The Dead Are Dead/Ancestors Never Die: Migrants, Rural Linkages, and Religious Change in Northeastern Madagascar

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 347-375
Author(s):  
Laura M. Tilghman
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Family Conflicts ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Rural Family ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Catholic Churches ◽  
Christian Beliefs

Abstract This manuscript explores the dynamic between religion and rural-urban linkages in northeastern Madagascar. I find that church leaders have coalesced around two competing narratives of ancestors. Catholic churches see some types of migrant linkages (e.g., burial in the rural family tomb and participation in rural ancestral rituals) as being in line with Christian beliefs, while Protestant churches see these same activities as morally questionable or potentially satanic. To some degree Protestant migrants exert agency in the face of these religious teachings, and do not view their religion as an impediment to maintaining rural connections. However, quantitative analysis of rural-urban linkage behavior over a twelve-month period shows that Protestants have weaker rural ties compared to Catholics, even for behaviors that are not the focus of religious prohibitions. I offer several explanations for this finding. Protestant migrants are less motivated to invest in all types of rural linkages due to family conflicts after conversion, uncertainty about burial in the rural family tomb, reduced opportunities to develop affective ties with kin, and economic motivations to reduce rural demands on their urban wages.

Witches and Succubi: Male Sexual Fantasies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serinity Young
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Intercourse ◽  
Sexual Fantasies ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
The Face ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Demonic

Witches, women believed to have supernatural powers, have been with us since ancient times. Often they were beautiful, highly sexual women whom men bedded at their own risk. They had magical powers (including that of flight), communed with the dead, and did not conform to patriarchal ideas of womanhood. Their sexuality led them to be classified as succubi, or female spirits who visited men at night and had sexual intercourse with them while they slept. In medieval Christian Europe, witches were refigured as ugly over time, and they became the face of evil. They were believed to fly to their unholy Sabbaths, where they participated in orgies with Satan and sacrificed babies. In truth, most people who were accused of being witches were women caught up in the changing mores and beliefs of the medieval Church, which began to view women as more susceptible to the demonic than men, a Church that needed evidence of their unholy activities, even if extracted by torture.

Between Dechurchification and Religious Persistence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detlef Pollack ◽  
Gergely Rosta
Keyword(s):  
Federal Republic ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Church

The analysis conducted in this chapter of the religious changes undergone by the Federal Republic since its founding considers the religious losses as well as the sometimes astonishing resistance of religious and church entities, but also the observable small religious increases. It addresses the following questions among others: Is it really the case that there has occurred a break in tradition in terms of people’s ties to the church? In which periods was religious change particularly dynamic, and in which periods was it less so? Did this change occur in the Catholic and Protestant churches in parallel? Are there counter-movements when it comes to free churches and small religious communities such as the charismatic churches? How have individualized forms of religiosity developed, especially those of non-church religiosity? The chapter not only describes religious changes in West Germany, but by referring to contextual conditions also explains the main tendencies observable there.

Devotion, Discontent, and the Henrician Reformation: The Evidence of the Robin Hood Stories

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Field
Keyword(s):  
Social Institution ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Robin Hood ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Local Parish ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Masses

The relationship between popular religious attitudes and the English Reformation has long been the subject of a fierce historical debate. The older “Whig-Protestant” view, championed most notably by A. G. Dickens, draws on evidence for clerical corruption and the spread of Lollardy to show that large numbers of English people were dissatisfied with the state of Catholicism, eager for religious change, and on the whole receptive to Protestant ideas. According to this version of events, Henry VIII and the Reformation Parliament rode a wave of popular discontent in breaking from Rome and dissolving the monasteries. If there was a split between the king and the masses, it came only later when Henry's conservative religious beliefs caused him to attempt to retain much of the substance of Catholicism in the face of popular clamor for more thoroughgoing reform. On the other hand, the “revisionist” camp, which includes such well-known names as J. J. Scarisbrick, Christopher Haigh, and Eamon Duffy, prefers to cite evidence from wills, local parish records, liturgical books, and devotional texts to show that “the Church was a lively and relevant social institution, and the Reformation was not the product of a long-term decay of medieval religion.” In this view, Henry VIII and his advisors pushed through a personally advantageous but widely disliked and resisted Reformation.An examination of the religious content of the tales men and women told about Robin Hood in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries offers a fresh perspective on this long-running dispute.

New Religions for Old: A Study of Culture Change

1971 ◽  
Vol os-18 (6) ◽  
pp. 241-253
Author(s):  
Eugene A. Nida
Keyword(s):  
Culture Change ◽  
Limited Resources ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Market Place ◽  
Satisfactory Model ◽  
New Religions ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Use Of Models

Culture change is of great interest to anthropologists, but none has developed a satisfactory model to explain it. The existence of various approaches to the study of religion points to the multidimensional nature of religion. In order to account for deletion, addition, substitution, and coalescence in religious change, the author proposes the use of models from economics and linguistics (the latter will be handled in the next issue). Economics models provide useful insights through the concepts of value and cost. For experience shows that in religion as in the market place, lowering the price of a “commodity” can also lower its value and therefore its desirability. It is shown also that values are based upon the total worldview of a society. They must also be related to the felt needs of people rather than to artificially ascribed needs. Finally, the author discusses the relevance of the concepts of “unlimited desire” in the face of “limited resources”.

On the Origin of the Ink of the Thanksgiving Scroll (1QHodayota)

2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Hahn ◽  
Gisela Weinberg ◽  
Ira Rabin ◽  
Timo Wolff ◽  
Admir Masic
Keyword(s):  
Trace Elements ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Spectroscopic Investigation ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
General Validity ◽  
Production Area ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Sea Area ◽  
Non Destructive

AbstractIn this study we demonstrate the possibility to identify the production area of the scrolls, coupling non-destructive quantitative analysis of trace elements to spectroscopic investigation of the inks. This approach, that allowed us to determine the Dead Sea area as origin of 1QHodayota, is of general validity.

scholarly journals An attack on the Cross: Spiritual leaders’ accounts of fear and resilience during COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mammusa Rosinah Lekoa ◽  
Sibusiso Louis Ntuli
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Spiritual Leaders ◽  
Vulnerable Communities ◽  
Difficult Time ◽  
Essential Services ◽  
The Face ◽  
African Context ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

This paper provides accounts on the impact that COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdown(s) had on the Church and its leaders in the South African context. The study explores challenges that the leaders faced and how they dealt with them to remain standing despite their fears. The context is COVID-19 pandemic, which brought mass deaths, fear, confusion and frustration to congregations globally. Church leaders faced a challenge to show resilience amid fear because they too were directly affected. Governments introduced regulations that imposed lockdowns to control the spread of the virus. Limiting contact by restricting distance amongst citizens. The church was one sector that could not operate. Although some sectors were never declared essential services like churches, this left vulnerable communities without support in the face of fear. Spiritual leaders had to demonstrate resilience to support the congregants. The key question the researchers seek to understand is to what extent did the church remain resilient during COVID-19 pandemic? And how did the church leaders deal with fear despite anointing and expectations from the congregants and communities? A qualitative approach was used in this study. COVID-19 has shown that Church leaders are humans and they are also fearful, however their faith in God has assisted them to show resilience even at this difficult time. The study also asserts that governments should consult different groupings of faith-based organisations, not only those that are under organised bodies before embarking on restrictions for pandemic control. Communities encompass many churches and leaders require support to assist them from church members.

Is There No Blessing for Me?

2019 ◽  
pp. 104-118
Author(s):  
Quincy D. Newell
Keyword(s):  
Salt Lake ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
The Dead ◽  
To Receive ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Church

By the 1880s, Jane James began a campaign to get permission to perform the temple rituals she believed were necessary to reach the highest degree of glory after death. She wanted to be sealed to Joseph Smith as a child and to receive her endowment, requests that church leaders denied. In 1888, James received a temple recommend to do baptisms for the dead in the Logan Temple. James’s children, meanwhile, made their ways out of the church. She received a second patriarchal blessing in 1889, which may have encouraged her to persist despite her disappointments. Her ex-husband Isaac James returned to Salt Lake in 1890 and lived with Jane James until his death in 1891. The following year, Jane James’s brother Isaac Manning came to live with her. In 1894, church leaders created a temple ceremony to seal Jane James to Joseph Smith as a servant rather than a child.

Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Apocalyptic Trajectories

2020 ◽  
pp. 217-270
Author(s):  
Christopher James Blythe
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
First Century ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
The Face ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Final Group

This chapter documents the fracturing of end-of-world belief among Latter-day Saints in the twentieth century. Church leaders re-envisioned apocalypticism as a “moderate millenarianism.” At the same time, Mormon fundamentalists—deemed heretics by many church leaders—deployed apocalypticism to challenge the processes of Americanization, adding the church’s own apostasy as a distinctive part of their last days chronology. Finally, radical apocalypticism continued to find resonance with a contingent of committed Latter-day Saints. This chapter wrestles with how this final group has been able to negotiate their apocalyptic sentiments and LDS affiliation even in the face of continual criticism. Most importantly, it is in this chapter that the author demonstrates how apocalyptic ideas of any variety continued to be perpetuated in private and family circles.

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