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Religious power assumes many strikingly different forms, which are often regarded as unique, unrelated, and even mutually exclusive. Religion in Context, however, adopts a holistic approach and argues that these apparently contradictory mystical experiences are in fact part of a web of mutually defining and sustaining elements. Stressing the importance of rigorous social contextualisation, I. M. Lewis analyses phenomena such as spirit-possession, witchcraft, cannibalism, and shamanism, revealing connections between them and with the world religions. This expanded and updated edition illuminates critical aspects of religious power, and demonstrates the value of a comparative approach to formulating anthropological theory. It will be of value to students of anthropology, religion, and to anyone concerned with the nature of religion in the modern world.
How should we think about religion, science, and their relationship in modern society? Some religious groups oppose evolution; some atheists claim science is on their side. Others reconcile their beliefs with science, or consider science and faith to deal with fundamentally different aspects of human life. What indeed is religion: belief or trust in God’s existence? How do we distinguish sense from superstition? What does science have to say on such issues? Willem B. Drees considers contemporary discussions of these issues in Europe and North America, using examples from Christianity and religious naturalism, and reflections on Islam and Tibetan Buddhism. He argues that the scientific understanding leaves open certain ultimate questions, and thus allows for belief in a creator, but also for religious naturalism or serious agnosticism. By analysing the place of values in a world of facts, and the quest for meaningful stories in a material world, Religion and Science in Context offers an original and self-critical analysis of the field, its assumptions and functions, and ends with a vision of its possible future.
Leading scholars from Italy and the United States offer a fresh and nuanced image of the religious reform movements on the Italian peninsula in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. United in their conviction that religious ideas can only be fully understood in relation to the particular social, cultural, and political contexts in which they develop, these scholars explore a wide range of protagonists from popes, bishops, and inquisitors to humanists and merchants, to artists, jewelers, and nuns. What emerges is a story of negotiations, mediations, compromises, and of shifting boundaries between heresy and orthodoxy. This book is essential reading for all students of the history of Christianity in early modern Europe.
McGuire provides students with an integrated overview of the subject and a useful basis for critical evaluation.
Common views of religion typically focus on the beliefs and meanings derived from revealed scriptures, ideas, and doctrines. David Morgan has led the way in radically broadening that framework to encompass the understanding that religions are fundamentally embodied, material forms of practice. This concise primer shows readers how to study what has come to be termed material religion—the ways religious meaning is enacted in the material world. Material religion includes the things people wear, eat, sing, touch, look at, create, and avoid. It also encompasses the places where religion and the social realities of everyday life, including gender, class, and race, intersect in physical ways. This interdisciplinary approach brings religious studies into conversation with art history, anthropology, and other fields. In the book, Morgan lays out a range of theories, terms, and concepts and shows how they work together to center materiality in the study of religion. Integrating carefully curated visual evidence, Morgan then applies these ideas and methods to case studies across a variety of religious traditions, modeling step-by-step analysis and emphasizing the importance of historical context. The Thing about Religion will be an essential tool for experts and students alike. Two free, downloadable course syllabi created by the author are available online.
A new introduction To The field of Chinese religion and culture ideally suited to undergraduate students.
Many scholars have documented how migration from Latin America to the United States shapes the interconnected spheres of religious participation, political engagement, and civic formation in host countries. What has largely gone unexplored is how the experiences of migration and adaptation to the host country also shape the ecclesiological arrangements, theological imagination, and communal strategies of immigrant religious networks. These communities maintain close ties with their home countries while simultaneously developing a religious life that distinguishes them both from their home countries and from faith communities of the dominant culture in their host countries. João Chaves offers an account of the dynamics that shape the role of immigrant churches in the United States. Migrational Religion acts as a case study of a network formed by communities of Brazilian immigrants who, although affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, formed a distinctive ethnic association. Their churches began to appear in the United States in the 1980s due to Brazilian Baptist missionary activity. As Brazilian migration increased in the last decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of Brazilian evangelical churches were founded to cater to first-generation immigrants. Initially their leaders conceived of these churches as extensions of their denomination in Brazil. However, these church communities were under constant pressure to adapt to their rapidly changing context, and the challenges of immigrant living pushed them in exciting new directions. Brazilian churches in the United States faced a number of issues peculiar to their nature as diasporic communities: undocumented parishioners, membership fluctuation caused by national and international migration patterns, anti-immigrant prejudice, and more. Based on six years of ethnographic work in eleven congregations across the United States, dozens of interviews with Brazilian pastors, and extensive archival history in English and Portuguese, Migrational Religion documents how such churches adapted to unique challenges, and reveals how the diasporic experience fosters incipient theologies in churches of the Latinx diaspora.
The introduction provides students with an overview of four key issues that are at stake when choosing an approach to studying religion in a multidisciplinary context.
Is there a place for religious language in the public square? Which institution of government is best suited to deciding whether religion should influence law? Should states be required to treat religion and non-religion in the same way? How does the historical role of religion in a society influence the modern understanding of the role of religion in that society? This volume of essays examines the nature and scope of engagements between law and religion, addressing fundamental questions such as these. Contributors range from eminent scholars working in the fields of law and religion to important new voices who add vital and original ideas. From conservative to liberal, doctrinal to post-modernist and secular to religious, each contributor brings a different approach to the questions under discussion, resulting in a lively, passionate and thoughtful debate that adds light rather than heat to this complex area.
Religion Online provides new insights about religiosity in a contemporary context, offering a comprehensive look at the intersection of digital media, faith communities, and practices of all sorts. Recent research on Apple users, video games, virtual worlds, artificial intelligence, digital music, and sports as religion supports the idea that media and religion, once considered separate entities, are in many cases the same thing. New media and religious practice can no longer be detached; this two-volume set discusses how religionists are embracing the Internet amidst cultural shifts of secularization, autonomous religious worship, millennials' affinity for new media, and the rise of fundamentalism in the global south. While other works describe case studies, this book explains how new media are interwoven into the very fabric of religious belief, behavior, and community. Chapters break down the past, present, and projected future of the use of digital media in relation to faith traditions of many varieties, extending from mainline Christianity to new religious movements. The book also examines the impacts of digital media on beliefs and practices around the world. In exploring these subjects, it calls on the study of culture, namely anthropology, to conceptualize a technological period as significant as the industrial revolution.