Search Results

This chapter examines the methods and theories proposed by four major disciplines to understand the presence of new religious movements in the West. It first describes the psychological approach, with reference both to the negative view which stresses the role of mind control in both recruiting and maintaining members, and to the literature that refutes it. Secondly, the sociological/anthropological approach is outlined and the trend for these disciples to see the NRMs as cultural and social phenomena arising in time of change is explained. Thirdly, the approach of Religious Studies, with its trend to describe, compare, classify, and interpret the movements, is outlined. Fourthly, the theological approach, which starts from a particular faith perspective, is analyzed with reference to the apologetic and dialogical perspectives. Finally, some suggestions for those teaching courses on NRMs are made.

Historicism, as the premise of historical context, together with ideas of universalism and progress, created a new epistemological and methodological landscape that by the 19^th century demanded a redefinition and reconceptualization of the nature and function of religion. Muslim intellectuals, like modernists in other religious traditions, historicized Islamic history and proposed a new approach to the Quran, Hadith and the nature of tradition itself. They rejected tradition as historically constructed and thus contingent, proposing that tradition as content, and precedent as method, be discarded in favor of the reinterpretation of the ‘essence’ of Islam according to contemporary needs. Studies of modernity should shift from an attempt to align definitions with empirical realities, and instead focus on the emergence of claims to the modern. This enables us to understand commonalities and differences among various modernities – and to avoid falling into worn paths of seeing modernity as a process of diffusion from the West to the ‘Rest’ while also not asserting the irrelevance of Europe. Islamic modernism has been treated as an instrumentalist language in the historiography of Middle Eastern modernization projects, and not appreciated for its deeply theological innovations and participatory role in engendering modernity.

The place of religion within the civil society has always been a contested issue. Some contend that religion should be separated from the mechanisms of the society while some argue that religion is indispensable to public morality and good government. In addition to the debates on religion, the concept of ‘political religion’ is also contested as it is a term loaded with ambiguities. Should religion be instrumentalised by politics? Should it be kept away from the political sphere? Is it the case that religions are constitutively political in their different ways, such that their political orientation will always come to light in the public sphere? These ambiguities in the notion of political religion call for caution in addressing the topic in the field of Religious Studies as well as in the field of International Relations. This chapter investigates in what sense religion can legitimately be political. It also considers the implications of this in International Relations. It ponders on whether the emerging global civil society will be secular in the same sense as its nation state predecessors.

This chapter examines the historical development of anti-mountaintop removal activism in Appalachia in the early twenty-first century. The chapter first examines how twenty-first-century groups such as Mountain Justice emerged out of decades of localized activism against strip mining in the area. It then outlines the theoretical influences from Appalachian studies and religious studies that have shaped this discussion of religion and place in Appalachia, including studies of Appalachian history and development, critical regionalism, and approaches to “lived religion.” Based on these theoretical concepts, the remainder of the book explores multiple religious threads in the re-imagining of Appalachian place by anti-mountaintop removal activists in light of a physically transformed topography.

As someone located in Daoist Studies and Religious Studies without formal theological training, I have developed my own pedagogical approach to teaching Comparative Theology and the theologies of religious diversity. I begin with a discussion of the relative appropriateness and problematic nature of the terms “Theology” and “Comparative Theology” for studying non-Christian and even nontheistic traditions. I then move on to present a quasi-normative polytheistic or pluralistic theology of religions and discuss Religious Studies classrooms as dialogic spaces and interreligious encounters. I emphasize that the postcolonial and postmodern study of religion assumes theology is an essential characteristic, which also reveals mutually exclusive, equally convincing accounts of “reality.” Comparative Theology and interreligious dialogue provide helpful methodologies for addressing the challenges of radical alterity. We may endeavor to “think through” alternative perspectives and, in the process, defamiliarize the familiar and familiarize the unfamiliar.

The conclusion reiterates the book’s main argument, that that environmental innovations in American religions have developed for reasons that expand far beyond direct expressions of religious teachings and faith. Then it discusses implications of these findings for the study of religion and ecology and religious studies more broadly.

This essay delineates the impact of gender studies, theories of religion, and hagiography on fields of patristics and the history of Christianity more broadly, with a particular focus on the influence of the work of Elizabeth A. Clark.

“The Shadow of God,” highlights a crucially important dialectical movement. It shows how a putative opposition between religion and science, combined with fears of despiritualization and mourning for the death of God, motivated the rise of spiritualism and occult movements, and contributed to the birth of religious studies as a discipline. Looking at Edward Burnett Tylor, Friedrich Max Müller, Éliphas Lévi, and Helena Blavatsky, it demonstrates how scholars, spiritualists, and magicians not only moved in common social circles, but also shared an engagement with spirits, mysticism, and “Oriental” mysteries. The chapter maps out the messy intermediate terrain between two spheres that considered themselves to be different and were sometimes opposed, but nevertheless exhibited the same basic habits of thought—including a myth of lost magic.

The introduction notes that throughout the academy there continues to be an ongoing investment in the modernization thesis, which is alternately celebrated or condemned. Fortunately, two small groups of dissenters have rejected this grand narrative: First, postcolonial thinkers have worked to shatter the reflexive linkage between Eurocentrism and modernization; and second, a handful of historians working on Europe have come to emphasize contemporary enchantments therein. Taken together seemingly suggests as paradox—if the rejection of the supernatural is supposed to be the defining feature of both European culture and modernity, then in this respect—Europe is not Europe. The introduction also locates the manuscript as a whole as producing a Foucauldian genealogy of Horkheimer and Adorno’s monumental Dialectic of Enlightenment and the left-Weberian narrative contained therein. The chapter then argues that one of the mechanisms that both makes magic appealing and motivates its suppression is the reification of a putative binary opposition between "religion" and "science," and the production of a “third term” (superstition, magic, and so on) that signifies repeated attempts to stage or prevent reconciliation between these opposed discursive terrains. Finally, the introduction lays out "Reflexive Religious Studies" as a new model for our field.

This introduction explains the book’s basic arguments and methodology. The book examines the place of apocalypticism in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a means of responding to what they perceived as persecution from the United States. It is particularly interested in how last days prophecies and visions have been told by those outside of church leadership. It defines the idea of apocalypticism and argues that Mormon Studies scholars have not sufficiently integrated their work with the field of lived or vernacular religion. This book seeks to remedy this neglect. A summary of each of the six chapters is provided.

This chapter explores more general questions that have come out of this investigation regarding the form and function of Chan genealogies that have been slowly generated and thickened. It assesses individual claims to having experienced Chan enlightenment, in any era, in the wake of seeing that Chan enlightenment, and the lineages that supposedly delivered it. The chapter emphasizes the whole promise of Religious Studies as a critical discipline, from the beginning, headed in the direction in which understanding the “all-too-human” origins of religions could also be grounds for a kind of liberating flexibility vis-à-vis symbolic orders, a flexibility born of recognizing how these orders were created and consumed. Understanding is required of the mechanisms by which humans devise systems of desire, belief, and closure and this requires being both inside them and outside them. Just this flexibility and irony vis-à-vis meaning and truth sets the stage for some rather profound reflections on human beings.

Modernity tends to frame religion as private spirituality and nature as objective materiality, each divorced from the other. Sinological scholarship on Daoism has tended to work within this framework and as a result has produced understandings of Daoism based on the categories of religion, philosophy, nature and culture that are external to the tradition itself. An alternative to the ordering framework of modern scholarship on China and Chinese religions is scholarship produced from a paradigm of sustainability.

This chapter turns to the infamous British magician Aleister Crowley, who overlapped with Frazer at Trinity College, Cambridge. This chapter shows that Crowley drew on the very text in which Frazer worked out disenchantment to stage his revival of modern “magick” [sic]. Hence, the narrative of disenchantment was self-refuting insofar as it reinvigorated the very thing it described as endangered.

One way of thinking about the last decades of scholarship on late ancient Christianity is to notice the effort to disentangle the historiographical project from the theological one. This effort has travelled alongside a series of overlapping intellectual (and political) turns within the humanities and qualitative social sciences: the feminist turn, the literary turn, the cultural turn, and most recently (ironically enough) the turn to religion. How do these interpretive transformations change the practice of reading ancient sources? By taking up The Life of Melania the Younger, this chapter explores the critical differences implied and imposed by this series of interpretive turns. The reading of the Life interweaves questions of gender, power, and the body; genre, rhetoric, and audience; materiality and social relations; the production of subjectivity through the repetitions of ritual and piety; and reflections on the future of feminist critique in the history of religion.

Where global priorities have suppressed the veracity of experiential differences, the field of religious studies has returned repeatedly to acknowledge them. Though many contemporary anthropologists are uneasy with the fact that ritually generated embodied practices may not always be accessible across cultures or to the lived experience of the ethnographer, religious studies is more happy to consider such differences. For its part, anthropology has moved in the direction of narrative—focusing on those lived experiences of others that are amenable to description. However, this was not always the case. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropologists were uncompromising in their descriptions of other ways of thinking—especially those considered incommensurable with Cartesian, monotheistic modes of understanding.