11. Cyberactivities and “Civilized” Worship: Assessing Contexts and Modalities of Online Ritual Practices

2020 ◽  
pp. 290-312
Keyword(s):  
Ritual Practices

Reconstructors

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Stefania Palmisano
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ritual Practices

This article treats the Reconstructors, a Catholic Community founded in Italy by the Jesuit Vittorio Cappelletto. After a period in India at the school of Anandamurti, the leader of the Ananda Marga movement, Cappelletto’s spiritual experiences induced him to import the teachings received from the Indian guru into Christianity. After presenting the salient stages in the history of the Reconstructors, this article analyses the doctrinal structure and the ritual practices of the movement. Next, it explores the movement’s esoteric bases and the relationships between Cappelletto and his disciples. Finally, the “story behind the story” is engaged, along with reflections upon the contingencies and dilemmas of fieldwork.

Ritualized Writing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan D. Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
State Control ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
Ritual Practices

Transcribing scripture (sutras) represents one of the most central devotional practices in the Buddhist world. Sutra copying functioned as a form of ritualized writing, a practice strategically set apart from more mundane forms through a set of practices and beliefs. This book highlights sutra transcription throughout Asia, but focuses primarily on seventh- through ninth-century Japan, where the practice is particularly well-documented. It shows how scribes engaged in ritual practices related to purification and how patrons held elaborate dedication ceremonies upon the completion of a project. It traces the social organizations and institutional structures through which sutra copying took place. It highlights the function of the practice in the lives of diverse individuals from scribes to rulers. As a whole, the book offers a radical reassessment of Buddhism in ancient Japan that moves beyond scholarly tendencies to focus on state control and exploitation, and proposes a new way to treat scriptures as ritualized texts that interact dynamically with the individuals and communities who produce them.

Textual Events

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Homeric Hymns ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Performance ◽  
Textual Traditions ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Ritual Practices ◽  
Formal Features

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts. The fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as textual events. Several chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings. Others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. In addition to studies that analyse individual lyric texts and lyric authors (Sappho, Alcaeus, Pindar), the volume includes treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events re-examines the relationship between the poems’ formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of sociopolitical discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within them. As well as enacting cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.

Influence on Early Christian Worship

2020 ◽  
pp. 377-391
Author(s):  
Paul F. Bradshaw
Keyword(s):  
Early Christianity ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Hebrew Scriptures ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Ritual Practices

This chapter traces the various ways in which the cultic language and imagery of the Hebrew Scriptures influenced and shaped the liturgical thought and ritual practices of early Christianity, from the first to the fourth century ce. At first, this was primarily through the metaphorical or spiritual application of such concepts as priesthood and sacrifice, but eventually there are indications of the beginnings of the adoption of a more literal correspondence between some elements of the Temple cult and aspects of Christian worship. Both corporate and individual practices of prayer are covered, including the use of the canonical psalms, as well as the appropriation of traditional ritual gestures and the emergence of Christian holy days out of biblical festivals.

scholarly journals Animating Idolatry: Making Ancestral Kin and Personhood in Ancient Peru

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 287
Author(s):  
George F. Lau
Keyword(s):  
Family Members ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Lines Of Evidence ◽  
Ritual Practices

Historical and archaeological records help shed light on the production, ritual practices, and personhood of cult objects characterizing the central Peruvian highlands after ca. AD 200. Colonial accounts indicate that descendant groups made and venerated stone images of esteemed forebears as part of small-scale local funerary cults. Prayers and supplications help illuminate how different artifact forms were seen as honored family members (forebears, elders, parents, siblings). Archaeology, meanwhile, shows the close associations between carved monoliths, tomb repositories, and restricted cult spaces. The converging lines of evidence are consistent with the hypothesis that production of stone images was the purview of family/lineage groups. As the cynosures of cult activity and devotion, the physical forms of ancestor effigies enabled continued physical engagements, which vitalized both the idol and descendant group.

scholarly journals Intersection of the Religious and the Secular: The Cemetery Festival in Latvia

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 69
Author(s):  
Anita Stasulane
Keyword(s):  
Participant Observation ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
Secular Society ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Ritual Practices ◽  
Research Tools

This article addresses the commemoration of the deceased by examining a peculiar Latvian religious tradition—the cemetery festival. Latvian society is moving down the path to secularization. Participation in religious ritual practices could be expected to decrease in a predominately secular society. Nevertheless, the tradition of the cemetery festival practiced in Latvia shows that the relationship between the religious and the secular is much more complex than simply being in opposition to each other. The analysis is based on data obtained by undertaking fieldwork at cemeteries in Latvia. Participant observation and qualitative in-depth interviews were the main research tools used in the fieldwork. Through an analysis of the fieldwork data, this article explains, first, how honoring of the deceased currently takes place in Latvia; second, the factors which have determined the preservation of the cemetery festival tradition despite the forced secularization of the Soviet period and the general secularization encountered today; third, the relationship between religious and secular activities and their transformation at the cemetery festival.

Becoming Heretical: Affection and Ideology in Recruitment to Early Christianities

2011 ◽  
Vol 104 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Eshleman
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Models ◽  
The Road ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Ritual Practices

A growing consensus recognizes that the differences among Christians in the late second and early third centuries were neither as obvious nor as great as representatives of later orthodoxy would have us believe, and that what divided Christians in this period were not so much different beliefs and ideas as different hermeneutical and ritual practices. This article approaches the same conclusion from a different angle: from the perspective of potential recruits to Christianity, drawing on social-scientific models of conversion. For them, the peculiarities of doctrine and even of practice that obsess ancient polemicists and modern scholars were often largely invisible. While those features could take center stage for mature converts—and hence in retrospective accounts of conversion—they seem to have played little role in bringing people to specific versions of the faith in the first place. Rather, for many Christian recruits, the road to “orthodoxy” or “heresy” began not in ideological attraction, but in attachments to family, friends, and patrons already inside the group.

The Main Stages of the Development of Incense Culture in China

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (10) ◽  
pp. 24-37
Author(s):  
Elena E. Voytishek
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Medicine ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Spiritual Healing ◽  
New Age ◽  
Animal Origin ◽  
Aesthetic Attitude ◽  
Ritual Practices ◽  
The Middle Ages

The article provides an overview of the main stages and trends in the development of the incense culture of China from antiquity to the present day. It covers religious and magical rituals, sanitary and hygiene, traditional medicine, a set of spiritual, healing, artistic, and game practices and rituals of Taoist-Buddhist and Confucian character. In China, over several millennia, a colossal experience has been accumulated in terms of the use of aromatic raw materials of plant, mineral and animal origin: thousands of treatises and reference books have been written, the properties of individual incense and their combinations have been studied, detailed classifications have been drawn up and principles of religious cults and ritual practices have been developed. Along with the applied value of incense, an aesthetic attitude toward incense aromas also developed, which repeatedly ensured periods of rapid flourishing of incense culture in antiquity, the Middle Ages and on the cusp of the New Age. Currently, the traditional aromatic culture in China is experiencing a period of upsurge and revival. This provides ample opportunities for its study in various fields of knowledge, which indicates the relevance and multidimensional nature of the study of this topic.

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