This article uses the term ‘equivocation’ to describe the sense in which Christian incarnational theology appears to have provided a resource or way of thinking about the embodied human condition. For British literary works produced across a period of over a thousand years, that is not wholly negative. Christian convictions about God's investment in the materiality of human existence bear witness to the perception of infinite human longings and seemingly endless possibilities, as well as our fearful limitations. British artists and commentators during this period have not all accepted the authority of a Christian approach, and in the last two or three centuries many have aspired to challenge the more negative or limiting emphases of its teaching. Arguably, the paradigm remains significant, yet it continues to provide both impetus and challenge to ongoing reflections on the nature of unavoidable human incarnation.
The focus of this article is how 'religion', as a materially heterogeneous concept, becomes mobilized in different educational spaces, and the kinds of knowing to which this gives rise. Three 'case studyish' illustrations are deployed in order to consider how religion and education produce kinds of knowing which may -or may notinvolve knowing well and knowing differently. We argue that it is necessary to attend to both the understanding of religion that is being deployed and the specific educational imaginary within which such knowing takes place. k e y wo r d s difference, educational spaces, imaginary, material practice, metaphor, religion How is it possible to know, know well, and know differently, in contexts conditioned for so long by relations of dominance? (Law and Lin, 2009: 1)
In This Incredible Need to Believe (2009), philosopher Julia Kristeva identifies the present as a time of crisis identified with ‘ideality’; historically significant cultural idealizations are failing us, leading to social and cultural breakdown, which Kristeva believes is not being addressed in ‘secular’ western societies. Remarkably, she defends the universal significance of what she defines as ‘belief’, revisiting earlier work on language, literature and the unconscious, against the background of a recent revival of interest in ‘religion’. In an introductory way, this article outlines ways in which Kristeva’s analysis can help feminist readers to take bearings at this time
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