2018 July - 26 articles
To choose a terminology for an investigation of shamanism in contemporary Norway is not entirely without problems. Many shamans are adamant in rejecting the term religion in connection with their practices and choose broader rubrics when describing w...
The meaning of a symbol is not intrinsic and should best be seen in relation to the symbolic order underlying it. In this article we explore the ritual complexities pertaining to the body’s most lowly and dirty part: the feet. On entering sacre...
In Jordan—home to some one million Syrian refugees—the vital roles played by vernacular politics, discourses of inclusion and exclusion, and sectarian social histories for Syrians are often considered unimportant when examining possibilit...
The notion that in previous centuries Jews were considered to be black, or seen as blacks, has gained broad acceptance in scholarly discourse on the Jewish body since the early 1990s. The present article considers the notion analytically and then exa...
This article offers a conceptual framework for understanding the diversity of pedagogies found in Talmud classrooms. It looks at how two different Orthodox Talmud teachers responded to an academic article about constructivist learning practices in th...
This study assesses the effect that private religious schools have on gender attitudes in students. Using data collected from twenty-one private schools in Guatemala, gender attitudes are assessed using latent class analysis. The results indicate tha...
Whereas the conflict over Palestine’s’ holy places and their role in forming Israeli or Palestinian national identity is well studied, this article brings to the fore an absent perspective. It shows that in the first half of the 20th cent...
As the First World War broke out in 1914, American Jews seemed far away from the upheaval in Europe. Yet their role as neutral spectators from the distance was questioned right from the outset because of their diverse transcultural entanglements with...
Scholars of Pentecostalism have usually studied people who embrace it, but rarely those who do not. I suggest that the study of global Pentecostalism should not limit itself to Pentecostal churches and movements and people who consider themselves Pen...
This article analyses the topic of Globalization and Orthodox Christianity. Starting with Victor Roudometof’s work (2014b) dedicated to this subject, the author’s views are compared with some of the main research of social scientists on t...
Shakespeare’s plays mix references to pagan and Christian symbols and ideas in ways which are only superficially contradictory. While the sometimes uneasy juxtaposition of classical and Christian religious thought is characteristic of Renaissan...
When children lose a parent during childhood this offers emotional and life changing moments. It is important for them to be included in the death ritual and to be recognized as grievers alongside adults. Recent research has shown that children thems...
This article critically assesses existing scholarship on the roles that religious groups play in collective contention. Researchers disagree on three main issues: (a) whether religious doctrines and values make religious groups more or less likely to...
This paper first introduces Mani the Buddha of Light—a collection of ritual manuals of the Religion of Light from Xiapu county, Fujian Province, China and Diagram of the Universe—a Manichaean painting produced in South China in the late 1...
Religion in the United States remains a consistent source of conflict not only because of the breadth and depth of personal religious commitment, but also because of guarantees from the United States Constitution. The First Amendment protects religio...
This paper recounts a parallel story of the Lamòling myth. The original analysis of the legend addressed the relationship between two gods, Lamòling and Lahatàla, from the Abui traditional religion. The myth evolved from ancestra...
In the 18th century, Halle Pietists were part of a global missionary network that reached into North America and that anticipated later developments in worldwide evangelical missions; Pietists made critical alliances with other Protestants, they were...
Transnational migration scholarship has discussed parents’ economic and emotional sacrifice for their children as a justification for separation. However, the researchers have overlooked addressing how the parents’ sacrifice is culturally...
In their article ‘Transmedial worlds: Rethinking cyberworld design’, Klastrup and Tosca show that the core elements of a Transmedial World are: Mythos, the lore of the world, the central knowledge necessary to interpret and successfully i...
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Scholars have argued that World War I and its aftermath caused a rapid transformation in American global philanthropy. The decline of the American “moral empire” coincided with the rise of professional, bureaucratic, and secular philanthr...
David Fincher may not be an expert in Buddhism. But his description of Fight Club—as reprising the figurative admonishment to “kill the buddha” by Lin-ji Yi-xuan (9th cent.), the founder of the Rinzai Zen Buddhist school—illum...
Based on a critical empirical application of Foucault’s concept of pastoralism and a genealogical research approach, this article suggests that the Catholic regime that operated in Costa Rica during the Spanish colonial period (16th to 19th cen...
This paper examines the moral community thesis in the secular context of China. Using multilevel logistic regression, we test (1) whether both individual- (measured by affiliation with Islam, Buddhism and Christianity) and aggregate-level religiosity...
While care for the poor was widely advocated and practiced in early Christianity, charity was not universally endorsed. The Gospel of Thomas (Gos. Thom.), for example, is notable for its rejection of almsgiving, along with other practices such as fas...
This paper studies the ways that Walker, a short film by the Malaysian-Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang, visualizes the relationship between Buddhism and modernity. Via detailed film analysis as well as attention to sources in premodern Buddhist trad...
