SPAN 40.13 Modern Saints: Religion and Politics in Spain
The relationship between culture, politics and religion in Spain takes three main forms. First, institutional and informal religious enclaves successfully (try to) resist material and symbolic processes of modernization, that its, capitalism, democracy, and scientific thinking. Second, the process of secularization of public and private life gradually but irreversibly changes traditional ways of conceiving the nation, its past and cultural manifestations. Third, it could be argued that the “substance” of religion does not disappear but evolves and mutates, secretly sacralizing new sphere of social coexistence. These profane and civil “religions” (religions without a proper God) trigger new beliefs, rites, and moral codes that, quite often, present themselves as totally rationalized and mundane. From a critical, politico-theological perspective, we can instead perceive their many metaphysical blind spots. In this course, students will be exposed to a series of literary and filmic texts in which these three forms of interconnexion between religion and political are easy to retrace. The goal of Modern Saints is to investigate how, in modern Spain (like so many other countries), modernity reinscribes many ingredients of spiritual transcendence in secular contexts, figures and practices. Well pay close attention to these new and disavowed forms of “sainthood” in which politics gain a lot of theoretical and practical traction.