Search Results

This chapter examines how the Soviet Communist Party tried to boost the political legitimacy of its ideological project to build Communism and produce an atheist society by addressing the people's spiritual needs. More specifically, it shows how, in the transition from socialism to Communism, the moral and spiritual character of the Soviet people—including their worldview and way of life—gained a new significance. The chapter first considers how the state, after building the material base of Soviet Communism, envisioned ideology as an instrument of spiritual transformation by taking into account Soviet people's worldviews and byt. It then discusses Znanie's various initiatives to bring atheism to the masses and how atheists relied on clubs and lectures to compete with religion. It also explores the clash between the scientific and religious worldviews before concluding with an assessment of the Science and Religion journal's renewed engagement with worldview questions.

This chapter explains how the Cognitive Science of Religion can serve as a powerful new method for exploring the making of representations in a religion and the cognitive processes by which an initiate apprehends a religion's symbol system. Following Dan Sperber's approach (Explaining Culture), all religions may be described in terms of the interplay of representations over time: public representations in the media of sacred spaces, physical images, performed rituals, and words uttered and recorded in text; and private representations in the minds of individual adherents. A fortiori, the negotiation of representations in Mithraism can have been no different. An appendix draws on Lucian's treatment of audience response in his essay On the Dance to show how the negotiation of representation worked in a comparable situation in antiquity.

Chapter 4, ‘Methods’, concerns methodological issues. Key to the paradigm shift in the study of culture in the nineteenth century is the idea of comparison. The chapter demonstrates that Max Müller’s view of comparison is intimately related to a broadly conceived historical approach, which he contrasts to a theoretical approach that allegedly neglects ‘historical facts’. At first sight it may seem that Müller merely defended an empirically grounded method, but it turns out that ‘Mr Müller’s Science’ is embedded in deep moral convictions about a shared human history, which even has a providential character. This shared human history makes comparison meaningful. Just like other branches of cultural study at the time, Max Müller’s work has a clear moral edge.

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 chapter introduces the reader to the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), especially to those aspects of this new field that are relevant for a deeper understanding of the cognitive theories used in this book. CSR is a research programme which draws on a growing body of knowledge from the cognitive and evolutionary sciences to explain human religiosity. It is a pluralistic movement, comprising different schools and currents; what they have in common is the effort to achieve explanatory and testable theories, as well as a multilevel analysis of religious phenomena. The survey of the schools and currents in CSR provides a basis for suggesting a ‘socio-cognitive approach’ to early Christian rituals, relying on cognitive theories of ritual that operate at both a social and a cognitive level. Three perspectives on ritual emerge from the discussion, described by the keywords ‘action’, ‘cooperation’, and ‘religious knowledge’.

Mormon intellectual life suffered acutely in the wake of turmoil at Brigham Young University in 1911, but less than a decade later, major changes in church leadership and educational policy would help stimulate renewal. At the same time, Mormon scholars began gravitating to new disciplines like history, sociology, and the academic study of religion. A number of these students would become scholarly authorities on the Mormon community and the Mormon past. The students' epistemology, which placed supreme value on documentary and statistical evidence, was bound eventually to clash with that of theologically conservative church authorities, who exalted the private tutorings of the spirit. J. Reuben Clark Jr., a member of the LDS First Presidency, was the most forceful critic of Mormon scholars who, in his mind, threatened to lead Mormon youth astray. His 1938 "Charted Course of the Church in Education" remains a profoundly influential statement, and warning, about the "fundamentals" of church teaching and education.

In the earliest period of American history, astronomy and the exploration of the heavens was considered a hallmark of intellectual development and a noble endeavor for the colonial elite. In the wake of the American Revolution, the desire to signal a robust and independent national presence intensified in all areas, including astronomy. Major efforts in this regard were led by John Quincy Adams. From the mid-1830s, and for the next four decades, the construction of observatories accelerated rapidly as part of what has been referred to as “the American Observatory Movement” starting with university and college observatories and progressing to observatories with broader social contexts. An observatory located on top of a Philadelphia high school was an unlikely inflexion point in the history of American space exploration. The motivations of religious belief also played a significant role in the funding of early American observatories. The Georgetown Observatory was a point of contention between American Jesuits and the Superior General in Rome, and politics and ambition elevated the Navy’s Depot for Charts and Instruments to America’s first National Observatory.

This introductory chapter situates the book in relation to existing frameworks for the study of religion and technology across various disciplines and arenas of discussion. The introduction begins with a commentary on how the study of religion and technology can and should build upon recent scholarship in religion and media (which has been marked by a growing interest in the material and technological dimensions of religious practice), and in social studies of science and technology (where there has been a growing premium placed on the ‘supernatural’ or ‘transcendental’ qualities of modern techno-science). The introduction proceeds to assess the established literature on religion and technology, noting problematic tendencies to rely on naively instrumentalist conceptions of technology use, and also on a Christian-centered conception of religion as an immaterial, symbolic force, completely separate from its technological engagements. This critique sets the stage for the agenda pursued in the rest of the book, namely to reconceptualize the relationship between religion and technology, and to demonstrate the possibilities for new interpretation through the close reading of particular case studies, both within and outside the history of Euro-American Christianity.

This chapter provides an introduction to the field of cognitive science and outlines the program of a cognitive turn in New Testament Studies. The chapter explains the background and significance of the cognitive turn in psychology and other disciplines and also discusses basic research questions concerning the human mind. The question is raised how the human mind manages a variety of cognitive tasks efficiently, and theories of modularity as well as different accounts of situated cognition are introduced. Following a brief outline of the Cognitive Science of Religion, the final part of the chapter considers what the program of a cognitive turn in New Testament Studies can promise.

After Utah attained its statehood, Mormons inhabited altered landscapes of anxiety and ambition. Despite experiencing meaningful new forms of acceptance and freedom, they still felt the sting of external hostility, while fresh internal disputes—about scientific evolution, biblical authority, and academic freedom—emerged as the LDS Church's defining controversies of the age. These circumstances produced new, enduring Mormon mentalities. One of the most striking developments at the turn of the century was the domestication of Mormon feminism, and while a new generation of Mormon scholars emerged and matured, the church's intellectual center of gravity shifted toward Brigham Young University, where academic freedoms narrowed quickly and considerably. The tensions would ease significantly with changes in university and church leadership in the 1920s, but they would remain fundamentally unresolved.

The Introduction explains the rationale of the book. From the viewpoint of the history of religion, the failure of early Christian scholars to include ritual in the story of Christian origins is striking. This book attempts to fill the gap in the scholarship by giving pride of place in the study of Christian beginnings to ritual. This aim reflects the renewed interest in ritual among early Christian scholars. The particular contribution of the book is that it combines insights from three fields, New Testament/Early Christian Studies, Ritual Studies, and the Cognitive Science of Religion thereby taking an interdisciplinary approach.

To appreciate the risks and benefits of anthropomorphism, it is important (1) to appreciate the genius and limitations of human cognition, (2) to compare ultimacy models to see what difference anthropomorphic modeling techniques make, and (3) to entertain the possibility of an apophatic approach to ultimate reality that relativizes and relates ultimacy models. An apophatic approach to ultimate reality relativizes ultimacy models but also implies a disintegrating metric that serves to relate ultimacy models to one another. Degree of anthropomorphism is an important component of this disintegrating metric. Comparative analysis helps manifest internal complexity in the idea of anthropomorphism by distinguishing three relatively independent dimensions: Intentionality Attribution, Rational Practicality, and Narrative Comprehensibility. Educational efforts stabilized in cultural traditions can confer on people the desire and ability to resist one or more dimensions of the anthropomorphic default modes of cognition to some degree.