Status Updates From Genealogies of Religion: Di...

For Kant, criticism is intended as an alternative to religious authority, not as a means of reinforcing it. But this difference is attributable, at least in part, to the fact that in Enlightenment Europe, religious authority was already in retreat. Political authority, of course, was not.
However, Kant insisted that the freedom to criticize everything should not interfere with the duty to obey political authority.

Ghība is strongly condemned in Islamic moral theology, so it is not surprising that the letter writers dismissed this analogy as absurd. But the point of likening moral criticism addressed publicly to the king to the sin of backbiting in private was, of course, to suggest malicious intent, a feature that irretrievably damages the
integrity of nasīha.

It is said that some of the King’s supporters who commented on the original letter by word of mouth claimed that the manner in which it
was delivered rendered this so-called nashīha (morally corrective dicourse) into something close to ghība—that is, speaking of someone’s
faults in his or her absence (and by extension also calumniating or slandering someone).

Into which category does a given new behavior fall? Is it really new, or is it an analogue of
something whose classification is not in dispute? The application of these categories to behavior engaged in by one’s fellow Muslims often
involves an elaborate work of reconceptualizing the context itself in ways that aim to be plausible to a Muslim audience

Islamic legal-moral tradition contains a graded scheme for classifying behavior—wājib
(mandatory), mandūb (recommended), mubūh (permitted), makrūh (disapproved), harām (forbidden). This classification forces specific
questions onto people who belong to that tradition:

According to Lipsius (Oestreich 1982), the influential religious skeptic writing at the end of the sixteenth century, the prince should follow
any policy that would secure civil peace regardless of moral or legal scruples. If religious diversity could be forcibly eliminated, so much the
better, Lipsius urged; if that was impossible, then religious toleration should be enforced by the state.

Intellectual and moral maturity, Kant tells us, consists in the ability “to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another”. This individualistic conception of understanding presupposes a space of freedom in which the mature individual can make use of his
own reason in opposition to that of others

Skillnaden mellan privat och publik skuldbeläggning, straffets roll kontrasterad med självbestraffningens.

to the trials imposed by him, and to the exhortations of his prophets. Hence paideia—or disciplina—acquired a strong sense of chastisement, correction, and the penalty inflicted for a fault.

In the Bible, disciplina is the normal Latin translation of the Greek word paideia. In the Hellenic world, paideia meant the physical,
intellectual, and moral cultivation of the person. In the Old Testament context it was used to convey a very different notion of education—
divine education directed not at an individual but at an entire people and achieved through submission to God’s law,

monastisk disciplin - särskilt sexuell disciplin - som metod att utveckla kollektiv självkontroll.

The same attitude of mind which allows of divination by auguries and sorcerers leads to the practice and the diffusion of the
criminal examination by ordeals and the judicial combat

it is characteristic, not of one
definite race, but of a certain stage of civilization. In the mythological stage of the human mind the deity was invoked upon the question
of guilt or innocence just as it was invoked as to the fate of a battle. In this respect there was a connection between beliefs and legal
institutions.

led him to refer to it by the Latin term habilis because the French habile did not quite convey what he was getting at. I think that Mauss wanted to talk,
as it were, about the way a professional pianist’s practiced hands remember and play the music being performed, not about how the symbolizing mind “clothes a natural bodily tendency” with cultural meaning.

The concept of habitus80invites us to analyze the body as an assemblage of embodied aptitudes, not as a medium of symbolic meanings.
Hence, Mauss’s wish to talk about “those people with a sense of the adaptation of all their well-co-ordinated movements to a goal, who are
practised, who ‘know what they are up to’” (1979, 108). This concern to identify and analyze bodily competence at something

Ritual is to religion what habit is to life, and its rationale is similar, namely that by bringing subordinate functions under an effortless
rule it permits undivided attention in regard to vital issues.... Just as the main business of habit is to secure bodily equilibrium ... so the
chief task of routine in religion is to organize the activities necessary to its stability and continuance as a social institution.

Ritual is to religion what habit is to life, and its rationale is similar, namely that by bringing subordinate functions under an effortless
rule it permits undivided attention in regard to vital issues.... Just as the main business of habit is to secure bodily equilibrium ... so the
chief task of routine in religion is to organize the activities necessary to its stability and continuance as a social institution.

It was in Europe’s eighteenth century that the older, Christian attitudes toward historical time (salvational expectation) were combined
with the newer, secular practices (rational prediction) to give us our modern idea of progress (Koselleck 1988, 17). A new philosophy of
agency was also developed, allowing individual actions to be related to collective tendencies.

Very insightful reading - at least for this rube.

p. 27-54; Chapter 1 The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category, by Talal Asad.

Medieval concept of discipline

Weberian Power: Formation of the self and manipulation of others

Disciplinary Practices, interesting

It can be seen as symbolic or as functional