Religious Remediations

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 155-181
Author(s):  
Birgit Meyer

This article addresses the interface of video-films and Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity in Ghana. This interface, it is argued, needs to be examined from a position that transcends the confines of film studies and religious studies and leaves behind a secularist perspective on the relationship between religion and film. On the basis of detailed ethnographic research, it is shown that, far from standing apart from the realm of religious beliefs, video-films call upon audio-visual technologies so as to remediate Pentecostal views of the invisible world around which Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity evolves. Video-films invoke a “techno-religious realism” that addresses spectators in such a way that they authorize video representations as authentic. Transcending facile oppositions of technology and belief, media and authenticity, and entertainment and religion, video-films are shown to achieve immediacy and authenticity not at the expense of, but thanks to, media technologies and practices of remediation.

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 206-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matti Kamppinen

Recently it has become fashionable to speak about embodied religion, religion as bodily processes and embodiment in general. In this article the different uses of the concept of the body are analysed and the different contexts in which the concept can be used in coherent and systematic ways are clarified, and furthermore in such a way that it enhances the methodology of religious studies. Bodies are relevant in religious studies first and foremost for the reason that some bodies support religious beliefs, desires and actions, such as priests in the Catholic Church or members of the organizations of charismatic Christianity. Secondly, bodies are ascribed religious meanings. That is, in addition to a human body x, we have one or more religious actors who ascribe religious meanings to this particular body. Even though bodily issues are important for biological creatures such as human beings, they are not relevant for religious studies if they do not involve secondary theories that attach religious contents to them.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 309-330
Author(s):  
Andreas Nordin ◽  
Pär Bjälkebring

Abstract One challenge for cognitive, evolutionary and anthropological studies of religion is to offer descriptions and explanatory models of the morphology and functions of supernatural dreaming, and of the religiosity, use of experience, and cultural transmission that are associated with these representations. The anthropological and religious studies literature demonstrates that dreaming, dream experience and narrative are connected with religious ideas and practices in traditional societies. Scholars have even proposed that dreaming is a primary source of religious beliefs and practice (here labelled DPSR theory). Using Barrett’s coding system, we measured a high frequency of minimally counterintuitive dream content among Hindu Nepalese, and we aim to quantify (1) the relation between counterintuitive imagery and reported likelihood to communicate dreams in general and to religious experts, (2) the relation between counterintuitive imagery and reported religiosity, and (3) the proclivity to communicate SA dreams among those who are more or less religious. These aims will then be related to the broader topic of (4) possible explanatory value of DPSR theory, or versions thereof, by framing the issue at the level of cultural transmission, religiosity and credibility of religious dream representations in relation to MCI theory. The article mainly draws upon data from ethnographic research among Hindu Nepalese.


1997 ◽  
pp. 51-58
Author(s):  
O. Karagodina

Psychology of religion as a branch of religious studies, in contrast to the philosophy and sociology of religion, focuses attention mainly on the problems of individual religiosity - the phenomena of religious experience, religious beliefs, mechanisms of the emergence and development of religious experience. The psychology of religion studies the experience of the supernatural person, the psychological roots of this experience and its significance for the subjective. Since a person is formed and operates in a society, the study of religious experience must include its social sources.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 374-395
Author(s):  
Rafael Ignacio Estrada Mejia ◽  
Carla Guerrón Guerron Montero

This article aims to decrease the cultural invisibility of the wealthy by exploring the Brazilian emergent elites and their preferred living arrangement: elitist closed condominiums (BECCs) from a micropolitical perspective.  We answer the question: What is the relationship between intimacy and subjectivity that is produced in the collective mode of existence of BECCs? To do so, we trace the history of the elite home, from the master’s house (casa grande) to contemporary closed condominiums. Following, we discuss the features of closed condominiums as spaces of segregation, fragmentation and social distinction, characterized by minimal public life and an internalized sociability. Finally, based on ethnographic research conducted in the mid-size city of Londrina (state of Paraná) between 2015 and 2017, we concentrate on four members of the emergent elite who live in BECCs, addressing their collective production of subjectivity. 


2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
David N. Herda ◽  
Stephen A. Reed ◽  
William F. Bowlin

This study explores the Dead Sea Scrolls to demonstrate how Essene socio-religious values shaped their accounting and economic practices during the late Second Temple period (ca. first century BCE to 70 CE). Our primary focus is on the accounting and commercial responsibilities of a leader within their community – the Examiner. We contend that certain sectarian accounting practices may be understood as ritual/religious ceremony and address the performative roles of the Essenes' accounting and business procedures in light of their purity laws and eschatological beliefs. Far from being antithetical to religious beliefs, we find that accounting actually enabled the better practice and monitoring of religious behavior. We add to the literature on the interaction of religion with the structures and practices of accounting and regulation within a society.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yue Feng ◽  
Xingcan Liu ◽  
Tangwei Lin ◽  
Biru Luo ◽  
Qianqian Mou ◽  
...  

Abstract Background In recent years, spiritual well-being has gradually gained the attention of health care providers in China, especially those in oncology departments, who have recognized the importance of improving spiritual well-being in cancer patients. Since most of the current research on spiritual well-being has been carried out in areas with religious beliefs, this study was conducted in the context of no development of formal religion. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between death anxiety and spiritual well-being and the related factors of spiritual well-being among gynecological cancer patients. Methods This cross-section study was conducted among 586 gynecological cancer patients. The European Organization for Research and Treatment for Cancer Quality of Life Questionnaire-spiritual well-being32 (EORTC QLQ-SWB32) and Templer's Death Anxiety Scale (T-DAS) were used to measure spiritual well-being and death anxiety. The Multiple Linear Regression Model was used to determine the relationship between spiritual well-being and death anxiety. Results For all participants, the highest QLQ-SWB32 centesimal score was 75.13 on the Relationship with Other scale, and the lowest was 60.33 on the Relationship with Someone or Something Greater Scale. The mean Death Anxiety score was 5.31 (SD 3.18). We found that Relationship with Someone or Something Greater was the only scale not associated with death anxiety. Overall, patients with lower death anxiety have a higher level of spiritual well-being. Besides, a high Relationship with Other score was associated with living with a partner (B = 2.471, P < 0.001) and married (B = -6.475, P = 0.001). Patients with higher Global-SWB were retired (B = 0.387, P = 0.019). Conclusions Our study found that the spiritual well-being of patients with gynecological cancer in China was no worse than in other countries with religious beliefs and patients with lower death anxiety have a higher level of spiritual well-being. Clinical staff should pay attention to the spiritual health of cancer patients, and spiritual care should be regarded as an essential element in cancer care.


Open Theology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 547-556
Author(s):  
Martin Nitsche

AbstractThis study focuses on various phenomenological conceptions of the invisible in order to consider to what extent and in what way they involve moments of hiddenness. The relationship among phenomenality, invisibility, and hiddenness is examined in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Henry, and Merleau-Ponty. The study explains why phenomenologists prefer speaking about the invisible over a discourse of the hidden. It shows that the phenomenological method does not display the invisibility as a limit of experience but rather as a dynamic component of relational nature of any experience, including the religious one. Special attention is paid to topological moments of the relationship between the visible and the invisible.


Author(s):  
Qiliang He ◽  
Jie Tan

Abstract Moving away from the text-centered paradigm in film studies, the present research explores the relationship between the growing popularity of the film in Shanghai during the first two decades of the twentieth century and city governance in the International Settlement. It argues that the rise of movie halls contributed to creating a new kind of crowd that blended Chinese moviegoers with non-Chinese viewers. The emergence of the cinema as a space where people of different racial and ethnic origins encountered impelled the Shanghai Municipal Council – the governing body of the International Settlement in Shanghai – to respond by implementing new measures of public safety and altering its decades-long unspoken rules of segregation in the realm of everyday life. For Chinese enlightenment intellectuals and government officials, meanwhile, anxiety over their fellow Chinese's lack of basic decorum in public spaces arose with the intense intermingling of Chinese and non-Chinese filmgoers under the same roof. Thus, the cinema became a “contact zone” – a space of asymmetrical relations resulting not necessarily from colonists' exercise of colonial power but from the Chinese elite's wrapping of the discussion of movie theater etiquette reform within a political and ideological framework of modernization, patriotism, and anti-imperialism.


Focaal ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (82) ◽  
pp. 80-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosita Armytage

Based on ethnographic research conducted with the wealthiest and most powerful business owners and politicians in urban Pakistan from 2013 to 2015, this article examines the particular set of epistemological and interpersonal issues that arise when studying elite actors. In politically unstable contexts like Pakistan, the relationship between the researcher and the elite reveals shifting power dynamics of class, gender, and national background, which are further complicated by the prevalence of rumor and the exceptional ability of elite informants to obscure that which they would prefer remain hidden. Specifically, this article argues that the researcher’s positionality, and the inversion of traditional power dynamics between the researcher and the researched, can ameliorate, as well as exacerbate, the challenges of undertaking participant observation with society’s most powerful.


2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-34
Author(s):  
Suzanne Owen

This paper is a response to Patrick Hart’s article ‘Theory, method, and madness in religious studies’ and further interrogates the terms “theory” and “method,” the relationship between them, and their application to the study of religion, particularly at a pedagogical level, where there is some confusion about what is referred to by these terms. This paper argues that theory and method should be included explicitly in religious studies programs and research to show how scholarship has been produced.


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