacanian account of the imaginary is powerful in exploring the assumptions and expectations of modern Sinophone intellectual discourse. Deconstructive discourse-analysis alone is insufficient for understanding the underlying forces that have been fundamentally shaping the contours of modern Chinese intellectuality, and attention needs to be paid to the psychological dimension of Chinese thought. With the aim of tracing and interrogating these underlying forces, this article seeks to show how the fervor for discussing the ‘problem of China’ reveals a hidden psychical mechanism. Craig Browne: Critiques of Identity and the Permutations of the Capitalist Imaginary Abstract: In their elucidations of the capitalist imaginary, Castoriadis and Adorno emphasize the significance of identity thinking to this social-historical constellation. Adorno contends that the principle of identity constitutes the nucleus of the capitalist imaginary, because it underpins commodity exchange and the formal rationality of bureaucratic administration. Castoriadis associates the logic of identity with the same tendencies, but accentuates the horizon of meaning that animates the deployment of this logic. However, Castoriadis and Adorno recognise that the critique of identity logic confronts a genuine antinomy. Although it is integral to the capitalist imaginary, the logic of identity is present in every institution of society. I show how these critiques of identity pose questions about the ontological underpinnings of capitalism’s value system. After explicating variants of identity logic and its critique, I explore different interpretations of the permutations of the capitalist imaginary. These accounts of conflict, innovation and individualism diverge from Adorno and Castoriadis’s assessments of organised capitalism. Similarly, Arnason’s civilizational perspective situates the capitalist imaginary’s permutations in a longer-term historical perspective and suggests a revised core signification of unlimited accumulation. Finally, my analysis outlines some highly significant, though arguably often neglected, current capitalist instantiations of identity logic. Werner Binder: Shifting Imaginaries in the War on Terror: The Rise and Fall of the Ticking Bomb Torturer Abstract: This analysis employs the concept of social imaginary to account for recent shifts in the imagination, discourse and practice of torture. It is motivated by a broader ambition to highlight the importance of the imaginary vis-à-vis the symbolic, which still dominates theoretical debates in cultural sociology. Culture does not only consist of codes and symbols, but also encompasses collectively shared imaginary significations. Only by paying tribute to the imaginary dimension of culture, we are able to understand how codes and symbols work. The importance of the social imaginary will be demonstrated through an analysis of the impact of 9/11 and the Abu Ghraib scandal on the American torture discourse. The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers did not bring up new arguments in favor of torture, but changed the social imaginary by turning the so-called ‘ticking bomb scenario’ from a mere thought experiment into a real possibility. The publicized abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison had an opposite effect: The infamous photographs changed the imagination of torture which in turn strengthened its critics. Suzi Adams and Johann P. Arnason: Sociology, Philosophy, History: A Dialogue Abstract: The dialogue focuses on the sources, contexts, and configuration of Johann P. Arnason’s intellectual trajectory. It is broadly framed around the interplay of philosophy, sociology, and history in his thought. Its scope is wide ranging, spanning critical and normative theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics, and contemporary and classical sociology. It explores the importance of Castoriadis, Merleau-Ponty and Patočka for Arnason’s understanding of the human condition from a comparative civilizational perspective; his engagement with Habermas and Eisenstadt for the development of his hermeneutic of modernity and multiple modernities; his ongoing, albeit subterranean, dialogue with Charles Taylor; and concludes with a discussion of his recent focus on the religio-political nexus.

What should the church's cultural witness be? Too often, it has been marked by political strong-arming or fearful withdrawal into the "Christian bubble." There is another way: creative cultural engagement, using our imaginations to plant oases in the desert, breathable spaces that refresh, challenge, and draw together Christians and non-Christians alike. Oases refresh the soul, provoke discussion, challenge assumptions, and lead the imagination to a new place. In Oasis of Imagination, Ted Turnau lays out the Biblical mandate for engaging culture, and why the imaginative path holds promise. He explores the nature of the imagination from both Scripture and nature. He asks, "What makes a Christian imagination that resonates with non-Christians different?" He explores examples of Christian creativity done well from video games to movies to music to The Lord of the Rings. He challenges the church, artist and non-artist alike, to be intentional about their own imaginative lives, how artists and non-artists can support each other, as they together engage in building bridges and being cultural ambassadors to the wider community. In-depth and wide-ranging, Oasis of Imagination equips and encourages Christians, whatever their calling, to consider how to imaginatively enter into the broader cultural conversation, beyond the culture-warring and Christian bubbles. It seeks to provoke a conversation within the church between its artists and non-artists about how best to unleash our God-given creativity to shine light into the broader culture.

The four articles, two review essays, various book reviews, and obituary contained in this issue all revolve around contestations of Islamic authority. Notably, two of these articles are drawn from the AJIS symposium on Maqāṣid whose first set of essays were featured in the previous issue (38:3-4) dedicated to the topic. In the first article, “Agents of Grace,” Ali Altaf Mian develops a sophisticated and nuanced reading of “intentionality” in the work of the moral theologian al-Ghazali. Mian reads the latter’s work to disclose ethical action as a site of contingency and ambivalence, indeed of the subject’s “non-sovereignty.” He contributes this theorization of intentionality as a constructive critique of accounts of ethical agency in the anthropology of Islam. In the second article, “No Scholars in the West,” Emily Goshey carefully unpacks the ostensible paradox by which Western Salafis who studied in the Muslim world are not seen as “scholars” by the very communities they lead. What then comprises religious authority and scholarship within these models of knowledge transmission? Goshey tracks the dynamics of scholarship and community leadership based on fieldwork with African American Salafi affiliate communities in Philadelphia. In the third article, “Maqāṣidi Models for an ‘Islamic’ Medical Ethics,” Aasim Padela presents a typology of maqāṣid-based approaches to medical ethics. Whether requiring a field-based redefinition, a conceptual extension, or a text-based postulation of the classical maqāṣid theory, however, Padela shows that these frameworks remain woefully underdeveloped to offer appropriate and sufficient guidance for pressing bedside cases. In the fourth article, “Developing an Ethic of Justice,” Thahir Jamal Kiliyamannil offers a creative rereading of new Muslim movements in South India. Rather than relying on old typologies about political Islam or secularized activists, he considers the Solidarity Youth Movement to articulate an Islamic ethic of justice inspired by Abul A’la Maududi. This case study shows not only how the maqāṣid framework may inform discourses well beyond the domains of legal practice, but also how this specific articulation of political justice is based in the praxis of the Indian Muslim minority. These four articles and the remaining elements of the issue foreground contemporary contestations of Islamic authority. Read together, they also offer a set of terms for thinking productively about its contours, limits, affordances, and possibilities.

In The Sides of the Sea: Caribbean Women Writing Diaspora, Johanna X. K. Garvey examines the works of contemporary writers from eight Caribbean countries, including Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Dominican Republic. Authors from Anglophone, Francophone, and Spanish-speaking countries illustrate experiences across the African Diaspora, including enslavement, colonialism, revolt, marronage, and decolonization. Characters in fiction and poetry by such writers as Erna Brodber, Jan J. Dominique, Mayra Santos-Febres, Tessa McWatt, and Dionne Brand confront trauma, engage in struggle, forge connection, and act as agents of change. Complicating categories of identification and employing multiple strategies of resistance, these Caribbean women writers show us paths out of and beyond the binaries embedded in colonialism and its aftermath. As their texts remember moments and sites of trauma beginning with the Middle Passage, they embark on new passages, claim oceanic spaces, and suggest directions that stretch beyond the Black Atlantic to a more complex understanding of how to “pull the sides of the sea together” in the twenty-first century. The Sides of the Sea is organized in three sections: “Plumbing the Depths,” which examines representations of the Middle Passage and its legacies; “Voicing the Wounds,” which explores genealogies, inherited trauma, and potential healing; “Unsettling Borders,” which discusses decolonial epistemologies, transgressive sexualities, and new visions of citizenship.

This book not only articulates a tradition-specific Pentecostal rationality of Biblical Pragmatism, but also provides the first intellectual history of a major British classical Pentecostal denomination: the Elim Pentecostal Church. Pentecostal theologians increasingly acknowledge that their theological methodology should be informed by a Pentecostal rationality, epistemology and theological hermeneutics. Simo Frestadius offers such a Pentecostal rationality from a Foursquare perspective. Frestadius first analyses and evaluates some of the main contemporary Pentecostal rationalities and epistemologies to date, with a particular emphasis on the works of Amos Yong and James K.A. Smith and L. William Oliverio Jr., before proposing that Alasdair MacIntyre's tradition-focused and historically-minded narrative approach is conducive in providing a more tradition-constituted Pentecostal rationality. Utilising the methodological insights of MacIntyre, the book then provides a philosophically informed historical narrative of a major British Pentecostal tradition, namely, the Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance, by exploring its underlying context and roots as a classical Pentecostal movement, its emergence as a religious tradition, and its two major 'epistemological crises'. Based on this historical narration and analysis, it is argued that Elim's tacit Pentecostal rationality is best defined as Pentecostal Biblical Pragmatism in a Foursquare Gospel framework. This form of rationality is then developed vis-à-vis Elim's Pentecostal concept of truth, biblical hermeneutics, and pragmatic epistemic justification in dialogue with William P. Alston. In doing the above, the book not only articulates a tradition-specific Pentecostal rationality of Biblical Pragmatism but also provides the first intellectual history of a major British classical Pentecostal denomination.

Spirituality has consistently been present in the political and cultural counternarratives of Chicanx literature. Calling the Soul Back focuses on the embodied aspects of a spirituality integrating body, mind, and soul. Centering the relationship between embodiment and literary narrative, Christina Garcia Lopez shows narrative as healing work through which writers and readers ritually call back the soul—one’s unique immaterial essence—into union with the body, counteracting the wounding fragmentation that emerged out of colonization and imperialism. These readings feature both underanalyzed and more popular works by pivotal writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Rudolfo Anaya, in addition to works by less commonly acknowledged authors. Calling the Soul Back explores the spiritual and ancestral knowledge offered in narratives of bodies in trauma, bodies engaged in ritual, grieving bodies, bodies immersed in and becoming part of nature, and dreaming bodies. Reading across narrative nonfiction, performative monologue, short fiction, fables, illustrated children’s books, and a novel, Garcia Lopez asks how these narratives draw on the embodied intersections of ways of knowing and being to shift readers’ consciousness regarding relationships to space, time, and natural environments. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Calling the Soul Back draws on literary and Chicanx studies scholars as well as those in religious studies, feminist studies, sociology, environmental studies, philosophy, and Indigenous studies, to reveal narrative’s healing potential to bring the soul into balance with the body and mind.

Represents some of the best, cutting-edge thinking available on multiple forms of social upheaval and related grassroots movements. From the January 2017 Women’s March to the August 2017 events in Charlottesville and the 2020 protests for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, social upheaval and protest have loomed large in the United States in recent years. The varied, sometimes conflicting role of religious believers, communities, and institutions in such events and movements calls for scholarly analysis. Arising from a conference held at the College of the Holy Cross in November 2017, Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval gathers contributions from ten scholars in religious studies, theology and ethics, and gender studies—from seasoned experts to emerging voices—to illuminate this tumultuous era of history and the complex landscape of social action for economic, racial, political, and sexual and gender justice. The contributors consider the history of resistance to racial capitalist imperialism from W. E. B. Du Bois to today; the theological genealogy of the capitalist economic order, and Catholic theology’s growing concern with climate change; affect theory and the rise of white nationalism, theological aesthetics, and solidarity with migrants; differing U.S. Christian churches’ responses to the “revolutionary aesthetics” of the Black Lives Matter movement; Muslim migration and the postsecular character of Muslim labor organizing in the United States; shifts in moral reasoning and religiosity among U.S. women’s movements from the 1960s to today; and the intersection of heresy discourse and struggles for LGBTQ+ equality among Korean and Korean-American Protestants. With this pluralistic approach, Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval offers a snapshot of scholarly religious responses to the crises and promises of the late 2010s and early 2020s. Representing the diverse coalitions of the religious left, it provides groundbreaking analysis, charts trajectories for further study and action, and offers visions for a more hopeful future.

Sound, Image, and National Imaginary in the Construction of Latin/o American Identities addresses a gap in the many narratives discussing the cultural histories of Latin American nations, particularly in terms of the birth, configuration, and perpetuation of national identities. It argues that these processes were not as gradual or constrained as traditionally conceived. The actual circumstances dictating the adoption of particular technologies for the representation of national ideas shifted and varied according to many factors including local circumstances, political singularities, economic disparities, and highly individualized cultural transitions. This book proposes a model of chronology that is valid not only for nations that underwent strong processes of nationalism during the early or mid-twentieth century, but also for those that experienced highly idiosyncratic cultural, economic, and political development into the early twenty-first century.

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, Americans finally faced a perplexing political reality: Democrats, purported champions of working people since the New Deal, had lost the white working-class voters of Middle America. For answers about how this could be, Yoav Fromer turns to an unlikely source: the fiction of John Updike. Though commonly viewed as an East Coast chronicler of suburban angst, the gifted writer (in fact a native of the quintessential Rust Belt state, Pennsylvania) was also an ardent man of ideas, political ideas—whose fiction, Fromer tells us, should be read not merely as a reflection of the postwar era but rather as a critical investigation into the liberal culture that helped define it. Several generations of Americans since the 1960s have increasingly felt “left behind.” In Updike’s early work, Fromer finds a fictional map of the failures of liberalism that might explain these grievances. The Moderate Imagination also taps previously unknown archival materials and unread works from his college years at Harvard to offer a clearer view of the author’s acute political thought and ideas. Updike’s prescient literary imagination, Fromer shows, sensed the disappointments and alienation of rural white working- and middle-class Americans decades before conservatives sought to exploit them. In his writing, he traced liberalism’s historic decline to its own philosophical contradictions rather than to only commonly cited external circumstances like the Vietnam War, racial strife, economic recession, and conservative backlash. A subtle reinterpretation of John Updike’s legacy, Fromer’s work complicates and enriches our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s great American writers—even as the book deftly demonstrates what literature can teach us about politics and history.

Looking beyond and beneath the macro level, this book examines the processes and outcomes of the interaction of economic reforms and socio-economic peacebuilding programmes with, and international interventions in, people’s lived realities in conflict-affected societies. The contributions argue that disregarding socio-economic aspects of peace and how they relate to the everyday leaves a vacuum in the understanding of the formation of post-conflict economies. To address this gap, the book outlines and deploys the concept of ‘post-conflict economy formation’. This is a multifaceted phenomenon, including both formal and informal processes that occur in the post-conflict period and contribute to the introduction, adjustment, or abolition of economic practices, institutions, and rules that inform the transformation of the socio-economic fabric of the society. The contributions engage with existing statebuilding and peacebuilding debates, while bringing in critical political economy perspectives. Specifically, they analyse processes of post-conflict economy formation and the navigation between livelihood needs; local translations of the liberal hegemonic order; and different, sparse manifestations of welfare states. The book concludes that a sustainable peace requires the formation of peace economies: economies that work towards reducing structural inequalities and grievances of the (pre-)conflict period, as well as addressing the livelihood concerns of citizens. This book was originally published as a special issue of Civil Wars.