Published on The Strasbourg Observers Blog

What is striking in the twenty years since 9/11 is not only the renewed attention to religion in the Western public sphere but the forms this attention has taken. Suspicion towards Islam has intensified. Narratives in which the West and Islam are conflicting and clashing entities have become entrenched. In Europe, anti-Muslim rhetoric has reached fever-pitch in far-right movements. What has gone l

Revelation’s Whore of Babylon and the hybrid animal upon which she rides provide a female-beastly assemblage against which is constructed the good sovereignty of the Lamb. Derrida’s thinking of animality and sovereignty indicates how the human political realm carves out its sovereign position in relation to the category “animal” and in reliance on a “reason of the strongest.” It is demonstrated th

In this article I explore the way in which popular perceptions of the Bible have become drawn into the ideology of the contemporary far right. By examining the far-right ideology that inspired Anders Behring Breivik’s terrorist attacks in Norway on 22 July 2011, I demonstrate how the Bible goes from operating as a foundational corpus for ‘Western culture’, to being employed as a militant mouthpiec

In the attempts to understand the ideology underpinning the terror attack in Norway 22nd July 2011, and the growth of far-right extremism in Europe more generally, Christianity and the uses of the Bible are a largely neglected feature. In this article, I examine the way in which the Bible is used in Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto, arguing that this provides an important example of the role of

In animal studies the Bible is often deemed a problematic anthropocentric heritage. There are, however, texts in the biblical archive that trouble such a judgment. Despite the picture given in scholarship on the Song of Songs, that (human) love and sex are at the centre of the poetry, animals are everywhere in the text. In order to take account of these animals and the relationship between animali

In this introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Animals in Literature and Theology’, guest editor Hannah M. Strømmen provides an introductory survey of critical issues in the intersection of animal studies, religion and culture. This is followed by an overview of the articles brought together in this Special Issue.

In this chapter, Hannah Strømmen examines the uses of texts in the practices of far-right populism, specifically the uses of the sacred scriptures of Muslims and Christians. Identifying patterns of scripture-practice is promising because it demonstrates the way different incarnations of the far right utilize shared strategies, particularly when it comes to the role Christianity and Islam play in c

The Bible appears regularly in Margaret Atwood’s novels, from The Edible Woman in 1969 to The Testaments in 2019. Atwood’s characters do not tend to be religious, but like most people in the Western world, they encounter the Bible in schools, at funerals, in headlines, advertisements, and occasionally from religious people themselves. Atwood’s Bible is a Christian Bible, the references running fro

Agatha Christie’s canon from the ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction is sometimes said to be surpassed in popularity only by the Bible. But is a large and faithful readership the only connection between the ‘Queen of Crime’ and the ‘Book of Books’? In this chapter, I argue that Christie’s popular detective hero, Hercule Poirot, becomes a mode of adapting religion to the modern world of Europe after the

In this chapter, I address the “containment” of meaning in relation to questions of authorship (or lack of authorship) in biblical studies. By revisiting Roland Barthes’ and Michel Foucault’s critiques of the author figure, I suggest that the implication for biblical studies is the opening of meaning-making beyond the figure of the author in his or her original context. Engaging with Brennan Breed