Nonlocal Consciousness and the Anthropology of Religion

"Most discussions of religion center on dogmas and beliefs, either of a particular religion or a comparison across denomina- tions. I would like to look at religion from the perspective of a consciousness experimentalist, setting aside the dogmas and beliefs. When I look at religion, any religion, as an experimentalist, what I see is a cohort of people consensually holding a world- view. The process of assembling the cohort seems to me very much like Thomas Kuhn’s description of the paradigm process. The paradigm in religion is defined by scripture and dogma. The paradigms differ in many ways but they all have one thing in common. All are centered on the aspect of consciousness that in science we call nonlocal, and that is now being explicitly researched in near death studies, therapeutic intention work, and remote viewing. For me what is perhaps most interesting of all in studying both religions and the science of consciousness is that this is one of history’s great confluences, the practices of the religion and the practices of science have found common ground, and reached the same conclusions."

Faith, Religion, and Spirituality: A Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Contribution to Parsing the Distinctions

Religion and spirituality are contested terms in the fields of Religious Studies, Theology, Sociology or Anthropology of Religion, and other areas, and the notion of faith has often been abandoned altogether. The present article attempts to make a distinctly philosophical contribution to this debate by employing phenomenological parameters, as they are articulated in the work of Martin Heidegger, for proposing distinctions between faith, religion, and spirituality. It then goes on to “fill” these structural distinctions in more detail with hermeneutic content by drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s work on faith and religion, as well as Johann Michel’s analysis of Ricoeur’s account of the self as a “spirituality.” The article thus employs Heidegger’s phenomenological categories and Ricoeur’s hermeneutic project in order to think through the possibility of making phenomenological distinctions between personal confession of faith, religious adhesion to a tradition via myth and ritual, and a broader spirituality as a fundamental dimension of the human being.

Becoming Jewish, Believing in Jesus?

This chapter investigates the question of how the Judaizing Evangelicals appear to want to become Jewish, believing in Jesus. It carefully analyzes the social and cultural organization of the religious hybridization undertaken by the community of the Judaizing Evangelicals. Special attention is given to how Christian tenets are gradually understood in new ways and are replaced by Jewish ideas and practices within this changing religious community. The analysis indicates that religious change is an open dialectic process, challenging both clear-cut “continuity” and “discontinuity” arguments found in the anthropology of religion. By revealing the dialectic role of past structures in change processes, the theoretical framework expands current conceptualizations exploring cultural hybridity.

Hacia una filosofía fenomenológica de la religión

La fenomenología de la religión es una de las ciencias de las religiones surgida en el siglo XIX. Tras una época dorada, las dificultades epistemológicas y los debates suscitados en torno al estatuto del saber la abocaron a una profunda crisis interna. En la actualidad, existen dos formas de entender la fenomenología de la religión: la primera, como historia comparada de las religiones, centrada en la descripción y clasificación de los fenómenos religiosos; la segunda, como fenomenología hermenéutica, centrada en la comprensión del fenómeno religioso. Ambas corrientes constituyen dos visiones divergentes de la fenomenología de la religión. Sin embargo, podrían concebirse como dos fases fenomenológicas convergentes que apuntan a la consolidación de una antropología filosófica de la religión. En este artículo, analizamos el objetivo, los principales representantes, las dificultades epistemológicas y los logros de cada una de estas for-mas de comprender la fenomenología de la religión y su posible conjugación en la configuración de una filosofía fenomenológica de la religión.The phenomenology of religion is one of the sciences of religions emerged in the 19th century. After a golden age, the epistemological difficulties, and the debates about the status of knowledge led to a deep internal crisis. At present, there are two ways of understanding the phenomenology of religion: the first, as a com-parative history of religions, focused on description and classification of religious phenomena; the second, as a hermeneutical phenomenology, focused on the understanding of religious phenomena. Both currents constitute two divergent views of phenomenology of religion. However, they can be conceived as two convergent phenomenological phases that point to the consoli-dation of a philosophical anthropology of religion. In this paper, we analyze the goal, main representatives, epistemological difficulties and achievements of each of these ways of understanding the phenomenology of religion and its possible conjugation in the configuration of a phenomenological philosophy of religion.

The Concept of Mind in S. M. Shirokogoroff’s “Psychomental Complex of the Tungus”

The aim of this article is to present a concept of mind by the ethnologist Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff, as a precursor for a specific turn taking place in contemporary cognitive science. Such a turn is visible in the discarding of explanations focusing on brain or on other vehicles of cognitive processes, which are typical of traditional cognitive science. The followers of this traditional trend are united by the methodological assumption that the key to understanding cognitive processes lies in the precise comprehension of the vehicle’s functioning. Currently, cognitive science is developing a paradigm describing cognition as being embodied, embedded and extended. Similarly, Shirokogoroff's research in the anthropology of religion is part of his general concept of mind understood to be a set of cognitive processes linked with a broadly viewed environment (combining its material, ecological, biological, cultural and ritual aspects).

Translation problems. The experience of reading one interpretation of religious life: A Review of J. V. Kormina, Palomniki: etnograficheskie ocherki pravoslavnogo nomadizma [Pilgrims: Ethnographic Sketches of Orthodox Nomadism]

The study is the result of many years of work by Jeanne Kormina among contemporary Orthodox believers in Russia. It is based on the methodological approaches of the anthropology of pilgrimage; the author describes the mobile life of modern pilgrims in the northwest of Russia on the basis of rich field material. Contextualizing the approaches adopted in the English-language literature, Kormina discovers such a phenomenon as Orthodox nomadism, which is a completely special and previously not described type of religious sociality. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the author does not clearly define the employed terms; as a consequence, she often extends her conclusions not only to the studied “weekend pilgrims”, but also to the Orthodox in general. Lastly, this work allows us to continue the discussion about the influence of the identity of the researcher on their interpretations in the field of anthropology of religion.