Post-Socialist Sufi Revival in Albania

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-334
Author(s):  
Gianfranco Bria
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Political Strategies ◽  
Virtual Spaces ◽  
Charismatic Authority

Abstract This work analyses the case of Sufi revival in post-socialist Albania, where the religious field has been fragmented by the competing actions of different actors (local, regional and foreign) and by the critical and individualised religiosity of the faithful. Sufi public life is substantially marginalised by the monopoly of the esoteric Baktashis and Sunni political strategies. Thus, many Sufi faithful prefer to live their religious experience and express their practice in inner, private and virtual spaces. This dynamics has transformed the Sufi path and the charismatic authority of the Shaykhs.

Belief in Science? On the Neuroscience of Religion

2019 ◽  
pp. 235-242
Author(s):  
Katja Guenther
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Brain Function ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Physiological Study ◽  
Important Lesson ◽  
Divine Nature ◽  
Brain Scans ◽  
Normal Product ◽  
Human Spirituality ◽  
Religious Differences

This afterword demonstrates how the return of religion to public life has had an impact on science. Faith itself has become an object of physiological study, with researchers deploying brain scans to identify a “God spot,” the supposed seat of a wired-in human spirituality. The afterword then considers the growing field of “neurotheology.” Rather than asking whether God exists and contemplating His divine nature, neurotheology seeks to ascertain whether religious experience is a normal product of brain function or the result of neural pathology. The reality has, however, not lived up to the hype. Far from overcoming theological stalemate, neurotheology has merely refought old battles on new terrain. Both believers and skeptics have been able to draw on neuroscientific results to shore up their positions, and debates have returned as vigorous and apparently intractable as before. In fact, rather than being a refuge from polemic, neurotheology provides evidence that debate over theological questions might not admit final resolution. Whatever its claims, neurotheology's most important lesson might be that people are better advised to respect religious differences than to try to overcome them.

Studies in the Graeco-Roman Beliefs of the Empire

1925 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. D. Nock
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Family ◽  
Intimate Association ◽  
The One

We may regard Imperial religion as having two main elements, the piety of public life or of the family on the one hand, the more intense piety of the small group or of the devout individual on the other. These two, though differing, are not to be regarded as opposites; they rest on the basis of common conceptual forms and of common beliefs, deepened and enlarged in the second case. In both we findμυστήρια, in both also the intimate association of the well-being of city or Empire with the ritual. Even in its individualism this religion is not consciously individualist; the possessor of religious experience may regard what has been manifested to him as a revelation of truth that all men share. Religion in either form is distinct from magic, if we mean by that term the individual's attempt to put supernatural forces in harness for his own ends. Such magic is different from religion and can be quite divorced therefrom. Nevertheless, such isolation is not characteristic of the Empire. The religious practised magic, and it could hardly be said that in their belief they were free from magical conceptions; the later Neoplatonists, in their attempt to spiritualise and revive paganism, took magic under their protection.

The Street Is My Pulpit

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mwenda Ntarangwi
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Global Impact ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Born Again ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Subjective Identity

To some, Christianity and hip hop seem antithetical. Not so in Kenya. There, the music of Julius Owino, AKA Juliani, blends faith and beats into a potent hip hop gospel aimed at a youth culture hungry for answers spiritual, material, and otherwise. This book explores the Kenyan hip hop scene through the lens of Juliani's life and career. A born-again Christian, Juliani produces work highlighting the tensions between hip hop's forceful self-expression and a pious approach to public life, even while contesting the basic presumptions of both. This book forges an uncommon collaboration with its subject that offers insights into Juliani's art and goals even as the book explores the author's own religious experience and subjective identity as an ethnographer. What emerges is an original contribution to the scholarship on hip hop's global impact and a passionate study of the music's role in shaping new ways of being Christian in Africa.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
John A. Jillions
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Public Life ◽  
First Century ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
The World ◽  
Rational Mind ◽  
Divine Guidance

For good or ill, people throughout the world of the 21st century continue to act on perceptions of divine guidance, inspiration, and revelation in personal and public life. Religious experience can lead to both extraordinary lives of human creativity and lives of crippling religious fear and violence. The first-century world of the apostle Paul’s Corinth brought together Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians in vigorous conversation and debate about mystical experience, religion, divination, superstition, providence, the rational mind, discernment, and delusion. Contemporary biblical scholarship has generally been wary of religious experience, but the texts themselves swim in this environment. The introduction argues that religious and biblical scholars as well as those who pursue or question spiritual exploration in the 21st century will benefit from engagement with these first-century debates.

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