Measuring Innovation

2020 ◽  
pp. 141-176
Author(s):  
Natalia Lidova
Keyword(s):  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Spiritual Practices ◽  
The World ◽  
Indian Form

Pūjā is often perceived as a predominantly Hindu form of veneration of gods, as it is currently the main ritual for almost one billion followers of Hinduism (about 15 per cent of the world’s population), with approximately 800 million of them living in India. It is less known that pūjā is also used as the main ritual in other religious communities, specifically different groups of contemporary Buddhists and Jains, as well as of Sikhs and various India-orientated spiritual practices and religious movements such as ISKCON. This makes pūjā not only a pan-Indian form of worship but the worldwide ritual that crossed the borders of its native country and gained many adepts all over the world. This chapter examines the genesis and development of this religious practice.

scholarly journals Individual belief and practice in neopagan spirituality

2009 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 182-195
Author(s):  
Britta Rensing
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Development ◽  
World View ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Spiritual Practices ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
New Religions ◽  
The World ◽  
Postmodern Spirituality

This article deals with Neopaganism, which is one of the fastest growing spiritual practices today. Neopagans are often placed in the field of new religions and new religious movements. When focussing on the world-view shared by these groups, this classification is correct, but no neopagan practitioner believes and practices like another. Neopagan spirituality is flexible and personal, which is often expressed in the art of poetry. Practitioners of this way of spirituality, where there are no texts or other sources telling them what to believe and how, turn to producing art for their personal spiritual development. While dogma is strictly rejected in postmodern spirituality, art obviously has become a very important element on the individual’s way to find her or his place in life and in the world.

The Rise of Black Ethnics: The Ethnic Turn in African American Religions, 1916–1945

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvester A. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Consciousness ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
American Jews ◽  
World War ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Racial Biases ◽  
The World ◽  
Moorish Science

AbstractDuring the world war years of the early twentieth century, new African American religious movements emerged that emphasized black heritage identities. Among these were Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew's Congregation of Commandment Keepers (Jewish) and “Noble” Drew Ali's Moorish Science Temple of America (Islamic). Unlike African American religions of the previous century, these religious communities distinctly captured the ethos of ethnicity (cultural heritage) that pervaded American social consciousness at the time. Their central message of salvation asserted that blacks were an ethnic people distinguished not by superficial phenotype but by membership in a heritage that reached far beyond the bounds of American history and geography. The academic study of these religions has largely moved from dismissal and cynicism to serious engagement with African American Jews and Muslims as veritable forms of religion. Despite this progress among scholars, some recent studies continue todenythat Matthew’s and Ali's communities were authentically Jewish and Islamic (respectively). When scholars dispense with theological or racial biases that bifurcate religions into ‘true’ and ‘false’ forms, the study of these black ethnic religions might best yield important insights for understanding the linkage among ethnicity, the nation-state, and religion. The religious reasoning of Matthew and Ali produced resourceful, complicated challenges to dominant colonial and racist paradigms for understanding agency and history. Their theology is appropriately discerned not as illusion, hybridity, or confusion but as thoughtful anticolonial expressions of Judaism and Islam that sought inclusion and honor through black ethnicity. At a time when African Americans were viewed as cultureless and without any legacy of inheritance except the deformities of slavery, the rise of black ethnics introduced religious traditions that demonstrated blacks were indeed a people with heritage.

Interfaith Families

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-104
Author(s):  
Halima Krausen
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Learning Environment ◽  
Meaningful Learning ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
New Normal ◽  
World Today ◽  
The World ◽  
Interfaith Marriages ◽  
Plural Society

In our plural society, interfaith marriages and multicultural families have become a new normal and are either considered problematic for the religious communities or welcomed as a contribution to a secular and more peaceful world. In the course of my work with European Muslims, I could accompany such families through a few generations. In this article, I am going to outline some typical challenges and crises in such relationships and their effects on young people growing up in mixed families, adding my observations of how they can be dealt with. Ultimately, there is a chance that, through dialogue, it provides a meaningful learning environment that prepares young people for the diverse reality of the world today.

scholarly journals A Sense of Presence: Mediating an American Apocalypse

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Rachel Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sense Of Presence ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come

Here I build upon Robert Orsi’s work by arguing that we can see presence—and the longing for it—at work beyond the obvious spaces of religious practice. Presence, I propose, is alive and well in mediated apocalypticism, in the intense imagination of the future that preoccupies those who consume its narratives in film, games, and role plays. Presence is a way of bringing worlds beyond into tangible form, of touching them and letting them touch you. It is, in this sense, that Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward observe the “re-emergence” of religion with a “new visibility” that is much more than “simple re-emergence of something that has been in decline in the past but is now manifesting itself once more.” I propose that the “new awareness of religion” they posit includes the mediated worlds that enchant and empower us via deeply immersive fandoms. Whereas religious institutions today may be suspicious of presence, it lives on in the thick of media fandoms and their material manifestations, especially those forms that make ultimate promises about the world to come.

scholarly journals Immigration and Multiculturalism in Italy: The Religious Experience of the Peruvian Community in the Eternal City

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 478
Author(s):  
Verónica Roldán
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Immigrant Communities ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
The World ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Popular Religiosity

The present study on the religious experience of the Peruvian community in Rome belongs to the area of studies on immigration, multiculturalism, and religion in Italy. In this article, I analyze the devotion of the Peruvian community in Rome to “the Lord of Miracles”. This pious tradition, which venerates the image of Christ crucified—painted by an Angolan slave—began in 1651 in Lima, during the Viceroyalty of Peru. Today, the sacred image is venerated in countries all over the world that host Peruvian immigrant communities that have set up branches of the Confraternity of the Lord of Miracles. I examine, in particular, the cult of el Señor de los Milagros in Rome in terms of Peruvian popular religiosity and national identity experienced within a transnational context. This essay serves two purposes: The first is to analyze the significance that this religious experience acquires in a foreign environment while maintaining links with its country of origin and its cultural traditions in a multilocal environment. The second aim is to examine the integration of the Peruvian community into Italian society, beginning with religious practice, in this case Roman Catholicism. This kind of religiosity seems not only to favor the encounter between the two cultures but also to render Italian Roman Catholicism multicultural.

New Religious Movements in Brazil

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Selka
Keyword(s):  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Religious Landscape ◽  
Late Modern

This article provides an overview of the Brazilian religious landscape and an introduction to this special issue on new religious movements in Brazil. I stress how the Brazilian religious landscape, although often imagined as a place of religious syncretism and cultural mixture, is crosscut by an array of boundaries, tensions and antagonisms, including ones grounded in race and class. The article outlines the major topics and problems taken up by the contributors to this issue, including appropriation across lines of race, ethnicity and class; the growing influence of evangelical Christianity in Latin America and beyond; esoteric religious practice in the late modern era; and questions of purity and authenticity, syncretism and anti-syncretism. Through their engagement with these themes, the articles in this issue contribute to a number of important discussions that relate not only to the study of religion in Brazil but to the study of new religious movements in general.

Post-Hellenistic Philosophy, Neoplatonism, and the Doxastic Turn in Religion: Continuities and Ruptures in Ancient Reflections on Religion

Numen ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 63 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 147-166
Author(s):  
Tuomo Lankila
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Main Line ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Historical Drama ◽  
The World ◽  
Hellenistic Philosophy

This article is inspired by Peter Van Nuffelen’s comparison between post-Hellenistic philosophy and Neoplatonism. The article defends the thesis of a fundamental break between ancient religions and new universal religions which became prevalent at the end of late antiquity. This break concerns not only fundamental doctrines but also the principles of how religious communities were constituted. There was a shift from the world of practice-oriented and reciprocally recognizing cults to the world of exclusive theocracies whose mindset emphasizes doctrinal confession. Some seeds of such a “doxastic turn” are to be seen in the post-Hellenistic philosophy and especially in the dogmatic tendencies of Middle Platonism. Thus, there is an observable route from the post-Hellenistic thought towards late ancient universal religions.Neoplatonism’s role in this historical drama is not that of precursor but, rather, it represents a deviation from the main line.

The Study of Hindu New Religious Movements

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-19
Author(s):  
Gene R. Thursby
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Meditation ◽  
Social World ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Arya Samaj

The category of Hindu new religious movements is conventional and useful, but has imprecise boundaries. Scholars tend to include within it some groups that have claimed they are not Hindu (Arya Samaj, Ramakrishna Mission) or not religious (Transcendental Meditation). Within its wide range are world-affirming groups dedicated to transforming the physical and social world as well as world-transcending groups that find the status of the world doubtful and their purpose at another level or in another realm. The four articles in this special issue of Nova Religio on Hindu new religious movements represent several aspects of this category, and the potential for accommodation of basic differences, social harmony, and even world-transcendence.

scholarly journals Sisters and Brothers Abroad: Gender, Race, Empire and Anglican Missionary Reformism in Hawai‘i and the Pacific, 1858–75

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 328-344
Author(s):  
Steven S. Maughan
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Continued Use ◽  
High Church

British Anglo-Catholic and high church Anglicans promoted a new set of foreign missionary initiatives in the Pacific and South and East Africa in the 1860s. Theorizing new indigenizing models for mission inspired by Tractarian medievalism, the initiatives envisioned a different and better engagement with ‘native’ cultures. Despite setbacks, the continued use of Anglican sisters in Hawai‘i and brothers in Melanesia, Africa and India created a potent new imaginative space for missionary endeavour, but one problematized by the uneven reach of empire: from contested, as in the Pacific, to normal and pervasive, as in India. Of particular relevance was the Sandwich Islands mission, invited by the Hawaiian crown, where Bishop T. N. Staley arrived in 1862, followed by Anglican missionary sisters in 1864. Immensely controversial in Britain and America, where among evangelicals in particular suspicion of ‘popish’ religious practice ran high, Anglo-Catholic methods and religious communities mobilized discussion, denunciation and reaction. Particularly in the contested imperial space of an independent indigenous monarchy, Anglo-Catholics criticized what they styled the cruel austerities of evangelical American ‘puritanism’ and the ambitions of American imperialists; in the process they catalyzed a reconceptualized imperial reformism with important implications for the shape of the late Victorian British empire.

The Baltic Countries

2021 ◽  
pp. 586-600
Author(s):  
Sebastian Rimestad
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Baltic Countries ◽  
The North ◽  
The World ◽  
The Baltic

The three Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) have a varied religious history. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they were the last region of Europe to be Christianized. Today, they—and especially Estonia—are among the most secularized societies in the world. This is not only due to the Soviet past but also to Baltic German dominance at key moments in their history. While Lutheranism has dominated in the north (in Estonia and Latvia), the Roman Catholic Church is still the main religious player in the south (in Lithuania and parts of Latvia). Primarily due to Russian migration, the Orthodox Church also plays a significant role in Baltic affairs. There is, finally, a small but vibrant cluster of new religious movements, notably neo-pagan groups.

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