Re-Picturing the Reception of the Spirit with Ritual Experience: The Role of Baptism in 1 Corinthians 12:13

In this article, I argue that the ritual experience of water-baptism plays an essential role in Paul's metaphorical expression and rhetorical purpose in 1 Corinthians 12:13. To explore the role of baptism, I use conceptual blending theory from cognitive linguistics to define and demonstrate the metaphorical ways in which ritual functions in the human mind. In so doing, I emphasize the performance of a ritual itself and the contextual perception of its performance, arguing for a metaphorical relationship between the two. I apply conceptual blending analysis to interpret the complex interplay of three metaphors in 1 Corinthians 12:13. I argue that Paul forms a conceptual blend of three metaphors in this verse, and that baptism, the water-rite, plays a pivotal role in this blend by providing the physical pattern of immersion and the cultural understanding of this immersion as a new belonging. Using baptism, Paul achieves his purpose of re-picturing the reception of the Spirit and appealing for social union. This verse thus presents an excellent case of the role of ritual in the emergence of early Christianity and the explanatory power of ritual studies to the New Testament texts.

Hexametrical Genres from Homer to Theocritus

This book focuses on the evidence for short, non-epic hexametrical genres as a way of gaining new insights into the variety of their often ritual performance and their early history. It also shows how poets from Homer to Theocritus embedded or imitated these genres to enrich their own poems, by playing with and sometimes overturning the generic expectations of their audiences or readers. In doing so the book combines literary and ritual studies to produce a rich and detailed picture of a number of genres performed in sanctuaries, such as hymns and laments for Adonis, or in other spaces likewise dedicated to traditional speech-acts, such as epithalamia, oracles, or incantations. It deals primarily with the recovery of a number of lost or underappreciated hexametrical genres, which are usually left out of modern taxonomies of archaic hexametrical poetry, either because they survive only in fragments or because the earliest evidence for them dates to the classical period and beyond. Of central importance will be the surviving hexametrical poets, especially those of archaic and Hellenistic date, who embed or imitate traditional hexametrical genres of shorter duration either to give a recognizable internal structure to a shorter poem or to an episode or speech within a longer one.

Givenness, Saturation, and the Self: A Phenomenology of Christian Initiation

Phenomenology holds great promise yet underdeveloped potential for ritual studies and liturgical theology. As phenomenology has indeed taken a “theological turn” and the contentiousness of such an approach abates, questions remain as to what insights, concepts, and language phenomenology can offer to deepen our understanding of Christian ritual practices. Specifically with respect to rituals of initiation, does phenomenology open new avenues of appreciation for the sacrament of baptism, to enrich and to deepen the faithful’s experience of these rituals? This article considers insights afforded by a phenomenological approach to the sacrament, in particular with regard to adult baptism and the catechumenate in the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA), the rite of reception and sacramental initiation into the Roman Catholic Church. Considered through such lenses, a phenomenology of baptism promises to open new avenues of ritual understanding, theological appreciation, and depth of prayer. Drawing primarily from the work of Jean-Luc Marion, this article also considers prominent critiques of his work to articulate a phenomenology of baptism as an experience of givenness and reception, of identity formation within and through an ecclesial community, and of prayerful preparation for Christian neophytes.

Ars moriendi as social reality : articulation of the good death in the United States

Death and dying are often theorized as micro-level processes, focusing on the experience of the death process from the perspective of the dying, or in the context of grief and psychological healing on the part of the bereaved. While these academic analyses have merit, their analytic utility is limited. Death, dying, bereavement, and memorial are social processes that require multidisciplinary investigation. Utilizing sociological, religious studies, and ritual studies methodologies, this dissertation explores ars moriendi, or the good death, as a process enmeshed within the macro-structural forces of political, religious, economic, and social institutions. Through these discrete case studies, the dying and the bereaved are recentered as active agents driving and responding to change within the contemporary American death industry.

Practicing Atheism

Practicing Atheism is a cultural study of contemporary atheism, focusing on how atheists negotiate meanings and values through media. This book examines a variety of cultural products, both corporate driven and grassroots, that circulate messages about what atheism means—what ideas, values, affinities, and attitudes the term denotes. Through the creation, consumption, and exchange of this media, atheism gains positive content, the term signaling much more than lack of belief in god(s) for those who identify with the emergent culture. Primary source materials for this book include grassroots Internet communities, popular television programming, organized atheist events, and material culture representations of the movement, such as those found in atheist fan art. Practicing Atheism argues that atheist culture emerges from a unique tension with religion—a category atheists critique and resist but also, at times, imitate and approximate. Using a framework based on ritual studies, this book theorizes ambivalence, ambiguity, and “in-betweenness” as the essential condition of contemporary atheist culture.

Enclosures of Death in the Early Iron Age

This article focuses on the study of the Early Iron Age necropolis of Esfola, taking into account the burial rituals of the site (the architecture, the funerary objects and the human skeletal analyses are dealt with in the context of ‘burial ritual’ studies). This research will contribute to the body of knowledge on Early Iron Age necropolises with enclosures, typical of the Beja and Ourique regions in southern Portugal, i.e. Vinha das Caliças 4, Monte do Bolor 1–2, Cinco Réis 8, Carlota and Palhais. All these sites identified in the southern Iberian Peninsula allow us to characterize the funerary rituals practised in this region during the Early Iron Age.