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This chapter discusses the impact of demographic change (Southern population growth and Northern population decline) on the form of Christianity that is likely to be practiced in the future and points out that claims that the Southern churches have strayed from older definitions of Christianity are greatly exaggerated. However much Southern Christian types have diverged from older Christian orthodoxies, they have in almost all cases remained within recognizable Christian traditions. The first part of the chapter looks at various aspects of inculturation (interpreting the Christian proclamation in a form appropriate for particular cultures) in relation to determining what are the core beliefs and what are the cultural accidents of Christianity; these aspects include architecture, liturgy and religious language, changes in patterns of worship and their underlying beliefs, and the implications of the emphasis on popular belief and tradition for the veneration of the Virgin Mary in Southern Catholic communities. The second part of the chapter discusses patterns in the emerging Southern churches that go beyond familiar Christian traditions, even as far as a thinly disguised paganism, which is manifested in belief in spirits and spiritual powers (which have their strongest impact on terms of healing and miracles and exorcism) and the concept of spiritual welfare (confronting and defeating demonic forces). The third part of the chapter discusses the cultural conflict over literal interpretations of exorcism and spiritual healing in the Bible, the acceptance by the Southern churches of the Old and New Testaments as documents of immediate relevance, their emphasis on aspects of Christianity that have become unfamiliar, and their revival of ancient customs. Last, the Southern churches – the ‘new’ Christianity – are discussed in terms of their sectarian character, and how this is likely to change in the future as they grow and mature, and become more like the major churches.

This chapter examines various forms of qawwali, paying special attention to changes in concepts of spiritual disempowerment and the transmission of spiritual power, the seemingly paradoxical relationship between the two, and the role of music in both. Qawwali, a musical genre that originated in Pakistan and India, is ritual of poetry originally performed to music in Sufi shrines, but developed by a single practitioner, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, into performances on a global scale. The chapter analyzes musical events, poetical texts, audience responses, and the spirituality of the music in its original as well as its (com)modified Western settings. It explains how qawwali is traditionally performed in dargahs, tombs of the saints, epiphanic places where time and eternity intersect. The transfer of qawwali practices from shrines to the concert stage has important consequences not only for the performers and their audiences, but also for the spiritual role of the music.

This chapter looks at challenges to the power of the Papacy in the late Middle Ages. It begins with a discussion of the dispute between Pope Boniface VIII and King Philip the Fair of France. This was concerned with whether the King could tax clergy within his kingdom, and who had jurisdiction if they committed a crime. The dispute was also directly productive of some extremely important political theory, notably the writings of Giles of Rome and John of Paris. These took opposing views over the respective competencies of the spiritual and temporal rulers. The chapter then moves to detailed readings of three theorists of temporal power: Dante, Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham. Dante, better known as the poet of the Commedia, was author of the important Monarchia which argued for a resurgent empire free from papal control. Marsilius offered a defence of the smaller political unit of the city. Ockham, who became a political theorist late in life, was an advocate of the Franciscan vow of poverty, and believed that the church should be poor. Yet this was not simply a view about property, but a view that the church should absent itself from all worldly concerns.

This chapter looks at how goddesses and female symbols of the divine functioned in two major movements that sought religious salvation in the context of Greco-Roman society: the mystery religions and gnosticism. Although both have been passed down to us shaped by a male point of view, both included women as priestesses, religious leaders, and adherents. Unfortunately, we have no texts by women in which we can glimpse how women saw their relation to the goddesses of the mystery religions. Gnosticism is even more complex: despite its androcentric view of divinity, it had powerful female deities and suggested a kind of subversion of the whole dominant patriarchal society and cosmos. Perhaps we glimpse here a proto-feminist movement in the context of an international, colonized society of antiquity. After discussing the mystery religions in the Hellenistic world, this chapter examines eschatology in Hellenistic Judaism, female spiritual powers in gnosticism, and female disciples in some gnostic gospels.

Theologians of African origin consider Christianity as indigenous to Africa. They affirm continuity between African indigenous religion and Christianity. This essay explores how traditional African understanding of humans, ancestors, deities and God, and the complex fluid traditions and histories of African peoples contribute to a renewed interpretation of the suffering of Jesus Christ, the Healer, for the good of Africa and the world. First, attention is drawn to figures of “redemptive suffering” in African traditional religions: persons endowed with, possessing or being possessed by, “spirit” that empowers them to function for the good or health of the society and individuals. Second, the essay highlights the way spiritual and religious power operates in African Christian communities and the conflicting interpretations and evaluations of this reality. The meshing of indigenous with Christian elements enables African Christians to reinvent the discourse on redemptive suffering in contemporary Christianity.

This chapter looks at the later Middle Ages. It provides a reading of the organic idea of the body politic in the work of John of Salisbury. It examines the idea of the ‘two swords’, where the Pope claimed both temporal power—over the span of human life on the earth—and spiritual power—over sin, salvation and their eternal souls. The Pope laid claim to supremacy in the latter by right, and appointed or anointed secular rulers such as Kings or Emperors to act on his behalf in the former. However, this split, originally proposed by papal theorists, began to articulate a scope and purpose of a separate kind of power, which secular rulers and theorists began to develop. The chapter also discusses in detail the rediscovery of Aristotle’s political writings and their translation into Latin, initially through the Arabic. Translation is not simply a textual question, but one of practice, because the availability of these texts changed both the language and the substance of political thought. In this chapter there is a particular focus on the work of Thomas Aquinas and Ptolemy of Lucca, and in particular their guidance on how to act politically.

This chapter explains how the papacy's first brief in reaction to the revolutionary legislation indeed condemned the concept of “rights in society,” a principle the brief attributed to the National Assembly's usurpation of not only temporal but also spiritual power. For what really brought Pius VI's anathemas down on the French Revolution was the National Assembly's unilateral attempt to bring the organization of the Gallican Church into conformity with the principles of the Revolution by means of the legislation known as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Combined with the inevitable papal condemnation of 1791, it was that ecclesiastical legislation and the French and European Catholic reaction to both that would ring the death knell of Reform Catholicism.

This chapter considers the significance of miracles in Sufi fraternities of the Afghan period which was a significant source of their authority. It looks at the authoritative collection of the biographies of the Sufis, Akhbar-ul-Akhyar of Abdul Haqq Muhaddis Dihlawi, himself a saint of considerable reputation and an eminent Traditionist or scholar of the traditions of the Prophet. There is a possibility that the stories of miracles may have sprung up among the beleaguered Afghans under the Mughals when Abdul Haqq recorded them in his work. The chapter looks at the Sufis' valuable contribution to what is traditionally referred to as syncretism and synthesis in the field of religion and culture. The chapter also studies miracles and conversion and the role it played in recognition of spiritual power. It also attempts to understand the ulama's efforts to establish their own interpretation of the shari'at or Islamic law as a way of life in the realm.

This chapter examines African cosmologies and the nature of spiritual power and beliefs, alongside axiological ideas of beauty and value in Toni Morrison's first novel The Bluest Eye. In this novel, Morrison used the metaphor unyielding earth to refer to white supremacy. She also explored the psychic breach of having been looked upon with the evil eye and suggested that there may be a need for an alternative view of God, one that aligns itself to the image of the person in the mirror that would yield self-acceptance for all African people.

In Chapter 6 the author explores conventional and creative strategies for success by male shamans. Unlike female shamans who constantly push against the larger system, male shamans are gainfully positioned in a male-dominated patriarchal system. Their shamanic strategies include demonstrating kinship affiliations with well-known (during their lifetime) ancestors; seeking international recognition through global travel and networking; and using everyday micro-tactics to recruit clients through casual conversations and impromptu encounters. These postsocialist shamans must also demonstrate their prowess in dealing with the influx of previously suppressed unidentifiable spirits who roam in search for human hosts. Some shamans construct tight-knit kinship enclosures from their origin spirits and block the stranger-spirits from pestering them. Others take the opposite route, adopting the orphaned spirits for various tasks. Economic success and spiritual power prove to be interdependent; material resources are necessary to support spiritual advancement. But this presents a delicate line for shamans to tread: though they display their economic success in order to prove that their spirits are potent, they must also downplay their material interests in order to persuade others of their spiritual power, thus maintaining their credibility and avoiding being labelled “business shamans.”

This chapter describes language as a powerful weapon in the war waged against minority religious groups. Just as the Springfield residents in the “Joy of Sect” episode of The Simpsons consistently refer to the Movementarians as a “cult,” many in our culture employ the same vocabulary in equally negative ways. These “deviant” groups are never recognized as legitimate religions. Denying these groups the status of religion means, in the eyes of their foes, that “cults” seek not spiritual power, but rather some type of material advantage, be it economic gain, political clout, or mind control. The “cult” label enables television viewers and cultural observers to “know” from the start that these groups, whether the fictional Movementarians or the actual Moonies, are “frauds.” It causes people to rely on simplistic stereotypes rather than actively seeking the truth.

This chapter highlights the prevalence of religious imposture in early modern England, including prophets, visionaries and exorcists. It suggests that the occurrence of religious individuals who claimed spiritual power and thought themselves prophets, exorcists or healers is not a peculiarity of the early modern period, but rather a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon. The chapter explains that religious impostors during this period can be divided into a category of people who deliberately perpetrated a fraud, a larger category who believed in their own religious powers and role but were rejected by some contemporaries, and a category of people who functioned as puppets. It argues that the language of religious imposture had reflected the struggle between denominations since the Reformation, and was again a significant rhetoric tool in the debates over probability and certainty, and over the meaning of credulity and incredulity, in the late seventeenth century.

This chapter studies the recipients of care in medieval hospitals, interrogating who these guests were and what kind of care they received. It argues that these guests played a vital role in the “economy of salvation” and were not simply the passive recipients of care. While the sick poor who were admitted to hospitals were often very dependent on the physical and spiritual assistance provided to them by a hospital's personnel, they also carried with them a certain kind of spiritual power as the intercessors who might assist donors and the hospital brethren in obtaining salvation. The sick poor thus played a central role in the triangular system of exchange involving hospital workers, benefactors, and God. The chapter then shows that the charitable activities of hospitals extended outside the hospital walls to the city streets, where various kinds of charitable assistance were also provided for by family members, neighbors, and other religious organizations. While continuing to focus on the example of Champagne, it also draws on examples from other regions, mostly in northern France.

Witchcraft had deep roots in Pre-Contact social logic, benefiting power holders and the wealthy through the agency of revenge accusations and magical spells. Sorcery shaped and undergirded factional competition and displayed the spiritual power of the witch as well as the witch hunter. Witchcraft is materialized through various forms, but especially owl effigy ceramic vessels. Witchcraft perpetrators created medicinal concoctions and crafted visual forms of culturally accepted and identifiable shapeshifting and transformation. I argue that the agency of the witch was greatly feared, providing an important source of spiritual power manipulated by Mississippian political aggrandizers.

During the repressive decades of the 1950s and 1960s, the oases created by the nurturing subterranean springs of Islam provided refuge for the faith and kept alive the prospects of renewal. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, heralds of the Islamic Renewal burst on the scene, including the Egyptian al Ghazzali, the Bosnian Izetbegovic, the Iranian Shariati, the Lebanese Fadlallah, and the Turk Erbakan. The oases had allowed such figures to repair and gather strength to act for Islam. Each created entirely new, networked linkages to energize and inspire masses of ordinary people. The new horizontal structures were suffused with spiritual power. Their astonishing creativity made the heralds of the Renewal virtually invisible, except to the millions of Muslims who responded to their message. Islam did more than survive. In the early 1970s, Islam experienced a revitalization to become once again a major player in human history.

While the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 gave Japan the opportunity to reconsider the basic relationships between humans and nature, the scale of this disaster was not limited to Japan. It may be said that all of us live in “the age of co-disaster” in which we must realize that disasters are unavoidable. The earthquake brought forth a new agenda for environmental ethics, that is, disaster prevention. However, little research has been done in this area by environmental ethicists, many of whom have focused on the conservation of nature. Disaster prevention may be introduced into environmental ethics by examining Japanese mythology, which can help us develop new ways of forming, maintaining, and restoring good relationships between humans and nature.

This chapter explores how, in many ethnicities, words possess a spiritual power—a power by which people believed things could be called into life. This spiritual power was not just limited to the words of a God who would say “Let there be light” in order to bring light to this world; even the words of man were believed to possess such power. The word calls the thing into being. This power is the kotodama (spirit of words) hidden inside the word. This is considered a primitive belief that is not reflected in the contemporary world. However, when one thinks of the mechanisms of language, one must inevitably face the power of kotodama.