Introduction: The Study of Religion and Emotion

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Emotional Component

This book is about religion and emotion. It explores the emotional component in religion within the framework of a certain tradition, focusing on emotion in new religious movements. There are essays on Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Japanese religions, Buddhism, and Islam. The book remarks on ways that emotion has been overlooked in the study of religious traditions, and how a focus on the emotional can lead to fresh understandings about how persons create, through religion, relationships with nature, deities, and each other. It also includes essays that address the emotion component in various areas of religious life, including ritual, gender, sexuality, music, and material culture. The book shows that emotional life is profoundly shaped by religion, and that religion, in turn, directs and reinforces the construction of emotional ideologies having to do with a wide array of behaviors. In addition, it addresses specific emotions such as ecstasy, love, terror, hate, melancholy, and hope.

Dialogue or Confrontation?

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ringo Ringvee
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Neoliberal Governance ◽  
Religious Associations ◽  
Liberal Attitude

The article focuses on the relations between the state , mainstream religions and new religious movements in Estonia from the early 1990s until today. Estonia has been known as one of highly secular and religiously liberal countries. During the last twenty years Estonian religious scene has become considerably more pluralist, and there are many different religious traditions represented in Estonia. The governmental attitude toward new religious movements has been rather neutral, and the practice of multi-tier recognition of religious associations has not been introduced. As Estonia has been following neoliberal governance also in the field of religion, the idea that the religious market should regulate itself has been considered valid. Despite of the occasional conflicts between the parties in the early 1990s when the religious market was created the tensions did decrease in the following years. The article argues that one of the fundamental reasons for the liberal attitude towards different religious associations by the state and neutral coexistence of different traditions in society is that Estonian national identity does not overlap with any particular religious identity.

scholarly journals CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE MYTHMAKING OF H.P. LOVECRAFT

2019 ◽  
pp. 137-142
Author(s):  
Denis D. Pyzikov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
New England ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Western Esotericism

H.P. Lovecraft created an original mythology that has not only become science fiction and fantasy classics, but also determined horror genre development in general. In his literary works, Lovecraft used images derived from both ancient religious traditions and contemporary western esotericism, filling his imaginary worlds with mysterious cosmic creatures. The writer’s cultural and historic environment played a very important role as the cultural landscape of New England and theosophical concepts widespread at that time had a great impact on the author’s work and writing. The original “mythology” invented by Lovecraft later played a key role in development of some new religious movements. Besides, Lovecraft’s mythology and images are reflected in the modern popular culture. The paper analyzes Lovecraft’s works and religious motives that are used or reflected in them, cultural factors that influenced the writer and Lovecraft’s heritage place in occult concepts, practices and subcultures of today.

The Cultural and Historical Setting of the Shang

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-252
Author(s):  
Jonathan Smith ◽  
Yuzhou Fan
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Meteorological Conditions ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Military Campaigns

This chapter offers a basic historiographical overview of the Shang period and polity, with focus on the roles that general archaeological, specifically inscriptional, and received textual evidence have played in approaching the history, chronology, religious traditions, calendrical practices, material culture, and lifeways of the Shang and their cultural forebears. Special attention is paid to pyro-osteomancy plus inscription, a defining feature of Shang religious life. These “oracle bone inscriptions” testify to the use of divination by or on behalf of Shang royals to gauge the auspiciousness of circumstances and hypothetical courses of action relating to sickness and health, military campaigns, hunting expeditions, agricultural production, meteorological conditions, and much else, perennial and overarching question being the proper manner of presenting sacrifice to deceased ancestors.

scholarly journals TOWARDS A JOINT FRAMEWORK FOR THE STUDY OF CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS IN AFRICA: RESPONSE TO J. D. Y. PEEL

Africa ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 86 (4) ◽  
pp. 628-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgit Meyer
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Islam And Christianity ◽  
The One ◽  
Critical Intervention

The main point of John Peel's intriguing critical intervention is to warn against what he sees as an overemphasis on similarities between Christianity and Islam. Making these religions look all too similar, he argues, may come at the expense of paying due attention to the distinctiveness of each of these religious traditions and hence to their intrinsic differences. He suggests an analogy between the stance taken by ‘somewhat left-wing and anti-establishment discourse’ to equalize Islam and Christianity under the label of fundamentalism on the one hand, and a strand of Africanist work on West Africa that pleads for the close similarities between these two religions to be acknowledged on the other. For the latter, he takes the article ‘Pentecostalism, Islam and culture: new religious movements in West Africa’ by Brian Larkin and myself (2006) as paradigmatic. For my part, it is difficult to see how the use of the notion of fundamentalism in current debates and the position ventured by us converge. I would certainly refrain from using the notion of fundamentalism (even if invoked to balance Huntington's equally problematic notion of the clash of civilizations) as a category that serves to draw out similarities between certain radical movements in Christianity and Islam both past and present – a use I view as highly problematic. The fact that Peel converges the levels of general public debate about political Islam and research regarding Christianity and Islam in African studies makes it quite difficult for me to grasp what his main concern is. Is it a worry about a – in his view – problematic, broader trend of denying actual intrinsic differences between Christianity and Islam, a trend that spills over from critical opinion into current Africanist scholarship, or vice versa? Is it the problem that foregrounding certain formal – and to him ultimately superficial – similarities favours an ahistorical stance with regard to these traditions? Or is it a concern – albeit not explicitly articulated – that the insistence on similarities with regard to Christianity might draw a too positive picture of Islam, pre-empting it from the critique that he considers necessary?

scholarly journals Perspective: What Are We Studying?

2004 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Barker
Keyword(s):  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Traditional Religions

The objective of this article is to encourage scholars of religion to retain an awareness of the significance of new religious movements (NRMs) being new. It arises as a response to three propositions made by J. Gordon Melton in this issue. The first of these is that NRMs have more in common with their religious traditions of origin than with each other. The second is that NRM is a residual category——it is not a church, a sect or an ethnic religion. Melton's third proposal is that NRMs might best be defined as religions that are greeted with antagonism by significant elements of the wider society, including traditional religions. My response is, first, that however related or unrelated they are to their respective traditions, NRMs are likely to share certain characteristics with each other merely because they are new. Second, these characteristics are deserving of attention in their own right and cannot be reduced to their not being various types of other religions. Third, rather than being used as a defining characteristic, the antagonism with which NRMs are met can be more usefully thought of as a consequence of their newness.

scholarly journals New religious movements and their perception as conflict religious groups: the case of the Czech Republic

2006 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 393-403
Author(s):  
David Václavíc
Keyword(s):  
Czech Republic ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Religious Group ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Czech Population ◽  
Czech Society

At first sight, both the role and the position of religion in the Czech Republic may appear to confirm the secularization thesis. The results of sociological surveys and census statistics show a clear decline in religious faith and practice. According to last national census of 2001 more than 59 per cent of Czech people declared themselves to be ‘non-believers’, while only 32 per cent of Czechs declared themselves to be ‘believers’. And if we look at the statistics that concern the intensity of religious life, we can see a more ‘secularized picture’ of Czech society. For example, only 5 per cent of the Czech population attends religious services regularly, and only 20 per cent of population is willing to contribute 1,50 euro a month to a religious group or church. But do these data present a true picture of secularization in Czech society? What exactly is the attitude of Czech society towards religion? These and other questions are examined in this article.

Charisma and Authority in New Religious Movements

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Prophet
Keyword(s):  
Management Theory ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Optimal Conditions ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
The Relationship

Using examples from new religious movements ranging from the Children of God to Sahaja Yoga, the chapter takes a multi-disciplinary approach, reviewing insights from sociology, psychology, anthropology, and management theory. It focuses on charisma as the authority to lead and transform religious traditions, reviewing not only identified qualities of leaders, but also the role of followers in creating and maintaining a collective myth, as well as the importance of the situation and culture in which the relationship develops. Key concepts include legitimation strategies, charismatization, and the role of the “charismatic aristocracy.” Attention is paid to factors contributing to instability and violence, particularly related to the institutionalization of charisma known as routinization, as well as optimal conditions for “benevolent” and “diffuse” charisma.

The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion

2009 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
William James ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Emile Durkheim ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Ritual Music ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Specific Emotion ◽  
Academic Study

This book offers a range of critical perspectives on the academic study of religion and emotion, in the form of syntheses, provocations, and prospective observations. The academic study of religion has recently turned to the investigation of emotion as a crucial aspect of religious life. Researchers have set out in several directions to explore that new terrain and have brought with them an assortment of instruments useful in charting it. This volume collects essays under four categories: religious traditions, religious life, emotional states, and historical and theoretical perspectives. In this book, scholars engaged in cutting edge research on religion and emotion describe the ways in which emotions have played a role in Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other religions. They analyze the manner in which key components of religious life—ritual, music, gender, sexuality and material culture—represent and shape emotional performance. Some of the essays included here take a specific emotion, such as love or hatred, and observe the place of that emotion in an assortment of religious traditions and cultural settings. Other essays analyze the thinking of figures such as St. Augustine, Søren Kierkegaard, Jonathan Edwards, Emile Durkheim, and William James.

“I am Mother to my Plants”

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-182
Author(s):  
Breann Fallon
Keyword(s):  
Survey Methods ◽  
The United States ◽  
Initial Section ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Ancient Egyptian ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Qualitative Survey ◽  
Survey Results

The tree stands as a sacred symbol in many faith traditions. Unsurprisingly, nature-based new religious movements are no exception. This article considers the manifestation of sacred trees in a number of religious traditions, including Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander spirituality, Abrahamic traditions, Ancient Egyptian religion, Buddhism, Hinduism, Norse mythology, the Shinto faith, and nature-based new religious movements. After this initial section, I present the findings of a fieldwork project undertaken in 2016. Using the survey as a tool, this project enquired into the use of trees, plants, and private gardens among practitioners from nature-based new religious movements. This survey makes use of both quantitative and qualitative survey methods, having been distributed to various nature-based new religious movements in New Zealand, Australia, Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Despite extensive tree lore, these survey results present the tree as a peripheral plant in the practitioners' everyday practice, with the garden as a whole being more critical than any single variety of vegetation.

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