NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 62, Issue 1, 2008

Since the late-1990s, migrants have become subject of a heated debate in the Netherlands. This article examines and analyses this debate. It is marked by five characteristics: culturalization, islamization, rejection of islam, ‘new’ nationalism and a plea for assimilation. These trends relate to developments with regard to Muslims both in the Netherlands and the Islamic World, and also to mechanisms of ‘selfing’ and ‘othering’ among native Dutchmen. These mechanisms are connected with factors like a feeling of threat and a lack of trust in the political elite to overcome these threats. What are the effects of the polarized debate on the attitude of Muslims towards Dutch society?

This article offers a critique of Philipse’s main argument in favor of disjunctive atheism – that is, the view that either semantic or classic atheism is true – as presented in his well-known Atheïstisch manifest en De onredelijkheid van religie. After a number of preliminary comments, the authors argue against two crucial premises of the argument. First, they show that it does not follow from every religious proposition’s being outside of the domain of reason, that semantic atheism is true. Second, they explain why it does not follow from every proposition’s being within the domain of reason, that classic atheism is true.

The article deals with the relationship between Christian apocryphal texts and hagiographic texts. It starts with theoretical considerations about the meaning of text interpretation. Their result is that it should not be asked whether a text is ‘apocryphal’ or ‘hagiographic’, but whether it can be interpreted ‘reasonably’ as apocryphal or hagiographic literature. Thus, one and the same text can be understood reasonably from one point of view as apocryphal, and from another point of view as hagiographic. Those theoretical thoughts are illustrated with the analysis of the figure of ‘Veronica’ in the Acts of Pilate, the so called Mors Pilati, as well as in the Sixth Station of the Cross.