The rites of identity Eddy, Beth; Eddy, Beth
2003., 20090110, 2009, 2003, 2004-01-01
eBook
The Rites of Identity argues that Kenneth Burke was the most deciding influence on Ralph Ellison's writings, that Burke and Ellison are firmly situated within the American tradition of religious ...naturalism, and that this tradition--properly understood as religious--offers a highly useful means for considering contemporary identity and mitigating religious conflict. Beth Eddy adds Burke and Ellison to a tradition of religious naturalism that traces back to Ralph Waldo Emerson but received its most nuanced expression in the work of George Santayana. Through close readings of the essays and fiction of Burke and Ellison, Eddy shows the extent to which their cultural criticisms are intertwined. Both offer a naturalized understanding of piety, explore the psychological and social dynamics of scapegoating, and propose comic religious resources. And both explicitly connect these religious categories to identity, be it religious, racial, national, ethnic, or gendered. Eddy--arguing that the most socially damaging uses of religious language and ritual are connected to the best uses that such language has to offer--finds in Burke and Ellison ways to manage this precarious situation and to mitigate religious violence through wise use of performative symbolic action.
Jane Addams played an integral role in the development of a pragmatic ethic. Influenced by Darwinian naturalism, Addams found her religious calling as the founder of an American settlement house, ...Hull House. On a postgraduation European tour Addams visited Toynbee Hall and met followers of Auguste Comte's Religion of Humanity and adherents of Edward Caird's Oxford Hegelian idealism. Comte's account of the social organism provides Addams with an alternative to Spencer's social Darwinism, one more compatible with Addams's social gospel ethics. Caird's Hegelian interpretation of the evolution of Christianity shaped the settlement movement. Addam's saw her American settlement house as the perfect environment for developing American democratic and humanistic faith.
This book details a pragmatic approach to the ethical and religious implications of a Darwinian perspective, drawing on the work of thinkers both secular and religious. The approach taken by James, ...Santayana, Addams, and Dewey should be of interest to scholars of religious naturalism and humanistic ethics.
Ralph Ellison was one of the most prolific beneficiaries of Kenneth Burke’s thought about the religious and ritual elements of identity construction, destruction, and transformation. The “both/and” ...antiessentialist thinking of Burke works itself out in Ellison’s writings as a tension between feeling both a part of and simultaneously apart from various identity groupings. Like Burke, Ellison rejects a conversion model of identity formation in favor of a confirmation model, which he takes to be more pious. Many of the same influences from Freud and Santayana found in Burke’s work show up in Ellison’s as well, as I will endeavor to
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