These papers explore what becomes possible in the study of religion when the oft-interrogated distinction between the religious and the secular is not so much challenged as ignored. With case studies treating parody, nihilism, mastery, and sublimity located in particular sites - a cat's astrology chart referenced in a psychiatric case study, a church-like bar, Elena Ferrante's novels, a trio of Korean postcolonial novels - these papers offer an innovative selection of exciting insights into what the multiplicity of methods in religious studies make possible beyond the religious-secular divide.
This paper examines an early twentieth-century psychiatric case study as one resource for expanding approaches to esoteric religion. The mental patient was involuntarily institutionalized after an astrologer convinced him that his wife was having an affair. This archival document, circulated within early clinical pastoral education networks, demonstrates how esoteric practitioners were cast not only as “cons” but as sincerely mentally ill. My research thus extends scholarship on the limits of religious freedom by considering spaces beyond the courtroom. I look to mental hospitals as another site in which the veracity of esoteric religion was critically evaluated. This paper critically draws on Theodor Adorno’s analysis of the Los Angeles Times astrology column to juxtapose the “pseudo-rationality” of astrology with historical methods’ empiricist bent. Following Adorno’s critique of modernity’s compulsion to calculate, this paper asks: To what extent can the absurdity of our objects of study trouble the violence of mastery?
This paper considers the places of theological reflection through an analysis of the “Christian kitsch-themed” and art space Atlanta bar, Sister Louisa’s CHURCH of the Living Room and Ping-Pong Emporium. Drawing on Melissa Wilcox’s notion of serious parody and Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading, this paper considers how Sister Louisa’s queer parody of American Christianity does not merely subvert or resist their normativities paranoically but re-presents and re-imagines theology in ways that reactivate its teachings, precisely where much of contemporary Christianity has become inured to it. , CHURCH performs in space what queer theology has claimed in text: to consciously pose to theology a serious of questions that expose, destabilize, and repurpose its sexual, political, and economic investments and sureties. And perhaps, even more than that, it may be church in more than name alone.
This paper offers a reading of the contemporary Italian author Elena Ferrante’s writings in conversation with Kant’s account of aesthetic experiences of the sublime and human freedom in the third Critique. It argues that the two main characters of Ferrante’s bestselling Neapolitan Novels, Lenù and Lila, respectively represent what Ferrante theorizes as “compliant” and “impetuous” writing in her nonfictional work. Connecting Ferrante’s portrayal of Lenù and Lila to Kant’s account of the beautiful and the sublime, this paper argues that Ferrante's depiction of Lila's sensation of “dissolving margins” in key moments of the Neapolitan Novels is a quasi-spiritual experience of radical freedom. Recognizing the “dissolving margins” as a spiritual experience of freedom and sublimity can not only open new ways of interpreting Ferrante’s influential depiction of women’s experiences of oppression and liberation, but also can further illuminate the relation between freedom, aesthetics, and the religious imagination of the divine.
This paper develops an existential-analytic approach to postcolonial melancholia found in 1950s—1960s Korean literature, engaging with Walter Benjamin’s organized pessimism and Friedrich Nietzsche’s nihilistic affirmation of vitality. Focusing on Obaltan (Beom-seon Lee), The Square (Choe Inhun), and A Respite (Oh Sangwon)—works shaped by the memory of Japanese occupation (1910-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953)—this study contends that postcolonial melancholia, with its theologico-political and ontological-ethical valence, is clarified when interpreted through a framework integrating organized pessimism and nihilistic affirmation of vitality. Drawing on Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, I theorize postcolonial melancholia as an existential attunement—manifested as grief—toward a world wherein the hope for redemption is grieved over as a loss. This melancholia confronts nothingness, revealing the absence of moral grounding in postcolonial liberation. Reading 1950s—1960s Korean literature through Nietzsche’s nihilism and Benjamin’s pessimism illustrates this condition, necessitating that theologies of postcolonial existence center their discourse on the courage to be and to endure when romanticized notions of redemption appear nebulous and meaningless, and thus undesirable.