Book Review: Can a Renewal Movement Be Renewed?: Questions for the Future of Ecumenism

Abstract

der Veer. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014. Pp. xi, 282. $75 / £52; paperback $24.95 / £16.95. This study in comparative sociology, driven by "anthropological theory" and fashionable tropes of "discourse analysis," makes vast and sweeping historical claims about complexities of Indian and Chinese cultures. In so doing, it attempts to refute the notion that elements of modernity within these cultures are imitations derived from the West. Rather, it argues that ancient traditions of these societies have been transformed in distinctive and unique ways.Peter van der Veer, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, in Göttingen, and distinguished professor at Utrecht University, begins by exploring how, out of nineteenth-century imperial history, Western concepts of spirituality and secularity, as also of religion and magic, were utilized to epitomize traditions of China and India. He then attempts to show how modern notions of religion and magic were grafted into the respective nation-making projects of nationalist intellectuals within China and India in ways that were quite distinctive. Thus, while religion played a central role within nationalisms of India, religion was viewed as such an obstacle to progress in China that it had to be strictly controlled and marginalized. In pursuit of this argument, van der Veer addresses different understandings of art, compares yoga with qi gong, looks at concepts of secularism and of conversion within Christian histories, differentiates between constructions of religion in India and campaigns against superstition in China, and juxtaposes Muslim Kashmir and Muslim Xinjiang.As a prominent champion of comparative studies in religion and society, the author stresses the importance of deeper understandings of what is spiritual and what is secular within these two major civilizations. In pursuing this theme, where ideology can parade in the garb of theory, veracity is ever and always seen as conditional and contingent, if not contrived. Comparative analysis of culture ends in intellectual construction and invention. The "conditional idea" is made to represent "real presences" in a house of cards that is largely abstract. Thus, despite sometimes brilliant insights, forays grounded in actual historical events reveal little about those events that has not already been known for some time. What may be new within this study lies in the way already-known events can be remolded. Vocabulary for such analysis, borrowed from current fashions of literary criticism, sociology, and anthropology, invokes the lineage of Max Weber and genuflects before the rhetoric of Edward Said and his disciples.Interactions between four select concepts-religion and magic, secularity and spirituality-are connected, defined, and then redefined in respect to relations of power within imperial and national institutions. Yet, for scholars interested in the history of Christian missions, there is not much new to be learned from such rhetorical exercises, however daz...